@sharksarecool
"The trans woman is hurt that you don’t see them as a woman, as that is how they identify and who they want to be. What do you say to that? Because is the GC position to say ‘if you are born a man you cannot use facilities for women as it makes women feel unsafe’? And why is that different to a racist B&B in the 1960s saying they didn’t want black patrons because they made them feel unsafe? "
The difference is that there was never any reason to segregate by race in the first place. Conversely, there used NOT to be sex-segregated toilets and other facilities at all, and women campaigned for them because they ARE necessary. The reason they are necessary is because men are bigger and stronger than women. So a woman who feels unsafe in a private space with a man is justified, because men can overpower women easily. There's no such size or strength difference between black and white people, a white person has not legitimate reason to say that sharing spaces with black people makes them unsafe.
The civil rights movement campaigned to get rid of separate spaces for "blacks" and "whites", and they succeeded because there is rarely any need for such separation. No one ever suggested retaining "black" and "white" segregated spaces but then allowing black people to self-identify into white spaces.
As I mentioned before, Google the 'urinary leash' for descriptions and explanations of why women spent decades campaigning for single-sex toilets.
To give an indication of how ludicrous the comparison is between single-sex toilets to protect women's and girls' safety, and a B&B owner excluding black guests, you and your DH should know that around the world, aid charities including Oxfam etc have spent years campaigning to get...single-sex toilets, to allow girls to safely attend school, for example.
The idea that our leading aid charities are all campaigning for something that is the equivalent of racism, in the poorest countries in the world, is patently ludicrous.
What this misunderstanding comes down to is a (deliberate) pretence that all boundaries are bad - that anything that involves allowing a powerless and vulnerable group (eg women, or children) to maintain boundaries is Bad, and equivalent to segregation, or exclusion.
But of course that is the opposite of the truth - women and girls are entitled to boundaries, to keep us safe, such as boundaries around our bodies and our space. We have the right to say No to men wanting to infiltrate those boundaries, physically or sexually, whether the men involved like it or not. We have a right to bodily autonomy.
The kind of men who try to argue that women have no rights to bodily autonomy, to privacy, to safety, are the kind of predators who are precisely the kind of men women wish to keep out of our spaces - for good reason. That way lies rape culture. It is against these men and in defence of women's right to assert our boundaries that MeToo started. And make no mistake - it is as a calculated attack on women's boundaries that this form of reactionary, regressive gender extremism has risen to prominence so quickly. It is not a Trans Rights Movement. It is a Men's Rights Movement.
To attempt to conflate women's right to boundaries and freedom from assault with segregation is a deliberately bad faith argument. It does not stand up to a second's scrutiny. Segregation as practiced in S Africa was bad because it was the POWERFUL excluding the POWERLESS, from the realm of power.
That is completely the opposite to (eg women's) boundaries, which are the POWERLESS asserting the right to autonomy and control over ourselves and safe spaces.
To suggest that women ought to allow men into our safe spaces is equivalent to suggesting that disabled people ought to allow non-disabled people into disabled toilets, or they are 'excluding' non-disabled people unfairly. Or the equivalent of arguing that able-bodied people should be allowed to take part in the Paralympics, or they are being unfairly biased against.
I hope that demonstrates to you how, at heart, what this is about is POWER. The whole idea that males have a right to infiltrate female spaces rests on the - unspoken - assumption that females are more powerful than males and so are being unfair if they don't share that 'privilege'.
When anyone with half a brain knows that hundreds of women a year in the UK are murdered by men (compared to zero murders of trans people in the UK now for several years), that rates of sexual assault and domestic violence against women by men have been rising for years, even while the conviction rates continue to steadily decline.
Women need safe spaces away from men. In other developed countries, this includes things like female-only train carriages, for example, to reduce women's risk of assault. We could be going further in that direction. There is certainly no evidence that it is yet safe for women to relinquish our hard-fought-for women-only spaces.
And if men don't like that, tough.
They need to be putting their energies into reducing the rising rates of violence against women first. Only when that violence is long-distance history will I, and other women, be content to give up those precious and important women-only spaces.