To think that, under the threat of "Let the war begin", there should be specific laws against male's entering female private spaces (and vice versa)

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

After being told they will not be allowed to enter female toilets, changing rooms, clubs and other private sexed spaces, men have vowed to "fight" or be arrested “multiple times”

https://archive.ph/tdkd0

"Let the war begin. Fingers crossed. You need to fight for all of us globally. It’s a war."

I think it is reasonable to have a specific crime for this sort of violation of rights and privacy, rather than Outraging public decency, Voyeurism, Exposure/ indecent exposure.

It seems clear that without firm dealing with, men are going to violate these spaces again and again.

If a tree falls in a wood but there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If a man posing as a woman goes into the female toilets but there’s no one there to witness him, can he really say he’s a woman ? 🤔

Indeed AstonUni

The ‘reality’ in this case is that the person is male and not experiencing that particular interaction as a female experience.

It is not a female experience to need a male catheter for a female body that has not undergone extreme modification of the urethra.

This is always where reality abides regardless of someone’s philosophical belief about themselves.

Trans: when ideology meets reality, by Helen Joyce.

That’s why her book is so perfectly titled.

My friend has a daughter whose social transition she eagerly participated in pre teens. Always very gender nonconforming, huge pre pubescent trauma, autistic, has experienced periods of anxiety & depression. Also indulged by said parent & subsequently very entitled. A textbook case for the Tavistock.

A few years down the line she’s on testosterone. Her beard is growing, & her voice breaking & deepening as her vocal chords swell too much for her naturally slimmer female throat.

Reality will really hit ideology when the vaginal atrophy starts to kick in, along with menopause likely before she’s 30. But hey, trans.

Its not knowing that what they are feeling is “female” - it’s a direct experience/ awareness of self as being female- that is the experience itself:
It’s like saying- how does someone know they are sexually attracted to men? Or how do they know they are hungry? They know it because they experience it.

But how? They have make bodies. They are not female. So how do they know what feeling like a female is? I know I am female because I have female biology. They don’t. They are male. They cannot know what it is to be female.

“It absolutely is possible to be registered male at birth and to understand / experience/ have knowledge of self as female.”

This only exists as a conceptualisation for that male person.

They experience life as THEY conceptualise a female person might experience life, but that doesn’t make it in anyway an accurately labelled conceptualisation. It just means that they have no objective experience in which to categorise their experience.

Just because they ‘believe’ they are experiencing something they label as a ‘female experience’ doesn’t make it a female experience.

Why should society be validating these inaccurately categorised experiences as being accurately categorised when to do so causes harm to others? Since when has it been required that the population validate someone’s philosophical belief when it doesn’t reflect material reality?

Again, this group of male people are demanding privileges that are in addition to the rights of the rest of the population.

No, it's completely unlike either of those. Because both things, hunger and sexual arousal, are body functions.

Imagining a gender identity is all mental.

What do you mean by “ bodily functions” versus “ all mental”?

These are false distinctions.

Hunger is a mental cognition- something that you experience in the brain. As is sexual attraction. Yes both may have physiological underpinnings- in both cases these are hormonal . Very likely gender does too- in fact there’s a lot of evidence on this.

“Because both things, hunger and sexual arousal, are body functions.”

And they are generally universally felt, and describable in terms that allow categorisation based on material reality.

@Tandora - this took ages. Please, respond clearly and point by point to this if you possibly can.

No one can directly access another person’s inner life. A male can sincerely identify as a woman, but he cannot know he “feels like a woman,” because he has never been female and has no way to compare his inner state with female embodiment. That makes the claim an interpretation, not knowledge. Courtesy is fine; where sex matters, we should use sex.

The core point
To know what something is like from the inside you need direct experience of it, or a way to compare your experience against it. A male has never run the “female body” with its lifelong hormonal states, puberty, menstruation, pregnancy risk, menopause, and sexed socialisation. He cannot verify that his inner feeling matches “being female.” He can only label a feeling “woman” based on observation and imagination. That is empathy or stereotype, not knowledge.

Why this matters

1. Epistemic limit: Sincere feelings are real to the person who has them, but sincerity does not convert a private feeling into confirmed knowledge about a sexed class one has never belonged to.
2. Category mistake: Confusing identification with identity is like saying “I feel like a pilot” versus holding a pilot’s licence. One is an inner state; the other is a status grounded in material constraints. Sex is a bodily status, not a mood.
3. Stereotype trap: If “feeling like a woman” means clothes, mannerisms, or roles, that reduces “woman” to a costume. If it is not stereotypes, then it rests on an unverifiable private feeling and cannot override sex where sex is relevant (sport categories, intimate spaces, safeguarding).

Analogies that shine a light on this argument:

• Colour vision: A red-green colour blind person can learn every fact about “red” and copy the social cues, but they still do not see red as others do. Knowing about is not the same as knowing from within.
• Pregnancy and the risk of it: You can empathise with pregnancy without ever knowing what it is like. Even women who never become pregnant live with the bodily possibility and the life shaped around that risk. Males do not.
• Native language: You can be fluent in a second language, yet you do not retroactively acquire the childhood formation of a native speaker. Lived formation matters.
• The bat thought experiment: You can study bats forever; you still do not know what echolocation feels likewithout being a bat. Likewise, a male can learn about women yet never be female.

