Aren't transpeople still a tiny minority?

[Waheymum]

Over about fifteen years, I've noticed growing awareness and concern about transpeople. This may be my age and simply a case of when people I knew started to transition.
What I'm wondering is whether there are statistics further to the last census on how many people are transitioning or have transitioned. This is because I'm pretty sure that men are still a bigger threat to women's safety than transgender (m-f) women are. I'm not saying that no transwoman poses a risk to women, I'm querying whether, statistically, I'm better off crossing the road to avoid a cisgender man or a transgender woman (if, hypothetically, one were on each side of the road).

It certainly suggests very strongly that they are a long way away from being as safe to be around as the "women" they claim to be.

We don't have to believe trans women are more likely than other men to be a risk to women before we can justify excluding them as we do those other men (although as above, if you widen the definition of harm beyond the physical and consider the social, emotional and economic harms to women of sexism, the sexism that trans identities embody starts to look very problematic for women especially). To justify excluding them as we do other men, we just have to believe they are more likely to inflict sex-based harms on women than women.

Because despite the unerring tendency to assume men are the reference point, actually the reference point is women. The purpose of single sex spaces isn't to put the cutoff for women's safety just below the risk posed by the average man, it's to put it above the risk posed by the average woman. Not "are these men legitimately less dangerous than other men" but "are these men legitimately no more dangerous than women?". Which they manifestly are not.

That brings me to the frequency fallacy. The comparator here is not "all men", it's "me who have privileged acess to women". If you have 100 men, only 10 of whom (you don't know which) are dangerous and only 1 of whom is allowed in women-only spaces, the one is the woman-only space may only have a 10% chance of being the bad-un but he is the only one who is given an opportunity to harm a woman in a woman only space, and therefore is an increased risk not because his trans status (if you chose to assume the stats are wrong) makes him more likely to be a danger than other men, but because his trans status gives him access other men do not have.

But taking a step back, the real point isn't even whether trans identifying men in particular pose a significantly higher or lower risk than the average man. Because regardless of whether trans women pose more or less of a risk to women than non-trans-identifying men, gay men, sappy men, macho men, vegan men, ginger men or any other group of men you want to arbitrarily pick, they still have no more claim whatsoever to women's spaces than any other man, because outside their own heads in objective reality they are no closer to being women than any other men.

I was called a Nazi Apartheid-ist on X for suggesting third spaces as the solution.

Its really not the GC side that are the barrier here.

Single sex spaces and facilities have evolved because of a millennia of experience of the differences between the sexes, and some of the risks associated with some of these differences, especially for women. Nothing has changed to justify the removal of that provision.

Diverze Which is all fair enough but don't then pretend that FWR is championing 3rd spaces. It doesn't have to, but don't then pretend that is the main advocacy on here.

FWR is not a monolith, there's more than one opinion, and opinions change over time, in response to changing facts.

I for one regularly challenge the concept of '3rd spaces' as the panacea - first of all, there already are 3rd spaces, they are the accessible toilets which are for disabled people who actually need them, not able-bodied people who feel more 'comfortable' using them, we are talking here about FOURTH spaces in buildings which already have the other three kinds of spaces.

The cost, both in terms of money and disruption, is huge, and my point is that such huge expenditure for such a tiny percentage of the population, who are perfectly able to use the existing facilities designated for their sex, is difficult to justify.

And then there is the argument that facilities like toilets and changing rooms are separated on the basis of biological sex, not gender, and everybody is either one biological sex or the other, so nobody has 'nowhere to pee' in the established men's/women's/accessible configuration.

But yes, many posters on here have supported the idea of 4th spaces for transpeople.

It's also true that many of them have changed their opinion over time as it becomes obvious from well-publicised behaviour by TWs that what they demand is not 3rd/4th spaces, but validation by having access to women's toilets.

There is a range of opinion on the topic of 4th spaces, some pragmatic, some on principle, and opinions sometimes change in the face of new evidence.

I know the conversation has moved on and I’ve not the time to catch up right now, but in answer this question:

I'm querying whether, statistically, I'm better off crossing the road to avoid a cisgender man or a transgender woman (if, hypothetically, one were on each side of the road).

Knowing absolutely nothing about either man on either side of the road, and knowing that offending patterns don’t change with transition I’d rather avoid the transgender woman because, all things being otherwise equal, the TW has already crossed boundaries by appropriating my material being as a woman. And that is the only thing that sets apart a man from a man claiming he’s a woman.

3rd spaces have long been advocated on here as the most obvious solution to the conflict of perceived rights and protections posed by trans activism/ideology. It was mostly dismissed as 'othering' and its proponents called bigots for not accepting that TWAW.

It is the job of trans activists to campaign for discrete provisions for trans identifying people; in the same way that every other group has had to campaign for theirs.

Feminists don’t need to campaign for third spaces, because the beneficiaries of third spaces are not women. Feminists centre women and their problems. Women have not created this problem and it isn’t theirs to solve.

