To be shocked by a transwoman guest on Jeremy Vine today asking a female caller what sex she is - and whether she’s “been tested?”

[AlertMaker]

I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A woman called in to make a point and instead of responding to her argument, the guest asked her what sex she was - and even questioned whether she’d been tested to confirm it.

I found it incredibly demeaning and unsettling. AIBU to think this kind of behaviour undermines the whole idea of respectful discussion and actually silences women?

Simple but not practical. How do you propose those third spaces are created in every restaurant and public space up and down the country? The disabled loos is a bad choice, disabled people already have to queue behind parents changing babies much of the time which is a pain - do we give every business a grant to create unisex toilets?

I'm genuinely sorry if this makes things harder for you. However the sooner the ruling is accepted and its meaning complied with, the sooner we can start the journey back to a time when if women saw a non stereotypically female person in the women's toilet, their first thought wouldn't be that she was a man. All the fuss and demands by male people to access female spaces has drawn a great deal of attention to it, and resulted in a lot of opposition. The aggressive tactics of activists have ramped up fear. How long this continues to be an issue and women stay vigilant and you are at risk of being challenged will depend a great deal on how long the TRAs continue to put up a fight.

That wouldn't be necessary. You'd just need to repurpose a certain number of existing toilet facilities as unisex.

At the end of the day, for a multitude of reasons, biological women ARE entitled to have access to single sex spaces without fear of intimidation from biological men, however they choose to present.

So we can either create unisex spaces - or end up in a stalemate, which I don't believe anyone truly wants.

YABU to be shocked by anything a TRA says

The aggressive tactics of activists have ramped up fear. How long this continues to be an issue and women stay vigilant and you are at risk of being challenged will depend a great deal on how long the TRAs continue to put up a fight.

💯👏👏

I am choosing to hope this is the outcome, too. I do think we need to take responsibility for our own behaviours though. No TRA is forcing a woman to call me a pervert in a public toilet while I wash my hands privately. We have fought for autonomy and it’s important we own our actions and our words now we have the freedom to act and the voices to speak. It is not the fault of trans women that some men impersonate them to abuse women. Yet it’s me and trans women who are hurt by the SC ruling and while I do believe that hurt is required to protect women in some circumstances, I don’t believe abusing masculine women or even trans women who are not interacting in any way in public places helps more than it harms. I hope women simply don’t do it or if they do, they do it kindly just in case they’re wrong, and they so often are.

The absence of proportionality and nuance in conversations like this hurts all of us and I just hope by knowing people like me exist, it makes people think twice about challenging people they think are trans.

It’s not the actual cubicles that are the problem it’s the communal areas, how do you propose those are separated off?

Ive just been trying to count and I think I’ve had someone say something to me 13 times since 2015, not all in toilets. I’ve never had anyone directly ask ‘are you male?’, but I’ve been called a pervert while washing my hands, I once had a woman in a changing room say ‘shouldn’t you be in the men’s? There’s little girls changing in here’ and I’ve also had a woman come up to me on a train and say ‘I’m not being funny but you don’t pass you know, I know what you are’. I had a teenager call me a tranny in the street once, then I ordered a mojito at a bar on holiday (I was wearing a women’s swimming costume) and a woman said ‘funny drink for a bloke, that’. Before 2015 I’d had a few incidents of being misgendered and called ‘he’ but it never felt deliberate, just people giving me a passing glance and assuming. That always hurt but it wasn’t malicious so easier to move on from. It’s the viciousness towards me I struggle with when I’m genuinely not a bad person and these people don’t even know me. I’ve given them no reason to be cruel at all.

Which is right - no amount of women asking me if I’m a man or not would prevent that rape from happening though, that’s the point.

It's a bit strange but ever since the Thatcher years, I've felt as though we were all under immense pressure to dress and behave like men. I wear what are effectively men's clothes, and feel constantly bad for being "only a woman" and a SAHM at that.

Now suddenly things have changed and somehow the men want to be women and people are looking to see if we are female and "properly female" at that. It's all really confusing I think.

I still will have to wear men's clothes because if I put on womens' clothes then I look ridiculous. They kind of make me look like a drag acctress, whereas men's clothes make me look comfortably feminine.

Nobody would ever doubt that I'm female though. I mean it's patently obvious that I'm a woman, and a downtrodden one at that because I've spent my whole life appoligising for being not as good as a man.

Gawd I'm confused.

And according to this ruling he should use the women's toilets. And has every right to do so.

Seems to me that the response of some TRAs to the recent ruling is this. If you don't accept me in to a space where I can see your fanny, you must show me your fanny to prove you have the right to not show me your fanny.

I sound batshit but no more so than all the rest of it.

I think I’m less confused and more just bloody knackered. Im currently up breastfeeding and thinking god I hope by the time this baby is my age, we’ve put all this to bed. I agree with you though there’s been a swap somewhere but I don’t think it’s more men wanting to be women, there’s always been them. I think it’s more people deciding that particular group of people are the singular biggest threat to women which allows so many other shit things society does to women to fly past us while we’re all busy working out who has a penis and who hasn’t. It’s just so shit.

The only people who have ever challenged my sex were women. If you want it to be weird for men to ask to see your fanny in public toilets, then women need to stop asking to see people’s fannies in public toilets.

