What forces?
Another odd argument from Jolyon Maugham, which started with a gripe about the state of the BBC:
John Humphries may be gone but his attitude to equalities lives on at the BBC. If you’d like to know more about self-ID this Q&A – from leading feminist charity @fawcettsociety
– is well worth a read. https://fawcettsociety.org.uk/sex-gender-and-gender-identity-qa
What naughty Nick Robinson had said:
Should the law treat me as a woman if I chose to identify as one? Yes @lucianaberger
of the @LibDems told me on @BBCr4today despite criticism by some women that their rights are being ignored
The purpose of societal norms isn’t to guard against the worst amongst us – that’s the job of the criminal law. It is to express the values we share, conditioned by a desire to respect difference and protect the vulnerable.
But who in this dispute has the relevant “difference”? Who is “vulnerable”?
At a later point he explains:
My tweet was a response to those saying “if you let those with xy chromosomes into women’s toilets they might molest women.” I was making the point that if they do the criminal law can deal with them. And also that there are other forces that stop those are not women…
… (such as Nick Robinson) from using women’s toilets but allow those who are women (including transwomen) to use them. And those “other forces” are an important part of how a functioning society self-regulates. Hope that helps.
It doesn’t help, because what “other forces” are those? How do they work, where do we find them, how do we invoke them? What other forces are there that distinguish – instantly, on the spot – between those that are not women, like Nick Robinson, and those that are, including trans women? What forces are there that distinguish – instantly, on the spot – between men pretending to claim to be women, as a joke or to make a point, and real genuine authentic actual vulnerable women of the subset trans? What forces are those?
I doubt that he has the faintest idea what those forces are or what they could be, and I think he is able to be so blithe about it because it doesn’t affect him.
I’m so tired of being lectured by clueless men on the need to be more accommodating of the vulnerability of men who say they are women.
What a load of crap. Criminal law is society’s collective cry of, “we will avenge thee!” I’ve always been a bit dubious that this was of comfort to those in need of avenging. I’ve always been more of a fan of rights with balanced social principles which is more of a vow of, “we will keep you reasonably safe in the first place.”
We won’t provide safe spaces for you but fear not – we will punish any transgressors (- wait probably not because where men and women are concerned history suggests that the courts will err on the side that the women were probably asking for it.)
There was a time when a person’s rights were understood to end somewhere beyond the tip of another’s nose but not if you are a women I guess. Women are expected to completely re-imagine their self identity so as to not give offense.
Women are expected to completely re-imagine their self identity so as to not give offense.
Nailed it.
So the outcome is that the woman is already raped, and then someone steps in and says “naughty boy”. No effort to prevent the rape, just say something after the fact.
And with the actual statistics on rape reporting and the prosecution/conviction rates on reported rapes, this is small comfort, even for those who prefer that women be raped first and then men punished than that we keep the men from raping the women in the first place.
There is only one thing I can say to Jolyon Maugham:
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
Right-ho, and I suppose worrying about guns is wrong, too, because the law is there to prosecute your killer.
Whatever happened to prevention is better than cure?
And as soon as he’s forced to concede that no such forces exist, he’ll just shift the goalposts once more. Not very long ago this was about ensuring a small number of geniune transsexuals were protected from harm and genuine discrimination; then the definitions of “genuine transsexual” and “genuine discrimination” kept inflating so that we had to dismantle any distinction between transwomen and women in social contexts, and then legal contexts, and then sports contexts…
The goalposts will not stop shifting — they can’t, because under this line of reasoning nothing can really make sense until they reach the very end of the field: removing any distinction between males and females anywhere — that is, the total erasure of feminism and of women as a class. And Jo Maugham probably thinks that sounds just fine — utopian, even. Like the post-racial paradise misguided white people imagine they’re evoking when they say they “don’t see colour,” here’s an entitled man coming to tell us he “doesn’t see sex” because he’s so much more enlightened than you nasty women. Easy for him to say; it’s not his class being wiped out of existence.
The fuck you say. The job of the law is to enforce critical norms.
It is, for example, a norm of our society that we not capriciously beat people on the streets. The law then punishes those who capriciously beat people on the streets.
This is truly not that fucking complicated, you sophomoric twit of a twat.
The entitled man “doesn’t see sex” as long as it’s in your restroom. And he’s fine and dandy with getting the poofs out of his restroom.
I came to say something, but everyone has beaten me to it. So I’ll sit here nodding vigorously, making iknklast coffee.
Rob, I like it black.
I confess that on this issue, I am a clueless man. I will, however, not lecture you all, but ask for enlightenment. I’ve never really understood how the bathroom issue is supposed to play out.
What currently stops (or, if you live in a place where things have changed, what used to stop) male-bodied people from loitering in women’s restrooms and assaulting whoever they please, and what do you think is going to (or already has) change about that?
