Male friend on FB (a doctor no less), telling me that trans women are real women.

[Blondiebeachbabe]

I shared a meme on FB, about not supporting trans women in female sports.

A male friend of mine, who is a GP, commented that trans women are real women 🙄 I replied that trans women are men, and that my gripe was men in women’s sports, and men (rapists like Karen White), being housed in female prisons.

He then said that he knew lots of trans men, who just wanted to live a peaceful life, and I’m thinking well yes, because they are actually biologically female!

He then went on to quote all manner of statistics about violence from men against trans women and how trans women are at more risk of violence than cis women (I hate that term). and how cis women are more likely to be attacked by cis men than trans women.

It’s been annoying me all day. Here is another male telling me what to think, but also, whether the violence comes from normal men against trans women (who are men), or trans women against real women, this is essentially a male violence problem.

Because, we as women, aren’t the perpetrators in any of this. So men, stay in your own lane and sort out all your shit. You don’t get to throw the men you don’t like into our lane (bathrooms and prisons), and make us your collateral damage.

If a fox said that it felt like it was a chicken, you wouldn’t let it sleep in the chicken coup, just in case it was lying.

I may not have articulated this in the best way!

Well some women and children have actually been assaulted by men claiming to be trans women in women's toilets. Such as Katie Dolatowski's victims, for example (one of whom was a 10 year old girl).

A solution needs to be found to keep vulnerable adult males safe in toilets which does not compromise the safety of women and girls. And allowing male people who believe they identify as women into women's single sex spaces does compromise women's safety, and also their privacy and dignity.

Women and girls are not a shield to protect vulnerable adult males against the behaviour of other adult males in men's spaces.

You also do not "know for a fact" that there is any risk to your friends whatsoever if they were to use men's toilets.

So to mitigate the imagined risks to your nice trans pals, women must then put THEMSELVES at risk by allowing ALL men into their safe spaces.

Just so a few men don't have to feel uncomfortable, ALL women must shoulder the additional risk to their safety, privacy and dignity.

And I'll ask the question that is always asked and that NEVER gets answered.....Why do the feelings of the male party in this instance, trump the rights and feeling of the women whose safe space they are now invading?

Why are HIS feeling of fear/awkwardness/distress, more valid than those of the women he is now putting in the EXACT same position?

@fungipie this is your exact post from yesterday 16.21

Transwomen have no penis- you do realise, whatever they wear.

Have you changed your view since then?

(PS you are allowed to change your view, no judgement there).

And this was my perfectly reasonable question in response to that post, which you never answered.

@fungipie you say that "transwomen" do not have a penis, so can you clarify that are you saying that your position is that "transwomen" who still have a penis are not actually "transwomen"? That is not the position most TRAs take at all, so that is a bold view. It is along the lines of saying that there are real "transwomen" and faux "transwomen", which I believe is frowned on in TRA circles. Is that what you are saying?

What are your views on what terminology should we then use for the vast majority of people referring to themselves as "transwomen" who do have a penis? Do we get a new word for them?

Lots of toilet discussion on here.

Mixed sex toilets are more dangerous to the population as a whole. They will increase the amount of sexual assaults, deaths and irreversible injuries in toilets. Medically vulnerable and females are most at risk. This can be shown by the numbers of these incidents happening in disabled toilets (mix sex, fully enclosed) to able bodied people and disabled.

Lobbying captured the first government consultation on building regulations for toilets in dwellings other than homes. So the aims of the following main consultation were to make toilets more private, more mixed sex toilets and to have single sex toilets (but in the detail say the toilets can use the fully enclosed design).

So in the first public consultation on public toilets, guess which phrase was used 67% compared to just 2% for the word ‘disabled’?

Where do people go when they are out and about and feeling ill? They may collapse behind a full height door, which is not great when the door now won’t open inwards because of the body (not that anyone would know). They are lots of conditions such as asthma, diabetes, epilepsy, cardiac problems, strokes etc etc. Even drink spiking. Smoke inhalation.

I doubt all those people lobbying the initial consultation thought it through but standardising fully enclosed toilets in schools, department stores, train stations, entertainment venues, nightclubs and hospitals etc etc is disastrous. It affects everyone.

Fungi has been very clear though. In their opinion only males without penises are to be treated as female people. No one else.

But this also then fails the logic comparative test of those male people losing their penis and testicles due to disease or injury must then also qualify as female people and get to use female single sex spaces.

