A Question of Some Considerable Delicacy

[theilltemperedmaggotintheheartofthelaw]

Ever since FWS, we've been told by TRAs that the country is awash with transwomen who are heartbroken and terrified because they've been told to stop using women's facilities, and this has outed them to their colleagues.

I'm finding this hard to believe, because I have virtually never mistaken a transwoman for a woman. There have been previous threads about this, from which I gather that the scientific consensus is that humans are very good at sexing other humans from an early age.

Maybe I am just wrong, though, and have been fooled many times. And maybe some people aren't very perceptive. According to a recent thread, Morgane Oger thinks he could only accurately sex about 70% of a mixed crowd; a PP on the same thread thinks Maya Forstater looks like a man.

So I would like to hear other people's experiences of this (please try not to insult or offend!). Were you ever surprised, when a woman turned out to be a man?

This piece about Kelly v Leonardo reveals the mindset:

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/10/terf-employee-admits-to-secret-cis-only-bathroom-at-work-i-wont-sacrifice-my-privacy-my-dignity/

Kelly also admitted to speculating over her colleagues’ gender identities and tracking their bathroom usage, telling the tribunal that over a period of six to nine months, she identified three people she believed to be trans who were using the women’s restrooms.

This seems to misrepresent what was happening. MK was not speculating: she knew that they were men, surely?

I'm interested primarily in what this means for the law, in particular in relation to Article 8 ECHR (right to private life). TRAs interpret this as an unlimited right to conceal one's sex in every situation. But how can even a limited such right exist, if there is no way in reality that such concealment can reliably be achieved, from everyone, all of the time?

Are they actually demanding the right to force everyone to pretend to be fooled? That's not a privacy right.

That is the thought process that many of us go through when we are in the situation though.

Again, not sure how many more times or how many more ways we can tell you that those reactions you are saying are genuine will have a proportion (and that may be large) of people who react that way performatively. Maybe due to the situation not being one where sex matters or if sex matters in that situation, it may be a way of hiding distress to ward of adverse reactions.

When people have been told that to express that they don’t share a person’s belief in gender identity theory is to be avoided at all costs due to adverse outcomes of doing so, they will certainly be playing along acting as if they too believe that a male person can someway be a ‘woman’. By now, with so much messaging from the internet, societal pressure and media, I don’t believe that anyone would fail to understand that there may be an adverse reaction to showing any negative reaction, even what some call micro aggressions.

In Australia, the Victorian state government did a campaign that educated women that if you are in a lift and a male person you feel uncomfortable with enters the lift, if you leave that lift you are the problem. The ad basically aimed to educate women that they have to suck up their discomfort to make a male person who has the philosophical belief that they are in someway female feel better.

Universities have put up signs to tell female students on campus not to question or make male people feel excluded in toilets. One university started to educate female students no to show any micro aggressions.

We asked you : what do women have to do to show their distress to you before you will stop using female toilets? You have not even tried to reply. So, no. I don’t think you have any understanding of what female people have been ‘educated’ to think through and how they are expected to act to make male people in female single sex provisions happy.

If I met you (assuming your demeanour is as you have represented it here, and you weren’t in a single sex female space) I would be polite, and as friendly as the situation warranted.

I would certainly not draw any attention to the fact I could tell you were male. I don’t have any antipathy towards men wearing make up, long hair and clothes usually associated with women - I grew up in the 1970s and was a young adult in the 80s - and I wouldn’t want to make you feel self conscious.

I do not think I’d be alone in that.

Keeptoiletssafe is an amazing women, she seems to be single handedly doing all the work that should have already have been done around this. I'm really grateful she's doing it, and bringing it all to the attention of the right people.

Her posts about toilets are incredibly informative and her work shows how unhygienic and unsafe these floor to ceiling cubicles are for all sorts of medical reasons, as well as those of sex based violence.

This.

@TheGreyDeer we are telling you how women and girls deal with their distress. Are you even listening?

I don’t think that poster is remotely interested in what women might feel.

This poster has confirmed that they have read through the nurses’s threads. But cannot associate their own actions as being comparative to Upton’s or Henderson’s. They said so early this morning on the thread.

Also remember, some men have a paraphilia about being humiliated.

Remember back when Me,too happened, and all the men were apparently utterly baffled and astounded at the processes that most women go through on the daily as a matter of course? It's a good demonstration of the impact of a lifetime of living as a female in a patriarchal society, and how males just do not and can not even begin to understand the many, many layers and aspects of it.

That's before we even get to all the bodily processes that are very different.

Epitome of male entitlement

Of course they’re not listening. They’re too busy focusing on all the lovely, affirming interactions they’ve had IRL with no thought for the fact that women learn very young that ‘placate and/or extricate’ is an unconscious safety strategy.

Not being confronted doesn’t mean they’re welcome, it means women are doing what we’ve always done: managing male behaviour to protect ourselves.

The absence of confrontation shouldn’t be read as comfort. For many women staying polite and quiet is simply the safest way to get out of the room unharmed.

Here you are @TheGreyDeer

Just part of the education of female people to not react to show our distress to male presence in situations where we feel uncomfortable.

Do you see it yet?

‘placate and/or extricate’

I like that terminology.

Yes, and often they take over the space just with the way they are, it was a mixed hobby but now it's somehow all about the guys?

