"I worry that the orthodoxy will be that women lose the courage to challenge these male bodied individuals in their spaces which will put them at risk, or they will simply stop going."
I think this is already happening all over the place. No one is measuring how this is affecting women's participation, but anecdotally I and several other women and girls I know choose not to participate in both online and offline spaces which toe the trans line. We do not feel welcome or respected, so we don't waste our energy.
I wrote a research proposal for my final undergrad assignment last year, pointing out that girls in schools and womens orgs had been given no voice or acknowlegement at all when several different sets of trans promoting guidelines for schools had been developed and sent out by local authorities. They (we) have not been considered as a stakeholder group at all when their (our) teams, toilets, changing rooms, school trips etc have been opened to males who identify as trans. I got the lowest mark of my entire degree by nearly 30%. They gave me the lowest mark possible - I'm not even joking about this. 40 was the pass point, I got 41. If they had given me 39 I could have asked for a re-mark, but they gave me just enough that there was nothing I could do. I don't think it was a great assignment, but I know I was given that low mark because of my topic and angle - suggesting that the impact of trans centred policies on women and girls should be investigated is basically seen as hate speech in many places.
This all makes me feel like a nutty conspiracy theorist, but the fact is that women and girls are being silently excluded from all sorts of spaces by trans centred policies. I know teenage girls who avoid using their school toilet block since they changed it to be more open, one of the ones with sinks down the middle, the local press reported that it was now welcoming to transgender youth (I suspect it was more built to save money or something?). The girls I know aren't comfortable with it, they'll talk about that out of school, but they haven't made a fuss and so no one has noticed that their access and participation has been affected. No one cares except feminists, and we are being censored and banned from any space where we might bring the topic up.
We need to take control of our own spaces again, as a starting point. We need to make feminist spaces women only and we need to tell anyone who doesn't like it - tough. We need to work out how to make existing laws work for us, we need to rake through international and European human rights legislation etc and point out where our rights are being obliterated. We need to stop calling men women and she and pandering to people who disrespect and despise us. We don't need to 'go along' - but if we are going to stand against the tide then we need to stand together and create some sort of support network or safety net for those women who are targeted by the wrath of these guys.
I have started bringing up this topic with different women in different contexts, and maybe it's just cos they've all been mums so far, but not a single one has been 'trans positive' - theyre all aghast. We aren't small in numbers, we just aren't organised!