Proportionate
Oh really. Is that true?
The trouble is, the two parties are not symmetrical. Men who want access to women’s spaces want the access in order to dominate or rape. Women want access to men’s institutions in order to have equality. The motivations are radically different. Women are locked out of men’s institutions because of entrenched sexist and misogynist attitudes. Men are locked out of women’s physical spaces for safety reasons.
In short women in this dispute are not the plantation owners. Not even slightly.
If men want single-sex spaces because they have a demonstrable need to protect themselves from women, we can certainly talk about that.
This is actually not true – plenty of building codes and various government regulations currently require single-sex spaces in government, institutional and commercial facilities. I guess these folks are welcome to have a go at getting all these laws changed one by one, but I think they’ll struggle as the political winds of change have as far as I can tell decidedly turned against them.
Did they even notice that they’ve conceded that trans-identifying people aren’t the sex they claim to be? If single-sex spaces are supposedly unlawful, they are supposedly unlawful because they exclude males — specifically, males who are pretending to be women.
It’s funny, because trans activists spend half their time arguing that sex isn’t binary, and the other half of the time accidentally acknowledging that it is.
Mixed-sex bathrooms are a good example. If transwomen really were women then why would they need or want mixed-sex bathrooms? They’d want men out of their spaces just as much as any other woman does. If trans “rights” activists actually believed that transwomen are literally women, they wouldn’t be campaigning for blanket mixed-sex bathrooms, which implicitly erase the distinction between transwomen and “cis men”, and instead they’d campaign to reinforce the (supposed) distinction between transwomen and “cis men” and campaign to keep “cis men” out of women’s bathrooms.
It’s one of those plain-on-the-face-of-it-this-makes-no-sense things. I posed this question to the board or directors at the theatre I managed when it went with “all gender” washrooms. This was over a decade ago. The reaction I got was puzzlement tinged with defensive panic and anger, so I quickly dropped my objection. That’s about when the alarm bells started going off for me that the trans movement was triggering bizarre and irrational behaviour among progressives.
The one concession I managed to obtain was to put great big signs on the bathroom doors indicating which one had the urinals and which one didn’t, as a sort of signal about the intended sex of the bathrooms without actually mentioning sex. Looking back, that sounds about right: the trans activists have become neurotically terrified of the mere existence of biological sex as a concept, to the point that they don’t even know what they’re arguing anymore.
Tell me, how is women — the raped, sexually assaulted, perved-upon sex class — not wanting to be undressed in the presence of men — the rapist, peeping Tom, voyeuristic, violent assaultive sex class — not an objectively obviously legitimate purpose? And is there any means of achieving this legitimate purpose other than total exclusion of the opposite sex? Having bathrooms and locker rooms that women can use safely is a legitimate purpose. Tell me how it’s not. Speak out Sister hates women.
I’ve always thought that the all-gender and only all-gender bathrooms were a sort of scorched-earth policy, a “fuck you” to all the people, laws, and biological facts which were preventing trans people from using the bathroom they were comfortable with.
“Oh yeah? Well, we’d rather get rid of the Woman’s Room completely than allow one which turns away trans women. See what you made us do? How do you like that??”