I find male bodies in female spaces very threatening....

[loveyouradvice]

.....it is as simple as that.

I want safe spaces where I know I can relax and know that there will not be male bodies present.... whether it is at the swimming pool, or in the ladies, or in so many situations...

And I find that in this tough world of ours in other situations I feel uplifted by being in women- only groups, nurturing, supporting, caring, sharing....

I know that many transwomen badly want to be women but the reality is that they do not have female bodies - their bodies can be very threatening, especially given so many of them do indeed keep male genitalia.

And more than that.... I feel threatened that I will lose those precious supportive women's spaces, having heard of so many others they have destroyed, whether it is Michfest or lesbian groups or even just women's groups where vulnerable women have ended up fleeing.

Is it ironic that the only sensitive transsexuals we seem to come across - the likes of Miranda Yardley et al - are quite clear that they are men and are keen to understand a "woman's lot".

I would feel far more reassured if there were transpeople who were wanting to be assimilated into a woman's world by understanding and sharing our causes, which never seems to happen and we never hear about - all we hear is of those who are closing down by demanding that trans issues are not excluded.....It feels so strange, I have never heard a woman campaigning for the end of FGM complain that it is not about them but about others....

flourella, good grief.

If you hit problems my mother always suggests screaming. Make a right fuss.

Fwiw, bespin, we didn't all make fun of your username, as you noted, there were quite a number who correctly identified the origin.

Nobody 'made fun' of anything. I pointed out that I can't really trust that someone with a user name that is an anagram of B-penis is posting in good faith particularly when the topic is penises in female spaces.

Weird huh?

Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them. Margaret Atwood.

FloralBunting I know it's not everyone on this forum. But a lot of people are silent when things like this happen.

TellsEveryoneRealFacts telling me you were not doing that while posting a quote about men not finding things funny really says a lot. I'm not really interested if that's your approach to this, you can explain it to the mods.

bespin I didn't make fun of your name but I did think it was possible you were messing with us by your choice of name once the anagram was pointed out.

I'm on twitter, from their tweets transwomen on twitter are more obsessed with penises than men.

Not this is not an apology by any means - there are limits to my female socialisation

MIdgebabe, there's nothing to suggest that I will end up on the ward at the same time as a transwoman, of course. I have just been prompted to consider this issue in the context of NHS policy and it seems to me that, in a time when NHS Trusts get fined for still having mixed-sex wards, trans people get to say where they want to be placed regardless of their sex and this is somehow in keeping with the policy on same-sex provision. It's ludicrous!!

Unfortunately for me, I'm far too meek and inhibited to kick up a fuss about anything! I wonder if (and how) anyone will be collating data on women and girls who will be quietly giving up their hobbies, rights to treatment, etc because of this insidious bullshit.

Snappity I'm intrigued by you saying you're not a transwoman, a woman would not have made that offensive comparison so suggests you're male. For women this debate is personal, as indeed it is for transwomen, so that's why we're all here. So I'm curious Why are you? (Your posts aren't actually helping the trans cause, if that's your motivation.)

Flourella I hope your hospital stay goes well with no unnecessary stresses

SpareRibFem thank you. It's a specialist OCD ward rather than acute care for a crisis. Hopefully it can make a difference to me.

TellsEveryoneRealFacts telling me you were not doing that while posting a quote about men not finding things funny really says a lot. I'm not really interested if that's your approach to this, you can explain it to the mods.

Threats as well, how feminine! You are coming out of this better and better. I posted the quote because you said I was making fun of you, which I wasn't - I was pointing out a crass anagram. If you interpret women's words s making fun of you, then you are falling into the male trait of not wanting women to laugh at you - hence the post.

No matter what - the traits come out in the words. Every time.

TBH not many men want female bodies in their spaces either, for different reasons. I'm still waiting to see men being asked to move up a bit to make space for the transmen

Well, yes, a number of us raised suspicions about the motivation behind bespin's username, and in this particular climate of being forced to endorse lies, I think that's fairly understandable. But then the star wars connection was highlighted quite quickly and that was the end of that. I wasn't critiquing the women with questions about the username, I was underlining that that it wasn't quite as bespin had received it.

