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It is hard not to conclude that such things are at least partly the result of a concerted attempt to stigmatise and demonise women who attempt to raise concerns about a policy that they feel poses risks to their safety and even their fundamental existence.
To be clear at that point, I note that the following two statements can both be true, at the same time. Neither fact justifies the other. First, some transgender people suffer unacceptable physical, mental and social abuse that causes them real and unacceptable harm. Second, some women who question the move towards self-defined gender feel real and unacceptable fear of physical harm at the hands of some people who advocate that change in the law.
Perhaps you think a Woman’s Place UK are over-reacting, or talking up the threat for political purposes. If so, I suggest you search online for ‘punch terfs’. Or follow a case of alleged assault currently awaiting trial. Or review the history of the group’s Edinburgh meeting, where one of the protesting groups has demanded that the venue that had the temerity to host a bunch of women talking about feminist theory hand the proceeds of the event over to a group that says punching Terfs is a moral duty akin to fighting Nazis.
Against which background, I suggest that it is depressingly understandable that some of the women involved in tonight’s meeting feel genuinely threatened, and threatened over the simple act of attending a political meeting.
And for all that this might upset or even offend some people, biology does matter here. Biological males are, on average, larger and stronger and more aggressive than biological females. Biological males commit more acts of violence — and more serious acts of violence – than biological females.
For these sadly rational reasons, among others, women are more likely to feel afraid of men than men are of women. Hence the existence of those spaces and places that law and convention reserve for women: changing rooms, refuges, hospital and prison wards.
Would the safety of those spaces be compromised if any man could gain the legal right to enter them simply by saying the words ‘I am a woman’? That is one of the questions the women who meet tonight are asking — keenly aware that some of the people who might take up that legal right are currently issuing threats against them.
I don’t know the answer but I think the question is a valid one and deserves a considered answer from anyone who proposes to change the law to allow such a situation. But it appears that some of those people don’t want to answer the question. They don’t even want it to be asked.
So the story of tonight’s Women’s Place meeting is this: a group of people who were raised male and in some cases retain full male anatomy are perpetuating a narrative that harm – including physical violence — can and should be inflicted on women who question the things those people say are true.
This debate about gender and sex and identity may seem terribly modern, a product of our times, but really, this is a story as old as they come: women who do not know their place are threatened and punished. Britain in 2018 is still a country where women who speak out risk a smack in the mouth.