Trans vs other protected characteristics

[Rudest75]

As somebody who has always been an advocate of both women's rights and LGBT rights I'm struggling to get my head around the recent trans debate. It seems to be an issue where you can't really support both sides, yet it's so less clear to me than is the case between most opposing ideologies like conservative vs liberal, nationalist vs multiculturalist, etc.

A common question around the bathroom debate seems to be "what rights exactly are trans people being denied?" When I try and apply this question to other protected characteristics I'm even more confused!

If we take the statement "trans people shouldn't be allowed in women's spaces because of a minority of dangerous men" how does this differ from the following examples?

"Muslims shouldn't be allowed in Christian spaces because of a small minority of terrorists/suicide bombers."

"Immigrants shouldn't be allowed in native spaces due to a small minority of rapists."

"Black people shouldn't be allowed in white spaces due to a small minority of gang members/Bloods/Crips."

I can't get my head around it!

'women's rights and LGBT rights ... It seems to be an issue where you can't really support both sides'

Hi op.
Lesbian are women.

Who do you mean when you say lgbt? If you include Lesbian in lgbt then listen to us when we say our communities are being destroyed and our identities are being erased.

Or do you mean 'L'gbt males only?

There is no conflict.
Members of oppressed groups are not monolithic.
Listen to Lesbian who are women and gay, or don't, but don't pretend we don't exist or that we aren't women and don't want women only spaces.

If we take the statement "trans people shouldn't be allowed in women's spaces because of a minority of dangerous men" how does this differ from the following examples?

The difference is that we segregate by sex, not by race or religion. We do this for reasons of safety, yes, but also for reasons of privacy, dignity and notions of decency.

For example, I am 100% confident that my husband's best mate, my father in law and my next door neighbour are not a danger to women. BUT I still don't want to get undressed in front of them (and I'm sure none of them would want to get undressed in front of me either).

None of these men are trans. Trans doesn't come into it. I don't want to get undressed in front of any man other than my husband and I don't expect anybody else to tell me that I should. Other people do not get to decide my boundaries.

women's rights and LGBT rights ... It seems to be an issue where you can't really support both sides

Which is why LGB rights, which are about sexual identity, should be separate from the T, which is about gender identity.

I'm bisexual and pro-LGB+ rights (I say LGB+ because asexual etc). I'm also a gender critical feminist. I don't want to have to withdraw my support from LGB+ events because the T insists on being the biggest victim and the one that receives the most support.

We segregate men and women on the basis of sex. And of course it's not just predatory men. It's men, period. Comfort, respect, boundaries. Like people are saying, I don't want to get undressed in front of my father-in-law, or my son's best friend, despite them both being completely unthreatening.

Men have proven themselves over and over to have zero idea of why women prefer to be in a vulnerable situation away from men. Even all those nice, sweet benign men simply have no clue.

Because they're men. Look at how so many men reacted to the #metoo campaign. Disbelief. Dismissal. Whataboutery. Outright accusation that it was all exaggerated.

When you have a subset of men insisting that you believe a lie in order that they can actively infiltrate your space, you've got a problem.

I know very many nice decent man in my life. None of whom would ever dream of demanding access to women's spaces. Because they are nice and decent and they don't want to intimidate women.

So what are you left with? Those who do, or don't care.

No thanks.

As somebody who has always been an advocate of both women's rights and LGBT

OP - can I stop you there.

Lesbians. Transwomen are berating lesbians for not sucking their lady cock. If lesbians 'went for' transwomen, then what does the marker 'lesbian' mean any more, as surely they are just Bisexual as they can effectively be atrracted to humans with female and male sexual organs.

Gay. Gay men are attracted to humans with penises. Transmen have been astonished when gay men on dating apps have not taken up the offer of dating a Transman. Mainly because they have female sex organs. If they did, again they are effectively bisexual.

Bisexual. We are all therefore bisexual as we have to be attracted to anyone, because Transwomen can have penises and Transmen can have vulvas/vaginas and so the terms 'Gay' and 'Lesbian' And 'Straight' cease to exist.

So that leaves BT. If you swallow the TransMafia Agenda, then you are effectively killing off [to use the TransMafia Hyperbole] Gay, Lesbian and Straight people.

So if you are supporting T then the rest cease to exist and we are all Bi.

Your equivalences are false

I suggest you stop trying to analyze sexual politics via useless and irrelevant thought experiments and focus on unpacking the actual matter in hand.