I sometimes get the impression that the scenario being posited is that right now, a woman who sees someone she believes to be a male in a women’s restroom can scream/find the manager/call 911 and… then what? The police will come and demand to see genitals or a birth certificate or other proof of gender, and then arrest the miscreant on the charge of “being present in the wrong-gendered bathroom”? And that the fear of that prospect is what keeps male would-be predators out of women’s washrooms? And that the concern is that in the near future, such predators will be able to loiter in women’s restrooms all day, and if challenged, snarl through their mustache “oh yeah? Well, I IDENTIFY as a woman, and that’s that, so ya got nothing on me, copper!” And the cop will shrug and say “he’s right. Oops, I mean, she’s right” and walk away.
Now, I respect you all too much to think that you actually are imagining such a silly set of scenarios, which contain some pretty clear flaws that you could probably all point out as well as I can. So I know I must be missing something. Some current protective bit of safety that you fear will go away soon, or already has.
Anyone want to clue me in, hopefully not with the clue-by-four? I hope I’ve earned enough credibility here that you take this comment as sincere confusion.
No I’ve wondered about the same thing. All I can come up with is the taboo, fear of shaming or embarrassment, all that. What that meant was that it happened rarely. I’ve mentioned before that it happened to me once, in the university library when I was an undergraduate. I went into an empty women’s room and into one of the compartments and right after that someone else came in and took the next compartment…which made me uneasy enough that I leaned forward to see the feet, and thus saw them disappear as he stepped on the toilet to look over the partition. He saw me looking up and was out of there like lightning. I told the campus cops; end of story. What stops that is usually the social rule, except when it doesn’t.
Anyway that one incident was more than enough to tell me that women who raise the issue aren’t being alarmist or mean.
(So in other words it wasn’t about loitering inside, it was about somehow knowing when the room was empty and when a woman went in…and I don’t know how he did that. If I remember correctly the restroom was around a corner, it wasn’t visible from areas with desks or anything. I think it was a minor puzzle at the time, how he knew I’d gone into an empty one. Maybe he didn’t, maybe he would just say “Oops wrong one sorry” if he bumped into someone.)
It’s also that the very idea of having separate washrooms for women is being phased out. And I think people are doing that because they can’t figure out how to maintain washrooms designated for women only, while including transwomen, and at the same time still excluding men. (Those “forces” of which Maugham speaks have already proved elusive to those who have sought them.) They realize there’s really no practical way to exclude men at all without excluding some who self-identify as women, so they just get rid of sex and gender requirements altogether.
It’s not that they don’t see that there’s a need for separate spaces for women, it’s just that they’ve chosen to dismiss that need because they think the price is too high for males who identify as women to pay.
And of course it starts with washrooms, and then it follows with changing rooms, communal showers, dormitories, crisis shelters, prisons, sports. It’s the “universal acid” that burns through everything without end.
Sounds about right.
The thing is, it is currently unusual to see males in female restrooms. In the overwhelming majority of cases, such a male is probably up to no good, so the rare interloper is immediately suspect. If a female sees a male, her guard goes up and takes her away from the threat. It’s a simple and reliable heuristic: if you see a man, then GTFO. That reaction reduces the effectiveness of the “loitering in the women’s room” tactic. The woman doesn’t have to wait for the miscreant to assault her before identifying the threat.
Under the proposed model, females have to ignore their defensive instincts. This does more than make using the restroom a potentially nerve-wracking experience. It reduces the dangerous male’s salience, as he is now just another “woman”. It takes away the most basic and reliable tool of self-defense—the ability to recognize a potential threat before it becomes an actual threat.
Addendum: Even were the heuristic super-unreliable (for instance, if the vast majority of men in women’s rooms were not up-to-no-good) there is no social cost for a false positive under the current model. Given the potential outcome of a false negative, that seems like a fair arrangement.
Screechy Monkey —- the point of not allowing men into women’s spaces is that we want to reduce the chances of harm happening. You say this is not a perfect system and you are right. It is the best system we have found that works in a free society where very few spaces are separated by sex. Laws against robbery and murder don’t stop those crimes, so I guess you are OK with getting rid of those silly laws, too, right?
Deterrence is a thing. If a man is seen trying to enter a women’s space, anybody who sees him has the right to challenge him, to yell a warning and to call the police. That alone is going to stop some men from trying it. Why should real women be told to ignore our instincts and give up our rights and have to play split-second risk assessment just because it makes some small number of men happy?
So what if the cops show up and he pulls the trans card on them? At least the people in the area are now aware of what could be a dangerous situation happening in the women’s spaces. If I come out of a stall and there is a man blocking my only exit from the room, I have little time to react if he is a threat. Even the few seconds that may be bought by somebody yelling “hey! Mister, that is the women’s room, you can’t go in there” might be enough for me to escape the room or at least get some means of self-defense ready.
The system we have had is not broken. Again, why break it for the happy gender feels of a few men? Gun control advocates say “one death by shooting is too many” and call for gun control. Why can’t we express that one rape or one perverted attack is too many and call for male control to continue in these few areas of our society?
