How to respond to "oh there's always bad apples that ruin things for everyone" and "well women do that too" ?

[Ohisitjustme]

How to respond to this?

Discussed the trans issue.

I said I'm really concerned about women's safety in eg changing rooms. Any man can come in now and flash their penis and anyone who complains is a transphobe.
Response: well nobody should be flashing their penis around. There's always a bad apple in every barrel
Me: but there's now no recourse to complain without be labelled transphobic
Response: well there'll always be people who'll take advantage

Me: no woman now can get changed in M&S changing rooms without worrying about a man opening their curtain, pretending it's a mistake
Response: well women can be voyeurs too
Me: but women don't rape other women
Response: yes they do

Me: muslim women now can't use public toilets as men are allowed in
Response: so should everyone use the toilet of their birth sex?
Me: yes
Response: what about Butch lesbians who look masculine and are then reported for using women's toilets. And what about women living as men ; should they frighten women by using female toilets?
Me: everyone knows what a woman looks like vs what a man looks like.
Response: what about that Butch lesbian who was asked to leave?

I don't know what else to say. Apart from "seriously are you fucking serious?"

Sorry, didn't think it would quote the whole post 🙈

Thanks @Helleofabore Sex is determined at fertilisation. We can predict the sex class of an embryo well before any sex phenotype develops, and with almost-perfect reliability.
Human embryos do not all start as female. This is a scientifically-illiterate claim.
Brilliant explanation.

Hah! that's nothing! I very nearly pasted the WHOLE of the Irish Constitution instead of one one-line article from it on another thread yesterday!
Fortunately I didn't hit send and fortunately there is a delete icon..😆

On the bizarre assertion that spaces should be mixed, the below may help (from the sometimes-rather-activist Independent, no less):

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/sexual-assault-unisex-changing-rooms-sunday-times-women-risk-a8519086.html

(As if we should need the research to tell us this...)

It's been said that you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. Believers in gender ideology don't argue in good faith. They take edge cases (DSDs) and extremely rare occurrences (female sexual predators) and claim that because these happen, all boundaries should be broken and all safeguarding should be thrown out.

Tell her you're embarrassed for her, does she have any idea how stupid she sounds, she's supposed to be intelligent? Ask her to defend her unreasonable arguments. Ask her for names and numbers. Ask her for the evidence. Tell her no. 'Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence' (Carl Sagan). Use Hitchen's razor 'What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence'. Make her defend her position.

'Well, women do that too'. 'That's an extraordinary thing to say. At the same rate? What's your evidence for that?'.

'Oh, there's always bad apples'. 'These aren't apples. Why are you so cavalier with other women's safety and dignity? I hadn't realised you were such a misogynist.'

To add to the advice upthread, I think if you do want to pursue this with her - and that's a complex if in itself - or find yourself pushed into it, a good approach may be to pick just one of her more clearly flawed arguments (eg. embryonic development / mixed-sex changing rooms), really make sure you know your stuff in advance &, as Marie advises, keep replies brief & factual.

It's really fine - it could even be helpful, in fact - to respond to any unexpected counter-arguments / confusing segues with a kind of, "That's interesting. Your thoughts have made me realise the importance of really thinking hard about these issues and 'knowing your stuff'. I'll go away and look into this a bit."

Perfectly courteous. Models the behaviour you wish she'd follow. Gives you time to prepare for, & some influence over the focus of, future conversations ("So, I followed up whatever..." And can be re-used as needed... until you become truly expert!

Not that I manage this, of course! I find it so emotive & complex it gets hard to stay focussed. But I do notice that, although I'm good at expressing myself on-the-spot, the conversations in which I feel I do the GC perspective justice are those in which I'm more succinct, factual & focussed (a pity, as remembering facts is my weak point, at least without serious prior study! 😅)

Or do what Cake says. 😂 It could be cathartic! It's certainly tempting...

