@The_Dybbuk #115292
Deconstructing…
That isn't to say trans women should use men's bathrooms. They should use private restrooms where available.
And where not available?
trans women especially who haven't had their bottom surgeries or their hormone treatments haven't gone through the full transformation or even a part of it and are indistinguishable physically from the types of men who would take advantage of the trans movement to prey on women's private spaces.
…and those trans women would generally go to male toilets, because they’re terrified of being attacked if they do otherwise, and often also because they don’t want to make cis women uncomfortable.
Trans women who do “pass” can simply enter women’s toilets without incident, because they are not recognized, of course.
But the big problem, Dybbuk, is that there are trans women who are visibly trans, yet can’t pass as simply ‘male’. What about them? They are in that terrible zone where whatever they do, they have a serious risk of being harrassed, whether by transphobes who simply loathe them for what they are, or paranoid guardians of womanhood who see them as a threat to “real” women.
What makes it worse is that the existing trans panic has already often victimized cis women who don’t look sufficiently pure feminine.
Simply put, there is no way for you to ‘protect’ cis women the way you seem to want without making it invasive or grossly unfair in some way. How will you gatekeep who’s sufficiently “female” in a bathroom, especially when you have even cis women being hounded due to being suspected as trans?
To expect that trans women must fulfill a certain “sufficiently feminine” look before being allowed in ends up being unfair and even dangerous to a fair amount of both trans and cis women.
To demand that trans women somehow prove their womanhood is the same problem… how would they do that — give a certificate of having gone through gender-affirming surgery or having been long enough on hormones every time they enter a women’s toilet?
And note that they’d have to do so in a world where access to hormones is often strictly gatekept (there are no informed consent clinics in Europe at all, for instance). In the UK (and Ireland IIRC too) as of right now, you need to wait 5+ years after applying just to have your first psychologist visit for gender dysphoria. And that’s just the first step of the transition process.
Also, obtaining a legal sex marker change in the UK and many other countries is notoriously difficult in many ways, to the point that in the UK very few trans people managed to get that ‘certificate of legitimately being trans’.
Not to mention how hormones, even when you finally get to access them, often aren’t covered by insurance. Or how sex reassignment surgery is extremely expensive. Or how trans people are disproportionately poor, unemployed and homeless.
Cis people often assume that transitioning is somehow easy, effortless and can be done in the span of a weekend (I’m exaggerating, but only slightly). Nothing could be further from the truth.
Now consider that TERFs and other “guardians of the poor oppressed women” (‘women’ only being cis women and trans men, of course) want to make accessing all of those treatments and paperwork more difficult, not less. And how even the increase in difficulty is only a temporary compromise until they manage to achieve what they really want: the complete elimination of trans rights and trans people as a recognized concept.
Also, if TERFs had their way with birth sex being the only thing that decides whether someone is a man or a woman (enbies, of course, don’t exist in that view, and intersex people must be collapsed as a category into either ‘female’ or ‘male’), and if the ‘guardians’ somehow manage to test that accurately when people enter “women’s spaces”, then this would necessarily follow from that:
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The reason why it's more important to protect women's private spaces in general is because women, some of them, have been brutalized by men.
Same goes for trans people, including trans women. They’ve been abused very often, in fact. Yet somehow, few of those who are “very worried about vulnerable women” seem to care much about that, oddly enough.
Yes, there is room for discussing what to do about things like women’s shelters, but TERFs and their allies don’t want a fair solution that would be discussed in good faith. They always have and always will follow the 1979 dictum of Janice Raymond, one of their founding mothers:
“The problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.”
When you get down to it, this whole issue ends up being that trans women have to bear the burden of all male violence against women, and answer for it.
The solution, ultimately, is to address and reduce that violence itself, particularly by changing the views and behaviors of the group that is its chief perpetrator (cis men). But that’s a difficult and generational process. Instead, trans women make the ideal target — they’re different, strange, not understood and assumed to be scary… and piling the blame on them provides an easy outlet that doesn’t challenge the real source of the problem.