Ugh that's horrible, a lot of us will recognise that situation!

Smiling all the while, trying to stay polite while trying to edge away, or wind the window up by millimetres while not looking like you're actively trying to put a barrier or distance between you. You know there's always the chance he'll turn suddenly because you haven't reacted in the way he wants.

I think a lot of us have also had experience of that, which can be really quite frightening!

Edited to say, I think I can be quite a gobby and opinionated wee shite IRL as well as online, but even I'm usually careful in my interactions with men, especially if I don't know them.

That ad is so annoying. He's standing really close to her, between her and the lift buttons, and scowling. I'd think twice if it was any man. Hell, I'd be a bit wary if it was a woman!

I do indeed.

Oh! I had another poster in mind.

In day to day interactions where your sex is irrelevant, most people (including everyone here) will not comment on anything personal about you, because they are not out to hurt you, cause you distress or start a completely unnecessary argument. So you really shouldn’t be surprised that no-one passes comment; only a particularly nasty person would choose to do that.

That is a different situation to when you choose to access spaces set aside for females for our privacy, dignity and safety.

You are not listening to how women feel about encountering males dressed as women in these circumstances. It makes many women feel unsafe, it is a primal reaction to a male presence where we are undressed or otherwise vulnerable or dealing with private bodily functions. We don’t want male people in there.

However, no one is going to serve you in a shop and say, “ here’s your change, have a good day, no one’s fooled, you’re clearly a bloke” because people have been school to ‘be kind’ and not cause offence

its not even that…it doesn’t come up

i don’t stand in a queue chatting going ‘hello lady how are you’ or going for a walk saying ‘good morning man’

the sex or perceived sex doesn’t come up….pretty much ever!

Responding to the question in the OP:
So I would like to hear other people's experiences of this (please try not to insult or offend!). Were you ever surprised, when a woman turned out to be a man?

I can't think of an instance. When I saw my new near neighbour for the first time I knew he was a man. If you saw him you would know I am not being very unkind in describing him as looking like an old, recovered meth user/alcoholic with sparse receding hair. Very tall and lanky (a very male build).

When I come across him in the street I never say "oh hello, by the way you are not a woman." I am always polite and friendly because why would I not be? In the street meeting like neighbours do, sex does not matter.

If I met him in a public toilet I would wish to say "as you are male, could you please use the men's loo". I might not though, it would depend how brave I was.

I have often spotted men who claim to be women in films or series and point them out to DH. Often he has not noticed and is surprised I did. It's no mystery, I am a woman and many years of evolution have honed this skill in us.

He's clearly just sticking his fingers in his ears and singing "La la la la! Can't hear you! Nyer nyer can't stop me going in the women's toilets!"

That's fine, these days he runs the risk of getting arrested for IMO basically doing the modern day equivalent of what the man in a trench coat flasher type of man used to do. We all used to be aware of the flasher guy in a trench coat who would also be rightfully arrested for exposure and harassment.

The only difference now between trans identified men who go into female single sex spaces, and the trench coat flasher type (again IMO), is the trench coat guy didn't necessarily go into female single sex spaces to perform his harassment of women.

I have no problem with men who want to wear stereotypically female clothing, hairstyles, makeup etc as long as they stay out of female only stuff.

The moment a trans identified man enters a female single sex space like toilets or changing rooms is the moment they become a massive problem for me because that is the moment they show themselves up as predators. The moment a man enter female sports competitions (or other female single sex prize winning events), is when it becomes a problem for me because that is the moment they show themselves up as thieves. And so on.

If I saw him in a female single sex space I wouldn't confront him, I'd go call the police.

I remember hearing one mantrum online from a TW saying "people tell me all the time I am a woman"
Funnily enough in over 50 years of being a girl/woman nobody has ever felt the need to tell me that - I wonder why?

Any male person who deliberately makes the choice to enter any single sex female provision understanding that even one female using that provision may be harmed simply by that male person being there is exhibiting behaviour that is the equivalent of raising a red flag.

And yet, as we can see here, that male person will dismiss any information that they don’t want to hear that contradicts what they wish to believe. They will attempt to deflect the harm behaviour such as their’s causes.

When a group’s feelings has been centred in this way for as long as it has through ‘kindness’ and ‘tolerance’ messaging and ‘most vulnerable’ messaging, it will really take a long time to overcome this. It seems too that if a male person only surrounds themselves with acceptors, they will never get an answer that they don’t want to hear.

Yes. I remember a Mumsnet post from a woman who goes jogging. She and a male relative were talking about places to run; he suggested somewhere that he used (some woods, I think,) and was completely gobsmacked when she said she wouldn't dare go there alone; it had simply never occurred to him that it might be an issue.

It showed how utterly oblivious men can be to women's daily realities. And ironically I think it is often some of the nicer men who don't get it until something brings it home to them. Because they wouldn't behave badly themselves, they don't realise the extent to which men who do behave badly have to be taken into account by us.

A news report is not data

Oh well that's all right then. It clearly doesn't happen in that case.

Ffs what's the MATTER with you?

That's another poster who's got their fingers firmly wedged in the ears.

It's not even just disingenuous IMO, it's wilfully deceitful behaviour to say "a news report is not data" in an effort to discredit the fact that some trans identified men have sexually assaulted women and girls in toilets.