Is it possible to be a feminist and also have some empathy for transgender people today?

[HoundOfTheBasketballs]

I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert here but everything feels incredibly polarised. Like, either you’re with us or you’re against us.
Is there no middle ground in this debate?
I am, and always have been a feminist, but I know and like people who are trans and non-binary. I can’t be the only person feeling confused and conflicted, can I?

These men are not seeking access to specific spaces away from other men, or they would use third spaces, they are seeking access to women. Just look at the Dr Upton trial - he was upset that Peggie was not changing with him.

So what is in your mind a reasonable amount of ‘giving up and accepting our fate’?

your argument is basically, ‘Women are going to be raped and attacked anyway so why bother putting in place safeguards.’

Should we abandon CRB checks because paedophiles are going to get jobs in schools anyway so why bother trying to stop them.

Should we all just leave our front doors wide open when we go out because thief’s will break in anyway so why bother trying to stop them.

Or is it only when the risk is to Women and girls that we should sit back and let what happens happen to avoid hurting men’s feelings?

I’m not refusing to engage, I’m trying to understand both sides. There are a lot of people who don’t agree with you, and I have sympathy for those people.

@InfoSecInTheCity your examples are safeguards that make sense and significantly reduce the risk of crime. I don’t believe that keeping trans women out of women’s toilets significantly reduces the risk of crime, and it definitely causes harm to the people who are banned.

That’s the great thing about a legal ruling - there are no ‘both sides’. A judgment has been made. Trans women are not women. Trans men are not men.

and it definitely causes harm to the people who are banned.

How, exactly, does it cause harm to a trans woman being banned from using women’s toilets?

Then you haven’t been paying attention.

Attacks on women and girls in changing rooms have happened disproportionately in those changing rooms that allow males in. 90% of reported incidents of sexual assault, voyeurism and sexual harassment occurred in those facilities made unisex rather than single sex.

When males - any males, regardless of gender presentation - are allowed access into women and girls in changing facilities and toilets, the risk to those women and girls goes up sharply.

No one is saying all men are sex offenders, or that all men who identify as transwomen are sex offenders.
The evidence demonstrates that sex offenders are almost always men (including transwomen as @Helleofabore has VERY patiently posted and reposted earlier in the thread)

Requiring transwomen to use those facilities for their sex isn’t humiliating, unreasonable or illegal. It isn’t denying their existence.
It’s expecting them to observe the rules of society; it’s expected them to respect the privacy, rights and dignity of women.
If they are uncomfortable around other men, that’s an issue for men to resolve.

In the room with the entire of generation Z?

The way that it impacts on our safety is that prior to female people being told, through media, peers and direct signage on toilet doors and at basins etc, that male people have a right to use female single sex spaces too, female people had a range of options available for their safety.

This included walking out, pointing out they were in the wrong toilet, importantly, alerting other female people of the presence of that male person either while in the toilet space or at the door. Also we were inclined to get security or call the police.

These options are now clouded in indecision. There are some toilets that even have signs that say to female users that microagressions are hateful. Meaning even looking at a male person to assess their sex can be considered hateful by the organisations who have those signs.

That is the very real impact on safety.

So to, it gives legitimacy, not just normalisation, to male people being in that space. Including those who wish female people harm in any way. This also includes male people who simply wish to intimidate female people with their presence. After all, single sex spaces are there to provide female people space away from male people. All male people above the age of about 8 years old.

The sex crime stats posted numerous times on this thread show that for safeguarding risk assessment, male people who have declared they are transgender, have at least the same risk as all other male people in the UK.

So, please can you explain why you believe that they should be exempt from safeguarding decisions? Such as excluding them from female toilets?

Excluding all male people has been done for proven reasons. Looking at those statistics, can you tell us why those statistics don't show that that group of male people still need to be excluded just like all the rest?

"There’s literally nothing stopping a man dressed as a man coming into a deserted women’s toilet and attacking a woman there if they want to."

Using this as a comparator, do you not bother locking your front door then because it doesn't completely stop a burglar entering your house?

There were ways that female people protected themselves and other female people in the toilets. Those options are now significantly reduced in allowing any male who says they are female into those toilets.

I'm sure it makes a car jacker very sad when he's told that he cannot take other people's property however entitled to it he may feel and whatever his reasons.

I don't think it's harmful to require him to respect other people's rights though.

OP I agree. I think the only realistic option now is third spaces, individual changing etc. As if I were a trans man/woman I probably wouldn't be desperate to go into the changing rooms of my biological sex either! I can imagine that feels very shaming / vulnerable. But.... we know that women's spaces is not the solution.

@MoistVonL I agree about keeping changing rooms separate and sex-based.

But attacks carried out in unisex facilities are a different thing to attacks carried out by trans women in single sex toilets, so using the stats from one to support the arguments of banning the other doesn’t make sense.

Why would transgender people need 'empathy' when there has been a clarification of language and law that was allowed to get out of kilter with reality? If transgender people have been benefitting from that wave of unreality, and now have to face actual reality, that's tough but nobody is taking their rights away. Unfair privileges, maybe, but rights? no.

I posted a slogan on some other thread, it's an adaptation of a slogan from a men's group in Canada, back when when 'men's groups' and 'Canada' were very different things from today!
They emphasised ways in which men could be supportive of women

• 'To men, our rights and no more. To women, their rights and no less'

So -
To transgender people: their rights and no more.
To women: our rights and no less.

Yes, and totally "feminist" to care about men but not women or angrily tell other women to suck it up or that they're being pathetic or letting the side down if they acknowledge they might be potentially unsafe because they're not being "kind enough"to the males if they don't. Despite what the evidence and stats tell us.

