More compash, but not for you
A woman can “quite clearly” have a penis, Sir Ed Davey has said as he suggested the debate around transgender issues had already been settled.
The Liberal Democrat leader insisted discussions around single-sex spaces were not new and that more compassion towards trans people was needed in society.
During a phone-in with LBC’s Nick Ferrari, Sir Ed was asked a question by a caller named Mary from Cambridge who said she was speaking “on behalf of 51 per cent of the population”.
She told him: “I’m a tactical voter and I would like to support the Lib Dems. But can you answer the question ‘what is a woman?’, please?”
Sir Ed said: “The truth is, Mary, the vast majority of people whose biological sex is a woman at birth, they feel they’re women. They feel their gender [is] the same at birth. But there’s this very small number of people who don’t feel like that, and the law has recognised them for over 20 years now.”
It’s not about “feel.” What if I “feel” I am Sir Ed Davey? Men can “feel” they are women all they like, but they can’t take our stuff.
Arguing there was a need to “take the heat out of” the gender discourse, he added: “There is a small number of people who actually they’ve got… They have a tough time, they’re harassed, discriminated against. And I think we need to manage this and think about it and debate it with a bit more maturity and a bit more compassion.”
I wonder if Sir Ed is at all aware that women too are harassed and discriminated against. Maybe he “feels” they are not.
And yet, if I claim at the top of my voice to ‘feel’ like a giraffe, and get myself into the giraffe’s enclosure at my favourite zoo on the strength of that, Sir Ed would probably rather not speak up for me. or back me up in any way; not even in some interview on TV. Nor admit the injustice of it all.
As someone important once said, life wasn’t meant to be easy.
Fraser? I hope not.
Shaw, by all means.
“Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.”
― George Bernard Shaw
I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but he’s making a huge unstated assumption there: everyone in these discussions simply assumes that it’s only the (actual, biological) women who need to have “more compassion” — in the usual, patriarchal, and sexist-steteotypical way of giving up and ceding to the desires of the men. T advocates like Sir Ed Davey are talking (down) to entirely the wrong party. Their exhortations to show “more compassion” to trans-identified males ought to be directed to the other men.
The entire supposed “justification” for allowing trans-identified men into women’s spaces is that other men will commit violence against insufficiently masculine trans-identified men. That is 100% gold-plated male-on-male violence. That is a problem for the males to solve among themselves. It is not women’s job to solve it for them. Let the men solve their own violence problem. If men had more compassion for men who do not perform typical norms of masculinity, then the “justification” for trans-identified men to invade women’s toilets and locker rooms vanishes. If a (trans-identified) man fears going into the men’s room because other men might attack him, let him carry the burden of figuring out how to do so safely. Let him ask a male friend to go with him. Let him advocate for men to be more compassionate toward one another, including gender-nonconforming men. Take responsibility for yourselves, men. It’s not women’s problem.
[…] a comment by maddog on More compash, but not for […]
Your Reverence @# 2: Fraser it indeed was (and his past tense) that I had in mind. Not Shaw with his present tense expression of the same amusing idea.
Maddog:
I have no problem with a bloke in womens’ attire standing at a urinal in a mens’ room next to me. But when in the past a resident of Sydney, I used to work with some rugger-bugger types whose idea of a good start to any weekend was to go up to Kings Cross and “beat up the poofters” they encountered there.
It’s a bit like the ‘rape culture’ debate. It is not the men who visit blogs like this excellent one who need to do the changing. It is those who apparently never do.
The real problem of biological males being allowed to use womens’ washrooms etc is that it provides a perfect cover for the heterosexual would-be rapist; which I believe has already been made use of somewhere.
The real problem is more than that, of course. That is definitely a problem, and a huge one. But aside from that, even if no man ever used this as a cover to abuse women, it is still a problem.
It is a problem of women not having their own spaces, having to accept men into all of them. When I was a teen, I was in the Rainbow, the young women’s Masonic Lodge, so to speak. My mother was in Eastern Star. I remember being infuriated because neither group, the young women or the older ones, was allowed to hold a meeting unless there was a mason (translate: man) there. We had no place of our own. The men had to keep an eye on us.
Even if every trans woman was a perfect gentleman in the women’s restroom (and we already know they aren’t), it would be an invasion of a space that has been reserved to women, free of men. Being an adult human female (or even being a non-adult human female, from my experience) is filled with pitfalls caused by men. At some point, we need to be able to have our own spaces, especially those spaces where we are performing intimate acts.
So, yeah, even if men weren’t a risk, even if trans women really didn’t ever pose a threat to women, I would still advocate for women only spaces free from the male gaze, the male society, the male dominated world.
So what if “the law” has recognized something for 20 years? There have been plenty of laws passed and remaining on the books for years that were clearly wrong according to any sensible interpretation.
iknklast @#6: Agreed. Point taken.