Is there a name for this?

[Confusedpleaseeducateme]

Pardon my ignorance. But can anyone help? Genuine question. Just a NC

I say that I'm GC as I don't believe you can change sex. However I strongly believe you should go where your genitals match. E. G. If you've COMPLETELY transitioned then use that toilet.
By all means say you're a different gender (and I'll just roll my eyes internally) but personally I don't have a problem if a true TW uses the ladies facilities. I just don't want to share female spaces with a penis!

I don't believe TWAW. I believe they are TW.

Does that make sense? Please be gentle... First time posting on this board but been reading a long time but don't recall seeing anyone saying anything about this? But I could just be being dull... Menopausal brain!

Since the vast majority or transwomen are not surgically changed - it would be interesting to see if the prison stats see a behaviour difference between completed surgical transition and the standard transistioner - but that needs data which people are keen to avoid collecting

I went (some years ago now) from not seeing what the problem was & why we couldn’t just be kind, to thinking that we should just let TWs who had had genital surgery into women’s spaces, to understanding why the only answer was to keep our spaces single sex.

I think it’s a fairly common version of the journey.

I understand where you're coming from here but the bottom line is if you let a man into a female only space (penis or no penis) it becomes a mixed sex space.

I also believe that if a person willingly alters their body when there is no medical need then it is up to them to work out how best to navigate life. It is not for women and girls to find a solution or make space for men who cut their penises off.

I highly recommend Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stocks books on this issue.

Jeez when will this #bekind shit end? 🙄

Mate, the bottom line is we can’t police who the nice penis people are, however they present. My DH, for example, you could trust with your life. Other blokes? Who knows. Wearing sparkly eye shadow and a dress does not help in this discernment. The only way you’ll have a fair chance is to have single sex spaces. No penises. Even the good ones.

HTH.

You’re broadly speaking, gender critical but suffering from a societal expectation to be kind.

Intellectually, you are there, you understand.
Your heart however has been groomed to prioritise some people’s needs- usually male- above others. You are brainwashed into thinking we can’t make poor Billie go in the gents with all those other men who don’t carry handbags and lipstick.

For me, no, not least because:

1. A transwomen with or without a penis can still present as masculine, will be male height and build, has still gone through male puberty etc. and thus still unnerve and frighten women in any women's space;

2. This would greatly incentivise such surgery which is risky and irreversible in order to maybe "access" women's spaces. This includes vulnerable adults who may regret this and wish to detransition in future.

At any rate I believe biological women are entitled to same sex privacy and dignity and transwomen should be otherwise accommodated. But even if you disagree see 1 and 2 above.

I completely understand where you’re coming from OP. Requiring full surgery seemed to protect high level women’s sports, for example, and problems only started to arise when that requirement was removed.

There’s also a feeling that removing all the transtenders and cross dressers from the equation would make women safer, which I have no doubt it would, simply because it would limit numbers in general and put off the casually criminal.

The first and most obvious problem relates to the fact that, unlike in elite sport, there is no way to regulate who uses which space. It’s all done on trust and on women having the confidence to object. As soon as you let any man in, you create a situation where those women feel less able to object as it’s no longer clear cut. And even then, some genuine transsexual patients can’t have the surgery. You start trying to draw lines in the sand about which men and at what point.

But beyond that, there is evidence showing that even transsexual men retain the criminal offending and violence patterns of men. However genuine, however hard they’ve tried, they simply are not women and even in small numbers, their presence increases the risk to women and leads to some women (usually the most vulnerable) self-excluding.

There is no line that’s workable , other than basing it on sex. If those men don’t feel safe in men’s spaces, it’s up to them to look for other solutions that do not impact women.

The physical threat from male bodies extends way beyond having intact genitals.

My brother, kind though he is, can hold me down on the floor with one hand/arm while I writhe and kick (we haven't done this for 30 odd years but we used to sort of wrestle and tickle each other.) DH can physically pick me up off the floor etc. Which he has only done romantically, but...

I feel threatened in small spaces when around male bodied people who could physically restrain or hurt me without even exerting themselves and against whom I have no advantage in terms of getting free or escaping.

