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I can, I hope, understand the desire of cis-women to have safe spaces which exclude men given their experience of misogyny and male violence, and their fear that those spaces will be violated if gender becomes no more than a matter of self-declaration. I can also, I hope, understand the desire of trans-women not to be excluded from women-only spaces on the basis that doing so rejects their existence as women. I don't have an answer to how that conflict can be resolved, and given that I have no skin in the game, I don't feel I'm in a position to offer one. All I think I can do at present is to make sure that, as far as I possibly can, I'm not part of the problem.
Brommers I'm afraid you didn't edit (thank you) so I can reply.
The thought experiment is basically the toilet one (such a distraction)...
But let's try the same experiment with other form of discrimination.
Racism
I can, I hope, understand the desire of white people to have safe spaces which exclude black people given their and their fear that those spaces will be violated if race becomes no more than a matter of self-declation.
I won't even finish it, but you know... it's pretty obvious already.
Homophobia
I can, I hope, understand the desire of normal people to have safe spaces which exclude gays given AIDS is a gay disease and their fear that those spaces will be violated...
Agism
I can, I hope, understand the desire of young people to have safe spaces which exclude embittered and smelly older people and their fear those spaces will be violated...
Ablism
I can, I hope understand the desire of able-bodied people to have safe spaces which are not compromised just to accommodate disabled people and their fear those spaces will be violated...
You can run the gamut of other exclusionary, segregatory, hate and isms... and no matter how you do the thought experiment, the conclusion is that the first part of your argument is transphobia.
The real risk to any persons isn't to the woman at risk in the toilet from another woman... it's the woman that was forced to use the men's toilet. Forced to out themselves, be humiliated, be uncomfortable, be subjected to any type of speech (and you know men will open their mouths and say something when a woman is in the men's toilets).
No woman can look at another woman and judge whether she is, or isn't, a woman based on looks. Hell, men look like women, women look like men, many just look like how they are and fit less binary definition. It's all so arbitrary, but when the transphobic argument is used to create discriminatory laws and rules that segregate and exclude... it's trans people that pay the highest price (think of the reaction if the trans man uses the womens facilities! exactly the logical conclusion of TERF argument though), now excluded from all spaces and as a result from society at large. Yet as you cannot know who is or isn't trans unless they're telling you... what you also do is bring in laws which now overlap policing and enforcement into the spaces and lives of all women.
This stuff is transphobic, and it's not even an argument as to whether it is. It doesn't hold against any scrutiny or intellectual thought. It barely holds at the level of pub debate. It's transphobic. And it does not differ from racism, homophobia, sexism, ageism, ablism, or any other hate thread.
Do I care whether or not any individual honestly believes that trans people are not the men or women they claim? Nope... I'm going to ban. Because I also do not care if someone honestly believes there is a difference between races, that gays are perverted, that disabled people shouldn't be allowed in their space as it makes them uncomfortable, yada, yada, yada. I'm just going to ban people based on hate language regardless of other factors.
I don't buy it, and nor should you.
In fact... I didn't enter into this trying to convince anyone of anything, but if you've (all cis-men thinking they have no skin in the game) reached the end of this post and are still wondering how you can make a difference... it's the same as with racism, ablism, ageism, homophobia, sexism, etc... fight the hate and don't make excuses for it. Understand it, and fight the hate.
Velocio-
When it comes to female-only spaces and language, the relevant comparator for other -isms isn't cis==white/hetro/abled/young, trans==black/gay/disabled/old, it's male==white/hetro/abled/young, female==black/gay/disabled/old.
Unlike Male people excluding female or White people excluding Black, Female people didn't need spaces / rights / opportunities reserved for female people to maintain power and entitlement, they needed, and still need, them as a refuge from Male power and entitlement.
That's the power dynamic that female-only spaces exist for.
And in case there's any doubt, I would 100% support (and indeed actively do support) Black people saying they need a space away from white, or opportunities created for Black people, to mitigate the challenges of being Black in a racist society. And the same for gay, disabled, trans and old people (and actually, young people), and any subsets in those groups or other groups that feel they need to define themselves separately to deal with the challenges they face by being not society's default human. Marginalised people have a moral right to physical and mental space away from the powers that marginalise them, and to be allowed to define themselves and speak of their own lives in their own voices.
Maybe you move in circles where this doesn't happen any more, but I promise you for me and many, probably most, other women, being female in this world is like carrying a weight around all day. Female-only spaces, places without males taking up our space, resources and attention, are the respite that allows us to heal and find ourselves.
But if we can't talk about the impact of sex in the context of gender (because notwithstanding that sex may be biologically complicated in the details, the physical and social consequences of sex for the roughly 50% of humans that do meet the criteria to be correctly recognised as female the day they are born are certainly fucking real) then this disappears from the picture. And that's just --- sexism on steroids.
