Woman

So grannygranby the next time I'm singing in a pop up choir for IWD and the person next to me looks a bit masculine (I have a deep voice and I'm what one choir leader used to refer to as a "tenor lady," it's a joke when you say it) what do you recommend I do? Challenge her? My friend is 6ft tall, weighs 15stone and is quite muscular and strong.Will she have to be regularly checked? I'm not diverting by the way I'm simply asking that reality be part of the discussion and any solution. The person standing next to me may be a transwoman or a ciswoman I really don't know and I don't particularly care.

Are you deliberately misunderstanding us when we say that unless we are in ‘safe spaces’ it doesn’t matter?

I have asked repeatedly if you take us at our word in this but you repeatedly ignore the question.

Pressed too soon. Trisher, no one has tried to misrepresent you on here-believing that could lead to an irrational fear (phobia) of posting, which obviously hasn’t happened.

Grannygranby I really appreciated your post, especially the second paragraph.

In relation to the swimming pool subject:
My local gym has cubicles for showers, though there are communal ones, usually used by groups of children after swimming classes. In the communal changing rooms, women do strip off partially or fully to change, usually facing the lockers and often using a towel to be a bit more discreet and there are a small number of cubicles.
Trisher says, “Transpeople must use the facilities of the gender they consider themselves”
If they are discreet and have no wish to flaunt their body parts or cause distress to women or girls, then no one would either know or care.
**If they knowingly do something which women find distressing or make advances to the women changing there then they should not be allowed to use the female facilities.
To avoid being accused of misrepresenting you, I’ll simply ask,
Do you believe that women should be safe from transwomen who behave in that way?
I’m not asking, “Do you think it is possible to police these spaces?
Just, “Do you think believe women should be safe from transwomen who behave in the way mentioned at ** above?”

Mollgo I have been accused of supporting trans rights over women's rights. Of denigrating others feminism (apparently making suggestions about action instead of rhetoric is this. Which makes you wonder about the suffragettes and Deeds Not Words-but I digress). Of not caring about women who are subjected to violence, of supporting men. Of all sorts of things simply because I don't believe any of the stuff being posted by most of you is either viable or acceptable.

As I said in my earlier post my pool bans anyone from stripping off in the communal showers area. Problem solved. You strip in a cubicle or you can be banned. No question of discrimination. No question of staff being afraid to implement. Everyone safe.

I did think of posting - but I know how seriously you take this that what you actually needed was a hen party in that pool. They would undoubtedly greet any show of genitals with derisory and insulting remarks. Which might solve the problem. They certainly wouldn't be intimidated.
So perhaps there is your solution.
Form an organisation recruiting groups of women like hen parties who can target any place a man or transwoman displays their genitals. Once they have dealt with a few, word would get round that actually women aren't intimidated by the sight of a penis and it would stop.
Women protecting women by being assertive. There's a new idea.

To put the record straight on rights I believe everyone has them. I don't believe one group of people having theirs attacked benefits another group. I think once you start playing into this "whose rights are more important agenda" you are in fact playing patriachy's game. I believe if you attack one persons you are also attacking mine and I believe we acheive more by standing with other minorities than we ever do on our own.

Doodledog as I don't understand what you term "safe spaces" I'm a bit confused. I thought those were specifically women's groups, rape support networks, refuges and other organisations which risk assess and filter entrance.
Are you now including swimming pools and other public spaces? Because I think it might be. a bit much expecting staff to monitor and implement any policies or even laws about access to them.

Are you Catfishing us ??

Where in the name of Sylvia Pankhurst are we going to find hen parties of women willing to lurk about in toddler group swimming sessions in case of wandering males? These days most women hold down paid work, and/or have other things to do. Ridiculous.

As Molly said, it would be great if you could stop diverting questions by not answering but wandering off into other nonsense. When I asked about 'safe spaces' above, I was referring to places which are designated as being for female use. Places where women might be naked, ill, vulnerable or otherwise unwilling to be in the company of men. I would have thought that that would be obvious from the context of a toddler session in a swimming pool with a communal changing room, but I hope I have cleared up your 'confusion' with this explanation.

I will ask again. Do you believe us when we say that it is only when women are in safe spaces (as defined above) that we are concerned about being in the company of transwomen?

