Telegraph article: ‘We’re not transphobic, we just want privacy’

[RoyalCorgi]

Haven't seen this shared anywhere else. This is a good article about the Darlington nurses who were forced to share changing room space with a person called Rose who, in the words of the article, "was born a man and retains male genitalia".

The women are taking their employer to an employment tribunal for sex discrimination and sexual harassment. I absolutely applaud them for doing this and admire their determination. But I also think: isn't it time to be a bit more blunt about this? In any normal context, if we knew a male person was using a female changing room, we would recognise him as engaging in voyeurism and, possibly, exhibitionism - both criminal offences. Isn't there a case for going straight to the police rather than to an employment tribunal? I am so fed up with the way we all tiptoe round this issue rather than speaking loudly and clearly about what's going on.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/02/darlington-nurses-fighting-for-women-only-spaces/

I and my immediate galpals would agree. Many many people of my age (20) wouldn't.
Personally - definitely a personal opinion - I think it is an affront (to people like me with Vs) for people without Vs to call themselves women - personal opinion!

And personal opinions are fine.

If some women want to believe that some men are women because they said so, and have not yet personally experienced the things that make this problematic to put it very mildly, bully for them. I'm glad they've been so lucky and privileged and I hope their eyes are never opened by personal experience. Although they could try being equally as kind and keen to listen to other women as they are to men.

If some women consent to go and take their clothes off with random men to validate a man's inner self (and support his sexual experience) then their body, their choice, they can have a third space and go nuts and I hope they feel lovely for doing so.

But when this opinion is used as a basis to tell women strip and give him use of your body and shut up, or be shunned and excluded? Or threatened with sexual violence and murder? And actual MPs are standing under signs about this grinning?

Then it's gone hideously wrong.

People are perfectly free to opt into this belief as they like, no one's stopping them. They cannot require others to genuflect at that altar with them.

It was hideously wrong from the start. Male crossdressers have always done this to deceive and break women's boundaries and get their sexual thrills from it. What's worse now is that it's a male supremacy movement that has governments and corporations salivating to support it.

What @Catsmere said.

GladAllOver · 03/10/2024 21:47

But in this case they are not being told to. They have been offered an alternative (but unsatisfactory) place to change.

The first instance I read of this, several years ago, was in a school changing room, where any girl not happy in the presence of the boy posing as a girl could use a cupboard. Quite why the girls should have to queue up to use an unsuitable place, when the boy could have managed fine on his own was ad still is beyond me.

I realise your last sentence is probably rhetorical, but it’s a real reminder for me regarding the enormous pressure on girls to feel shame for wanting boundaries. Very much “We’re going to make an example of any girl who doesn’t shut up and comply,” to which the only response that will have an effect depends on all, or at least an inconvenient majority, of the girls having the courage to stand together to oppose it. Very few young school girls would have the strength of character to be the first to stick her neck out and lots of others wouldn’t support her openly, out of fear. It’s an incredible act of bullying.

Yes, as I recall, girls who objected to the arrangement would be disciplined. I think that they complied in silence and parents who complained were shut down a bigoted idiots.