Why don't trans women care if women feel unsafe?

[ItsCoolForCats]

I listened to the Stephen Nolan show earlier on BBC Sounds. They were discussing the FA ban on male players in the female category. A lady from SEEN in Sport was on and was great.

Then there were two transwomen on (one who is involved with Mermaids). There was lots of talk about their feelings and some quite infuriating twisting of scientific fact (women come in all shapes and sizes, so transwomen have no advantage). But one thing that came up several times was how they didn't feel safe using male facilities. Stephen Nolan did the faux naive thing quite effectively and tried to turn it around to get them to consider other people's viewpoints, unsuccessfully. It was back to their feelings again. The levels of entitlement was quite astonishing.

Why don't they ever consider women who feel unsafe sharing spaces with males? Is it because these women are just bigots that need to be re-educated and reframe their trauma?

Needs tend to be articulated within certain contexts and sets of conditions. Your niece/nephew has been inculcated into the contemporary trend that is 'gender ideology'.

Everywhere they look - on social media and in their friendship circles this is reflected back to them. Their confusion and personal struggles are framed within this context; using these sorts of symbols and looking to these sorts of solutions ....which is to frame your discomfort with your developing body and/or sexuality as being 'trans' - that your discomfort with sex based stereotypes must mean that you are really the opposite sex, or no sex at all.

If reinforced.....this will result in feelings of really needing to go through with the solutions offered...which are to block natural puberty, take cross sex hormones not naturally suited to your body, and even to have parts of your body surgically removed.

The worst thing about this is that you cannot really change sex, and sex actually matters in certains types of situation. You find you have been misled and encouraged, by friends and family, to adopt a false belief.

The problem is your relation is not female, so the only bits of being "female" that are open to your relation to signal this imagined "femaleness" are things that are possible for men, which are: to play "dress up" in stereotypically female clothing, to behave in ways and have interests that our culture stereotypes as "female", and to appropropriate spaces and support that is labelled "woman-only".

None of these things are neutral. All are negative for women either by validating and perpetuating the same social stereotypes that are used to justify excluding us from the powerful roles in society, by reducing us from complete human beings to chariactures, or by directly destroing the women-only supports that exist to mitigate the reality of being female in male-first world.

It is not fair to expect us to turn a blind eye to this. You say you are only asking for kindness and empathy, but what you are really asking us to do is erase and debase ourselves and pretend our rights and needs do not matter if they are an invonvenience to men.

No. You are not kind. You are asking women to hurt themselves and to give up their rights in service of your male relation's comfort. Women have a moral and legal right to No to this and we are.

Because they are men and men are selfish.

Because they are NOT women they are men. No such thing as a "transwoman" they are blokes, males, Mr's, men. Stop using the word women, you are misnaming them.

"without being noticed"

This really needs to stop being repeated.

Most female people can correctly identify the sex of a male person. Some can do this immediately using the male body cues that that person has, some will require some interaction whether that is watching their movement or listening to their voice.

Female people do this by analysing skeletal proportions, hip alignment, the many many facial cues that are rarely changed successfully in person even with repeated extensive surgery. And voice. It is highly unlikely that a male person's voice will not be identified as being male.

And that is before we even start discussing the non-verbal expressions detected by our brains.

It really is the very opposite of 'kindness' to expect any female person to accept a male person into a space that they need to be single sex.

It is not a need, it is a want. And women are not obliged to facilitate men's wants.

I think this issue is like Israel/Palestine; you can’t have a workable negotiated settlement without broadly agreeing definitions and terms.

The two extremes in the gender debate have little genuine common ground to work with as ideology doesn’t function well at the negotiation table and women are understandably protective of hard won territory.

The law can be unwieldy when applied to such a complex web of outcomes when gender impacts so many strong and weak groups so personally and so profoundly.

I am consistently struck by how oversimplified the debate inevitably becomes. The needs of these various groups within the trans community are conflated as if they were one homogeneous group but they are not.

I think this will be worked out over time slowly and painfully.

"i’m sure no one goes through this process without really needing to"

I suggest that any person reading this sentence above and believing it needs to read a lot more and from a lot wider sources. I would suggest that you start by reading about the transmaxxers, the eunuch fetishists, and the many male people who are proudly documenting how seeing themselves as a woman is hugely sexually arousing.

Plus there is the growing porn category that is male people with artificially enlarged breasts either masturbating or having sex.

