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Let me stop you right there. It was never about male-looking people. It was always about males. It just so happens that being male-looking is a pretty good proxy for being male in the real world (despite what the trans lobby wants you to think).
The rationale is that many more males abuse women and girls than females do. Therefore, women and girls are safer in the presence of other females then they are in the presence of males. If you disagree with this fairly obvious statistic, what do you think women-only spaces are for?
Why do people who want to scare women with pictures of trans-identified females always go for the photoshopped ones, and not for a more realistic one that shows that Buck Angel is actually pretty tiny and nonthreatening compared to her male counterparts?
Moving away from anecdotes, I think it's important to realize that for every masculine-looking trans-identified female, there are probably three trans-identified males that are absolutely deranged, like Karen White, Darren Merager, or Michael Pentillä. Would I rather have women share a bathroom with a female porn star, or with a male serial killer and unrepentant rapist of women and young girls, you ask? Wow, what a dilemma you put in front of me! I just don't know how to choose!
No seriously, obviously it's the female porn star. If it were up to me, I'd put a hundred Buck Angels in women's bathrooms before I'd let a single Michael Pentillä in. It seems the obvious choice, if you want to optimize for women's safety rather than maximizing the euphoria of rapist serial killers. Was that really supposed to be some sort of gotcha?
That picture shows Buck next to Laverne Cox who’s quite tall and wearing heels, he’s actually the average height for a cis man in many countries at around 5’9. I personally wouldn’t use Buck Angel as the go-to trans man because he’s turned into a proto-TERF himself strangely enough, and far more physically impressive trans men absolutely exist, see Mitch Harrison who can stand next to the Rock and is 6’3 and is quite muscular.
How are you supposed to enforce sex-segregated bathrooms anyhow? Should you pepper spray anyone who you think doesn’t belong, like what happened to this tall biological female thinking they were in the presence of a biological male?
The sources I’ve looked up show no link between gender inclusive bathroom policies and crime rates, but if you have any that contradict that, feel free to share.
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Yes, but he's still the smallest of the five people, smaller even than the only other female. The point is: most transmen aren't that masculine, even not the ones hand-picked by trans-advocates, not to mention obvious women like Elliot Page.
Anyway, I didn't want to get caught up in discussing individual cases. I'll grant you that some well-passing transmen exist, but I think they're the minority. My argument more broadly is:
The average transman doesn't truly pass a man, and the average transwoman doesn't truly pass as a woman (arguably less so). So the argument that swapping transmen and transwomen is worse for women because now they suddenly share the bathroom with many more male-looking people isn't true: at best you're replacing male-looking men with male-looking women, which is sort of a wash.
But the more important argument is that regardless of visual passing, transmen are much less likely to harrass or assault women than transwomen are. That's why it's better for ciswomen to share the bathroom with transmen than with transwomen.
I don't think enumerating exceptions to the rule invalidates this argument.
I often wonder if people raising this question are disingenous. It's phrased as if the idea of sex-segregated spaces is a crazy far-out utopian idea, like universal basic income. In reality, all bathrooms in approximately the entire world worked like this throughout the entire 20th century, using the same mechanisms used to enforce most norms: through a mix of social contral and legal consequences.
Did you see the video of the Wi Spa where a male pervert enters the women-only section of the spa, so one of the women there goes to complain, and the employee at the desk can't do anything about it because in California it's illegal to kick male creeps out of women's spaces, and the only male patron who weighs in on the matter says "How can we know if the fully grown man with a penis isn't a woman?"
In the 90s, this scenario literally would not have happened. If a convicted sex offender entered a woman-only nude space with his dick out, all women present would scream at the top of their lungs for the pervert to get out. Employees would rush in to demand that the offender leave. Men would gather angrily at the door, ready to help escort the man out of the building, but careful enough not to trespass themselves. If necessary, the police would be called to take the man into custody.
Moreover, everyone knew that this is what happened to men who violated this social norm. That's why this type of crime was actually relatively rare.
No, of course. But first, I don't see how putting transwomen in women's bathrooms solves this problem, since a woman that is willing to pepperspray a masculine looking woman will obviously do the same thing to your average non-passing transwoman.
Second, I think some of this paranoia is actually fueled by genderism. In the past, if you saw a masculine-looking person entering the women's bathroom, you'd assume it was just a masculine-looking woman, because who else would someone use the woman's bathroom? Today, you can no longer assume that because males entering women's spaces is stunning and brave, actually. This puts gender nonconforming women under suspicion in a way they wouldn't be in a society that strictly enforces sex-segregated spaces.