This is about single sex spaces for everyone else but not for trans people and definitely not for trans women who are legally female but still have a penis.

When you wonder about people's doubts about posters on threads. This is the bit that raises the hairs on the back of my neck, my radar warning. And it galls me that by making this post, I would be accused of 'making it all about genitalia'. Because, realistically, it is.

Many, many females have been talking for many years now about how this doesn't sit right.

If you're truly female, even if you, yourself, have had no problems with be-penised people in your sex-specific spaces - whatever they are, I'm not just talking about toilets here. Surely you'd have empathy with females who do?

You wouldn't just go 'oh, let people with penises into female spaces, because they say they're women, otherwise it's just not fair'.

It just feels such a counter-intuitive argument to all the females I've known over the years, from so many backgrounds. "Yeah, let penises in, they're legally female". I know not one female in real life who would go "that's a good idea".

I took my daughters swimming last year and there was a naked man in the women's changing room. My mouth said stuff before I had a chance to engage my brain. He left (still naked)

I don't think he was trans. But what do I know? There's no way to deduce someone's gender when they're naked. I could only deduce his sex. Which he was waving about as if he owned the place. Wanker

In the past men like this used to expose themselves to little girls and women in parks and woods. They stood in the cold wearing their open raincoats with the intent to frighten and intimidate us. Now they can just go into the ladies changing rooms and show us their wares and if we complain then we’re bigots.

pombear, yes, that's really the kicker, isn't it? As someone noted earlier, the initial TRA response is not empathy, it's entirely self-focused. And when that attitude is countered, it becomes dismissal of concerns entirely.

Why TRAs refuse to even try to empathize with women who feel threatened, and demand the TRAs be given top billing - and then those same TRAs wonder why women are deeply suspicious of their motives - is a mystery to me.

Can I just pick up on a post from a few pages back where someone said "but my local pool has cubicles"?

I do wish people wouldn't assume that every single space in the country is like the one nearest to them. There are three pools close to me which have single-sex, communal open plan changing rooms without cubicles (an old-fashioned lido on the coast, the local FE college which opens to the public at weekends, and a small, community run, volunteer-staffed pool). I doubt it would be easy for any of these to install cubicles - in fact I suspect that the financial hit of trying to do so would close the community pool.

So please don't assume all pools have cubicles - they don't. And I personally don't want to see a stranger's penis when I'm butt-naked. Regardless of how the penis owner "identifies." Not frightened, not traumatised - I just don't want to see it. And my "no" should be enough. My body (naked and vulnerable), my boundaries.

No is a complete sentence. It's not the opener to negotiations.

But trans people don’t want single sex spaces anyway, they are generally against sex segregation. if a TW uses female loos, changing rooms etc - it automatically becomes unisex by their presence - so why fors Snappity think they don’t want a unisex space?

I think thats a fallacy there. If you see someone, anyone acting threateningly in those spaces you'd report it or call the police. The fact of the matter is this: what prevents a man walking into those spaces right now and perpetrating the same crimes? The same thing as 20 years ago.

I’ve been threatened, harrassed and sexually assaulted many times since i was a child. Never ever reported or called the police - that’s not often how females deal with these instances- did the whole metoo with women telling how often this stuff happens and they feel silenced for many different reasons - did it all just pass you by?

What prevents a man nowadays is probably firstly that someone is likely to say " hey mate, wrong way" if they saw someone about to make a mistake.

And secondly because everyone knows it is wrong so it takes more effort to do it.-you need to overcome the Fear of being caught, that has been instilled from birth..."be a good boy"

If you remove that element ( if you can say are trans and you will not only get away with it but the woman will be charged with a hate crime) then it will become much more common.

I don't think transactivists want unisex spaces, as that implies open to all. They want segregation to continue, but by gender identity, so they can have whatever feelings they think of as their "womanhood" or "manhood" validated by being allowed in with actual women and men. Although, as so many comment on this board, the transwomen wanting into women's spaces seem much more insistent (and rude, and ignorant, and selfish) than transmen wanting the same of men.