Sure, there are some male people who they feel that they need to transition for other reasons. Many of those male people have also told us or their friends and family have that they don't access female single sex spaces ever. And they are very clear that they are male people and accept that no one person on this earth needs to accept them as women because they understand other people's have boundaries and rights too.

But any person who believes 'i’m sure no one goes through this process without really needing to' probably is either heavily invested in believing that or has not done the reading and listening that they need to really understand what is happening when male people declare that they are female.

"The needs of these various groups within the trans community are conflated as if they were one homogeneous group but they are not."

"I think this will be worked out over time slowly and painfully."

Feminists are campaigning to have all male people once again excluded from female single sex provisions (ie. spaces, opportunities and toilets) and for the highest medical standards to be applied to children and vulnerable people.

Can you explain what are the different needs of the various groups within the trans community? How are these groups sorted and how are they identified by other?

Can you explain how you see various groups within the trans community getting their unique needs met that allows for strong safeguarding to be applied, as well as not reducing the opportunities for female people?

I am interested in your thinking here and how it contradicts what feminists have been campaigning for, which, I point out has for over a decade included the suggestion of third spaces. It seems to be a lazy 'both sides' accusation that you have made, and I am interested in whether you have a proposed solution or not.

whilst I don’t personally agree with the recent ruling,

I am sure the five learned Judges of the Supreme Court will be devastated to hear that you disagree with their clarification of the Law. On what grounds do you believe they are mistaken in their interpretation of the Law? What legal qualifications do you have above and beyond theirs to come to that conclusion @RFRose ?

I think one question I would like trans activists to answer is what benefit they think there is for women in being grouped together with trans women.

Do we gain any benefit from having them in our toilets (which, if nothing else, marginally increases the number of people using the already inadequate toilet provision for women)?

Do we gain any benefit from getting changed in their presence?

Do we gain any benefit from having them in our rape crisis groups and domestic violence shelters?

Do we gain any benefit from their participation in initiatives for women?

Do we gain any benefit from having them in the female prison estate?

If the answer to these questions is no, and we are already aware that there are negative impacts for women from all these things, it appears that trans inclusion is something that solely benefits trans women and disadvantages women.

So how can it be justified, from a feminist perspective?

Someone posted a link to this a few days ago on another thread. It's interviews with some of the attendees of the anti-woman march held in London after the SC judgement. The three characters that pop up at the 9 min. mark! Especially the bloke in the bikini top made from pink insulation tape, totally passing as his two friends also do. He seems perfectly pleasant, as do most of the interviewees. He's going to ignore the judgement. He doesn't see how it can be policed. Although the smirk when he says about a hand down the pants, one for the wank bank? #notafetish. Juxtaposed with the comments from the woman interviewed immediately before him gives quite the dissonance.

I don't like to generalise but I'm happy to say none of the folx on that march would care about the rights of nonbelievers. If they did the best you could hope is they'd just dismiss us as bigots who don't deserve rights. The ones not actually getting off on it that is.

The term 'narcissist' isn't an insult, it's a name for a personality trait which includes:
Sense of entitlement, deserving of special attention
Manipulative behaviour.
Need for attention and validation
Lack of empathy with the needs of others
Unwillingness to take responsibility for actions
Disturbed self-identity
Need for control
etc.

Anyone who has ever been in a relationship with a narcissist will recognise those traits, and how damaging they are.

The behaviours typical of a narcissist are also typical of the behaviour of the trans movement in general - you can check off each item on the list and find obvious examples of it, from everything from toilets to the law having to defer to trans demands, to the non-factual self-identification with the opposite sex.

The hyperbole about 'genocide' and 'literal violence' and the threat of suicide if their demands are not met are also narcissistic behaviours.

There has to be some explanation for how an unscientific, obviously untrue statement like 'Transwomen Are Women' has been able to take over societies to the astonishing extent that it has.

Since the transgender movement can't rely on science or justice or fairness to bolster their campaigns, there must be something going on that has allowed such an unlikely and obviously flawed campaign to be so successful.

Narcissists are excellent at controlling personal relationships, and making otherwise sensible people stay with them and make excuses for their abusive behaviours; they often do this by 'gaslighting', inventing a false narrative of reality which makes them the central character in all situations, and the hard-done-by victim in any conflicted situation.

Sadly it works very well, too well in many cases. But if you can identify the emotionally abusive person as 'a narcissist', i.e. having narcissistic traits, it's not an insult, it is an understanding that helps break the control they have over you.

