Largely hypothetical risk

Jun 18th, 2023 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Guardianista Kathryn Bromwich tells us what we should worry about:

Judging by column inches alone, you might be forgiven for thinking that the thing keeping women awake at night is not femicide, sexual assault, plummeting rape convictions, stalking, unequal pay, the erosion of reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, rampant online misogyny, an institutionally sexist police force, healthcare inequality, insufficient childcare provisions, or never being allowed to age.

While all these issues do get reported, a disproportionate amount of attention is given to another topic: men masquerading as trans women in order to gain access to single-sex spaces.

That’s actually not “another topic.” It’s the same topic. Men pretending to be women are relevant to femicide, sexual assault, rampant online misogyny, along with a lot of things Bromwich carefully didn’t mention, such as opportunities in sports.

Over the past few years this idea has become so pervasive it is now inescapable in the media, culture, higher education, politics and sports; Ipso research shows that reporting of trans issues increased by 400% between 2009 and 2019.

Stop right there. The idea under discussion was men in single-sex spaces. That’s a much narrower subject than “trans issues.”

Either way, though, of course “trans issues” are being reported on more. The number of people calling themselves trans has skyrocketed, just for a start. There’s a feedback loop here: trans is a hot topic so lots more people hear about it lots more often so some of them think “Heyyy, that’s for me,” so there are more people calling themselves trans, so there’s more discussion of them, so more of them think “I’m one!” and on the loop goes.

It is worth noting that trans people make up roughly 0.5% of the UK population; instances of men infiltrating women-only spaces are few and far between (in Ireland, where self-identification has been legal since 2015, there has been no discernible adverse impact).

Is this deliberate deception? She can’t really be that dim, can she? It’s not about just literal physical “spaces” – it’s about jobs and promotions and prizes and sports and politics and pretty much everything. It’s about men supplanting us in every part of life they can get at. It’s about men trying to bully us out of feminism, and often succeeding. It’s about women getting fired, punished, boycotted, berated for not agreeing that men can be women. It’s not just the toilet, it’s the ontology.

With so many real threats to women’s safety, it is confounding that this much time and attention is being lavished on a largely hypothetical risk. Every single case of someone being attacked is unacceptable, and everything must be done to protect women’s safety. Many cisgender women who support trans rights, myself included, have personal experience of sexual assault and take the topic extremely seriously. But the main threat to women comes overwhelmingly from men, not from trans women, who should not be penalised for the actions of predatory men. 

Oh dear god. Yes, the main [physical] threat to women comes overwhelmingly from men, and men who call themselves women are men. That’s the whole point. We’re being ordered, with menaces, to agree that men who say they are women are indeed women, and we refuse because men who say they are women are still men. Anyone can say anything; saying isn’t magic. Men are men, regardless of what they say.

Excluding anyone on the basis of biological difference demonstrates a spectacular failure of empathy…

Huh. Does it? So if I exclude elephants from the category “birds” that’s a spectacular failure of empathy?

Also, speaking of empathy, how about the spectacular failure of empathy of hulking men like Lia Thomas and Rachel McKinnon and Austin Killips destroying women’s sports?

What a contemptible pile of nonsense this article is.

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