Wonderful that you are reading this thread Ms Roberts. You have conceded sport is a special case. I'd love to know if you would consider the following situations based on real cases I know of in the same vein:
You have a woman in your practice who has been so traumatized by male violence she cannot tolerate being in the same hospital room as any males, let alone being touched by one.
Her medical notes stipulate female HCPs only to ensure that her health needs can be met (it took three years just to get her to come to your clinic).
You have a male-bodied HCP who identifies as trans and who demands to be allowed to care for this patient as this man believes himself to be female.
What is kind in this situation? To tell this female patient she is a bigoted transphobe for correctly sexing this person as male and suffering an entirely involuntary trauma response? Will you seek to re-educate her out of her prejudiced trauma responses? Or will you follow the best practice trauma-informed and patient-centred procedures that have been in place for over a decade? Which means explaining to the male HCP that this patient's needs must come first.
(This is based on real women who self-exclude from medical services because they are so severely traumatised by male violence and on real male HCPs who put their own need for validation above patients' needs.)
Or if this is too hard:
You have a school girl so severely traumatised by male violence she has not attended school for ten months.
Through gentle but persistent therapy and one-on-one teaching, you have finally got this little girl to the point where she is ready to leave the house and receive her one-on-one tuition in a separate room in the school. Part of this therapy is to teach her to trust her instincts if something feels wrong, to listen to her fears and to help her to understand that she has not only the right to her own boundaries but also the right to assert them against all males.
She cannot yet tolerate being in the presence of her male peers, let alone adult males, but a treatment plan has been drawn up that will re-integrate her fully into school while respecting her boundaries.
She gets picked up in a taxi which by prior arrangement will only be driven by female drivers. On day four she does not come to school. It turns out the driver on that day is male but self-identifies as female.
Her boundaries have been violated once again. She has been retraumatised by being expected to be in an enclosed space with a male stranger. You've lost all progress and have to start again.
What is kind in this situation? Is the child unkind in not accepting this male's self-identity? Should she be punished for being a transphobic bigot? Or is the male driver selfish and uncaring in insisting on doing this journey when all the other male drivers have respected the arrangement?
(This is also based on a real case.)
Male violence against women and children is real. Traumatised women and children need our unequivocal, unquestioning support to recover. For 99% of them this requires female-only spaces.
Are these, like sport, also special cases where sex matters?
If yes, how traumatised do survivors have to be to qualify? If no, please explain how this squares with your appeals to kindness.
Do you understand that by including male people who identify as trans in certain spaces and under certain circumstances a number of female people will be excluded and denied help when they are at their most vulnerable?
Could you please quantify how many such survivors should be abandoned for the sake of kindness to males?