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?”

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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?

I’ll make this point outside of a reply because I actually think it’s worth highlighting.

While I agree with the ruling and accept it was required to protect women and girls, I am a woman who was assigned female at birth who, due to PCOS and a few other hormonal quirks grows quite thick facial hair, which I pluck but when things are bad, I have to shave which leaves me with a shadow. I’m also overweight and unfortunately have a naturally quite ‘masculine’ set of facial features (I take after my dad). I wear my hair shortish and I don’t wear very feminine clothes anymore because when I do, I look like a trans woman to other women and I find I get stared at less when at a glance, people assume im
male. When I used to wear dresses, I got challenged in public toilets by women quite a few times over the years. One woman shouted ‘you’re a pervert coming into the ladies where there’s little girls!’, another spoke to me at the sinks and said ‘you do realise we’ll never accept trans women are women, you’re not welcome here’. Another said ‘you don’t pass you know’ on her way out as I was entering a cafe. I will say I have never once had abuse thrown at me by a man. It has gotten a hundred times worse in the last couple of years to the point where I fully stopped dressing in feminine clothes about a year ago and whenever I can, I use disabled loos/ baby changes. I am a ‘cis’ (I hate that word) female.

Despite agreeing the supreme court ruling protects MOST women, it actually makes my life significantly harder but when I try to talk about this, im immediately assumed to be a TRA. I’m fully expecting to be challenged more often now and asked to ‘prove’ my sex and I’m genuinely frightened about it. All I’ll ask is that people don’t take this ruling as cart blanche to be arseholes to people you don’t think are feminine enough.

I used to believe feminism existed to make sure we smashed through the image of what women SHOULD be, I believed it existed to help women like me. But, if this Supreme Court ruling was an act of feminism, then I feel very much kicked out of the tent.

So what would you have preferred the ruling to be? @Fannycrevasse The SC made a ruling that defined woman in a way that excludes TW, and as you are not a TW It makes no difference to your position. I empathise with the difficulties caused to you by the moves to include men in women's facilities, but what would you have hoped for from the SC to make this better for you?

I am a female who has birthed 2 children. My problem isn’t me not knowing my sex, it’s other women looking at me and assuming they know my sex. I don’t have a DSD, I have PCOS (admittedly quite severe). I am part of a support group for other women with PCOS and hormonal disorders and there’s bloody loads of us and many of us are bricking it.

I feel for you, but this situation had come about as a result of men breaking the social contract by entering women's spaces - making women much more suspicious than they ever used to be.

Hopefully in time, trust in men to do the right thing will grow and problems like this will diminish.

As I said, I agree with the SC ruling, I wish, selfishly, however it had never been brought to the SC in the first place because I wish trans people generally hadn’t been targeted by the far right, catapulted into the national discourse and disproportionately depicted as a threat. Yes, there are men who pretend to be trans or pretend to be women in order to harm women, but no one disagrees that the vast majority of trans people (of
which there are vanishingly few) are just trying to live quiet lives, like me.

The SC ruling doesn’t change my position legally at all, what it does though is allows my sex to be challenged more, emboldens other women to question me more, makes my life more conspicuous. If you ask me to prove I’m a woman in order to still attend my all women therapy group for example, are they expecting me to show them my vulva? Carry around my birth certificate? (Which of course I could have had changed if I were male), on the spot DNA test? Realistically, what’s going to happen is my looks will be the only proof of sex anyone will ever actually use which in my case makes life a lot more difficult.

@FannycrevasseOut of interest, did you get challenged more before or after tw were allowed to assume they could use the ladies? And what happened when you said hang on a minute I'm female?

Really? Because there’s loads of us. You’re a gynae nurse you’re not an endocrinologist which is where most of us with severe PCOS tend to end up. I don’t think I’ve ever needed to see gynae in relation to PCOS, why would I?

This. Seems to be a lot of angry men on TV lately.

I didn’t say hang on a minute I’m female, my breath caught in my throat and I was too focused on not crying to say anything back. That probably confirmed to these women that they were right. They probably left the interaction feeling they’d done some excellent feminism.

I got challenged a lot less before trans people were all over the media, it really got severe in about 2016.

Men don’t need to pretend to be women in order to hurt women, or to enter women’s spaces uninvited. I hope the SC ruling is enough to help women feel safer so the trans debate comes out of the media spotlight and I can then feel less conspicuous again.

You do know that there are absolute numpties like Green MP Maggie Chapman, great ally of the trans, who says stuff like she doesn't know what chromosomes she has as she has never been tested? Despite giving birth to children? Yes, there are great answers to the questions but we are really dealing with the deliberately goady here, and the intent of the question is to mock and demean women.

That doesn't mean we open the door to them and invite them into our intimate spaces to give them more opportunities however.

This is all about the bad behaviour of men. I hope it's cracked down on quickly.

I think Maggie Chapman is genuinely, certifiably insane. The things she's come out with are beyond batshit.

What test could they have meant??

It just goes to show how ignorant men are in general about the female body. Most of us spontaneously menstruate in our teens. 100% of girls who have menses are female. No testing required. Following from that an awful lot of us have been pregnant. Again, 100% of humans who have been spontaneously pregnant are female. The idiocy is painful.

But who calls her out on it? As for other women who are suddenly claiming that their tall female friends or PCOS female friends are being called out and harassed in public toilets by other women, colour me sceptical.

Literally certified female.

Yes. And did he share his male result?

Hi, I’m a woman with PCOS who has been challenged about my biological sex a number of times in recent years. It’s not had time to get worse yet but I’m expecting it to.

I feel for you - I also have PCOS, am muscular and hairy, and quite tall. To top it off I now have cancer, which means I'm bald. I have received dirty looks in the toilets as well and am scared of where this judgement is leading. It reminds me of my school days, where the girls found out I'm bisexual and took it upon themselves to flush my clothes down the toilet, sexually harass me and ultimately forced me to change in the toilet because I was a 'threat'.
I'm scared too - you're not alone.

The only thing giving me comfort right now is that (for now) my understanding is there is still no law declaring that trans people must use the "correct" spaces. You are not obliged to prove or explain yourself to anyone. I'm practising the line "I am entitled to use this space, and I am not obliged to prove it to you". Nobody can call the police on you for being in the wrong bathroom.

There is absolutely no way of enforcing this without invasive medical procedures and there is no way I am complying with anyone who asks me to in the future. I would absolutely not want any trans person to be subjected to it either, or face arrest or harassment for simply being in a space.

This hysteria is not the fault of trans people. The media has been whipping up this frenzy and feeding people's fears using extreme examples of dangerous people, which you can do for pretty much any group.

Why on earth are you blaming feminists for the fact that women now need to side eye people whose sex appears ambiguous in women's toilets? I'm sorry that happened to you, it's not nice, but it's trans activists who caused the situation, not feminists.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/03/27/cis-woman-fired-after-customer-accused-her-of-being-trans-says-it-felt-like-a-stab-in-the-back/

Could this be where we're headed?