Morning all,
Was browsing reddit last night whilst sitting around on the evening shift. Ended up going down a bit of a rabbithole and reading some discussions on AskTransgender as was curious to see what the response to the recent supreme court ruling was.
Ended up reading a thread asking why so many cis women are 'not accepting of trans women' and one of the first responses I read was the below, which appeared to be written by a man. I'm still getting my head around the various arguments as tbh I've not really given much thought to the whole discussion the past few years - I don't think I've ever actually seen a trans person in real life aside from a few non binary looking schoolgirls who could also have been lesbians, and I work in the construction sector where all this woke stuff is pretty non existent.
Curious to see if people agree with the below. Sounds pretty logical to me and quite surprised it hasn't caused an epic shitstorm on there tbf lol.
Some people are just bigoted no doubt, but I think it's reductive to suggest it's all down to transphobia. I think more often it's a fundamental disagreement on a few key aspects.
Typically, the discussion focuses on trans identity and the refusal of gender critical women to accept said identity. However, I think in some cases the resistance might actually stem from the GC women feeling that their own identity is being challenged.
For example, if you've been accepted as 'a woman' all your life and somebody you perceive as male suddenly tells you that they're a women now and you're a cis woman some people aren't going to like that. Perhaps even less if that person is younger than them or of a demographic that would've been considered male in traditional societies.
That would perhaps explain why a lot of GC women tend to be middle aged - they've had years of being a woman and then suddenly a 20 year old 'male' (in their eyes) tells them he's a woman and biological women are now just a sub category of womanhood. Whether or not the GC woman is justified in feeling this way, some will no doubt argue that it's like telling a pre-op trans woman that she's now going to be called a 'pre-trans' rather than just a 'trans woman'.
Another common theme seems to be women's safety. I'm not going to try and define biological sex as there is much disagreement on what constitutes it. However, we know for a fact that 98% of recorded sex crimes are committed by individuals with a penis. This seems to be a big part of GC women's resistance to being alone in a state of undress with individuals that have penises, or facilitating a situation where said individuals could be around their daughters unsupervised whilst both are unclothed. Same for women who are rape survivors and experience trauma responses when alone with unfamiliar males, especially when naked and feeling vulnerable, or women that can't be naked with 'male bodied' people for religious reasons.
This isn't strictly about trans women from what I've read. The argument seems to be that we don't want to normalise the situation where a male paedophile can just claim to be a woman and follow the girls swimming team into the changing rooms. Many would say this is the entire reason we have sex segregated facilties in the first place and the reason behind the recent Supreme Court judgement.
Unfortunately, there have been a few high profile cases where some pretty vile sex offenders (e.g. Barbie Kardashian) have transitioned and been sent to women's prisons, which has fuelled the flames. Many people would argue that a male sex offender shouldn't be able to get sent to an institution full of vulnerable women just by claiming to be a woman shortly before the sentencing date, which appears to be what happened.
These aren't necessarily my own views. I'm just explaining what I understand to be the common GC arguments as somebody who has tried to understand both sides of the debate.