Why do GC arguments focus on single-sex spaces rather than sex discrimination?

[ariel333]

From my understanding of the Supreme Court ruling, sex has to mean biological sex in the act because that’s the main reason why women are discriminated against, so that is the characteristic that has to be protected. If trans women are included as women then biological sex is no longer the protected characteristic but gender identity - and employers could go back to asking women if they intend to get pregnant in job interviews - as they used to before the Sex Discrimination Act.
This seems to me to be a pretty good argument for the necessity of sex meaning biological sex but it doesn’t seem to be used. The focus is much more on single sex spaces. Is there a reason for this?

It benefits them to do this, because it’s seen as trivial and petty.

They are related.

Single sex spaces are a concrete example of women, and actually men too, needing provision because of the nature of their sexed bodies.

Most people find the abstract claim harder to really understand and become confused without contextualising it in a real example, grounded in physical bodies.

Women and men want separate changing areas doe entirely to the realities of human sexual dimophism which becomes relevant when people are removing clothing. For safety, in the case of women, but also to support privacy and reduce inappropriate consensual sexual behaviour in those spaces.

Clothes or pronouns are completely irrelevant to whether people change together.

The article in this post https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5535328-trans-rights-the-conjuring-trick-at-the-toilet-door-and-left-vs-liberalism-id makes just the same argument, toilets are a distraction. deliberately so. The movement is a discriminatory one. It's not about toilets.

Well first of all the FWS case was actually primarily about gender recognition on boards. So it was about discrimination against women. Or rather whether men could take advantage of measures put in place to reduce discrimination against women.

I think the reason toilets have become such a focus is because these are the single sex facilities everyone will use on a weekly if not daily basis. They’re key for women to participate in society fully

I think the reason toilets have become such a focus is because these are the single sex facilities everyone will use on a weekly if not daily basis.

I really think toilets are the focus because trans activists decided they would be. It's much easier to make an argument that poor vulnerable trans-identifying men should be allowed into women's toilets ("we just want to pee") than it is to argue they should be allowed into women's changing rooms, women's hospital wards, women's rape crisis centres or women's prisons.

The best way of addressing this is to repeatedly ask the Staniland question: "Do you believe that male-sexed people should have the right to undress and shower in a communal changing room with women and girls?"

This question gets to the heart of what the issue is all about.

Maybe because if a transwoman gets onto a shortlist/attends a college/gets a job/ joins a club, no-one will be traumatised, injured, or killed, or unable to access a vital resource.

Alone of all the parts of the Act, those relating to single-sex services have built-in safeguards in the interests of safety, fairness, and decency, which were being widely flouted at the behest of Stonewall et al. The consequences were highly visible (pink leggings!) and hastened their defeat. FAFO.

I think it's because the right to single sex space is actually removed if transwomen are let in whereas it doesn't affect my being protected from discrimination, in your example, if anyone is stupid enough to ask a transwoman if they plan to get pregnant. The point is they don't ask me, as a women of childbearing age, and that was still in place, I was still protected. It wouldn't actually change that if the law said they weren't allowed to ask anyone if they planned to get pregnant (men, older women) - they still can't ask me. Whereas my chance at fair sport is instantly taken away when transwomen are included.

The actual discrimination problem with your example is the risk trans men are not protected, but it is hard to fight for someone's rights if they themselves don't want you to.

Although it might have been heading that way and interpreted that way by lobby groups, I don't think sex was replaced by gender identity, they were more messily grouped together. The vast majority of people don't have a gender identity at all, so you can't take sex out and put gender identity in.

Let's not forget the only reason men went into female spaces in the first place was because the doctors insisted they had to use them and relied on them reporting back that nobody had challenged them in there, before they signed off on the next stage of the process.

I agree that protection from direct and indirect sex discrimination and the protection of reproductive and health rights are the concerns that are most important to me, but I can't complain about other people campaigning for what is most important to them.

However, the For Women Scotland case was about laws designed to protect women from sex discrimination.

Nobody expects a man to adopt a child in the same way that they assume that a childless woman in her thirties will have a baby.

And the thing is they aren't wrong. It is more than likely that a childless woman in he thirties will have a baby, and that will be a pain for her employer, but that is why women need sex based protections against discrimination and the right to maternity leave.

That is just one of the many, many reasons why women need rights that men don't, regardless of their feelings about their identity.

What do the women here think of this trans woman’s story? I found it incredibly sad. I know that sex segregated spaces are necessary and that trans women are not entitled to take things from us for themselves but the hatred and hardships that this trans woman experienced are insane. And in the end she ended up killing herself or getting murdered.

And it feels so awful, how I’m much more likely to see her as a woman but the other less passable trans women put me on guard.

As much as i do want cis women to have these protected spaces, it’s important that transwomen have protected spaces as well. Trans women, like her, are not going to be protected by gender segregation alone, the same way we wouldn’t. What is the solution here? What do we do?

For me all-women shortlists was my entry into the debate. Toilets came later.

If there's a shark in the swimming pool it's not possible to focus on anything else until the immediate danger has passed.

I think that incels and men’s rights activists would definitely benefit from cis women no longer having access to sex-based safe spaces though. What a coincidence, that all of this trans gender equality stuff happened right after the manosphere got worse and worse and worse.

But both groups view womensrights as optional and women as second class citizens. According to both groups, women only exist to support and serve men. Loot at the word “cis” for example. It means not trans apparently. So to call someone a cis woman is to define her in relation to men. Not as a person in her own right.

