Consideration of Trans-women and Women's Spaces

I'll try to be circumspect, but this is  going to be a little graphic.

eXTwitter user @country_spaces posted about how consent for men in women's spaces cannot be given by men to other men, nor can any woman give consent in the stead of another woman for men to be in women's spaces. If one woman in a group says no, it does not matter what the rest say. It isn't a majority-decides argument. @country_spaces says the answer for that group must be no.

But trans-women are women, according to certain trans-women, and the question should therefore not be raised for trans-women, according to their argument.

What's wrong with their argument? 

Such spaces are only partially relative to sex/gender, anyway.

Well, ...

Among civilized people and even among most less-than-civil people, private spaces are private spaces because of the right of refusal.

Said another way, without the right of refusal, there is no such thing as a private space.

If I can't tell you to get out of my private space, my private space is not private, and it is not mine.

This principle applies regardless of sex or gender.

Doesn't matter if we are both men, if we are both women, or if one of us is a man and another is a woman, or if you are some alien of a thirty-third gender and I am some alien of no gender at all. Without right of refusal, there is no privacy.

In certain public spaces, physiological realities require us to provide private spaces within those public spaces.

Without such private spaces, personal assault, including sexual assault, becomes a statistical problem. Why? Because the whole purpose for these spaces is so that we can let our guard down to take care of private business. And people looking for people to assault will assault people whose guard is down.

We can make rules and laws, but there will always be in any large enough group (large enough meaning more than one hundred in some cases, but more than just one in others), certain individuals who will not exercise self-control in another person's extremity.

So in civilized society, we try to provide those private spaces within public spaces, to the extent that we can.

But logistic realities mean that these private spaces within public spaces cannot be made perfectly private. So we compromise by providing shared semi-private spaces. Not perfectly private, but better than nothing.

in other words, we set up the sharing according to certain statistical realities.

Statistically speaking, women do not assault other women as frequently as men assault women. It happens, but much less frequently than men assaulting women. 

Women tend to respect each other's privacy more than men tend to respect women's privacy.

Also, men do not assault other men as much as they assault women. It does happen, but men tend to be more conscious of men being able to fight back. 

Do women tend to assault men in semi-private spaces? It's not a question we need to ask, if men and women do not share these semi-private spaces.

The difference is significant, and usually is sufficient to make a division of these semi-private spaces based on sex/gender a meaningful protection of both women and men.

Are these shared spaces really safe?

Not perfectly. If there is a rumor that some man has hidden cameras in the stalls of a restroom at a certain venue, women will go to significant personal pain to avoid using those restrooms. (And avoid the venue if possible, as well.)

Men, too, but not so much, since men are less vulnerable in their extremities than women.

So what about trans-women? If they are women, the same should hold for them.

Except, if a woman sees a trans-woman and suspects that the trans-woman is actually just a man pretending, the woman is not going to feel safe in letting down her guard. That, all by itself, nullifies the semi-private nature of women's spaces.

Moreover, we do not have sufficient statistical data to actually agree with the assertions of trans-women that they are women in this sense. There are reports of trans-women in prisons assaulting non-trans women at rates significantly above the rates of women assaulting women, and until these reports are proven false, women in shared prisons have no private spaces at all.

And above that, when a trans-woman sexually assaults a non-trans woman, there is a probability of pregnancy that requires much stricter considerations than the possibilities of women assaulting women. 

(Sexually transmitted diseases might be assumed not to have a sexual bias in infection frequencies? Maybe, maybe not. Until we have proof otherwise, we should rather assume that there is more of a tendency for transmission of disease as well when physiological males assault physiological females.)

And what about trans-men?

Careful. Discussion of the concept of shared private spaces in the context of trans-men is way too likely to shine too much light on the whole theory of gender affirmation.

What about the poor intersex people?

I'm going to suggest that letting people self-identify, and supporting insurance-paid gender-affirming surgeries is actually making it harder for true intersex people to have their private spaces. 

Twenty years ago, if a woman entered a men's restroom in an emergency, nobody got too excited -- other than certain men with no sense of self-control who complained that it never happened while they were in the loo. 

And, likewise, if a man apologized for entering a women's restroom in an emergency, he knew he had no right to be there. If he was allowed, he took care of his business and got out. And took a lot of ribbing from his buddies for letting himself get caught in such an extremity.

Very few trans-women apologize. Many seem to actually deliberately take way more time in restroom facilities than necessary.

Twenty years ago, intersex people could usually slip in under the radar. Now it's much harder.

If trans-women insist on unreasonable rights relative to women's spaces, it destroys the privacy of those women's spaces. Society may have no recourse other than to do completely away with shared private spaces in public spaces.

And that would drastically alter our ability to assemble freely, since most venues would have to just shut down completely.