Chris

That’s not quite what Sex Matters has been saying.

If it was Helen Joyce you were watching (it may have been, as she was very much doing the media round) she will have objected to the premise of the question, first of all, by pointing out that almost nowhere these days has separate male and female toilets but no ‘third space’ - what we still, erroneously, call the ‘disabled toilet’ but is in law performing a more general function as an accessible space, including baby change if there’s no room for another separate area. Overwhelmingly, smaller venues have self-contained lockable facilities that are for all users. In the *tiny* number of places where this is an issue, the primary concern is the safety and dignity of women, who have a greater need of segregated facilities.

Addressing the ‘but what about the sad transvestites’ question (which large swathes of the media seems to have decided to use as its framing), she pointed out that very, very few women undergo such radical transformation that another woman can’t tell she’s a woman. There may be a tiny number of cases where a woman has so radically transformed her appearance that she looks like a man, that she causes distress to women in the women’s toilet. In such cases it might be simpler for her to use the men’s, again, in the tiny number of cases where there’s a separate men and women toilet but no third space.

But once more, I’d draw your attention to the way the issue has been framed here. You are talking about a vanishingly small number of situations where a woman has genuinely made herself look like a man (far less frequent than you think) and there is no third space (a.k.a. ‘Disabled toilet’). And in focusing on this question you ignore a couple of important points.

Overwhelmingly, the middle aged cross dressers are not women cosplaying as men, they are men cosplaying as women. Be in no doubt that it is male entitlement that is driving this - trans activism is, overwhelmingly, turbo-charged misogyny, which exploits neurodiverse children, people with DSDs (disorders of sexual development, erroneously also called ‘intersex’) and trauma-surviving women as human shields. It is by far the most pernicious social contagion of the modern age and sociologists and others will spill gallons of ink over it in the decades to come.

The much greater problem here, and the one that led to the Scottish Government getting rinsed by the Supreme Court last year, is the issue of women’s rights to safety and dignity, segregated toilets being one of the most visible provisions in pursuit of that aim. Whataboutery is how trans activism has gaslit society for the past 15 years, and it has to stop. Women are deserving of their protections and their rights must not be subordinated.