What would you actually do if you saw a transperson in the wrong toilet/changing room for their sex?

[FattyMcFattyArse]

I've been pondering this ever since the FWS decision and since I saw an obviously male transperson using the ladies at a service station. I initially froze and wanted to say something, but all my Britishness and female social conditioning made me just mutter under my breath and walk away in disgust.

What would you do?

What have you done?

What is the right thing to do?

They don't belong there, according to the law.

https://archive.is/I2oAD paywall-free

@Dominoeffecter has the imagination to do so. She just doesn't want to engage with it, because it will lay bare the problems with the position she's taking.

nah mate. The only place they look female is in their imaginations.

Have any of the resident handmaidens come back with any benefit to women and girls from letting men into female spaces yet? Or is it still just the usual scolding and “I don’t have a problem with it”?

It’s not really that @TheKeatingFive, it still wouldn’t bother me as I’ve shared toilets with trans women before BUT that said this thread has given me some points to consider ☺️ I’ve seen you on threads before and have respect for your opinion so I’ll certainly consider and you’ve got your points across without resorting to insults which I appreciate.

I couldn’t resist 😆

If anyone has daughters (late teens or early twenties) that are going into pubs and clubs, I would particularly make them aware of the dangers of going to the toilets by their own particularly if they are mixed sexed fully enclosed designs. These are built to be sound resistant and with pub/club background noise it is extremely difficult to know if they are in trouble. Men take advantage of women who do not have full capacity to make decisions as they are feeling ill through drink or being spiked. Also if they were to fall ill, no one would know.

There are lots of cases that make the papers and many more that don’t. It’s not something I was aware of until I started researching toilet safety. Pub and club toilets are particularly bad.

I am not trying to make anyone anxious, just aware, and it’s a common sense way to reduce the VAWG figures.

I am on another thread about someone's MIL having an XL bully.

Someone has just made the point about banning things in response to proven dangers.

XL bullies were banned because they kept mauling people to death.

Handguns were banned after the Dunblane and Hungerford massacres.

How many little girls need to be harmed by trans women in female only spaces before we all accept that it is a safeguarding risk?

No - it's pretty much been the usual 'hysterical women', 'I don't have a problem with it, I don't look at anyone's junk' and 'TW have really hard lives, why would I make their lives harder', while women and girls can pretty much stfu.

Yes, I already clicked that this is a man.
I gave him some tips on what to wear this afternoon.

Okay, fair enough.

I suppose the point is that we may feel comfortable as individuals, but there will be other women more vulnerable than us who may not. Young girls are an obvious example, as we've discussed. But also women who've been raped/abused by men and who would really struggle with men in their intimate spaces.

What about the safety of women? We cannot tell which men mean us harm which is why all men (however they present) need to stay out. Women are not human shields for men.

Men are not 1% of the population though. Wearing a dress doesn't change your sex.

I think because the question was what I would do I answered literally and then got bombarded ☺️ it literally wouldn’t bother me but I haven’t said it shouldn’t bother others and I have unfortunately been a victim of SA when I was younger so I can concede that it may be a trigger for some people.

While I understand that some people don't have a problem with who uses female single sex spaces, other female people do have a problem. It is not just about safety, it is about privacy too.

Toilets are not just used behind a closed cubicle door. There are quite a few aspects of female toilet usage that happen in the public space, or even now still occur with a toilet door jammed open.

Well from my personal experience here is a list.

I have had to use the toilet while having a pram / pushchair jammed into the door with groceries.

I have had to have my mum use the public toilet because the disable toilet was not available and had her wheelchair jammed in the door because I couldn't leave her sit to move it and shut the door.

I have had breastmilk leaks / children's vomit / food spilled on my clothes and needed to have an unbuttoned top to dry the top under the hand drier.

I have come across other women quite regularly washing out their tops or their skirts etc and drying them enough to put back on .

I have friends who have miscarried in toilets and needed assistance and for that to be female people to make it more comfortable.

If you as a female person have not experienced these issues, that doesn't mean it is not happening. I am glad that you have never needed to do this things, it is uncomfortable and can be quite humiliating. But at least, in a female only toilet, it is a little better.

I think when people think of toilet usage, maybe they have never had to use the toilets in any other way other than behind a closed door. But the needs are still there and they are real for many female people to be able to engage in public life.

Apparently the (untested) reason for it being safer to have enclosed private mixed sex cubicles with a mixed sex area in front of the cubicles, it because there will be more people watching who is going into each cubicle and how long they are in there for. Thereby if they were having a medical emergency, there may be more chance that someone clocked a particular door hadn’t been opened for some time. There may also be more chance a good man could notice a bad man entering a cubicle with a child or woman. Apparently the good men will form some sort of surveillance team against the bad.

It fails of course because in reality good men do not want to hang round surveying women in toilets or make an assessment on who is allowed in toilets together, and collapsed people need to be tended to immediately and don’t make a noise. It also assumes there’s a constant flow of good men.

I think the person would probably feel safer in the ladies' loos than the men's, and I would let them be.

Can someone explain to me - there is a understanding in this statement that men pose a threat, but as soon as a man appears in the womens toilet, they no longer do?

There was no consideration for passing, or GRC, or surgery or even hes with a woman, it just that the man probably (not even does for sure) feel safer.

Is it people are confusing single sex spaces for safe spaces?

At what point does a man who identifies as a woman stop being a man?

