In nearly half a century of using the women’s toilets, I’ve never seen a single woman challenged in the loos for being a man. I feel pretty sure that if it happened frequently, I might have had some idea about it (and I spent a couple of decades as a lesbian - and though I’m not particularly butch, I never heard of any of my friends who were very butch being mistaken for a man in the loo!)
I only heard about this idea in the last few years from students and teenagers, and from
Tumblr. I think it’s a bit of Americanised discourse that has started floating around here along with the gender stuff.
I have a private theory that it seems plausible to young people who (a) don’t really have any idea or think about the fact that for large parts of the twentieth century, most women wore their hair short and many did not wear makeup or particularly “gendered” clothes, so they have some kind of idea that it is terribly “gender non conforming” to have short hair and not wear all the contouring/long swishy hair/overdone nails stuff they associate with social media-influenced “femininity”. They are too deep in the present moment to realise that many/most women went about all of the 70s, 80s and 90s in jeans or slacks and an anorak and a short haircut and still weren’t assumed to be either men or somehow making a radical statement about “gender”. They simply don’t understand that for most of the postwar period, mostly only very young women had long hair, and married or older women generally uniformly had short hair styles.
And (b) added to that, it doesn’t occur to the same young people to look at their grannies (or any older women), and notice that still most women older than about 60 have short hair and wear trousers. My mum is 72 and sings in a big community choir for older women, and last time they performed out of about 300 women only a handful were wearing a skirt or dress - they almost exclusively wear tops and trousers and have short hairstyles! I’m currently on a walking holiday in the West Country, and nearly all men and women are dressed completely the same in sportswear and hiking gear and identical fleeces and anoraks (can still easily tell who the women are though…)
The “women who are gender non conforming might get CHALLENGED in the loos” Tumblr/Twitter crowd just seem not to actually notice older women, or society around them in practice; nor take a look at what anyone older than about 25 is wearing to realise that very few women over that age are what you’d call particularly “gender confirming” anyway.
So, anyway. Long rant, sorry, but the short version is that I think it’s US-influenced internet scaremongering, by people who don’t seem to take the trouble to actually look around themselves on a daily basis.