Let me talk about shark attacks for a moment (it seems appropriate as we were looking at then yesterday with my kids).
They make headline news all the time. Everyone is petrified of shark attacks. They make movies about shark attacks (some better than others). Sharks are seen as this deadly threat to humankind.
But the actual underlying statistics are rather interesting.
There are almost 500 species of shark. Only 3 of them have ever committed fatal attacks on humans. Yes, less than 1%.
On average sharks attacks number under a hundred per annum (roughly 70 odd, more often than not through human stupidity) worldwide, and deaths are in single figures. Yet we are petrified of sharks. We scandalize them on television, they are hunted for the supposed prowess and sometimes to 'keep us safe'.
Humans kill over 100 million sharks every year.
There are 18 species animals that are responsible for more deaths every year, on average, aside from humans of course. Horses, deer, cows, elephants, hippos and domestic dogs are all more deadly (and one of those we keep in our houses, and one of those use as for entertainment). Some of those by quite a margin (Deer primary kill us by putting their antlers through our windscreens, but cows? Those things are mean when provoked!)
Mosquitos kill up to a million people per annum.
More Americans die from 'inhalation of gastric contents' that there are actual shark attacks.
More Americans die from 'ignition or melting of nightwear' than die from shark attacks.
But yes, let's focus on sharks to make us 'feel safer'. Of the several million people killed every year by animals, let's focus on the single digit number and not the millions. Or hundreds of thousands. Or even hundreds. The single digits, because they are 'scary' and keep us awake at night.
Sharks don't have a Reddit forum to discuss their sexual desire for eating humans thankfully. Otherwise they would be perceived as even more scary...
Now apply the same logic to trans people in bathrooms. Only the difference here is that there aren't 70 attacks in the past year you can even find. There are one or two, if that, tenuously linked to being trans and passed around like sacred stones among the anti-trans lobby. And few if any of those are in the 'safe spaces' you talk about. Yet we trans people have been using them for decades already. Self identification or not.
But trans people in the media are often portrayed as villains or perverts (I'm guessing you watched Silence of the Lambs?). The media turns us into sharks (yup, that's a battleground I'm engaged in on a different front). Then factor in the masturbatory fiction found on Reddit and bingo you have a mental picture of a trans person as a hairy assed knuckle dragging man with a deep voice pawing at the door of the ladies bathroom with one hand fumbling in his knickers (misgendering deliberate for effect, I hasten to add).
Real life couldn't be further from the truth. There are still few, if any, cases of an actual 'shark attack'. But the fear is there.
Fear is a incredibly powerful motivator. It does make us irrational and triggers primitive responses, especially when it comes to protecting our young. I fully understand that desire to protect yourself and your offspring (I have two daughters, one just turned 13 - protecting them from sexual predators is one of my primary concerns as well). Vilifying trans people as sharks is not the answer (we aren't even sharks).
Here is what you could be doing instead:
- Getting behind campaigns to provide better Sex and Relationship Education
- Asking for improvements on reporting and communication around sexual offences
- Redefining the sexual offences in this country (rape is only rape if it involves a penis in the UK!)
- Getting behind the campaign to make misogyny (e.g. cat-calling) a hate crime (you probably don't want to because the campaign was started by someone that identifies as non-binary - but here is the campaign link anyway - chn.ge/2ddecnG )
Those are just a few starters. And focusing at the mosiquto end of the animal attack scale (especially the misogny one. How much safer would women feel if cat-calling were made illegal?!?)
The trans agenda is on your side with all of the above (like we pretty much started the last one. And were any of you standing outside Parliament chanting for better sex education this year?)
We also want a safer world with less predatory attackers, we want safety for ourselves and for our children just as much as you do.
You don't need to believe in being trans to stand with us. All we really need is some solidarity, respect for our pronouns and the chance to coexist peacefully.
And realise that we want to use the bathroom to pee.