This is a very good point.
On all occasions over many years (bar a couple when there was a fight), when visiting women's toilets in pubs and clubs there has been a sense of looking out for other women. When a woman has slumped drunk in a stall, other women have noticed, got them out and helped them. When a woman has come into the loos to escape some unwanted male attention or an abusive BF, the women have waited with her and kept her safe. When a woman has been unsteady on her feet, worse for wear or just not acting right, women have stayed with her, sobered her up a bit and made sure her friends were found or she got a taxi home.
This would not happen the same way or as much if the loos were floor to ceiling enclosed and unisex.
The power of the sisterhood to safeguard other women (not solely but especially in night time venues) is not to be underestimated. And this is lost if all toilets are unisex cubicles. Not to mention the unmentionable harm that can be done behind closed doors when nobody can see or hear what is going on.

Individual women shouldn't be taking responsibility for asserting our right to female-only spaces. Certainly we shouldn't be confronting men who get a kick out of transgressing our boundaries if we are alone and vulnerable. They are doing it as a way of asserting their power - and they are correct, they do have more power as an individual trans-identifying male than an individual woman has. The kick they get from using "the ladies" unchallenged is such a masculine act - overpowering a woman's choice without her consent - I hope they realise how very male they are being every time they do it, and communicating that is an important part of the messaging that will change thongs eventually. We have more power when acting corporately. We can campaign for truly female-only spaces to be restored to us. We can challenge every business that doesn't provide suitable facilities to comply with the law. We can bring group actions to sue the businesses that force us to self-exclude and have a less comfortable experience with their services due to them not providing a proper single-sex option. It's annoying that we have to re-fight battles that we thought were won and it's really annoying that our campaigning needs to include campaigning for reasonable provision of unisex facilities alongside single-sex facilities (so that no male who genuinely "just needs to pee" has any excuse for thinking that it's reasonable if he's wearing a dress) but it will get there. I am much more concerned about hospital wards (especially in mental health facilities), prisons, womens shelters/domestic abuse escape services and rape crisis services, employee changing facilities for jobs where getting changed in the workplace is unavoidable, and things like that to be totally enforced as genuinely female only. That's the most important fight, and more easily winnable as all the people involved will have their true identity and status known. After that comes other changing rooms eg at sports facilities and shops. Toilets are the lowest priority, whilst still being important, and it will be less easy because of the anonymous nature of those public facilities, but the culture shift required to win the other fights will pave the way for winning there too eventually.

I’d walk straight out again and wait outside. Warn any other woman/ girl who is about to go on there that there’s a man in there and that I’m waiting ‘til he comes out. If there was a security guard around I’d ask him to go in and evict him.

Old timer?! How very dare you!😄

I don't know that posters who say they don't care about men in women's spaces are necessarily trans activists at all. At least not consciously. It's often far more passive.

Many women are unconcerned by mixed sex spaces; many women are keen to accept men into women's spaces, for no doubt a range of reasons, including (I think): it won't/hasn't affected them; they feel sorry for men they think have debased themselves by dressing as women; they feel sorry for men they believe probably have gender dysphoria; they wish to help these men because they believe these men are marginalised/vulnerable/have a hard time.

Some of these are understandable motivations. However, they all involve centering the desires/wants/needs/preferences of men, despite knowing that this will impact on women (and girls), by raising the risk to them. [Edit: More men in women's spaces will, statistically, make these spaces more dangerous to women and this in real terms means there will be more attacks]. Some women will be made anxious, some will self exclude, some will be retraumatised, some will simply be upset.

The logic outcome is that if men want a space free of males, then this must be respected and women must surely accommodate that wish. If women want a space free of males, then tough shit, suck it up, buttercup, hysterical/fragile bigot, etc.

To be fair though, I have given him a few tips on what to wear in this hot weather.
I know "they"often think tights are best but bare legs are better in Summer weather.
I suggested we can also give tips for Winter wear too.

I’ve made several friendships over the last few years with trans people whilst studying a Fine Art degree. It seems that creative courses are often popular with trans and non-binary people, perhaps because self-expression, acceptance, and inclusion are central to both art and identity. And rightly so – those are needs every human being has.

None of my trans friends pose any kind of risk to anyone in bathrooms. In fact, the risk is far more likely to be to them rather than from them. Research has found that almost half of trans people in Britain avoid using public toilets for fear of harassment or assault.

Realistically, unless someone leaves the cubicle door wide open, what do people think is going to happen in a bathroom?

And if the argument is really about “men being predatory”, then why are there no rules or laws preventing young boys from sharing toilets with adult men? Clearly, that would be recognised as homophobic. So why is it somehow considered acceptable to push transphobic restrictions under the same logic?

Weaponising feminism to justify hostility towards trans people is not only misguided – it also distracts from real issues of violence against women. If people are truly concerned about attacks in toilets, where is the evidence that incidents involving trans people are on the rise? There isn’t any.

The reality is that trans people make up a very small percentage of the population (less than 1%), yet they face disproportionately high levels of violence and discrimination. According to government and police data, hate crimes against trans people in England and Wales increased by 56% between 2020 and 2022. By contrast, there is no evidence of trans people posing a systemic danger to others.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of sexual violence is committed by cisgender men: CPS data shows that around 91% of those convicted of sexual offences in England and Wales are male.

So if the real concern is protecting people from sexual violence, we need to be honest about where the actual risk lies.

Come on. Man up!!