You mentioned Intersectionality. You assumed I wouldn't know what it was. I was doing womens/gender studies back in the 90s. Yes I know about intersectionality. Back then it wasn't "who can pile the highest intersectional pile", it was about understanding that intersecting axis of oppression change the shape of oppression - that women experience different aspects of sexism based on factors like race, class and so on. Back then we saw gender as another axis of social control, cultural myths pretending to be "natural" (yep, pretty sure I even read some Judith Butler as well). We saw gender as a tool of the Patriarchy, something we needed to challenge and demolish in order to free both men and women from constraining stereotypes and myths. Our aim was to be without gender, just people with different bodies. If someone had told me then that 30 years later we'd be told that it's the gender, not the bodies, that is real, that people would start thinking they had to change their body to match their gender and that this would be called Progressive - well honestly I think I'd have blamed last night's acid.
So to talk about Intersectionality without including sex, the deepest, probably oldest, most universal axis of oppression, the one the runs like a faultline through our history and through all our social structures from our most private domestic lives to our heads of state, the one that we are unwittingly complicit in before we are even born because of what our gestation and care means for our female parent in a sexist society - to think you can reoplace that axis with gender identity and it doesn't even fucking matter - that's just a sick joke.
You talk about the real problem being the Patriarchy. I agree. You think saying a trans woman is male is transphobia. I disagree. I think society can neither challenge the Patriarchy NOR fully accept trans people UNTIL we can honestly talk about the significance of sex. Trans women ARE male. It's kind of the fundamental defining feature, otherwise they'd be cis women. Owning that is in itself is a huge fuck you to Patriarchy. Denying it is not only letting that big toxic lump patriarchy labelled "Maleness" to continue to exist unchallenged, it's actively perpetuating the Patriarchal power structure of male people believing they have the right to define, speak for and utilise female people.
As I said in my original post, yes, trans people exist, but Female people also exist (some of whom are also trans, of course).
We share many challenges. We could have a fantastic dialogue between trans people and female people about the way male-shaped culture shapes us and how to escape that and make it better for all of us. But we cannot do that when male people who believe they are the same as us appropriate our cultural and physical spaces, our political voice and even our own name, because you do not even allow us the words we need to describe what it is to be us and not you.
Because even if you don't believe our sex is innately significant, living as female in culture shaped by and for male people makes it significant, and we need the rights and language to talk about that.
brokenbetty
Me too. As a white, straight, cis-male with privilege oozing from every pore I'm hesitant to put my oar in more than I have done previously as, like you, I've found the most informative and enlightening posts recently in this thread to have come from women and non-binary/trans people. However, as someone who'd like to be an ally to both cis-women and trans-women, I also feel it would be cowardly not to try and educate myself on these issues and to engage in the debate so that I can better understand the issues, learning from those better placed than me to comment on them.
Also agreed. I can, I hope, understand the desire of cis-women to have safe spaces which exclude men given their experience of misogyny and male violence, and their fear that those spaces will be violated if gender becomes no more than a matter of self-declaration. I can also, I hope, understand the desire of trans-women not to be excluded from women-only spaces on the basis that doing so rejects their existence as women. I don't have an answer to how that conflict can be resolved, and given that I have no skin in the game, I don't feel I'm in a position to offer one. All I think I can do at present is to make sure that, as far as I possibly can, I'm not part of the problem.
Also agreed, but it does seem to me that sport is one of those issues where there is a more fundamental issue than misogyny and general discrimination against women. It seems fairly clear to me - although I stand as ever to be corrected - that while there has undoubtedly been misogyny and discrimination in sport, the fact remains that people who were born male and grew up as male have a distinct advantage over women in sport, due to the effects of testosterone and androgen on the human body.
@Velocio has referred to women being excluded from the TdF, and being given their own race on that basis, but in reality the very best women cyclists wouldn't get a place as a domestique in a race open to both men and women. If you ignored sex in professional cycling, or Olympic track cycling, then there would be no professional women cyclists. That isn't the result of a social construct or historical misogyny. It's just biology. Sure, if I was racing against Katie Archibald on a track (or anywhere, frankly) I wouldn't even see which way she'd gone, but that's because I'm old, slow and have the athletic ability of a bunch of asparagus. To my mind, it's not a question of excluding women from male-only competition. It's a question of excluding men from women-only competition, so as to provide women with a space where they can compete on a level playing field with other women. As to who qualifies as a woman, well, on that point I am going to take the coward's way out and defer to others.
At the risk of being pilloried as Centrist Dad (despite having no children) I can understand why a trans-woman would want to compete as a woman, as an affirmation of her identity and to reflect the physical changes which come with hormone treatment. However, I can also understand why cis-women would consider it unfair that someone who had the benefit of the hormonal advantages of going through puberty as a man would be able to race against them when they did not have that physiological advantage. Going back to something @ough said, I'm not sure it's really a zero-sum game. Seems to me it's a question of two inherently incompatible arguments with no obvious answer.
Trying to. Hope that comes across to all and sundry. Flame away if you wish, but this is genuinely written in good faith and with a fair degree of trepidation.