To add a little to answers 14-16: The very same men who are most likely to be a threat to women are currently the least likely to enter women’s space. I have seen men intent on harassing women stop dead and recoil at the women’s room door, when there was nothing physically keeping them from following their prey right in–but their instinctive terror of unclean women, or their terror at being perceived as unmanly, was enough to prevent them. As far as I can determine, a subset of these men can believe they are trans, or pretend to believe they are trans. A while back I read a woman writing that she’d rather use the men’s room, because she knows the men in the men’s room aren’t interested in transgressing or invading women’s spaces–men in the women’s room are by definition untrustworthy, because they’ve already demonstrated that they have no respect for women’s boundaries.
Thank you all for your responses. I have, not so much counter-arguments, as just reactions.
Ophelia: your anecdote just makes me wonder what stops a would-be predator from simply hanging out in the hallway outside a women’s restroom until he knows that a woman is in there alone.
Artymorty: I definitely can see the concerns about having shared restroom facilities (assuming we’re not talking about single-occupancy ones). Because that to me presents risk of what I would call “opportunistic” harassment, meaning men who didn’t set out to assault or harass a woman, but find the opportunity irresistible.
Nullius: that’s a reasonable argument, though I’m not sure it’s a persuasive one. As a practical matter, how much effort do women expend in scrutinizing the other people in a restroom? I mean, is it only the broad-shouldered 6-footers who are eyeballed to see if they’re really women, or are women glancing at everyone’s throats for a possible Adam’s apple? How many women would raise a stink if a petite trans person who almost-but-not-quite passes for a woman was in the restroom?
southwest88: Your response seems self-contradictory to me. You claim that men are currently deterred from entering women’s restrooms by the threat of the police being called, but then you say “[s]o what if the cops show up and he pulls the trans card on them? At least the people in the area are now aware of what could be a dangerous situation happening in the women’s spaces.” So what is it that you fear is going to change? It sounds like you believe this deterrence works whether or not the police can actually charge the alleged man with anything. Perhaps you’re suggesting that in the future, cultural pressure to not be “transphobic” will deter women from raising the alarm, and that this will in turn embolden male predators, which is similar to Nullius’s argument.
guest: Your response also seems self-contradictory. If what is really deterring men from invading women’s restrooms is a fear of “ickiness” or being perceived as “unmanly,” surely that won’t change. He’s not going to consider it less “icky” because he’s pretending to identify as a woman, and surely men obsessed with their own manliness will be the last to claim trans woman status? Perhaps I missed your point.
On the flip side: what should a trans woman who needs to pee do, other than “stop being trans”? Do you think it’s safe for a trans woman to use men’s restrooms? If not, is that (or the alternative of being yelled at and treated as a predator in a women’s restroom) just part of the price they have to pay for being trans? Are you sympathetic to these concerns but just feel they are outweighed by the safety concerns of cis women, or do you deny those concerns exist, or think they should receive no moral consideration (e.g. because they are freely chosen)?
Screechy – Well, what made the guy crash out of there at such speed? You have only my word for it that he did, of course, but he did. I was musing on it later yesterday, while walking down the hill (it’s a longish walk), prodding at the reliability of the memory. Research on memory has found that we change memories every time we summon them, so I was prodding at that, trying to separate a minimal narrative from possible illusions of actual memory. The feet withdrawing – I asked myself about that. Did I have any idea what shoes he was wearing? Nope. I remember the fact of seeing one foot disappear upward and then the second one – but the visual memory (minimal though it is) could well be just filling in the factual one. But I do think I remember the almighty crash the cubicle door made when he slammed out.
Something made him slam out, as opposed to saying “Hi, I was hoping to watch you pee.” I think that something is probably what stops a would-be predator from simply hanging out in the hallway outside a women’s restroom until he knows that a woman is in there alone. It would be obvious what he was doing, and it probably wouldn’t take long for someone to call security.
Actually, I probably don’t remember the crash the cubicle door made, I just remember the fact that it did and supply the sound effects from masses of background knowledge.
Ophelia — I hope you know that I wasn’t doubting your story.
But did you know (or suspect), until the moment you looked up and saw his face, that it was a man? Were the footsteps exceptionally heavy or something that put you on guard aside from the fact you noted about this person coming into the stall right next to you?
What I’m getting at is — wouldn’t this have played out the exact same way if it had been a cis woman? The moment you caught this person standing on the toilet to peer into your stall, they were doing something wrong, shameful, and probably illegal regardless of their gender. (I’m not disputing the point that men are more likely to commit such an act than women; I just mean from the point of view of “being on your guard” or “driving predators away” this particular scenario doesn’t depend on the gender of the miscreant.)
Oh, I definitely know that, I take you to be talking about how do we know what we think we know, which I’m always interested in.
No, I didn’t know or even suspect anything – it’s just that I’m neurotically uncomfortable in public toilets of that type (compartments open at the bottom and top) no matter what. I didn’t actually expect anything when I looked, it was just habit/neurosis (ewww y u pick stall next to mine ewww). I was absolutely staggered to see there actually was something.
Anyway you’re right, yes it would have played out the same way, but on the other hand, it’s really not something women do to women all that often.