Guardian article - it's cruel to keep trans women from single sex spaces

[Procrastinator1]

I've never started a thread before, but I am very disappointed with this opinion piece and feel quite angry when I look at this and the reporting of the attack by "women", which is on a different thread.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/26/trans-women-single-sex-spaces-cruel-impossible

I know it is just that, an opinion piece, but I am unhappy with the "integrity" of the piece. I feel a letter coming on, but sometimes despair about the voice natal women have.

Interested to know more about the author's feminist community, "Level Up."

Well I imagine her feminist community is the kid of place that centers and prioritizes a certain kind of woman, these days.

The author of this piece repeatedly references the awful murder of Naomi Hersi, without making any attempt to explain how this is relevant to single sex spaces. And then there's all the willful and deliberate misunderstanding of what single sex spaces are, and all the nonsense about policing them.

Yeah, it’s basically ‘I admit I know nothing about this but I have a strong opinion anyway’

I think she’s confused TBH... at the moment single sex spaces are gender neutral, they discriminate on grounds of sex class and there are laws designed to make this illegal when it is not legitimate or proportional because it is discrimination.

What the difference of opinion is is trans people want to change the discrimination from being based on sex class to being based on gender identity. Secondarily to make legal recognition of gender dependent on self declaration.

Some feminists want to retain sex based discrimination and feel self declaration conferring legal rights is a bad idea.

The tide is turning in our favour, expect more of the same. Desperate people do desperate writings.

It’s a bit simple minded to be all discrimination = Bad.

As GG reportedly said ‘we’ve got to discriminate against somebody’

(Girl Guiding not Germaine Greer BTW!)

How can she be the founder of an Anti sexism organisation if she has no idea what the impact of biological sex is?

And furthermore, the level of this is 'fire bad, tree pretty'.

What I can’t get is how she can imagine she might have hair type/music taste/experience of street sexual harassment in common with Ms Hersi but doesn’t seem able to make that leap that biological women have stuff in common with other biological women. Stuff that is likely to lead them to seek out places and spaces to connect with other women who have experienced those commonalities (infertility, abortion, pregnancy, post birth trauma and birth injuries, breast feeding, discrimination at work post motherhood, women’s cancers, motherloss, child bereavement, surviving child sexual assault or domestic violence etc etc).

It feels like there is a group of younger women who want to give up a whole load of woman centric stuff before they’ve reached a point in their own lives where they see how necessary it is.

The pendulum is swinging away from the other side.

Blimey. Is Level Up made up of all the trolls that have gracing FWR with their sage wisdom recently? So many recognizable talking points in that - dodgy stats, check. Significantly more vulnerable than yow, check.
I particularly enjoyed the injunction to stop worrying your little heads about swimming pools and toilets, because 2 women a week are killed and that is very important! Taking an actual stat that women are pointing to and using it to tell us to shut up about certain people trying to systematically remove the protections that might go some way to reducing that stat!

I feel your pain OP - read it earlier today and was pissed off by it. It's an opinion piece so unlikely to have comments either. If this is the type of feminist we have looking out for the interests of women and girls, we really are doomed!
Look at the thread on the Times article about the schoolgirl who successfully challenged her school's unisex toilet implementation instead - far more uplifting.

If its illegal to use toilets meant for the opposite sex then i might have to hand myself in (many years ago now but you used to get 20 minute queues for the ladies')!
Serious answer - this is very prominent now in media and we need to be discussing uncomfortable but practical topics like toilets as well as acting on stuff we can easily agree on, like sex or gender based violence

Oh get lost, Carys Afoko. Seriously. This whole thing about being 'creepily obsessed with genitals' keeps rearing its head. So if the only way you can tell someone's sex is by looking down their pants (which according to Carys it is), then how come we have always managed with male/female segregation in the past? I have never had anyone checking my genitals because I presume they can tell even just from my face that I am a woman.

Also 'you can't tell gender identity from someone's appearance'. Well no, you can't, but guess what? It doesn't fucking matter because gender identity has no fucking relevance to why segregation is sometimes necessary. If it's perfectly fine to have trans women in female spaces, then let's let all men in. We won't even know they are men unless we look down their pants though.

#makeEAexemptionsmandatory

I gave up reading these pro trans pieces in the guardian and elsewhere a few months ago because they depress me too much. Oh and anything by OJ. They don't even serve the purpose of sharpening my argument because they offer no counter argument to battle against. I can't believe the Guardian begs for money from its readers to pay for this asinine sh##. Anyway, I don't need to read it. I could probably recite it word for word as it is probably same old, same old.

I'm happy to be cruel in order for women and girls to be safe. I have no problem with someone thinking it's cruel. None. What. So. Ever.

It's ensured it's never going to get a penny from me.

Norther, you are not wrong. It's got the incisive and persuasive power of a cold, flaccid saveloy.

It's ensured it's never going to get a penny from me.

Same.

Anyone who recommends following Bergdorf and TRavis Alabanza as campaigners is clearly nailing their colours to the mast

What poorly written rubbish

The writer seems to be saying that safety concerns are real for trans people, but womens’ safety concerns are ‘spurious’.
Nice.

Ihavent that's one of the oft repeated steaming piles of crap that gets shovelled around FWR frequently.
Trans people, most oppressed evar. Women, don't be so silly. That exactly what Shon Faye meant by 'enjoy your erasure'.

The writer seems to be saying that safety concerns are real for trans people, but womens’ safety concerns are ‘spurious’

Yup. That seems to be the sum of the argument. Trans women could not possibly go in male changing rooms because they would just be attacked and their dignity violated. However, women who say they feel uncomfortable with a male body in their changing room need to STFU, educate themselves and stop being so fucking transphobic because there has literally never been a case ever of a trans woman attacking anyone.

Yes I wish some of them knew anything about using statistics. 41% of trans people have experience abuse have they, and that means that women all have to put up and shut up because they have such a hard time.

Curiously enough 40% is equal to 2 out of 5 - which is the number of women who are estimated to experience rape. That's rape: many more will experience verbal abuse. (In fact I don't know any women myself in rl who haven't had some sexist verbal thrown at them at some time.) I suspect at least 12% of women in work experience harassment, and many more suffer discrimination in some form. But for trans people that this constitutes an especially bad epidemic of violence. When is the rather larger epidemic of violence and discrimination women are expected to put up with as a normal done deal going to be acknowledged by the writer of this article?

It's crueler to force women and girls, at least 1 in 6 of whom will already have been sexually assaulted statistically speaking, to share spaces where they're vulnerable and potentially naked with male people, especially given that they have no way of knowing the motivations of any of those male people, a problem that will only get worse if self ID is written into law.