Third and finally, let me explain how this sort of situation should be handled. If you're a woman who sees a man enter the woman's room, you first say “Excuse me sir, this is the woman's bathroom?” In 90% of the cases, he will look shocked and say “Oh, my mistake! I must have entered the wrong door” and leave. If it's actually a woman, then she'll say “Excuse me, but I am a woman!” In the case of someone like Rain Dove you can tell from her voice that she is speaking the truth, so you say “Oh, my mistake!” and that's the end of it. Now imagine you don't believe her because the "woman" is actually Karen White wearing a bad wig who couldn't pass for female in his wildest dreams.
Then you escalate the situation by finding a person responsible for the space, e.g. a security card in a public mall, the bartender, the office manager, etc.. You tell them there is a man in the woman's bathroom. They join you and ask the perpetrator to identify themselves. If they refuse, they are again asked to leave, and if they refuse, the cops are called.
All of this depends on government-issued ID to accurately label a person's biological sex. In the current world, all western countries have removed this label. This should be reverted. My (actually serious!) proposal is to list biological sex and socially desired sex separately, so we can still be polite by addressing transwomen as Ms So-and-so while separating them from women where sex matters.
I don't think there are sources that can show this. Not in the current world where:
Transwomen are a tiny majority, so even if they are significantly more likely to misbehave in bathrooms, you would need a lot of data to show that. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (actually it is, but only to a small degree, hard to get to p<0.05 that way). And that's before accounting for confounders. If a creepy male starts using the women's room and women stop going there, does that show he's not causing any problems?
You can't use crime statistics because the police is not even allowed to accurately register the biological sex of trans offenders, so while we could collect this information in a systematic way, gender activists ensure this doesn't happen (you might wonder why gender activists oppose this if they believe the results would be favorable to their cause?)
Academia is heavily politicized and genderism is one of those topics you are not allowed to objectively research. As a result, we cannot use academic sources to prove or disprove anything.
In short, I don't think you've seen compelling evidence that disproves the claim that transwomen are more dangerous to women than women (and transmen) are. I think you've seen a paper that said something like "we compared the number of reported incidents in inclusive bathrooms at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, populated entirely by highly-paid academics who value their jobs, with the numbers from the non-inclusive bathrooms at a Texas truck stop, and we didn't control for the myriad confounding variables that make that comparison meaningless, but we are going to conclude anyway that The Science™ shows inclusive bathrooms benefit women".
If you think I'm wrong, please cite the actual source you are thinking of. I'm sure I can poke one or more holes in it along the above lines.
On a meta-note: I feel a ton of this discussion about transgenderism is getting repetitive. I'm seriously considering putting together a document with the most common arguments pro and con, so instead of spending way too much time poorly reconstructing the same counterarguments, I can just say “you are using argument 69a, please see rebuttals 23a through c.”
It would save me a lot of time but I'm not sure if it would actually change anyone's mind.
Apparently something similar used to exist for creationism:
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This could be an interesting project. I find it's often hard to argue against the entire memeplex because the argumentation shifts constantly as it runs up against dead end and starts a new one until the interlocutors are exhausted.
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You trying to kill 50% of site traffic? 😩
Anyway, I doubt that would work. During the heyday of the online Atheism wars, it was common practise for both sides to compile wikis/dossiers with carefully curated links and even ready-made rebuttals for the usual objections raised by the other team.
It achieved absolutely nothing of note.
The default outcome of online argumentation is just about nothing at all, it is a minor miracle that it happens sometimes on this forum, and we usually attract more articulate, open-minded and erudite users than is the norm.
While I personally enjoy debate and discussion, including on values, it's more of a hobby rather than something I think is a net-positive return on my time and energy. If you want to convince people en-masse, you're better off doing something like optimizing for virality on social media, with all the concomitant loss of quality that entails.
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It's a crucial tactic that trans rights activists use. Many of their arguments derive from a foundational assumption that the trans person passes as the gender that they want to be (I've heard the bathroom argument turned in favor of the trans people by arguing that there's just as much danger if not more to a transgender woman being in the men's restroom than a man in the women's restroom), but much of the evidence to substantiate this assumption are photos taken using very specific angles and very specific lighting, if not photoshopped entirely. Candid, unaltered photos almost always show the trans person looking weird and out of the ordinary, if not failing to pass entirely.
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