How one defines “harm” and “involving others” is key. I could imagine the argument being made in the ‘70s that a bit of naughty office banter between the lads, made in the presence of the single female worker, wasn’t “harmful” and didn’t “involve her”. But we’ve reached the point, now, where we recognise it could be, and it does. It was subjecting her to a particular construction of who, and what, a woman is, in their eyes, that she could find demeaning or intimidating. Of course, I’m not saying that a transwoman colleague in the office, in the traditional sense of the transsexual, is remotely equivalent to this! But some other male manifestations of a trans identity that we’ve seen embraced in the workplace, those with overtly sexualised clothing, arguably have a similar effect.
It’s fascinating that, in the last half-century, we’ve come a long way towards addressing verbal re-/de-constructions of women by men in a professional context (”That comment was totally inappropriate, HR will have to have a word!”), while simultaneously becoming more likely than before to embrace physical re-/de-constructions of it like the offensively top-heavy Canadian(?) teacher.
I think it’s also honest and fair to acknowledge that, for some women, including among the most liberal-minded, LGBT-supporting demographic, even a more understated, conventional presentation by a male as female can feel a little unsettling at first. It is, after all, in a sense, another, different appropriation of their sense of self; a manifestation of what that man, in part, understands a woman to be, and with an emphasis on the physical as a necessary signifier. For women with inescapable “lived experience” of a society still filled with with reductive representations of their bodies - and representations of woman-as-body (and the physical vulnerability inherent in these sexualised bodies, that a man cannot fully experience) that can take some getting used to. I think that used to be accepted without question - just as the office banter did.
Interesting…