This is an extract from a speech a couple of years back by an author called Onjali Rauf who has been called a transphobe for it recently.
As I look around in today’s world, I see more and more bewildered women and girls feeling confused, alienated and afraid.
Women like myself and my Sikh or Hindu or Jewish friends who need single-space places to safely unveil, wash up and reconfigure ourselves; or women who are breastfeeding and lactating and needing a space to let it all hang out; or women going through the menopause or chemotherapy who need safe spaces to just be looked after, or young girls on their first ever periods or sprouting breasts who need space for support and reassurance.
Or every woman ever, who needs a safe space like this to come and meet and talk about our fears and battles, and hopefully create better policies and movements for our future women.
Even the smallest annihilation of the basic right to be a woman in the presence of other women can have dire impacts on our health and state of mind.
A case in point: three weeks ago, I took a dear friend to lunch.
All was going well, we were having a beautiful time, and halfway through the meal, she left to go to the restaurant bathroom.
The woman that came back, was not the same one who left the luncheon table: for instead of the carefree, happy being I knew, came back a pale, quiet and slightly shaken version.
It transpired the restaurant had a gender ‘neutral’ bathroom, and as she had made her way down, a very innocent man had walked out of the toilets, banging into her.
Nothing of any significance to anyone watching – not until I tell you that this friend of two decades, had been raped in her university dorm room at the age of twenty, and feared all contact with men – no matter how nice, kind, friendly, non-threatening or ‘effeminate’ they might seem.