I hope those reading along are beginning to realise that which ever way you try to argue it, male people remain male people with or without penises and with or without unique feelings that they associate as those only that ‘woman’ have.

To force accommodations in safeguarding for that special group leads to harm to female people because you cannot create sub groups of male people for exemption from safeguarding protocols. Historically this has proven dangerous and led to those supposed to be protected being harmed. There is nothing to prove that this group should be treated as ‘female people’ for safeguarding.

And no one arguing that female people allow these male people access has produced one shred of evidence that these male people have changed in any way from all other male people.

The dissonance in discovering that you, personally, have been believing only emotional manipulation from others must be quite hard to deal with. I imagine that if you put trust in people and then discover that you have not done the work to check the facts, you’d feel pretty embarrassed remembering that you shamed and admonished female people who could see the facts you didn’t seek and understood the significance.

I'll answer the question.

It's because the new patriarchy is just like the old patriarchy.

OK, so Fungi's view is that only penis-less people qualify to be considered as "transwomen" and therefore treated as female. Fair enough, that is a view (not one I agree with, but a certainly a view shared by a number of people). But in expressing that view without further discussion, the question of what we call and how we treat the far greater number of people calling themselves "transwomen" and demanding to be treated as female who do have a penis has not been answered.

So every doctor who has done any research into the psychology behind this, the surgical procedures or the hormone treatments - every one for the past 90 YEARS - all thought it was total guff, but might be a good chance to make a few quid?

Some are clearly turning a blind eye to the ethics of it all in order to profit. Siadbh Gallagher, for example. Others seem to have simply failed to exercise their critical thinking skills.

Prior to undergoing transition, trans people's bodies are completely unremarkable. The problem is 100% psychological.

What other psychological conditions do we attempt to treat by altering the body to match the disturbed state of mind, rather than trying to fix the disturbed state of mind or at least alleviate the worst of its symptoms?

@BrightonFrock likely a mixture of motivations. Ranging from true believers, to cowardly stooges, to out-and-out cynical opportunists, to fetishists, and everything in between (doctors are human beings with all the variation that implies).

@fungipie what term would you apply to the (very sweet-sounding) person who wrote this? Not a transwoman by your definition (although that is what he calls himself). So what then?
Best Underwear for Trans Women Who Don’t Want to Tuck | The Strategist (nymag.com)

(I find the statement that most of the women he knows have a penis to be quite instructive).

Of course, the creating a sub group of trans people that are considered 'real' trans people is simply not manageable and therefore that distinction is completely irrelevant.

So too for any person arguing a 'case by case' scenario for 'some' male people to access female single sex spaces.

Creating these groups are irrelevant because as extreme trans activists keep telling us, how do you police it. Do the police come when called and do a strip search? How humiliating for someone who has had all their 'kind' friends and support groups tell them that 'of course, you are a special male person so you should use the female toilet'.

How about we take this a step right back and declare no male people above the age of about 8 should be in any female single sex space to use it. How about organisations provide third spaces.

Plus, how about a campaign to stop any male people feeling unsafe in their own male single sex spaces. Or, is this considered not a priority? Maybe there are several reasons. Maybe some groups have decided that female people should provide the solution. Maybe there is no actual issue and this has been falsely amplified to justify female people being used as security shields. Maybe it is an issue in some areas and not generally and maybe those areas need to step up and fix the issue, and maybe a campaign needs to happen anyway to reassure all those male people, including non-conforming ones, that it is safe to use male single sex spaces.

"I have grand-daughters, and I do fear for them in so so many ways in todays's world. The above friends are NO threat to her whatsoever."

Then I hope that your grand daughters are not attending co-ed schools where the toilets have all been turned into mixed sex toilets to accommodate a sub-group of children. Because those toilets have proven to be a significant issue for female students of all ages.

Female students do not want to have male people accessing their toilets, and they do not want to have to share mixed sex toilets. For a start, many female students have reported that they are dehydrating themselves and causing health issues so they do not have to go to the toilet.

Then is the harassment reported. Then there is the fact that it has been published that close to one rape happens in schools in the UK each day (maybe that is incorrect and I will have to check it ). The policy that you are advocating for means that female single sex toilets and changing rooms have been removed and substituted for mixed sex spaces. The female students who have been raped by male students in their school now get to go to the toilet space shared by their potential rapist.

