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.

Why is that a questionable statement? 1% is one in 100, not one in 100,000 and it's totally plausible you would see several hundred people on a trip into town, even a small town.

Grey also underestimates the enormous pressure women are socialised with not to upset other people.

So we swallow huge amounts of discomfort to avoid even the risk of upsetting the trans identified man who looks quite quiet and polite and respectable and yet is IN OUR SPACE, as well as the occasional athletic, masculine appearing woman.

I’m fascinated by those women who have successfully shed that socialisation. I was aghast when I first started hanging out here at the sheer baldness of the honesty.

Hips, q-angles, femoral ratio are just some of the male skeletal differences that impact gait.

Those hips don’t lie!

www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00320/full

Table 2 shows that sex can be identified from gait by the study cohort with 65% accuracy just from dots on the joints over a 3.8 second duration

This is a fairly handy graphic. It is basic and is not showing q-angles but it communicates the basics.

If she lives somewhere like Brighton then it's entirely likely.

Fear. Don't forget fear.

Women, confronted with a bloke in a confined space, especially when he's not supposed to be there, are likely to respond with flight, freeze or fawn. Very few will fight.

Fawning is a dead giveaway. When women are extra kind to transwomen, this is usually what we're seeing.

The disbelief that we might notice someone who is male who has presented as being female so often must come from a place of dissonance. Maybe it comes from a feeling that the person is isolated from other male people who say they are women.

Because TRAs managed to convince many institutions and governments to decide in the last 10 years (after thousands of years of everyone knowing the truth), to pretend that it's no longer true that female people are women and male people are men, and in some cases vilify or even prosecute people for not believing this new 'fact'. How can you think this is a small-sized issue, ideologically, legally, morally?

It's not 'just' about the effects (on women's safety, privacy and dignity, fairness in women's sport and other achievements, the manipulation and medical assault on vulnerable young people). It's that it's a massive lie about who and what all human beings are, for the sake of appeasing a small but loud minority who want to believe they are something they are not (and demand that everyone else believe it too). Trying to impose this false narrative on society is a huge deal.

Well given that if someone goes for a walk around an average town they’ll see hundreds of other people it’s not an unreasonable figure?

I live in a small market town and there’s about half a dozen TIMs living here who I see regularly, plus there will be others that visit.

Or just if she went into a town that had more than a couple of hundred people in it! I mean... my local town isn't very big, but I'd only have to walk up and down the main street and go in TKMaxx and Boots to see a couple of hundred people .

Yes, if we're talking about the kind of well-presented men pretending to be women we see in the media, my gut reaction's more of an 'uncanny valley' than immediate recognition. I'll think she looks ... wrong or there's something odd about him before realising what that strangeness is.

You could go through and analyse it point by point - and I have done this, with data, as have other writers - but that isn't how human perception works. We don't perceive points, we see the whole and our unconscious does the vector calculations.

People are better than AI (currently) at determining sex. With only a photo of a face, humans do better than 95% iirc. Watching a video of the person walking, it shoots up to around 98.5%. Women do better than men, but not by a wide margin.

Dogs and other animals can tell the sex of a human, for god's sake! I read enough weepy tales of 'trans women' being all upset when somebody's man-hating dog snarled at them to know how anxious their delusions are. Yes, hormone substitution can make you 'smell' of oestrogen. No, it can't get rid of your male pheromones. You now have the scent of a man taking oestrogen. Congratulations.

Apparently, we are seeing ‘un-super-feminine’ women and mistaking them as being male people. And it seems that if you are feeling un-super-feminine as a woman, you should just except that you must be a man, or that you look like a man, or something. I have lost track of what is un-super-feminine women are to be feeling now.

This one's feeling precisely as interested as when any other man judges me insufficiently feminine 😂

un-super-feminine

French Super Woman

Yep. Same.

I work in a large organisation and have 2 fully transitioned colleagues! I can guarantee you would not be able to pick either out! Both are around 5’4” size 8 and extremely feminine! You’re stereotyping them all as 6’ lorry drivers who are using it as an excuse to access female facilities to commit acts of indecency!

To me the issue is how are fully transitioned males/females supported. There was an interesting article recently by a fully transitioned female, as in she has had all the surgery. She was in hospital with appendicitis and was put on a male ward, which to me as an open minded person was wrong, as she was no threat to women but could feel threatened by the misogynistic males in society! There is no definitive answer to this but tarring all trans people with the same brush will be like going back to the 1950/60’s when hotels had signs up saying no Irish or black people!

I don’t recall ever being surprised that someone is a trans woman and not born that way. It’s usually as obvious as a a lighthouse on a stormy night.

I feel sorry for women who are slightly masculine. I’ve often mistaken them for trans women.

“There is no definitive answer to this but tarring all trans people with the same brush will be like going back to the 1950/60’s when hotels had signs up saying no Irish or black people!”

Your analogy here uses illegitimate discrimination for situations that allow and need legitimate discrimination.

People might struggle to believe this, but I see thousands of people who look non-binary every single day. They’re everywhere! Maybe live in a really progressive part of the world?

I have an aquaintance who is a tfans woman. Met her in the 90s when she had already transitioned. No i couldnt tell. I also have family member who it ftm and you wouldnt bw able to tell, i would bet. I can tell most though, i think. But then how would i know?

Which toilets and changing rooms do these very petite TiM use @Horserider5678

I don’t care about the born with biological sex of anyone in a public loo, changing room or gym/pool whatever. Just use a cubicle, do what you need to do, leave. How would I know who is cis or trans or whatever? None of my business!

It is robust safeguarding to fully exclude all male people, regardless of how they look or how much medical treatment they have.

Safeguarding also is there so that no female person has to evaluate whether a male person has a penis or not, nor whether that male
person has done ‘enough’ to access that space, nor should a female person have to evaluate the intentions of the male person in the female single sex space.

What should never have happened was that access to female single sex provisions were viewed as a reward for some male people to work towards to achieve a level of effort that allowed access. This was never true. I can only assume that it started with those misogynist male doctors who made extreme body modifications to other male people and stated ‘you are now a woman!’

As if that ever mattered where robust safeguarding was needed.

No male person should feel they have to go through brutal surgeries to gain the reward of access to female single sex provisions. Access to those provisions is not based on reward at all. Simply abiding material reality of biological fact.

The passing transwoman is a fallacy. I blame the Haley Cropper story and Corrie’s decision to cast a woman. Genuinely. I think it caused people to believe it was possible to start out one sex and end up the other by rubbing in some hormones.
name a single known transwoman who passes other than in a heavily filtered still photo.

Can you clarify what you are actually asking please? I may be mistaken - it sounds like you have an issue with men in women’s spaces.

I only have to walk along my street to see a huge number.