So these safe female spaces where women are with toddlers. Is there one for men as well? Most of the family changing rooms I know are just that family ones. They are used by family groups. Children use them with their mothers and their fathers sometimes together sometimes separately. Of course if they are female only you have the problem of when you send your male child off to take his chances in the men's changing rooms. And of what a man does when he brings his small children swimming, or are you assuming only women care for toddlers?

Sorry Trisher, I must have missed the post when you supported women’s rights over transwomen’s rights. There is no equal playing field when it comes to rights if one set opposes or overrides the rights of another.
As for not supporting the rights of one group over another, if transwomen weren’t insisting that their rights override those of natal women, there wouldn’t be any need for discussion and that’s the patriarchy game that’s being played out in front of us.

I love your accurate statement is your post where you say “but I digress”. I admit to often thinking that of your posts many of which ‘I don’t find viable or acceptable’.

By the way nonsense is a two way traffic system.

I wouldn't expect you to Mollygo in fact I might be worried if you did.
I didn't by the way say I supported transrights over women's rights I said I had been accused of doing so. Really it isn't rocket science, but I can't decide if you deliberately misunderstand or not.
Where have transpeople asked that their rights be considered over natal women's? Apart from a few activists (and I really don't consider extremists typical of any group of people. Goodness knows what I could post about extreme anti LGBTQ people)

Doodledog suppose your law is enacted. A transwoman uses a female facility and therefore commits a crime. Someone reports her and she is arrested. It turns out she was badly beaten and raped the last time she used a men's room. Are you really saying you would criminalise her?

Give me strength!

I have no ** idea! It was my friend who took her child swimming. Not me. I wasn't there. I don't live in her town, so I have never visited the pool. I used the incident as an example of how these situations can (and do) arise when there are no sensible rules about what is a man and what is a woman.

It doesn't matter, anyway. A man taking his children swimming could do what my husband did, and use the cubicles, taking the children into his with him, or dressing separately if the family were not inclined to undress in front of one another. There is no need for a man (however he identifies) to be in a female communal changing room.

This is another deflection from the point, which you persistently ignore or divert away from, but is, as Molly says, that transwomen are insisting on their rights over women, that there is a lot of confusion about how far and to what extent people can object to this, and that this is where 'the patriarchy' are asserting their power. When 'women' become a sub-class of 'men' we have no rights, no safe spaces, no sex-specific research that might help us, and we disappear in all sex-based statistics.

This is not about a small number of men who feel that life is unbearable as they want to be women. It is much, much bigger than that, and I am not at all convinced that you don't know this.

I don't presume to know your agenda, but all I can think of is that either you feel backed into a corner and can't accept that your 'right on' support for all minorities has been misplaced, you genuinely see men's rights as more important than women, or you are some sort of plant. Your assertion that your views are somehow part of feminism just don't stack up.

Mollygo, I think I missed that post too. However, life's to short to chase it up.

But this argument is not just down to gender critical women or individual trans people, safe spaces or biology. It has been created and amplified by the trans activists and the murkier pools of social media, aided and abetted by organisations who should behave better. A minority of activists have infiltrated organisations, tinkered with policies, lit the blue touch paper and Boom! We are now waking up to find that even the word woman is offensive. Here we are today worrying about hospital wards and men in women's sports and wondering how this could have happened.

trisher

Doodledog suppose your law is enacted. A transwoman uses a female facility and therefore commits a crime. Someone reports her and she is arrested. It turns out she was badly beaten and raped the last time she used a men's room. Are you really saying you would criminalise her?

It's not 'my law'. There is no such law - I was simply asking you whether you would support such a law, but I guess from your response that you wouldn't.

In a case such as you describe, it would be tragic if someone found themselves in such a position, but she would only be reported if she were using a designated female space - simply being around women is not, and no-one has suggested that it should be, an issue.

As no law has been drafted yet, there would be plenty of opportunity to define the terms, to decide what we mean by 'transwomen' (which the TWAW mantra does not allow), to define what constitutes a female space, and how that is signalled, and to specify what sort of behaviour would contravene the law.

Doodledog It's you who are using the incident. I've suggested several solutions, asked if you would prosecute a transwoman who used female facilities because she has been raped in the men's. I suppose you would have some sympathy for her, but I know full well that there are others who would use the legislation you propose to its fullest extent and not care if transwomen are raped and criminalised. And the problem with what you might consider quite reasonable legislation is that unreasonable people will use it.