But hey ho... as long as your mates are looked after with all the policies and guidances changed to suit their needs and you, personally, don't care. And you get to declare any discussion you don't like as 'transphobia', as you did in the first pages of this thread. How kind!

😂 oh please do this!

I agree. During our last really hot summer, we had a woman collapse at work due to the heat.

Quick poll Mumsnetters, where do you think she might have been found? To which part of the building do you think the first aider was called?

Yes, the women's toilets. I don't know if she had someone in there when she collapsed, but even if she'd been alone at that moment, it wouldn't have been long before she was spotted, because women are in and out of that space. In one of a small selection of individual, locked separate toilet rooms, she might have stayed there until she came round enough to seek help. Other employees would have simply picked a toilet not in use, and rushed back to work without worrying about the occupied room.

Having just done a safeguarding course at church, I would like to point out that very lovely, kind, nice people DO assault others. The one thing you must never do in safeguarding is think, “Oh that would never happen here/with so-and-so”.
Very nice, gentle, polite, friendly, kind people are just as much of a risk as mean, rough, rude, aggressive people.
In fact those lovely, nice people may be able to gain access to vulnerable people by grooming those around them into thinking they are safe and lovely.
Paedophiles can spend YEARS befriending and grooming families to get access to children - look at all those paedophiles who became sports coaches, scout/guide leaders, vicar, television/radio presenters in order to access children.
Domestic abusers often convince those around them that they are the nicest person you could hope to meet yet behind doors they are beating their partner black and blue.
Never assume the nice ones are safe - always assume it could happen here.

@ThursdayTomorrow that is absolutely so true. My work involves speaking in great detail to survivors of childhood sexual abuse and assault about their experiences of abuse. I have met thousands by now, over the course of 30 years. The commonest scenario by far is not the scary rapist in the shadows, or even the violent alcoholic stepfather, although of course they exist in abundance. It is the kindly teacher/coach/priest etc who befriends an often lonely or unhappy child. They will often be highly admired people in the community, loved by the child's family etc etc...

Never ever assume someone "nice" is safe is a very good mantra. You do not know who is safe. But you do know that a man is much more likely to be a danger (the number of cases with a female abuser I have come across I can count on one hand, and she is almost always the accomplice of a man). This is the big big problem with #bekind.

Yes thursdaytomorrow. No special treatment for any sub-group of male people.

This does not mean at all that 'all male people are going to harm female people'. It doesn't even mean that some female people are not going to harm female people.

What it means, is that rather than discussing 'tiny, tiny minorities' as being excluded from safeguarding measures, the ALL male people are treated the same. And it has nothing in parallel to homosexual or bisexual male people in the past, except that the people involved are male.

All this talk about 'only those without penises' or 'on a case by case basis' is a complete distraction from the truth.

There is NO EVIDENCE that any male person at any stage of transition has a lower safeguarding risk than ANY other male person in the UK. There is NO EVIDENCE that any male person at any stage of transition has the same or lower risk than any FEMALE person in the UK that warrants them being treated like a female person for safeguarding decisions.

And safeguarding decisions are the basis for sex segregated toilets and changing rooms.

Sadly, I doubt the posters who have posted that some male people should have access for safety or privacy or whatever will acknowledge that.

Your post brings home the issue very clearly.

Does the OP know any transwomen?
She may or may not.

She certainly knows she isn’t one, which is the point of this discussion.

Does the GP know any transwomen for that matter? He suddenly started talking about transmen instead.

Maybe he'd respond to literature, OP?

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
Transwomen are real women in the same way Physician Associates are real doctors.

I'm only up to page 7 - I have to catch up, which I will do now.

I had an absolutely vile experience this morning, with a man via text. I was meant to send a payment via Paypal using the Friends and Family option, and I did it wrong. I've been called a mong, a cunt, a retard, and this man has actually proved to me that he knows where I live, by sending a screen shot of my address.

My DH is at work until midnight, so I'm alone tonight. I actually cried.

I'm ok now, and don't think it's a real threat. A nice lady took over and apologised for his behaviour and the issue is all sorted. However, THIS kind of behaviour from some men, is why women are often so fearful for their safety.

Another gem from fungiepie

Transwomen have no penis? Ha ha ha ha ha

The official stats tell us that 0.1% of transwoman have their penis removed.

In other words, 99.9% DO HAVE A PENIS

Do you think that these doctors believe that transwomen are women before they have the surgery or only after?

Thank you, this had given me such a giggle! Brilliant. FACT.