And is then, like me, a woman assigned female at birth who is more at risk of abuse in women’s toilets than they were before the ruling. I’ve been chatting to him tonight actually to keep me sane while this thread has been running and I’ve chosen to engage and his view is that it’s like Victorian lesbians - no one gives a shit if women don’t conform to sexuality/ gender norms. Just like lesbianism was never made illegal, it seems there’s different rules here for trans men and maybe that’s correct?

The court has ruled on what the government meant at the time of the law being created. Nothing more or less.

In the same way they are now, female sign on one communal area, male sign on another and 'all genders' on the area designated unisex. I really don't see an issue.

So grants to every business in the country to build or segregate off an entire area for unisex toilets? When were you last in a pub? Most are old buildings with zero room for anything like that. Like I say, a great solution but entirely impractical

It wouldn’t really because some women don’t have periods or give birth (and they are not trans women)

I'm not sure what your argument is?
If transwomen don't feel comfortable using the male toilets, then a third unisex space needs to be created. Obviously. The solution is not female-only spaces.

Maybe because it is women who have overwhelmingly been those most adversely affected by trans women. It hasn’t really affected men at all. Luckily men, such as prominent scientists like Richard Dawkins and Robert Winston - men top of their field with a much better understanding of biology than Stonewall have also made the stand

Of course but only a woman can have periods and only a woman gives birth. Adding in the super power that is breastfeeding - only a woman can do this.

I think most of us would probably agree that there are different rules for women in society generally. It's not really a new idea. And that's one of the reasons the waters around this were muddied in the first place.

It should never have got this far.

Women should have been respected enough in the first place that our voices were just listened to when we said it wasn't what we wanted. Then there wouldn't be so much angst now about where TW are going to pee when out in public because third unisex places that anyone (trans or not) could use would already have been established and that would have been the norm that everyone accepted. It would be well established now and everyone would have been respected. Job done.

You are absolutely right that lesbians were of little interest to law makers because no one really took much notice of women and what they did generally. The biggest problem that lesbains pose to men is that they won't have sex with them. But it's OK, because they managed to turn them into sexual fantasy - so phew! Some use after all!

So gender non conforming women are less of an issue because they pose absolutely zero threat to men in any capacity. Some men find androgynous women, androgynous presenting women, women in masculine clothing sexy. Well that's OK then! As long as men's sexual interests are still catered.for, it's all good! The only reason women had to fight to be allowed to wear trousers and flat shoes in the workplace is because men find women in short/tight skirts and heels sexy. So that was what women were required to wear regardless of how uncomfortable, impractical, physically damaging or painful those clothes/shoes were.

A lot of societal rules are based around the idea that a woman's primary function was/is to be sexually appealing to men at best and unproblematic at least. And women standing up and saying no to men is breaking the social contract that men applied and no woman explicitly agreed to.

It makes the majority of women uncomfortable to feel like that. Some respond by modifying their appearance to appeal to male sexual desires. Some respond by hating their 'inadequate' bodies. Some will respond by removing their 'femininity' and womanliness by transitioning to take themselves away from the male gaze. Some will just try to avoid men like that and hope they've found themselves a good one. Some will reject it all as nonsense.

It is different for transmen because they pose absolutely no threat to men whatsoever. They never claim to be 'more of a man than you'll ever be' because they're not in competition with men. Most I've spoken to/read about are just happy to be in their acceptable, unremarkable new 'male' body, to not be bullied anymore for not being feminine or pretty enough to avoid male crticism or subjected to lewd remarks because they had the temerity to grow breasts at 12.

Primogeniture laws weren't changed so no man will ever have to worry about a transman taking what's rightfully his away from him. And men have been permitted to exclude transmen from their spaces on the basis they weren't actually male. Eg the gay sauna that said they wouldn't accept a transman because they were gay and only attracted to other men and the transman was a woman. Where was the same, "Well, yeah, that's obvious!" when TW were.getting women kicked off lesbian dating apps for saying the same?

And most men could still beat up a transman in a fight or win over them in sport. So no threat there either.

A transman won't win business awards or other accolades designed for men because they weren't real or born men so why would they? And men 'feel' this.

So everyone knows and always knew that transmen were really women underneath the newly acquired muscles and beard. Men had no fear of being raped by transmen because a) women don't generally go around sexually assaulting people and b) men generally don't go around worried about being raped by other men anyway.

Basically, no one was under pressure to prove they believed transmen were really men. More than that, they were allowed to not believe it. And until this was pointed out, transmen were largely ignored by the trans rights movement. If the rules/expectations had been applied consistently across the board, i might have accepted that some people really did believe you could be born in the wrong body. But they weren't because they didn't. Otherwise, how would the eldest daughter not become the eldest son for inheritance purposes? It was because, deep down, everyone knew the truth, and that was a male privilege.

So transmen pose no threat to men on a societal, sexual, financial, sporting, dignity, professional level in any way.

And I don't think I need to make this post any longer by explaining why transwen are different because its all been said a million times already.

If it’s impractical to create the space, it will be a bit like where old buildings can’t adapt for disabled access and there will be an exemption. At the end of the day, the court case said sex is binary - for the purposes of single sex spaces, if there are male and female options you can use the one that aligns with your biology or if you present heavily as a male (mtf) the one that aligns with how you present in certain circumstances (although I have no issue with any biological woman using women’s facilities - I’ve included the carve out in the ruling for completeness)

To avoid confusion- I’ve use “you” in a generic way

You were conceived female. No one assigned you anything. When you were born it was observed that you were female.

Your use of these nonsensical phrases demonstrates how captured you are by this pernicious ideology.