I always swear I’m going to swear off fighting with nitwits on the internet. But!
So last week, I got into it with yet another radical who is convinced that trans women are just predatory men dressing up to access vulnerable women.
This hits home for me. I have been an adult entertainer since my mid-teens. So obviously, I’ve worked alongside a number of trans women over the years. And they were women.
They just were.
And these are the ones that I knew about, because not in a single instance, would I have known, had the person in question not chosen to share that information with me. Because of my age, and the limitations of medical technology and social attitudes, most that I knew were pre-op. In other words, they still had penises. All of them had endured blistering abuse and ugliness from others, long before they started taking steps to transition. And yes, they are probably more likely to have been abused as kids than the rest of us (...and the number isn’t exactly low for the rest of us).
So what’s the problem with these “anti-woke” (dozy?) people who are freaked out about transgendered people?? I can understand that a very insecure man, in finding himself attracted to a woman who turns out to be transgendered, might question his own sexuality. It’s pretty weak-minded, but I imagine it happens. But what possible reason would any woman have to be so against them?
Rape.
Yep, turns out, they’re concerned about the possibility of someone pretending to be trans just so they can get into some place restricted to women and girls only. Because we all know that rapes never occur outside these spaces. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So the unpleasant person that I got into it with (I’m going to call her Jane) wanted to know what would happen if there were a 6’4” “man in a dress” in the ladies room with her 87-year-old granny.
If there’s one thing I know about the ladies room, the overwhelming likelihood would be everyone would take a turn using a stall, then wash and dry their hands, and primp in the mirror for a couple seconds before exiting. That’s what happens in the ladies room. It’s quite uneventful.
Oh, but Jane’s fear is, what if that fellow put on that dress just to get into the ladies room, and is there to RAPE granny?? Her solution? We need “single sex” laws.
Let’s unpack it: first, what percentage of rapes occur in public women’s washrooms? Then, what percentage of rapes are committed by perpetrators that dress up like women to fool someone? Now, let’s make a Venn diagram showing what percentage of rapes are committed by perpetrators that do both? By now, you should realize that the level of concern here grossly outstrips the actual threat.
So we’re going to make a law, stigmatizing an innocent group of people, because someone might pretend to be one of them? Heaven help us! That would be like criminalizing drinking because some people drink and drive. Or criminalizing marriage because some spouses commit marital abuse. Last I looked, we criminalize behaviour, not people.
But let’s move on, to enforcement. How would such a law be enforced? Are we going to wait until there’s already an assault in a ladies room, then charge the perp, not only with sexual assault, but also with the far more serious crime of being in the wrong washroom??? Get real.
And it turns out, we already have laws against assaulting people in ladies’ rooms. It falls under the laws prohibiting people from assaulting other people… well… anywhere. So how will a new, redundant law improve on that?
The only way it could be an improvement would be if the enforcement were active. In other words, the biological status of every person entering the ladies room would have to be ascertained. Not sure how that would happen. In more than 60 years of using the ladies room, I’ve yet to see another person’s genitals in one. In fact, I don’t even see my own. It would require effort to do so. So obviously, all women entering the ladies’ room would need to undergo the indignity of a crotch check. (And hell, for the really radical anti-trans people, gamete size would need to be checked.)
Or, maybe we could single out—profile—only likely trans women and crossdressers for inspection. How will we decide who is “likely”? Will it be exceptionally tall or muscular visitors to the ladies’ room? I was 5’11” in my younger day, although I’ve shrank down to about 5’9” since. Mr JoyfulC, however, barely peeks over 5’6”! So based on just the “big & scary” criteria, he’d get a pass and I’d get a grope.
Or we could go by who looks inadequately feminine. I can predict that this will lead to a lot of pissed off, butt-ugly women!
There’s really no way to do gender profiling, to decide who needs to be inspected, without offending and subjecting at least some women to insulting treatment.
Do you see where this is going? “Single sex” bathroom laws will be redundant, impractical, offensive and ineffective. And they will serve to further stigmatize transgendered women. Is that something we women should run the other direction from??? I think so!
And finally, why make a law to stigmatize and punish transgendered women for the crimes of… men. Let’s face it, rapists are, overwhelmingly, men. We don’t need laws separating women from men in all situations outside the home. And we tend to look askance at those cultures that do have such laws, because they almost always result in oppression of women.
That’s where I see this radical movement against trans women going. We’d do better to reexamine our own attitudes about sex and gender. Another argument for “single sex” laws is, what about rapists trying to get into women’s shelters or women’s prisons? Again, as with the bathroom scenario, it isn’t impossible that someone would do this. But why punish trans women for it? Women have been raped or sexually assaulted in the dentist chair or at the gynecologist—should we prohibit women being treated by male dentists or doctors? Maybe we should prohibit women from going to bars, a site of many predations. Or from going out in public without a male family member as an escort. Maybe we should make all women bag themselves up in burkas, because some men can’t be trusted not to sexually assault, or at least try to seduce another man’s property… um, I mean, woman. See where it leads?
(And even in cultures where there are Draconian laws to “protect” women, there are still rapes and seductions.)
I think people like Jane are being radicalized by a 24/7 network news media that is perpetually frantic to find pertinent news to fill up those endless broadcast days. (Remember the War on Christmas? Man, they hauled that non-issue out for years!!) And it’s exacerbated by social media, where the more outrageous someone is, the more attention they get.
The fact is, throughout the history of humanity, there have been people who were born with a mismatch between their biology and their gender. Some of them went on to live as the gender they knew themselves to be. Sometimes they married! Often, no one even suspected until after they died and their bodies were being prepared for burial. We know this from their stories. Often, the ones we know of are trans men, because they’re the ones who went on to do things like practice law or medicine, or lead armies—professions not generally open to women throughout much of human history. But these are only the ones we know about. So you have to figure that there were many, many more. Maybe some were never able to do much more than be miserable and feel misunderstood all their lives. Some, we know, took their own lives. Maybe others lived and died in their true gender, but it never came to light or no one thought it worthy of mention.
We do know, for a fact, that sometimes nature makes mistakes. Aren’t we past the stage of consigning such people to the status of freaks and monsters? And how do we know for sure who, living among us, working alongside us, using the same facilities we are, isn’t transgender? We really have no way, not without infringing on their privacy and their dignity. So why get your panties in a knot over it?
(The pic here is Buddy. He died just about a year ago. I miss him every minute of every day.)