Totally agree. I suggest you start by looking at the title and defining what is 'trans' and what is meant by 'protected characteristics' then working on from there.

There is no shortcut to understanding to be found by saying 'X' is like 'Y' until you are absolutely sure you know what 'X' is and what 'Y' is.

If we take the statement "trans people shouldn't be allowed in women's spaces because of a minority of dangerous men" how does this differ from the following examples?

Natal men should not be allowed in natal women’s bathrooms because It infringes Women’s privacy.

Why can’t trans identifying men use men’s bathrooms? surely you are not suggesting it’s because of male violence ?

I think the focus on threat is confusing you as this is only one reason that there are segregated female places/services.

Some things are women only because we live in a patriarchal society and therefore women are an oppressed group. A few scholarships and female only shortlists are set up to tackle this.

Somethings are women only because there are profound biological differences between men and women, for example, sport and medical procedures.

in fact, terrorists are likely more dangerous than transwomen

Who's a what now?

The recent stats say that half of all women have been sexually harassed or assaulted at work. I would say that about 90% of women will be sexually assaulted, harassed, groped, raped or abused by men during their life. It's happened multiple times to all the women I know.

Transwomen with penises are a subset of men. They retain male patterns of offending. Add to that all the men who want to abuse and harass women who can just say, "I am a woman" and access women's spaces with self-ID... No way to tell who is doing it for the offending. None at all.

How many terrorist attacks have most people been in? Zero. What proportion of the world's 1.8 billion Muslims are terrorists?

Ask the question:

'How do you protect the most vulnerable in society?'

Then go from there, rather than looking at it from the other angle of groups of people - be they women or transpeople or an ethnic minority.

Then apply to something like the situation where TIMs are using the womens pool rather than the unisex one.

Does this make women feel vulnerable? Will it prevent some women from being able to use the facility at all? Does it leave the situation open to abuse from malicious men who are not TIMs?

What do TIMs gain from using the women's pool rather than the unisex one, apart from validation?

Its about respect for all.

Respect has to be a two way thing, in which it is understand WHY a particular group is vulnerable and why individuals in that group are more vulnerable than others.

There is a lack of understanding by transactivists about why women are vulnerable in the first place, yet women are supposed to bend over backwards to accommodate. That is a loss of safe guarding.

It also, ironically, might remove safeguarding for TIMs and TIFs.

You should instead be asking how can we improve safeguards for the trans community, without exposing women to risk.

This is the crux of it: Rights exist to protect.

To understand rights, you have to understand why those rights were created and who they were there to protect and what from.

Its not necessarily that giving access to trans people that's the problem. Its what else you let in, in order to accommodate that, and how that leaves both the trans community exposed and the women's community.

TRAs speak for a single strand of the trans community. Others see the approach they are taking as dangerous.

Why is that?

Its about balancing the needs of all. But those needs have to be acknowledged for that to happen. Saying biology is not important is a complete denial of why women need rights, and this is a massive problem.

The reason why I'm reticent to answer personal questions is because I observe it to be a common tactic on here to derail a debate by asking the OP loads of questions and then attacking the answers, thus shifting the focus away from the original question - 99% of the time this is done when the respondents don't like the line of questioning.

To give an honest answer, I'm not sure how I feel. I suppose my belief is that public areas are exactly that and are assigned via the will of the majority and not the individual. The only place you have full jurisdiction over is your home and if the public vote decides an area should be unisex then so be it. At one point in time, many people would've felt threatened changing in the presence of a black person but this had changed with the times and those who would prefer apartheid have had to suck it up.

Personally, I'd have no issue sharing my space with a genuine transwoman although I appreciate that they aren't the main threat. However, I'd still rather deal with the errant individuals on an individual basis than castigate the whole demographic because of them.

If a 'right' infringes on someone else's basic human rights, then you have to question if it is a right at all.

I cant think of another human rights movement that removes basic human rights from another disadvantaged group, with threats of violence, and demands they suck it up.

The recent stats say that half of all women have been sexually harassed or assaulted at work. I would say that about 90% of women will be sexually assaulted, harassed, groped, raped or abused by men during their life. It's happened multiple times to all the women I know.

Transwomen with penises are a subset of men. They retain male patterns of offending. Add to that all the men who want to abuse and harass women who can just say, "I am a woman" and access women's spaces with self-ID... No way to tell who is doing it for the offending. None at all.

How many terrorist attacks have most people been in? Zero. What proportion of the world's 1.8 billion Muslims are terrorists?

This.