And faux-naive questions are fab here, because many of the more extreme TRA perspectives are, when you dig down, very hard to defend convincingly indeed.

We get almost daily confirmation of this on this board from various visitors - even in this thread, the first challenger has leapt into irrelevant strawman hyperbole.

So maybe it's not so much that you need to know the facts to counter her views, as you just need to expose the relative absence of facts supporting them.

"Goodness, that's shocking. Could you tell me how you know that?"

Yeah, perhaps dial down my suggestions a bit 😁 But she's got you defensive, it's only fair she gets a taste.

I’ve never seen a butch lesbian that wasn’t obviously a woman, I think that one’s an academic argument that doesn’t reflect anyone’s reality. Trans men that are detransitioning back to be women are very sensitive about waiting until they pass as women before using the female bathrooms

Well, if you need to come her asking for ways for responding then maybe it is a sign that some of your hypothesis are not valid ? Just saying...

@lcakethereforeIam I've been guilty of a similar approach a few times - there's a time and a place for everything!

The most recent was a well-deserved response to a woke-bro's* nth smug assertion of what's Right and Good, and rather neatly (if I say so myself!) exposed the values he was imposing on a loooong-beleaguered audience as arbitrary and utterly hypocritical.

I was rewarded with the mask slipping into a look of pure, almost frightening - and very revealing - fury. And an angry silence.

Cathartic.

*hate that phrase - another "identity"/label... but oh, SO very apt in this case...

Or it shows an acknowledgement of the sheer complexity of this issue - and the challenges of dealing with someone who isn't showing an equivalent willingness to refine their own arguments with sound research & careful reflection on how to counter challenges.

There's another quote I've seen ascribed to various people; George Carlin, Mark Twain, Kermit

'Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.'

1.The reason we have single sex spaces is to protect the dignity and privacy of the female sex. It doesn't matter how 'lovely' a trans identified man is...he still has a male gaze.

2.It is overwhelmingly males that are voyeurs, fetishists, pornography addicts, cross dressers.....you just don't find females doing those things, and if they do they stand out as a rare exception.

3.Males can use male spaces or else they can campaign for their own facilities just like every other group has done for theirs.

4.Women and girls matter. Their dignity and privacy matters - even if your 'friend' thinks they don't.

And see what she says about this? Someone linked it this morning - there's a thread on it. I thought it was a fantastic exposure of the "oldest prejudice" ironically underlying the movement.

https://thecritic.co.uk/making-the-patriarchy-progressive/

It's not a complex issue at all. It's really simple. But it can be hard to answer questions that are phenomenally stupid. If you've ever tried to debate whether the moon landings really happened with a conspiracy theorist, or whether the earth is flat with a flat-earther, you'll know what I mean. You try saying "Well, obviously men landed on the moon", and you'll get back half a dozen reasons why they didn't (the waving flag! the lack of shadows! etc), and then you have to answer them all and it's exhausting.

Anyway.

All it comes down to is this: humans can't change sex. We have good reasons for keeping men out of women's spaces, and these apply to all men, including those who pretend that they're not men. If you really believe that women can be rapists or that some women look like men or whatever, then what you're arguing is that all spaces - toilets, changing rooms, domestic abuse refuges etc - should be mixed sex. Do you really believe that? No, of course you don't.

Totally agree.

Complex only in that it's been made so, in the way you describe. Complex in very much the way that arguing with a flat-earther would be. And complex in the sense that Victoria Smith highlights in the article above: exposing the misogyny in it can be like explaining water to a fish... AS a fish! Er...

"Women can be whatever whatever too"
"yes they can, but it is very rare. Women commit less than 5% of sexual assault and are 30x less likely to have a paraphilia. Women are threatened by men, due to the statistical likelihood of assault and also because men as a class are stronger than women and can overpower them. It might suit you to ignore these facts but I am not a bigot because I am not prepared to"

Yup, I have this with BIL. I just dont' engage any more because even with the arguments I have below, he's not interested. He's also ALMOST amusing becuase of the way he LOVES to put up pictures of very feminine trans women (or children - that's his FAVOURITE) on facebook with these oh-so-reasonable posts about how hard done by they are. But if he is challenged on facebook... he actually deletes the posts. hahahahaha.