Replying to some of your possible answers early:

• “Women do not all feel the same.” Correct. The point is not a single female essence. It is that women share a sexed embodiment and life-course that males do not. You can lack access to another woman’s exact feelings and still know what it is like to live as female in a female body. A male has neither.
• “Gender identity is my inner sense; you cannot police it.” You can describe your inner life as you wish. The question is what follows. A private sense can guide personal expression and courtesy. It cannot redefine a sex class or grant knowledge of experiences one has never had, especially where sexed reality has consequences.

What I am not saying

• I am not denying anyone’s distress or humanity. Gender dysphoria is real and deserves compassion and care.
• I am not arguing for rudeness in everyday dealings. I am drawing a boundary between courtesy for individuals and policies that must be grounded in sexed facts.

Conclusion
Feeling is personal; sex is material. A male may think he feels like a woman, but he cannot know it, because he has never been female and has no internal standard for comparison. Personal identification can be respected in social interaction. It should not replace sex where fairness, privacy, safety, and accuracy depend on it.

Please @Tandora - read this and give us a clear response about why you disagree with me, if you even do.

”Very likely gender does too- in fact there’s a lot of evidence on this.”

Excellent!

Please post away! You have the evidence that will convince many people so post that evidence so we can all learn from your evidence.

And women and girls? What about their fundamental human rights? The respect for their humanity/dignity, rights to privacy, protection from discrimination?

A s per usual you will never respond to this because you are all about the men.

Dear Helle, type the words “gender” and “hormones” into any academic or scientific library search engine and read away.

Here, I’ve started the process for you:

https://idiscover.lib.cam.ac.uk/primo-explore/search?query=any,contains,Hormones%20and%20gender&tab=default_tab&search_scope=default_scope&vid=44CAM_PROD&lang=en_US&offset=0

36,000+ results

Isn’t it lucky for these men that it’s all so complex, it’s an entirely personal experience, it’s an awareness of self, it ‘just is’ their reality (is it just me that reads these type of posts in my head in the soft, lilting voice of a female woke life coach?)

If you make it a woo, crystal thumbing, navel gazing ‘you’d just never understand’ it concept, then biological & material reality & other peoples rights can be waved away, with the magic wand of trans.

Some women’s toilets have male cleaners though.

Wait, so there is biological evidence by way of naturally produced hormones that is foundational to transgender identities and yet not one country’s medical review about treatments using puberty blockers found this as being high quality and use this hormone measurement for diagnosis?

Well, as I have said a few times before, this evidence needs to be submitted to all these review panels quickly!

Or, maybe it is a weak conclusion that is poor quality evidence that is being talked up on MN.

How do you tell?

Whats the line between exposing yourself to a child and exposing yourself to a child while using a toilet for its intended purpose?

Have you heard of plausible deniability? Predators and pervs are often pretty good at it. Gullible people enable it.

With signs usually informing female people so they can make an informed decision for themselves as to whether to enter or not.

Gosh. I wish I could reason things out this well.
My brain just goes all mushy with the frustration of it all!
Thank you for this👌

@SingleSexSpacesInSchools

Fantastic post, grounded in logic & reality.

I’m genuinely curious to see the response. The trouble is, all their responses are predicated on a lie, that men can be women by ….. (insert various fanciful assertions).

Dear Tandora

Please do your civic minded duty on this thread in your self appointed role as an ambassador to your cause and post the relevant studies with your professional comments on why they are strong evidence to support your points.

You claim that you have already posted links to evidence, yet fail to ever locate them again. When the reality is MN has an excellent advanced search function so you can use key words that you remember from those evidence links and your professionally grounded commentary on that evidence.

That is fine that you don’t. But you see, if you actually intended to ‘educate’ as you keep asserting, you would do this.

So there is something really inconsistent in what you say and actually what you do. Are you here to educate? Or are you here to simply present logically incoherent philosophically based arguments and to dishonestly represent evidence as being stronger than it is?

When a trans person says that they are female, they are not making any claims about your experience of being female/ your body/ etc etc. they are telling you something about themselves and themselves only. To be a trans woman is to be registered male at birth but to understand/ recognise/ know oneself to be female.

This is what it is to be trans.
it may seem impossible
to you because it doesn’t make sense from the perspective of your own experience or how you see the world, but it is real feature of human diversity.

This is a direct experience- it’s not a reasoned out thought process - oh I want to wear a dress/ lipstick/ like riding ponies, therefore I must be female because I think that’s what makes a person female.

It’s not that at all.

it’s not about stereotypes, or female essence, or a claim to anything in common with you or me.

It’s an entirely personal, pervasive, automatic, cognitive sensation like hunger - a direct experience / awareness of self as being other than the sex one was assigned at birth.

The distinction you make between “feelings” and what is “material” is false.
there are lots of psychological / cognitive processes that have physiological (often hormonal) underpinnings- hunger/ sexual attraction, etc. So it is with gender.

am not denying anyone’s distress or humanity. Gender dysphoria is real and deserves compassion and care.

thank you for this.

Oh. What a surprise. I get dancing diamond shapes that cycle into nothingness.

That seems rather significant.

Some womens toilets have male cleaners though?

And? All men, however they identify, should therefore be let into female single sex spaces?

Luckily enough there are plastic signs warning women that a male cleaner is there. This gives her the choice of whether to enter or not. A choice denied when men self identify & barge their way in ‘cause trans.’