Some years ago, I attended a friends wedding where there was only one, unisex toilet block available. It seemed that for purposes of keeping some parts of the venue shut down to the public, that they had assigned the use of the ladies loos to everyone attending the wedding. Quite unusual to see at that point in time.
I didn't think anything of it, until I went to use the loo. It was all cubicles (no urinals), with partitions at the top and bottom of doors and sides, not floor-to-ceiling privacy.
There were a lot of people I knew also at this wedding. When I went into the toilet cubicle and closed the door, I heard a couple of male friends of mine come in to use the loo. I knew who it was because I recognised their voices. I was shocked to feel suddenly uncomfortable about their presence, and tried to wee very quietly so that they wouldn't hear me.
One of my mates proceeded to urinate loudly, in the way that only men can when they are standing astride a toilet bowl. These guys are friends of mine, we go way back. But I found that noise extremely unsettling and I could not put my finger on why. I have heard men urinate everyday of my life, living with my family and then with my husband. But to hear it in that particular space just felt wrong somehow.
I had dressed up for the do, and usually after visiting the ladies I would always pause in the mirror to check my make up and reapply lipstick. But for some reason I felt that I could not do that, because my two male friends were coming out of their cubicles, laughing and chatting, and I felt that they would mock me if they saw me using the mirror. Which is a totally silly assumption to make.
So I washed my hands and left the loos.
The point I am trying to make is that even back then, when I had no clue about any of this whole debate, and truely had no opinions on any of the transgender argument because I was not even aware of it - but somehow inside of me, it did not feel right to share that female space. And this was in a situation with good friends, males I had known for years.
So that is how I know that I find male bodies in female spaces just wrong. And I will fight for as long as it takes.

A lot of it looks exactly like the gay panic defence and a lot of the persecution looks exactly like what we saw in the 80's and earlier, even the same bathroom panic issues.

It's funny you should say this GhostTess because I was just thinking that when trans women dismiss women as hysterical and fear mongering, and attributing to us the worst sort of motivations, and then demand we set aside our own rights, our own need for respect and dignity in favour of validating them and making sure their needs are met over ours. It looks exactly like the way men have treated women since forever.

Far as I know there have been no cases of transgendered being set upon in a men's public loo.
If you see someone, anyone acting threateningly in those spaces you'd report it or call the police.

Dykes are used to being asked for their ID in clubs when they go to the loo. It seems it is only the transgendered who expect an apology when they are treated like the women they claim to be.

www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2014/03/report_transgender_teen_attack.html

<a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN13X0BK&ved=2ahUKEwiT6-f69oncAhWHLsAKHQN5DCoQFjAMegQIBBAB&usg=AOvVaw3JT0_YRhYF6NLcPOo5WkiE&ampcf=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN13X0BK&ved=2ahUKEwiT6-f69oncAhWHLsAKHQN5DCoQFjAMegQIBBAB&usg=AOvVaw3JT0_YRhYF6NLcPOo5WkiE&ampcf=1

just for balance and for those who wonder if trans men have been attacked in bathrooms and the numbers in the US of trans people being attacked in bathrooms

I have heard it explained that women experience male presence as pressure.

Personally I find this a good description. Not because I’m a weak lady brain who needs protection. It’s becuse there are real reasons for this. Men have different bodies and are usually much stronger and are the sex that tends to commit violence.

I have never in my life been harassed sexually, been flashed at , assaulted or had a woman hit or physically threaten me.

However I have experienced all of the above from men. Clearly not all men are a threat nor are many trans woman.

However I have the right in a space where I am vulnerable not to have this pressure on me. I should not even have to think about this.

We need space when we are undressing etc dealing with body functions, menstrstion etc where we do not have to be on edge, worry about who may come in .

Currently woman can challenge a man in a woman space and I have done when this had happened.

So what you are saying is that trans men should use the women's bathroom because the men's is too dangerous for biological women who identify as men?

So it is aggression and violence that is the issue here?

And the TRAs are trying to get this message across using - aggression and violence - bloodied t-shirts calling for violence against women and baseball bats?