As I posted before, the issue of some men wanting to present in a stereotypically ‘female’ way but not being accepted as men when they do so, is a problem for men, and they need to solve it.

Women have helpfully suggested third spaces, even though it’s not their issue to solve, but TRAs, whose voices are loudest among men on this issue, have persistently rejected this idea, with threats of violence and shouts of ‘transphobia’.

The answer to this issue lies firmly with men. Women losing their hard-won sex based rights is not acceptable. Men need to find another way to exert their rights and leave our out of it. Despite the stereotypes, women are not here to solve all men’s problems for them.

Yes perfectly logical.

It’s all too easy to take seemingly obvious ‘facts’ from data which are actually inferences and therefore not known facts. I fear that many people will read the PP I originally commented on and make these inferences. This is all I was trying to talk about. Robert Jenrick made exactly this mistake about 6 or 9 months ago. He made some pronouncements about the number of immigrants men who were sex offenders. The BBC Fact Checking Unit (I think that is what is called) delved into the data and said he has misunderstood it. Easy mistake to make, although you would hope that people like him have access to people who understand data, but that is a whole other story…..

@BettyBooper I would like people to change the rhetoric.

I would like people on here to stop mocking transpeople with the line "stunning and brave" or suggesting that any person who loves and defends a trans person expects them to be "fawned over " whilst loudly declaring their family member is a man and plopping "he" as an entire post. It's just not constructive. I am not asking you to respect someone's pronouns, but surely you can see an entire post that just says the word "he" in response to me explaining a viewpoint is just inflammatory and unnecessary?

I would like people to stop making out that every transperson is perverted, fetishistic or mentally ill. I would like to stop the hyperbole around fringe trans people like Isla Bryson.

I would like people to acknowledge that trans people are heterogeneous like other groups. If anything, perhaps the largest subgroup especially among young adult trans women is autistic and rather vulnerable.

I would like people to say "look, we appreciate that most trans women are just trying to live their lives, but it's important to acknowledge that ordinary women have rights that clash and we cannot validate trans people simply by allowing access to female spaces and awards. It should never have been on the table and the lobbying didn't consider the needs or rights of natal women. There are women who will then be excluded, including some religious women, those who have a history of trauma, and so on. So it doesn't work for us.

We can also see it doesn't work for you to be forced into a male toilet or a male hospital ward when you are sick and vulnerable.

Let's work together on solutions that enable privacy and dignity for ALL".

It is true though that everyone who actually thinks they are the opposite sex to that which they are is suffering from a delusion - often one encouraged by others, and it is you who needs to do the hard work of campaigning for third spaces for your child.

No, they have in many cases been taught in school that humans have a gender identity and that if they question their gender they may well be trans as "cis" people don't do that.

Believing what you are taught and introspecting on it and feeling that it applies to you does not make one deluded. It may make one susceptible to manipulation, credulous, vulnerable....which is possibly why so many are autistic, in which cognitive flexibility is a core difficulty.

The major thing that we all agree on is that 'transwomen' are men. Yes, I'll correct wrong sex pronouns because language needs to be clear.

You have the TRAs to blame for presenting the trans community as one heterogenous group. Not us. We were told that anyonec who said they were trans should be believed. Including Isla Bryson. Our concerns about such men accessing women's spaces were dismissed (as you are doing to a degree now). If women got hurt, they were acceptable collateral damage it seems.

So honestly, I'm pretty much out. Fight your own battles. Women have been treated like absolute shit by the trans rights brigade. We owe these men nothing.

Men can stay out of women's spaces. Beyond that, I have no interest in how
mem present, what they wear. They are welcome to do whatever. However I'm not going to entertain any suggestion that they are anything other than men.

I hope that's clear

i absolutely agree about the harm done by transgender ideology in schools All it takes is one or two activist teachers. As an ex teacher ( I left teaching in 2010) i can assuredly say it simply wasn't a thing just 15 years ago; nobody had heard of it.

Did you ever bring the issue up with the school in question?

Safety is important and transwomen are men (men commit 97% of sexual crimes) but also a transwoman in a poorly labelled 'single sex' space makes it mixed sex and thereby excludes all religious women who need single sex spaces from public life.

I personally don't think it's worth excluding a good proportion of 51% of the population and removing their access to public spaces to make a tiny minority, who can safely use their own single sex spaces or third spaces, feel better.

It's discrimination against religious women including Muslim women who need single sex spaces. Men with a gender identity who use single sex spaces are excluding these women as well as many others.

This is such a clear explanation of how dangerous and damaging transgenderism/gender ideology is, especially, as you say Diverze, to people susceptible to manipulation.

Rather than looking for ways to accommodate or appease the small number of noisy, aggressive and sometimes violent people who promote these damaging ideas- including, as you point out, in schools- they need to be challenged and prevented from causing further damage to even more vulnerable people.

@Diverze
If trans people campaign for third/fourth spaces and women's rights campaigners merely stay out their way, don't bully, harass or intimidate them, don't set off smoke bombs, release swarms of insects, bang on windows, scream in their faces with megaphones, try to get them fired, drown out their talks with loud music, then they will be giving a lot more help to the campaign than was granted the other way around.

