The other is
The same failure throughout.
No, what’s utterly disingenuous is to ignore the (surely blindingly obvious) fact that no one knows who is a guy who identifies as a woman getting changed in a changing room and who is a flasher. No one knows who is which and no one knows how to find out. If you were a flasher wouldn’t you be in those changing rooms like a shot, unable to believe your luck?
But we don’t know whether the man changing his clothes is a sex criminal or not. We can’t tell. It’s not that he automatically is, it’s that we have no way of knowing.
She can’t really be this stupid can she?
I think drinking the trans-KoolAid sucks out some of your brain cells, or maybe just kills them off. It leaves you in a catatonic state of shouting TWAW! and DIE TERFS! because you don’t know how to interact with people anymore. It’s like a brain parasite.
The point here is that unlike your flasher who whips it out in the park and can be charged with a crime, you’re decriminalizing indecent exposure in female locker rooms by making it a space that’s welcome to transwomen. The fact that there’s no lack of males who are all too happy to expose themselves and who will take advantage of this at the expense of women and girls is asking too much on behalf of transwomen. So they can use a private changing room instead, they do exist and they don’t invalidate feelings either.
No, what’s utterly disingenuous is pretending that a man using the female changing rooms is “using it as it was intended.” Using the girls’ or women’s changing rooms “as it was intended” does not mean merely changing clothes. It means being able to change clothes without any males present. That’s “as it was intended.”. But you know that.
iknklast: Maybe another metaphore is “brain viral infection”. Like all irrational religions.
But the scenario that was outlined in the tweet that began this little font of stupid was this:
“Laurie, I have a 15 year old daughter. If she was in a woman’s changing room and someone with a penis came in and took all their clothes off near her…” Notably, this does not specify whether the person undressing was a trans woman or a perverted man, and the question put to her is very simple: how do we differentiate? To which she blathers on about the poor trans woman being perved on by a small girl. Fucking idiocy.
Some additional information I encountered online–apparently the man in question wasn’t just ‘changing’, he was hanging out nude in the spa area (which would ordinarily be perfectly appropriate, as the entire spa area on this floor is a nude area) sitting on the edge of the pool with his legs spread and his feet in the water, announcing that he was there to normalise girls being comfortable with penis.
I fear she can. More I fear a lot of people can.
It is my experience that in evaluating such a situation, a lot of people start with subconciously preconceiving the actors as good person or bad person. Then the evaluation of the situation largely depends on that preconception.
It was SUCH a republican/homophobic trope to say that trans access to female bathrooms would attract predators, too bad they were right. The demand for universal, unquestioning, acceptance of self-declaration is utterly refuted by remembering this fact. How many ‘Jessicas’ are acceptable?
NAMBLA doesn’t try to infiltrate Pride parades anymore, and hasn’t for decades. Just because religious homophobes still try to equate pedophilia with homosexuality doesn’t mean anyone else should.
Years ago (2009), back on Kate Harding’s blog Shapely Prose, there was a guest post titled “Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced”. Its basic premise was that since no woman could tell whether any given man was a rapist, women sensibly assumed that they all might be and acted accordingly. The post was *hugely* popular – somewhere upwards of 1500 comments, commenting going on for days. It was a thing on the feminist blogs I frequented back then, everyone passing the link around and writing about how brilliant the post was. And it *was* brilliant and also obvious and an enormous relief to see the obvious stated in clear and unequivocal language – that men were, as a group, dangerous to women, and only a fool forgot that.
I think about that post often these days, whenever I read something like Laurie Penny’s disingenuous babble. Most of the bloggers I read back then, who so loved “Schrödinger’s Rapist”, have either vanished or gone full TWAW. Apparently, in the intervening dozen years, they decided that there was one surefire loophole in the “any man might be one of the dangerous ones” rule, and that was if the man in question claimed to be a woman. Once he did that – poof! – the box is opened and Schrodinger’s Rapist is now proven to be Not A Rapist after all, and don’t you forget it, missy.
I wonder sometimes if any of those bloggers remember “Schrödinger’s Rapist”. I wonder what they would make of that same post today. I wonder why they are so fiercely determined to deny the risk they are demanding women take when they insist that we exempt transwomen/apparently-transwomen from the Schrödinger’s Rapist category. Because I don’t understand their logic, and I wonder whether they understand it themselves.
Karen R @9
I’ve mentioned it here before, but the massive inconsistency between Schrodinger’s Rapist and TWAW was what peaked me, alongside posts on FTB attacking Ophelia.
Having been lurking on Pharyngula and FTB during the entirety of Elevatorgate, the 180 degree shift was jarring.
A former friend who blocked me on Facebook over trans issues had once described his experience going to a nude beach. He thought we should all get over our hangups about bodies and get used to seeing people of all ages and sexes naked. This was roughly in response to issues about men in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms; just get over it, it’s not a big deal. He did not in the least understand this attitude as a form of victim blaming.
Sackbut, he probably also didn’t understand that it is different depending on sex, too. Most women I know are uncomfortable around naked women; the feeling around naked men is…much, much more than discomfort. Especially if the man has an erection.
My ex wife and her partner are nudists. They have memberships at several clubs and appear quite comfortable in that setting. But neither of them would consider parading naked in any other setting. Simple good manners and consideration for others, rather than the narcissism of a TRA.
It’s about numbers isn’t it? Everytime one reads about ‘free sub/cultures’ where no-one has a ‘hang up’ about nudity, the examples given always involve lots of people i.e. witnesses.
In a municipal pool at off peak hours I could be the only person in the changing room, in which case if I’m a woman then there are no witnesses when a ‘yaniv’ enters. All those who with no hang ups about nudity en masse, would probably have a different attitude if female and alone.
Re: #11 – #14.
I think there are two separate but related questions about the sorts of spaces where people will be naked:
– What spaces are allowed to exist?
– What is the societal default for provision of such spaces?
Currently, single-sex spaces are both allowed to exist and are provisioned as a default where we expect people to be naked (for example in change rooms.) People expect that, and will object if this expectation is not met. The nudist spaces are simply defined exceptions to the default: I don’t think anyone would knowingly enter the confines of a nudist club and then complain they encounter naked bodies of either sex.
The current push is of course to eliminate single-sex spaces (replace all single-sex spaces with either single-gender or completely mixed spaces.) My guess is that if we turned around and said ‘the default stays the same, but you can carve out specific “Single-gender” spaces for you and your friends’, this would be rejected as not good enough. At a minimum the people agitating for change want Single-gender spaces to be the default, I suspect they might not want to tolerate single-sex spaces at all.