So identifying the narcissistic behaviours used by the transgender movement in general is more of a analysis, an awareness, an explanation, than an insult.

Regarding the appeal to be kind from some posters because they know at least one ever so nice transwoman who is absolutely no threat to anyone - single sex spaces, services, opportunities and sports are not based on whether the person using them is nice or not, they are based on the sex of the person.

How would this niceness be measured? What is the criteria?

There is nothing remotely nice about a person violating women's boundaries and removing their needs and rights to single sex spaces, services, opportunities and sports.

So provide disabled/ trans loos, hardly possible!😡
I will stick clearly to my y viewpoints, abusers will always be around, hard to say, whether they appear or not to be

This is a problem. Lots of people think safeguarding should be renegotiated for the benefit of a unspecified group of men. And while there are people who want to keep that idea floating around, men are going to constantly push boundaries.

People cannot change sex, women and girls need space away from men. It is irrelevant what is going on in these mens lives.

Claiming to be in the reasonable middle, while declaring safeguarding as extreme is, at best, a bonkers thing to say on a feminists forum.

In answer to: 'why don't men with trans identities care if women feel unsafe' we've had:

1 - your pity and compassion for me and my trans child should mean you abandon all your rights and all those of your daughters, and of your children who are gay, and stop talking about feeling unsafe or criticising our behaviours

2 - women thinking about their rights is selfish and petty minded when there are real problems in the world that they should focus on, and they should stop talking about feeling unsafe or criticising men's behaviours

3 - if you women were just nice enough and kind enough, men might in turn be kind enough to care about things like women not wanting to be forced to undress for their pleasure or be strip searched by them (so stop talking about feeling unsafe and criticising men's behaviours).

4 - women talking about their needs for single sex spaces is extreme and no one should expect their extreme views to be listened to. Instead, if you all just took a more reasonable approach, those men will listen and care so much more. Society might even come up with a wonderful compromise that has never be suggested by the extremist women - or maybe it was suggested but rejected because the women are so extreme!

I hope you don't mind TheOtherRaven, the latest post reminded me to add another to your list. It is more of the same old, same old, but I thought it was relevant.

Because they’re not women and have no clue how women feel. It’s like the burly guys in women's sports, they don’t give a shit because they’re not looking at it from a woman’s point of view (looking at you Lia Thomas).

Yes, abusers will always be around. A man putting a dress on doesn’t make him harmless and fluffy.

All men have to be excluded from women only spaces for exactly that reason.
You just don’t seem to understand that.

Kindly, this is what we are all trying to say. Abusers will always be around. Statistically speaking, men abuse women massively more than women abuse men. Statistically speaking also, trans women (men who identify as women) abuse women more than men abuse women.

We also know that many men do not abuse women, and many trans women also do not abuse women.

However, they do not wear name badges to let us know which ones are the abusers and which aren’t. We cannot tell which ones are the lovely, non-abusing ones, and which ones will abuse.

Therefore, from a purely safeguarding point of view, we keep all men - including those who identify as women - out of women’s spaces. It is the only safe option.

Note, I am only talking about safety here. Women also deserve single-sex spaces for reasons of privacy and dignity. But even if it were only for reasons of safety, statistically speaking, keeping all men, including trans women, out, is the only choice.

Is this another version of 'men will always abuse women and girls, so we should ignore this and allow some special male people into female single sex spaces'?

It appears so but I would be pleased to told that I misinterpreted this. Because the length that some people will go to dismiss the need for male people to use male single sex spaces is rather stark when you see it.

And if there is a need to improve the safety in male toilets so that all male people, even those who have any gender identity, are safe, I think that should be a focus for transgender support groups.

Plus, disabled people should give up their spaces because some male people demand access to female single sex spaces? Or is this post stating that a mixed sex toilet provision that does not impact either disabled spaces or single sex spaces should be provided?

I agree.

No one who has a fully functioning, healthy body needs to undergo extreme body modification with high complication rates.

What is the actual problem with trans people using the spaces which already exist for people of their own biological sex?

So provide disabled/ trans loos, hardly possible!

Leave disabled toilets out of it, disabled people fought long and hard for the provision of those spaces for their needs. Stop advocating taking what is not there for the taking.

If trans people don't want to use the toilets and facilities for the sex they are, which is the epitome of inclusion then they need to campaign for a different, additional space to suit them.