Dowsing for Divinity

Here’s a question to which I don’t have an answer. Given that there are Those Who Walk Among Us who seem very confident that all women and/or all feminists agree with the recent decision by the Supreme Court in the UK, and similar views elsewhere … how did we get to this point? How do we get back to a more reasonable position ?

When I’ve tried to argue with people who disagree with me about trans women being women, I have found that sharing articles arguing a trans-inclusive point of view does no good, because the articles that I have shared are “biased” according to them (and I feel the same way about the anti-trans stuff that those people have sent me in support of their views). I’ve even shared Forrest Valkai’s excellent video about chromosomes and other biological determinants of gender and sex, to no avail.

One “argument” advanced by the anti-trans crowd is that women who’ve been raped are traumatized by the sight of penises, hence the “need” for “single-sex” spaces. Well, I have been sexually assaulted by a cisgender man, and raped by another cisgender man. I don’t think that every single person with a penis is a threat to me as a result of this experience. Nor am I in the slightest bit fazed by the sight of a penis. I certainly am not bothered by the sight of a trans woman with a penis.

The two ends of the Overton Window are very far apart on this issue. It’s also the case, I think, that the vast majority of women are happy to include trans women among them. Maybe I’m overly optimistic about that. But this insistence on excluding trans women from women’s spaces wasn’t a thing until relatively recently. 

I’d also like to remind people that EVEN IF there were some cases of trans women assaulting cis women in women-only spaces (which I’ve yet to see credible evidence of), there were an equally small number of cases of cis women assaulting other cis women in women-only spaces; and that excluding ALL trans women from women-only spaces on the basis of a very small number of cases, is collective punishment, which is illegal under the Geneva Convention.