It doesn’t matter if it’s got a special certificate
The point is this. Single-sex spaces for women can’t have men in them, because if they do, they’re not single-sex.
I told you it was simple. It’s like the “no peanuts” rule for a peanut-free dish. If you label a dish “peanut free”, you have to leave the peanuts out. All of them. The fact that lots of people like peanuts is no answer. Peanut-free dishes aren’t about those people: they’re about the people who may go into anaphylactic shock and die if they eat a peanut. It doesn’t matter if the peanut has been mashed to a paste, moulded into the shape of a walnut and scented with walnut oil, so that no-one looking at it, smelling it or eating it would dream that it might be a peanut. It doesn’t matter if it’s got a special certificate that says that for legal purposes it’s a walnut. It still needs to be left out of the peanut-free dish, or the peanut-free dish ain’t peanut-free.
Anaphylactic shock, sexual assault – not the same things, but both are unwanted.
I love the peanut analogy, having lived through it more than once. One time when my wife and I were at a Vietnamese restaurant I asked the waitress if a certain dish had peanuts in it. When she told me it did, I asked if they could prepare it without. When the food came, I noticed some light brown sprinkles on it, so I asked the waitress if those were peanuts. “Oh!”, she replied, “I thought you liked peanuts, so I told the cook to add extra.” (To be fair, she was not the regular waitress there—she was substituting for a friend.)
Fortunately my wife agreed to swap dishes, even though mine was far too spicy for her taste.
Similarly, “but what about the men who impersonate women ‘pass’? What are you going to do about that, ha!”
Assuming there are some men who ‘pass’ as women (a bold assumption), it’s still unethical deception. True, if someone like that invades a woman’s space, we may not be aware and able to challenge them.
It’s a bit like voyeurism and ‘peeping Toms’. Even if the person who is the object of the voyeur is unaware they are being observed, the voyeur is still committing a moral/unethical/dishonest (and possible criminal) act.
I really like that analogy, too. If all the walnuts in my salad identify as pistachio nuts, they will still send me to the emergency room with an asthma attack. Thanks for the great way to express this to others!
My car identifies as a cement mixer, but I don’t think I’m gonna get called out on jobs soon.
One of my daughters is very sensitive to peanuts. She had a very bad experience in a crab restaurant in San Francisco where they had assured us that there were no peanuts in their food. It was a lie, probably an ignorant lie, but a lie all the same.
More recently we were on holiday with her and her daughter in Chile. No problems until the very last day, when we went to a Peruvian restaurant. (Peru has a good culinary tradition, but Chile does not: to cook in the traditional Chilean style you need a lot of water and source of heat to boil it (I exaggerate, but not completely.)) My wife forbade the rest of us to order anything with peanuts in it, but they gave us a starter that they said was peanut-free, but it wasn’t. One bite was enough to make my daughter very ill, even though she spat it out immediately. She had to fly to San Francisco in the following morning.