The word women has never been particularly important- 70s feminists rejected it because it had the word "man" in it and made us part of men. They found it offensive.
Real life just means extending the word to accept people who have been with us for centuries and used the same facilities. Jan Morris transitioned over 50 years ago. I'm sure she wasn't the only person. In 50 years have women been in anyway damaged by sharing with trans people?

I can't believe that you are making a case for a hypothetical man who was raped in a male changing room to use a communal female one (and so ensure that Muslim women, Orthodox Jewish women and women who may have been raped feel unable to use it), but refuse to accept that women who have been raped should not have to share hospital wards, prison accommodation and DV refuges with intact men.

How can you say that and also that you are not putting men's needs ahead of women?

I would imagine that the two women Karen White assaulted might not share you view Trisher. I would also imagine the woman in a California prison now pregnant with a transwoman 's baby wouldn't either. Maybe not the 79 year old mother of Chris Chan, repeatedly raped by her son.
These women shared with transwomen. Dont they count?

trisher - you keep using the scenario of a transwoman being raped when using male facilities. How about a scenario where a woman is raped by someone self identifying as a woman whilst using female facilities? If someone is still physically male then they should not use female facilities . Once they have undergone surgery then, of course, they would be accepted as female.

“In 50 years have women in any way been damaged by sharing with transpeople?”
Good point trisher.
I’m sure you could produce documentation to support it.
Just because nothing was reported, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It could well have been because in the last 50 years, transpeople transitioned without the purpose of retaining elements of their birth sex with harmful intent.

However, you digress. The issue that needs addressing now is not what has happened previously, but what harm is being caused to natal women now.

All good examples, petunia, but also any woman who has been raped by a man - whether or not he identified as female - has as much of a chance to be traumatised and not want to be naked or otherwise vulnerable in front of intact males as a transwoman has.

Given the numbers of women rape victims against the number of transwomen rape victims, it seems to me, even without taking feminism into account, that the former's sensibilities should be prioritised.

A transwoman can always use a cubicle in a swimming pool. A woman has no choice about who is in the next bed in hospital.

Granygranby*
What do I think?? whatever floats ones boat.

Women will always bear the brunt of transwomen's unquestioned and wholesale inclusion in our safe spaces. We should be free to say no without censure.

So at what point in the process do we accept that a male is actually a female and say that this particular transwoman can have access to changing rooms, hospital wards, prisons, sports etc?

Has he become a woman on the day of his decision to live as a woman? Is it the point where he begins to wears women's clothes, some of the time, most of the time, or all of the time? Is it the point where that individual seeks medical help and begins hormone treatment? Is it the point where he tells his employer/family/friends etc. that he is now female? Is it the point where all official documents are changed? Is it at the point where he undergoes castration and the surgery to invert the penis to create the semblance of a vagina? Is that male ever biologically female?

If Alex Drummond rocks up for a hospital admission, where would we place him? If Eddie Izzard needed surgery would he swap wards depending on whether he was in girl mode or boy mode that day? If it was Wednesday we may place Pippa Bunce on a female ward, but what if today is Thursday?

When are you going to stop digging Trisher? Are you trying to reach Oz, circumventing current restrictions?

You've got a lot more patience than me trisher.

Where in the name of Sylvia Pankhurst are we going to find hen parties of women willing to lurk about in toddler group swimming sessions in case of wandering males? These days most women hold down paid work, and/or have other things to do. Ridiculous.
So Doodledog these intact males only operate on weekdays and during toddler sessions. Hang on aren't the mothers at these sessions women too? Why aren't they working? . OK let's drop the hen parties let's empower these women. Next time a man strips off suppose they all turn round and shout "Oh look a willy!" and make some disparaging remark about it.
I suggested hen parties because I've seen them operate and they terrify men. But a lot of young women don't faint at the sight of a penis.

I don't think anyone fainted.

While you're here, instead of spinning out one incident, can you please answer the more pertinent one about why it is more important to you that a transwoman shouldn't have to use facilities that she finds distressing than that women should have a say as to who is in the next bed in the hospital, or any of the other examples we have all given over and over.

If you could stick to the point whilst answering, that would be great.