Whilst of course there are women and girls who are bigger and stronger, the vast majority of female people would be much easier to get away from or retaliate against. Before we take into account that women and girls do not physically and sexually assault other women in any number comparable to male offenders.

Not having a penis makes a male person no less male. It means they can't rape me with that missing penis but they can grab me, restrain me, strangle me, grope me, assault me all the same.

1. Men who want to rape don't do it from sexual desire but desire for power and control. Rapists who can't use their penis will use objects instead and will be more violent and more dangerous too (more likely to kill after the assault). Any male who is a rape threat (and obviously a lot of TW are not) would not be any less dangerous if their penis is removed.
2. a rule that said that "males who have no willy can come in but males who still have one cannot" really would require genital inspections. Ew. No. No one wants to have the job of inspecting anyone's crotch. We can see who the male people are without needing to look.
3. a rule that said that "males who have no willy can come in but males who still have one cannot" would also be abhorrent because you would literally be legally mandating that someone who is suffering from dysphoria must undergo dangerous and ultimately ineffective surgery, when it's more likely to be better for their mental health to keep the body they have and learn to live with it.
4. There is no surgery that actually makes genitals "match". An artificially structured fistula at the site of a eunuch's wound is not a vagina (and is a very masculine idea of what a vagina is - a vagina is not just any old hole that a dick can be inserted into). A dangly bit of arm flesh sewn onto the crotch with no functionality is not a dick and has no erogenous nerve endings.
5. Toilets are the least important of single sex spaces but the most frequently used. We hold the boundary there so that the fight never makes it to the doors of the rape crisis centres, the women's refuges and the women's prisons where our sisters need to just be able to trust that they will be safe because things are bad enough for them already. Single sex spaces are not single sex wholely because of an elevated risk of rape when males are allowed. We need spaces where males are not. We have a right to those spaces. The very fact that some males will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure we can't have them is just more proof of how necessary they are.

There are many reasons why this couldn't work and to understand the reasons, there needs to be a basic level of acceptance that women need sex-based rights. (obviously it's open to incels etc to argue that women shouldn't have such rights, but that's not, I think, where you're coming from) .
Women need sex-based rights in order to take an equal part in society along with men. Women are more physically vulnerable at population level - smaller, weaker, slower etc, and the world is patriarchal.
If women are to have sex-based rights, they have to be based on sex and they have to apply across society. Not just toilets, where they're important for safety, dignity etc, but also to workplaces so we don't get sacked for being pregnant etc, and sport, so we don't cede all our medals to men, etc.
A man without a penis is still a man - bigger, stronger, more violent and more criminal than women, at population level, and as the S C pointed out, it's impossible to have a workable law which only applies to some men.
Laws can't be perfect. But they have to at least be workable. So males, however big or small their penis, and whether they've had it removed, cannot use women's sex-based rights. Otherwise women have nothing 'extra' to allow them equality in the patriarchy we live in.

but personally I don't have a problem if a true TW uses the ladies facilities

Tbh it doesn't really matter whether you have a problem with this or not, because the toilets have been dedicated as separate-sex for women only. The law says no man can use them no matter how big, small or inverted his penis is and whether he has a special certificate or not. This is the clarification that the Supreme Court ruling has given.

I don't believe TWAW. I believe they are TW.

And by advocating for some TW to be allowed through the door marked Woman you are contradicting the above statement.

Not only is that discriminatory and impossible to police it also then causes the situation of If they are women enough to enter the toilets for women then they are women enough to be included in all spaces, services, sports, etc., labelled for women and if not why not?

Allowing some TW through that door renders the space mixed sex it is no longer single sex and no longer women only. Spaces and services that are based on sex are based on sex and nothing else as they should be.

Toilets may not seem significant but they are, blurring the line there blurs everything else and that is why things have panned out as they have and reached the point they have.

It is simple and straightforward - no men, however they present, whatever they have done to their bodies use the services set aside for women. Use the services provided for men, the sex they are and always will be or campaign for additional extra services suited to their needs. Leave women's services alone.

Beautifully written, @GailBlancheViola

Toilets are the tip of the single sex iceberg.

