Can I just ask something - in her answer Jess states
I ran a women's domestic and sexual violence service and am confident in specialist services being able to risk assess for safety.
In that service, we had a small number of trans women in my time there and they did not pose a risk. Everyone in service was risk assessed on their relative risk.
Now I have been talking, reading, listening about this issue a lot. And what I have learned is that it is never not a problem when adult males are included in female-only provisions, whether that is spaces or services or scholarships or sports. But it is most harmful where vulnerable women are the ones having a male imposed on them.
I've also learned that services claiming it's not a problem do not come to that conclusion after talking to the women using their service about it. And we know that the rare woman who does speak up in such a situation has been framed as the problem, the troublemaker for the last five years or so.
Now Jess didn't actually run a domestic violence refuge providing frontline services, she was the business development manager for a number of refuges for Women's Aid in Sandwell from 2010 to 2015. Here is her role described in 2015, just before she stopped:
Jess Phillips leads the organisation’s growth, development and partnerships. She leads on all aspects of service development, funding and contracts. Jess works closely with the Executive Director to drive forward the strategic aims of the organisation and to develop new and meaningful partnerships and projects in order to ensure services are available for a growing range of victims of interpersonal violence.
She is speaking with confidence on the issue of including males who identify as trans in female-only refuges and precisely because she was a campaigners in this area, when she says there are no problems, she will be believed.
Given that she stopped working there just before the current self-id policies were adopted, how likely is it that she would know if there were problems now?
And how likely is it that Jess sought the views of all of the staff in all of the refuges back then? Or of all of the survivors using her service? And that the males in question were post-op transsexuals rather than the now much more prevalent crossdressers?