The anti-feminism movement has truly done a number here in recent years hasn't it? By rebranding itself as the only "true" feminism. Unbelievable.

I suppose because it's started letting light in on the delusion that transwomen are women.And they will do anything to maintain the fiction that they are real women.It's why some of them fought so hard to be in lesbian groups/spaces. Lesbian women are biological women who are only attracted to women . If a transwoman can be in that close proximity to lesbians then they must be real women. 'Lesbian' transwonen are just straight men

Lastly, it is not just about safety though is it.

Female people use toilets for a much wider range of activities than male people use toilets. It is often forgotten that the communal areas of female toilets are used for cleaning down stains. Be it blood, food, drinks, vomit, breastmilk leakage, what ever. It is not unusual to walk into a female toilet to find a female person with their top off or unbuttoned cleaning themselves or drying their clothes.

I used to have to jam my pram / pushchair fully laden with nappies and other groceries in the door of the public toilets before I started my walk or my bus trip home. Even when I had to deal with flooding post pregnancy periods. Why should I or any other mother have to deal with a male in the toilets? It was humiliating enough with other women who would have at least had a chance of having experienced the same.

So, it is not just about safety. It is about privacy and dignity for female people.

At the people who feel sympathy for trans people today I wonder did you also feel sympathy for the women who felt shame and vulnerability at the prospect or reality of males in their spaces?

As it is I have no objection to third spaces for trans identified people be that bathrooms, sports teams and so on. The issue will be that it won't be acceptable to them because for them the issues is that they believe they were somehow born in the wrong body and are ultimately their desired sex and access to spaces, especially women's spaces are less about safety and more about validation from access to those single sex spaces and the women in them.

But you could apply that logic to gay men, old men, young men, small men, ill men the mens toilet could be unsafe for them too. Should they use the ladies?

I don't want to share a toilet with men. Neither does DD. Not because we think most will attack us. But because we want privacy to deal with periods, breastfeeding and other things only women have to do. Also, men piss all over the floor.

This is our right.

Ok. Let's try it a different way.

How many female people do you think is acceptable to be harmed in any way through a group of males being allowed access to female toilets?

How many have to be reported? 1? Well, we have been past that already. 5? 50?

There have been a number of posters on FWR who have shared their experiences where they have been sexually abused in the female toilets by male people who presented as female. Do they have to be convicted for that to matter to you?

There have been rapes by males with transgender identities in female toilets already. This is not a theoretical event. It has happened. The question remains for you, how many is acceptable before you agree that no male people should be allowed to use the female toilets.

Yes , I have sympathy for Trans women.
This is the reason a 3rd space is needed, as a TERF I do not wish for a wipe out of Trans, I want the fairness of no penis owners in the Women's areas and no vaginas in Men's areas. Children would be allowed as they have always been , till age appropriate.

If barriers or exclusions for who can enter a space are removed, it is effectively an open invitation to anyone to enter that space. Not every person will take up that open invitation, but that doesn’t mean that the open invitation isn’t there.
So yes, if the barrier for entry to a women’s toilet is being a man (trans-identified or not), and that barrier is removed, then effectively ‘all the men’ have been given access to that space, whether they take up that opportunity or not. And there are plenty that will, given the indisputable reality of men who want to do harm to women (and that’s irrespective of how those men self-identify). That women’s toilet has been effectively changed to a unisex space, and the consequences of that for women are clear: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/sexual-assault-unisex-changing-rooms-sunday-times-women-risk-a8519086.html

‘By saying that trans women can’t use women’s toilets, you’re effectively saying they’re not allowed to exist.’ Not sure that logic stands up. Of course trans women exist, there’s no ‘allowing’ it – it’s just a fact. But the fact of their existence doesn’t give them the right to any space that they want, even if they feel the lack of that access affects their dignity. I’m afraid that their feelings in this matter come second to the wider, material issue, which is the actual physical protection of women from men (both trans-identified men, and men who are not trans-identified) in that space.

Please answer the question about how many female people you believe need to be harmed before you prioritise female people over a group of male people.

Because it really does come down to that. There is no way to arbitrate which male people should and should not access the female toilets. There is no way to know which are the lovely nice male people that you want to support vs the ones you agree should be excluded.

Not forgetting, that those you feel should be included, other female people consider harmful to be in those spaces. At what point OneAlertNavyAnt do you prioritise female people's needs rather than male people.

It is also well understood that in prioritising some male people and allowing them access, some female people will self exclude.

Female people self excluding from spaces meant from them means that they are harmed.

Let's take one of the situations that will now very likely change as a result of yesterday.

The police have a woman prisoner needing to be strip searched. An intimate touch, invasive and humiliating process involving her being undressed.

They have a policy that a woman can only be searched by an officer of the same sex. For obvious reasons of privacy, dignity, decency and reducing the distress of the process as much as possible.

They were trying to argue that a male officer with a certificate (and possibly on self ID, no one was sure) could and should be going to undress and handle that woman on the grounds of legal sex, regardless of how the woman perceived him, and it was his right to do so . Think about that. It was his right to have that intimate access to that woman. To do what no other man was permitted. And the woman likely faced legal consequences if she said 'but that's a man, I'm not ok with this'.

Today? No. He's not someone of the same sex, the law is clear on this. He cannot require that woman to submit and intimately search her.

Who is your sympathy with here? The woman who until yesterday would have had to co operate with a state enforced assault? Or the man who has been told no, he cannot intimately strip search a woman? Who do you think would have suffered most?