We make it damn clear that it's on men to do their bit to protect and accept their gender-nonconforming fellow men.

After years and years of 'be kind/shut up/budge up/you'll need to compromise (give your stuff to the sad menz)' I don't care any more. It's not women's problem to solve.

Women are not cis anything.

We are just women. And trans women are men.

Men and trans orgs need to step up then don’t they? Not women’s job to cater for men is it? If men are mean to other men, then men need to work together to budge up, be kind and support their GNC brethren.

What do we do?

Follow the guidance from the EHRC on the law and provide additional gender neutral spaces.

It is not necessary to choose between men's interests and women's interests, or to sacrifice access and equality for women. It's about more additional parallel accessible facilities.

TRAs are obsessed with getting transwomen access to the women's bogs so they keep dragging focus back to "but they just want to peeeeeee".

It's as simple as that.

I think it's the combination of something both very trivial but also very private that is so compelling. It's like the harem, the convent, the girls' school. It's a closed door where things they can't see happen. The secret everyday life of women they are sure must exist. They want to be right inside that mysterious feminine space.

I am far more concerned with what it means for women (in the original female sense) to disconnect the concept of "woman" culturally and linguisticly from the female body, and the utter wildness of a group of people who can look at the history and indeed current differences betwen outcomes for women and men and say "nope, no need to have separate and unique names for the male and female half of himanity, but by God we need a word that lumps transwomen's feelings and female bodies in together as basically the sane thing"

But TRAs never want to talk about that.

Also, because like everything else, the argument is that men's rights are the most important to preserve, support.

Women are just being uppity and non supportive of men to be so trivial as to insist that as a sex class they have the right to women only facilities, services.

The sheer cheek of women think they have equality!

Just to repeat myself, never forget how easy it was for TW rights to get support from most of society was because it is built on the fundamental driving force in society the MRAs.

And in fact if anything the MRAs are now even more blatant than they were is you take what is happening in the virtual world as well as IRL.

The basis of women's oppression is their sex class. Anything that the oppressing sex class, men, can do to deny that reality is a useful tool.

Well we could do the whole dance in miniature

They just want to pee!
Yes. So do women who can't do mixed sex spaces.

Vulnerable men!
Yes. Gay ones. Disabled ones. Young ones. Are they all coming in the women's?

But dignity, privacy!
Yes. Women who need single sex spaces need that too. What do we do with them when the women who feel savourish towards a particular group of men have made those women excluded from facilities and resources?

Mixed sex spaces are othering
Now we're getting to it. So it isn't about peeing or access - because other vulnerable people and people with opposite sex carers etc would benefit too - although there's a MNetter with strong research about the much lower safety of these necessarily single use enclosed rooms they're still in some cases a better provision and at least the choice/dignity requested.

So the actual issue after all this, ends up being, a man who identifies as a woman is deeply hurt and invalidated that a facility exists for biological women that he cannot enter, because this confirms that a man with a trans identity is not a real, actual woman.

And that is something that sadly, hopefully with support, he is going to have to learn to cope with.

He cannot trump the needs of women, because obvious sexism and equality. (Although plenty will argue that men just are more valuable than women, and women have no business saying no to men, particularly about their bodies. Hence why marital rape went on into the 90s.)

Those women have the same needs he does.

And women and gay legal protections in law cannot exist unless sex means sex.

So the only option to help and respect those people with gender identities is additional services and provision.

<Mega mix now follows>

teawamutu

We make it damn clear that it's on men to do their bit to protect and accept their gender-nonconforming fellow men

Yet there is no evidence that men are doing anything to hurt their "gender-nonconforming fellow men".

If they were then it would be all over social media and the various pro TQ+ sites.

Yet they are very quiet on this "issue".

No, I agree there's no evidence.

But the main pretext for TIMs demanding access to women's spaces is that they'd be at risk from men, given that almost all sexual and other violence is committed by males and you can't tell which ones are going to be a problem (YES. WE KNOW. THAT'S WHY YOU CAN'T COME IN etc etc etc).

So men have to do their bit to be more welcoming. Or not, and point out that it's all bullshit. Don't care. Just don't do the 'ah come on girls, shove up' bit.

Not women's problem to solve.

For me it was about why Approved Document T didn’t specify toilet door gaps for single sex toilets when I knew they saved lives. They can have them but they weren’t specifically mentioned. My design comments to the government, and those of a charities, were ignored. Then I analysed why and found out that transactivists preferences were overiding health and safety design features. It’s all there in documents. This came as a surprise.

I started looking at design and safety for all demographics and found the incidents of women and children being assaulted and raped in toilets of private designs very disturbing. As well as people dying in toilets and not even having a chance of being rescued in time because no one saw them.

Yet a private compartment is the toilet design we are getting more of, as a ‘solution’ to getting rid of the traditional single sex toilet washrooms with their cubicle door gaps for health and safety. We are designing-in crime.

For me, it’s about basic health and safety. ‘Inclusive’ toilets are not as healthy or safe as their designs focus on individual segregation and privacy.

If you want to get more into psychology/philosophy look up Marlow’s pyramid of needs for safe spaces. I want provision and that provision to be safe. Those are the very base levels for what is a basic necessity. You need them first. The self actualisation needs are much higher up.

p.s. There is no evidence to suggest that men are less safe going into men’s toilets if they are transwomen. What does make a difference to all men and boys is the design of the toilets.