As you may have heard already, trans folks got an early Christmas present in the UK: A transphobic woman lost her employment trial, establishing a trans friendly case law and also paying for the privilege of doing so.
In the wake of it J.K. Rowling dropped all pretence of not being a transphobe and the transphobic “persecution” cries are doing a round again. At the centre of their argument is that People who were AMAB pose a threat to women and girls in female only spaces*. They, including the very nice lady who didn’t get her contract renewed (she wasn’t even sacked as people would want to make you believe) believe that this is true regardless of what steps the person has done to transition** , which is part of why the judge ruled against the transphobe as the view was absolutist and “[t]hat belief is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”
This doesn’t keep transphobes from keeping claiming that trans women are a threat to cis women in changing rooms and I think that one reason why they’re particularly successful in Britain is because of their unusual layout of changing rooms. Whether in France, Spain or Germany, wherever you go shopping, the fitting rooms are unisex. Single stalls with a door or a curtain. It wouldn’t be hard to sneak a peak, and occasionally you can’t help seeing something when there’s a curtain that doesn’t close perfectly and a mirror, but you’re supposed to handle it like a grown up. Going to fitting room the first time in the UK was a culture shock there were separate ones for men and women and the women’s was a large open room with a couple of individual stalls that you could use if you tried on swimwear or something. Everybody else stripped and dressed together much like a gym locker. I guess you can see why that would be the image that flashes before UK people’s eyes when they hear “unisex” toilets or fitting rooms. Our communal swimming pool has always had “unisex” changing rooms: individual stalls that you enter on the “street side” of the pool and leave at the pool side. There’s also “family changing rooms”. No fucking body is forced to share space with somebody else while naked (unless you go to the sauna, but then that’s what you pay extra for).
Of course transphobes are not ignorant. The vocal ones are well educated and have for sure travelled to the continent and further away. They know what unisex toilets and changing rooms look like, but they choose not to correct their audience. Much like all other reactionaries who know better but who selectively present “facts” to mislead people who are probably well intentioned but just not as well read or travelled.
*Apparently boys are safe in male only spaces. For reasons. Or they don’t count. I don’t know.
**Now, just to make it clear: All trans women are women. I don’t care about the state of your junk or whether you stuff your bras with tissues or tits. None of them are my business. Unless you’re using live tits. That’s animal cruelty.
Ouch. I have never been in the UK. I had no clue about this. By the way, in Latvia fitting rooms are the same as in Germany.
Personally, I don’t mind being in the same room with lots of semi-naked men, but I can imagine how a lot of other people, regardless of their sex or gender identity, would prefer privacy instead. To me such communal dressing rooms sound like a bad idea in general (there exist cis people who feel shy about their appearance and don’t like being seen naked by anybody).
Last time I went to a sauna (in Latvia), it was unisex, people were expected to keep on their swimsuits.
It very much depends on the kind of store whether the fitting rooms have cubicles or are open plan. Generally I would say that cheaper stores and/or stores for younger people are more likely to be open plan than more expensive stores for older people.
But I am very glad the emplyoment tribunal found agaisnt this transphobe.
Over here, communal pools have gender segregated open locker rooms and saunas -- most everyone wants to use the sauna, and by tradition you’re supposed to go there naked. There’s been some persistent suspicion that wearing a swimsuit in sauna is somehow “unhygienic”, though we seem to be getting slowly over that.
(Sometimes, women janitors can be seen scrubbing the floor of men’s locker room during opening hours. Nobody seems to know if this ever goes the other way round.)
In any clothing store I was at in the US changing rooms are individual stalls with doors. The ones where I have been are gender-inclusive (though in department stores some will likely be biased towards one gender or the other due to being located near a department selling clothes coded towards one gender), but I understand that some stores do label their individual-stall changing rooms by gender -- hence the ‘scandal’ when conservatives decided to boycott Target for their gender-inclusive changing room policy.
TERF trash panicking about bathrooms and change rooms is predicated on fictions and falsehoods:
1) “All Transgender women are cishetero men sneaking in!”