Amen to this

I was going to write my own response but this pretty much says it all.

And we didn't push gender ideology into school. We're the ones fighting against it!

Keep thinking we're the problem though @Diverze. It's easier to think that than to face the truth, I'm sure.

The official position of the EHRC, endorsed implicitly by the courts, is that trans people should not be left without facilities because of their reluctance to use the facilities of their sex, and I agree: it makes sense whether you regard it as a religious type belief or a psychological disability, both of which we would accommodate in other contexts.

Trans people are rare, so could be accommodated within existing accessible facilities, but disabled people need priority. Given the safety and hygiene issues with enclosed single-user spaces, a push for more fully accessible spaces within single-sex multi-user facilities seems overdue.

You both want to tell us how to speak, get us to be extra polite towards people who are imitating us AND you want us to campaign for their needs. Despite the fact that the transgender ideology is one of the most well-funded campaigns in history. And yet they are slowly, too slowly, losing ground because they don't have reality on their side.

I don't think you are "the problem"

I said earlier it's a complex social issue, which you dismissed iirc.

I think teaching children about gender identity as if there were a clear evidence base for it is harmful and should not happen. I have nowhere suggested that you on FWR are proponents of this teaching. I know you are against it. I am in agreement.

I think teaching young people that a few people identify as the opposite sex, that this is pretty rare, and those people deserve the same respect as others and should not be vilified or mocked is okay.

I think as a society accepting that some people are gender non conforming and that's ok is fair. I think accepting that those people may be in danger or deeply uncomfortable in spaces for their natal sex has to be acknowledged. This doesn't mean that they should therefore access spaces for the other sex.

I think trans people organising their own times to use community facilities and using rooms for the sex they identify as during these sessions is also fair enough.

I think "the problem" is societal and Zeitgeisty. I think my child would never have been gender conforming. I think society has taught my young person that they are therefore trans. I acknowledge that this was deeply troubling to them when they believed that if they admitted this, we their family would possibly reject them. I acknowledge that knowing they are accepted anyway has been transformative. I would like it if they had a way to move easily through life in a way that didn't force they or others to be invalidated.

It's a hard no to any man who asks me to lie about reality or asks women to give up their rights.

In this country at least, since we're not Afghanistan, women have free speech and their perceptions thoughts and feelings are equally valid.

I don't actually think it's good to lie to gender confused people on request either (a position that longterm transsexual Miranda Yardley agrees with), but I'm not doing it out of concern for them and I don't care about their feelings.

I wouldn't agree with someone who is anorexic that they were fat and I won't pretend anyone has changed sex.

I only have enough energy to care about women and girls now.

No is a complete sentence.

It's against the law for men to be in women's single sex spaces if they're labelled single sex. Deal with it.

I would like people to say "look, we appreciate that most trans women are just trying to live their lives, but it's important to acknowledge that ordinary women have rights that clash and we cannot validate trans people simply by allowing access to female spaces and awards. It should never have been on the table and the lobbying didn't consider the needs or rights of natal women. There are women who will then be excluded, including some religious women, those who have a history of trauma, and so on. So it doesn't work for us.
We can also see it doesn't work for you to be forced into a male toilet or a male hospital ward when you are sick and vulnerable.
Let's work together on solutions that enable privacy and dignity for ALL".

What makes you think that wasn’t the starting point?

It’s very close to the tweet by JK Rowling that got her blasted as transphobic. It’s also similar to the original premise of WPUK. And I’ve already mentioned Venice Allan’s attempt to get Stonewall to sit down & discuss it & what that led to.

Acceptance without exception? No debate?

There are women who have been campaigning for years on this, lost their jobs, had rape threats, been threatened & physically attacked. And yet it’s always us who are expected to be reasonable.

Who on the other side is going to say “Yes, we recognise the importance of women’s rights & single sex spaces, let’s find a way forward that gives us our own spaces instead of us using yours”?

Yes, that was the starting point for me.

All the rape and death threats and pictures with baseball bats and guns have made me a bit more hardline to be honest.

There ARE some transpeople who genuinely seem to want to just live their lives (they mostly call themselves transsexual these days I think) who've spoken up about women's rights, like Miranda Yardley, who himself was sued for being 'transphobic'. But mostly there has been a resounding silence on the safeguarding risks to children and women.

So, you know, kindness needs to be a two way thing.

I'm not expending emotional energy giving the tiniest of shits about someone who doesn't give a shit about my rights or my daughter's rights. Who seems entirely happy for girls in school to be forced to undress in front of males.

No.

Sorry but you’re missing my point. You are using different statistics together to lead to a conclusion without understanding the contact of the data eg how it was collected, what possible flaws there could be, slightly different definitions, different dates or time frames etc etc

It is like saying that if the proportion of voters for party x in London is y% and then assuming the proportion of voters for x is going to be the same in some small village.