You are taking something that's incredibly common - sexual harassment of women by male-bodied people - and conflating it with something very uncommon.

Also an aside - terrorists aren't just muslim - you're falling for media bollocks if you think this is true.

And terrorism is a subset of male violence in the main anyway.

If we take the statement "trans people shouldn't be allowed in women's spaces because of a minority of dangerous men"

How does this differ from:

"people with male pattern violence shouldn't be allowed in women's spaces because of a minority of dangerous people with male pattern violence".

There is NO evidence to suggest that transwomen don't offend as often as men - in fact the evidence points to them offending the same as men.

Men are responsible for 98% of sexual assaults.

Why should women be forced to share our private spaces with people who are biologically male and no different (on a population level) in terms of patterns of crime, than men?

And terrorism is a subset of male violence in the main anyway

Yes - many lone attackers are also men who are domestic abusers.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/28/lone-attackers-domestic-violence-khalid-masood-westminster-attacks-terrorism

At one point in time, many people would've felt threatened changing in the presence of a black person but this had changed with the times and those who would prefer apartheid have had to suck it up.

I am 50 and have changed in front of/used toilets alongside black women/girls since about the age of knowing what the concept of age was. This really is an insulting sentence for both black women and girls, and those that 'had to' get changed with them. FFS.

Personally, I'd have no issue sharing my space with a genuine transwoman

Well, you see I do not know what you mean there by a 'genuine transwoman' Is that someone who has legal status under the current law, someone who is working towards that status, someone who says they are working towards that status but not actually actively doing anything about it, or does it mean the myriad of variations that come under Stonewall's 'Trans umbrella'. Or does it mean a man who has decided that his best interests are currently served by self defining when the opportunity arises. Or does it mean a man who likes to try anything once?

To give an honest answer, I'm not sure how I feel. I suppose my belief is that public areas are exactly that and are assigned via the will of the majority and not the individual

Has the majority been consulted over removing sex segregation? Last I knew, the NHS had to re-instate it following massive outcry.

"The reason why I'm reticent to answer personal questions is because I observe it to be a common tactic on here to derail a debate by asking the OP loads of questions and then attacking the answers, thus shifting the focus away from the original question - 99% of the time this is done when the respondents don't like the line of questioning."

But the question "why do we bother with sex-segregated spaces at all?" is the very heart of the matter. Why do we have women's prisons? Why do we have women's and men's wards in hospitals? Why do we have women-only domestic violence shelters? Why do we have women only sports?

Either our existing sex segregation is wrong, just as racial segregation was (though as others have pointed out, this analogy is spurious, because it's about protecting the space of the oppressed group, not keeping them out of the space of the powerful), in which case we just get rid of sex-segregated spaces altogether, job done or you have to explain in what respect transwomen are the same as women in order to justify why sex segregation should be replaced with gender segregation.

What personal questions?
You havent answered any of the rebuttals people have made to your post.

So just try one;
Whats wrong with a third gender neutral option?

If you genuinely want to understand, please consider this carefully. What's the answer?

the question "why do we bother with sex-segregated spaces at all?" is the very heart of the matter. Why do we have women's prisons? Why do we have women's and men's wards in hospitals? Why do we have women-only domestic violence shelters? Why do we have women only sports?

Either our existing sex segregation is wrong, just as racial segregation was (though as others have pointed out, this analogy is spurious, because it's about protecting the space of the oppressed group, not keeping them out of the space of the powerful), in which case we just get rid of sex-segregated spaces altogether, job done or you have to explain in what respect transwomen are the same as women in order to justify why sex segregation should be replaced with gender segregation.

Rudest's OP is exactly the attitude I was talking about on Bertrand's "Transwomen are women" thread - false equivalence being drawn with other protected characteristics. Then comes the motivated reasoning...

Either our existing sex segregation is wrong, just as racial segregation was (though as others have pointed out, this analogy is spurious, because it's about protecting the space of the oppressed group, not keeping them out of the space of the powerful), in which case we just get rid of sex-segregated spaces altogether, job done or you have to explain in what respect transwomen are the same as women in order to justify why sex segregation should be replaced with gender segregation.

And how the most vulnerable in society will be better off with the later rather than the former.

At some point in there you need to put this into context and assess risk and how many will be affected by the change.

You need to look at how many of each group there are, and what risks there are to them.

Strangely enough, prisons did do this. Their conclusion was ignored and labelled transphobic because it concluded something they didn't like and showed there WAS a measureable and greater risk in changing this.