If I wore “male” clothes and only went to gay bars and dated men, TERFs wouldn’t say anything. But suddenly I’m a “sexual threat” because I’m wearing my favourite skirt and makeup? My sexual attractions haven’t changed one iota.
2) “They’re sneaking into change rooms to spy on us naked!”
Then why don’t TERFs demand store change rooms have locking, solid doors? Why don’t TERFs demand separate change rooms at swimming pools? Because TERFs don’t want Transgender people seen anywhere in public. They lack the decency to say it openly.
Scant few places have family change rooms. Around my way, those that do usually let Trans people change there. I don’t mind using them, even if it is a form of segregation.
3) “We’re so desirable that Trans women all want to rape us!”
Forget the fact that there’s no attraction and zero history of sexual impropriety by Trans people, who would even want to be in the same room with TERFs, their personalities and hateful racist and rightwing ideologies?
Don’t forget, as Janice Raymond explained, that transsexual women rape all cis women by the mere fact of transsexual existence. If we are already raping all women all at once every moment of our lives, why wouldn’t it be reasonable to consider each and every one of us a threat to rape any one specific woman at any one specific moment?
TERF TLDR: Janice Raymond was right and totally not off her nut!
Whatevs, bigots.
Locker rooms. I don’t know about anyone else, but my main goal in the locker room is get dressed and get the hell out of there. The last thing I want to do is hang out and ogle people.
Intransitive
I’m not trans, but I can only imagine that you feel about these people like I do about the “MGTOW” crew who keep yelling “we’re leaving, we’re leaving, you’re fat and nobody wants to fuck you!!!!”
I don’t want to be in the same room as them and “naked in bed with them” would be the stuff of the nightmares you wake up from crying.
Andreas Avester
Germans are (in)famous for being really relaxed around naked people and having few nudity taboos. There are a few “textile saunas”, but most are mixed and naked. Occasionally Mr and I manage to break free for a day to go to a spa. You’ll sit naked with a bunch of people of all ages and sizes and even abilities and nobody thinks anything about it because it’s just bodies. It’s sadly still cisnormative. I’ve also been to the local swimming pool sauna alone and spent a nice time with total strangers being total naked, doing lots of small talk.
I wonder if the gender segregation in Finnish sauna is in part because everyone is assumed to want to use the sauna, not just those who feel truly comfortable with nudity. Of course, the problem here is that “inclusion of everyone” doesn’t traditionally take into account trans and gnc people. Besides, I can tell that some cis men feel awkward in nude sauna anyway, or prefer to go alone if possible.
Of course, a swimsuit doesn’t always help either. Some public pools have established women-only swimming hours to accommodate the women (mainly those from non-Western backgrounds) who don’t want to show up skimpily dressed in front of men. As you might guess, this arrangement initially drew some backlash from both islamophobes and MRAs.
The problem with countering the transphobes’ “arguments” is that they don’t actually care about what they’re complaining about. Even if you convince everybody else that their claims are nonsense, they’ll just come up with new ones. Sort of a Gish Gallop. They just hate us, and the stuff they say has nothing to do with why they hate us.
I imagine the origins of their hatred varies from person to person.
The only transphobe who I know much about besides their transphobia is Ophelia Benson, and my impression is that she just needs people to hate. At one point, she was gunning for the Skepchicks, I assume she stopped because she became aware that nobody else would accept it. Then she was full frontal Islamophobe, which worked out because Islamophobia is acceptable in atheist circles. Then she tried dumping on trans women and found both allies and enemies, which apparently satisfies her need.
The politicians seem mainly motivated by the desire to find a bogeyman for their flocks to be afraid of, and gays and lesbians don’t work so well because the population at large has started knowing gay and lesbian people and can’t take the wild slanders seriously. If some day the population at large discovers that trans people are just people, they’ll find a new target.
As for the Janice Raymonds and Julie Bindells, this is just a guess, but I think maybe they’re mainly enraged by what the Patriarchy is doing to “their people,” but The Patriarchy is too big and powerful for them to do any damage to (any more than an ant can hurt a truck), so they go after trans women, who they can hurt, which makes them feel like they have some power.
As Grace Slick never sang:
Don’t you want somebody to hate,
Don’t you need somebody to hate
….