But a few points I'd consider anyway because people who actually have just accidentally slipped down TWAW path may actually accept these....

Re the "bad apples" comment:
1 Men are far and away the ones perpetuating most violent and sexual crimes, therefore the "few" bad apples is not in fact that accurate. We ahve women's spaces in part to protect women from a known group who dominate in this area.
2 Even if a trans woman is NOT flashing a penis around, womens spaces are about making women feel safe and comfortable. Why is the comfort of one man more important than the comfort of many women [I should say, however, that this argument doesn't actually WIN any arguments because he thinks we shouldn't be uncomforable in the first place

Re rape

In this country, rape is defined as being done with a penis. Other types of sexual assualt are just that, sexual assault.

Women can also be bad.... sure, absolutely, but it's a much smaller percentage of the population. We know this - men are the ones predominantly being imprisoned for violent and sexual offenses.
Incidentally, the figures for transgender people in prison are dominated by sexual offenses.

As for the butch lesbian thing, that's just laughable.

My token answer to "women do that too" (murder, rape, commit adultery or arson or whatever) is "yes, about 1% of the number of men who do".

Ask her why she keeps trying to get men into women’s spaces when so many women have said no.
Consent is not transferable.
If she wants to campaign for third spaces and use them to validate men, that's her choice, but most of us don't.

Yup, if she likes getting changed with men so much she can use the blokes. Take her tw friends with her so they'll still get that sweet, sweet validation.

None of her hypothesis are valid. She's mostly talking nonsense. She should be able to back up what she says - but will not, on the evidence, be able to do so.
NB @ThatMerryReader which of OP's friend's hypothesis do you think valid? Why?

It is not complicated at all. Male people on hormones do not noticeably lose their strength, and certainly not their skeletal proportions and not really their density either.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.20039

First published: 27 November 2024

Results

Skeletal muscle size increased in TM (21% after 6 years) and decreased in TW (7% after 5 years). Muscle strength increased 18% after 6 years in TM (p = 0.003) but was statistically unchanged in TW.

And here is a paper regarding 'case by case' inclusion:

A GOOD DISCUSSION ON WHY CASE BY CASE DOES NOT WORK

"A unique pseudo-eligibility analysis of longitudinal laboratory performance data from a transgender female competitive cyclist"

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/teb-2024-0026/html

Tommy R. Lundberg, Mary I. O’Connor , Christopher Kirk, Noel Pollock and Gregory A. Brown

Published 4 December 2024

Particularly good points:

"There are also concerns about whether the determining criteria for including a trans woman in female sports is a reduction in performance by a certain amount, or simply that the performance must be comparable to female athletes. This opens the possibility for sub elite or regional standard male athletes with no reduction in performance being eligible for higher standard female competitions."

ie. Suddenly a sub-elite athlete becomes an elite athlete

"The authors also appear to advocate for hormonal treatment as a means for some trans women to participate in female sport. This raises ethical concerns regarding the primacy of health and bodily autonomy."

ie. Health concerns due to hormone suppression

"Threshold criteria of how many variables an athlete is allowed to have an advantage in is not provided, leaving this to be an arbitrary decision on the part of the authors."

ie Arbitrary decisions because no published levels of advantage to compare against, and what is an acceptable reduction anyway because there will still be advantage.

Or.... that the OP wants to have a carefully thought out answer rather than an emotionally manipulative one that is easily dismissed.

The fact that the OP has asked for evidence led counter arguments and that we can provide them for the OP maybe is a sign that the OP's friends answers are fallacious and inaccurate. Just saying .....