Ironically, the men you can trust with your life are the very ones who stay out of women's spaces . It's the ones who think they should be able to go in who you cannot trust.

So one more question.. If someone were to ask me my stance in a few words how should I reply? That was more my question tbh.

To me, it sounds like your position is the old-school liberal-left position - that men who go through so much are so few and far between and have been “gatekeeped” enough that women should be generous to them and make the concession.

It’s where many feminists were 20 years ago. It wasn’t a belief that TWAW, but it was a feeling of, probably largely pity, for people so hugely uncomfortable with themselves they would have their dicks removed. And went hand in hand with a belief that that generosity wouldn’t be abused by TW pushing into spaces where their maleness was a problem other than the threat of sexual assault (like sports and lesbian dating sites). I guess I felt that way myself back then but personally I think we’ve learnt that it’s not possible to draw the line there.

Edit to add: I also think we’ve seen that that view of TW was somewhat naive.

And even the ones you can trust with your life, well, that relies on trust. You don’t actually know.

The time I got a shock seeing a transwomen in the bathroom it was an instinctive response based purely on me recognising the male physique. This was the broad shoulders, bulky back and narrow hips. They weren’t huge, probably slightly above average height for a woman but not by much. All of the measurements individually may have been in the range of normal for a woman but combined they were unmistakably male and my fear response kicked off. This is coming from someone who isn’t usually nervous around men, it was just the shock of seeing a male form in a female space.
So bottom line is I just don’t feel comfortable with a transwomen in private spaces regardless of their pre or post op status and it’s an instinctive aversion. I have a lot of empathy for transwomen though and I would be happy to include them in my social circle, just not in female only spaces

It’s not just toilets though is it

@Talulahalula absolutely correct.

A fundamental of safeguarding is to treat everybody with the same level of mistrust, regardless of status, regardless of apparent personal probity.

On a different topic, I was berated on Twitter for saying that i (routinely) don’t trust men, particularly strangers.

He was from Manchester and thought my attitude was because I was a snotty, up-myself, and rude Londoner.

I told him that the wrong ‘uns don’t wear a ‘I’m a wrong ‘un’ lanyard, so i keep you all at arms length.
He begrudgingly agreed with me.

Well, thank god for that!

When it comes to the 'men who've had their penis removed' argument I think Sarah Jane Baker is a good example.

SJB was in prison for kidnap, torture, and attempted murder. He castrated himself while inside and claims to have eaten his own balls. He was recently recalled after calling for trans activists to punch feminists 'in the fucking face'.

This man should not be sharing spaces with any women.

If someone were to ask me my stance in a few words how should I reply?

Well, you could say that you agree with the court's observations in Croft v Royal Mail (postsurgical transwoman should use the ladies), but you can't because it's been superceded by the EA.

So my one word description for your stance would be obsolescent.

Exactly this.

It's plain on this thread alone that the women here have very different thresholds of what they would individually be able to handle in terms of a mixed sex space from 'not bothered much' to 'if he's had x and y done' to 'I can't no matter what'. A women's space has to inclusively work for all those women and be accessible to them. Those thresholds need to not be loosened and fiddled with in a way that is the thin end of the wedge to what we had before April, which was 'the most important people in a women's space are the men, and if you can't use a mixed sex space that is centred on male wishes, you're a bigoted cow who doesn't deserve to have a space anyway'.

Women with the luxury of not being as bothered as other women need to focus on the needs of other and less lucky women if they're interested in diversity and inclusion, rather than focusing on how they can cater to the wishes and desires of men. There is no reciprocal good will. There is no care or concern coming from men about women feeling comfortable or being safe or having equality of access: even our government isn't happy that women have rights and protections under law. If women don't care about inclusion for other women no one else is going to. And if it actually is a value around inclusion and not just around the greater importance and entitlements of men as a sex, they will do.

An opportune moment for Naomi Cunningham's no-peanuts piece, I think: https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2024/11/06/sex-peanuts-and-statutory-interpretation/

If something is peanut-free, it has to not contain any peanuts.

I Quite agree
( but my inner pedant is screaming "spiders have 8 legs!" ....)
Sorry.