For a while, I, and other supporters of trans rights, have been trying to keep the debate about GRA reform to just the GRA reform. It is mostly opponents of trans rights who have been trying to widen the debate and pretend that GRA reform affects a bunch of other issues. The GRA reform doesn’t affect these things, and we shouldn’t pretend that it does, nor should we delay or otherwise interfere with the GRA reform’s passage because of those issues.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore those issues. There are a lot of lies going around that are make at least some cis women afraid, and those lies need countering. There are also some actual concerns.
Q: Will cis men be able to pretend to be trans women without actually transitioning and therefore demand access to women-only spaces?
A: I’m tempted to say something like “are you kidding?”, but let’s take the question seriously:
Firstly, most “women-only spaces” (like toilets and changing-rooms) are run on an honour system. There’s a sign, and you go into the one that you feel is most appropriate to you. So it’s not like there is anything to stop a cis man going into the women’s toilets. Clearly, security staff and/or police could eventually remove them if they are causing trouble, but I don’t see how saying “I’m a woman” is going to make any difference to that. If they’re not causing trouble, then, well, how much of a problem was there in the first place? After all, people (of both the most popular genders) have been going in the “wrong” toilet when there’s a big queue (e.g. at a concert or a sport event) at the other one for years.
Secondly, other “women-only spaces” (like rape and domestic violence shelters) have a person determining who is allowed in and who isn’t. They already have to have rules for keeping some cis women out, because some of their residents have been abused by cis women, and also because male abusers sometimes recruit other women (sisters, mothers, new partners) to continue the harassment and abuse on their behalf. Just being a woman doesn’t get you past an individual threat assessment. Even if an abusive man went through a process to get female ID paperwork (and even the proposed GRA process is much more hassle than the current driving licence process – I can’t imagine someone that was deciding by paperwork accepting a birth certificate and rejecting a driving licence), that still wouldn’t get him in.
The same should apply to prisons – everyone sentenced for a crime should face an individual risk assessment to decide which prison to put them in, and the same any time they are transferred, including transferring from men’s to women’s prisons. That should apply to every prisoner. It seems that the prison service hasn’t been following their own policies (perhaps because of a lack of resources?) in a few cases recently, which have resulted in some genuinely awful situations, including trans women killing themselves in men’s prisons and sex offenders (it’s unclear from reports whether they were cis men lying about being trans or actual trans women) sexually assaulting women in women’s prisons. That’s not just true about trans people; there are serious problems with the prison service in the UK and they need addressing. When the policy they have is followed and properly resourced, then it has worked; the Prison Service needs to start abiding by its own rules and needs adequate resources to be able to do so.
Q: Some trans women have either not yet completed physical transition, or choose not to have surgery. That means that they still have penises. That’s not really a problem in toilets, and what you’ve just described about the higher-security situations is reassuring, but what about communal changing rooms and showers?
A: I don’t know about women’s changing rooms beyond what women tell me, but you’d have to be really staring at people to spot a penis in men’s changing rooms. People don’t go flaunting their genitalia about. Trans women, especially, are not generally very keen on their penises (that’s why so many of them eventually have their penis removed), so are especially unlikely to go waving them about. Because genital surgery is just about the last step in the process of transition, there are always going to be a bunch of trans women around with penises – even if you only count people who are eventually going to have genital surgery as being properly trans (which, to be clear, I don’t) – but they will also often have otherwise feminine bodies. Since they clearly can’t use the men’s changing rooms and showers, the only options are that they can’t use facilities where they have to change, or that they use the women’s changing rooms. Most places now have at least some private changing rooms (often described as “family rooms” because they’re intended to allow parents to change with their different-gender children) and perhaps cis women who would have an unusually strong reaction to a trans woman with a penis (for instance, as a result of past sexual abuse) should consider using those?
If you’re thinking about changing rooms in clothes shops, then they’re often not segregated in the first place. You’re in a individual cubicle, not in a shared space, so it doesn’t really matter who is in the next cubicle anyway.
You might see some transphobes pointing at a handful of cases where trans women have got photos showing their penises with them in various public places. What you may not spot, because they often take the photos out of context, is that these are almost always people who work in “adult entertainment” (ie, porn, stripping, or prostitution) and, well, cis women who work in those jobs also have lots of photos of themselves in public places with their primary genitalia exposed. The fact that a porn actress will have a photo taken in a shared changing room of her genitalia really says nothing about the normal behaviour of women (cis or trans).
Q: OK, but trans is a much wider concept than binary trans women. What about non-binary people or trans people who are also intersex or other people who don’t fit neatly into the category of “women” or “men”?
A: This is why trans rights campaigners have been pushing desegregation where possible in the first place. If you aren’t either a woman or a man, and the choices are “women’s toilet” or “men’s toilet”, which one are you supposed to use?
I think the only plausible answer is “whichever one makes you feel less uncomfortable”. But the ideal answer is that we don’t have that sort of segregation any more. Reorganise facilities to offer enough privacy that they can be mixed whereever possible. If that can’t be done, then I think it’s incumbent on binary cis people to be accepting of non-binary people using the facility they are most comfortable in. And, obviously, non-binary people can’t go into strictly women-only spaces (like domestic violence shelters) because they aren’t women. Of course, the GRA has nothing to do with non-binary people because we don’t allow legal documents to have a non-binary status. International passport rules allow for M F or X, but the UK won’t issue X passports and it should.
Part of the confusion here is that some transphobes refuse to refer to trans women as women and call them “trans” (often as a noun) – so, when trans allies and trans people say that “trans” is much wider than binary trans women, they think, or pretend that they think, that we’re saying that every trans person who was assigned male at birth is a trans woman. We aren’t saying that. Only the binary trans women are trans women. You can be trans and non-binary. All that means is that you were assigned either male or female at birth and you identify with a non-binary gender. Estimates vary, but between two thirds and three quarters of trans people are non-binary, the vast majority of whom do not want to have genital surgery. This means that binary trans women are a small minority of trans people, but they form the vast majority of people seeking surgery (very few non-binary people seek surgery; binary trans men are much less likely to seek surgery than binary trans women, in part because the results of transition surgery for trans men are not generally as good as for trans women). This has been used by transphobes to pretend that most trans women do not want surgery.
Another confusion is that a lot of stories about transgender or about trans women are illustrated with photos of drag performers. People then reasonably start asking questions like “which toilet should Conchita Wurst use?”. Conchita Wurst is a fictional character and doesn’t use real-world toilets at all. It’s like asking which toilet Hermione Granger uses. Thomas Neuwirth uses the men’s; Emma Watson uses the women’s. Drag performers may, in some sense, be in a broad trans umbrella. But no-one claims that drag queens are women. They’re cis men playing female characters. They use female pronouns when they are in-character because they are the pronouns about their character, not because they are actually women.
Q: What about sport? Trans women have an advantage over cis women, don’t they?
A: Trans women who have been on hormone therapy for more than a year or two (the time period in the rules varies between sports) do not have an advantage over cis women. Trans women have been allowed to compete in the Olympics for over a decade and have never won a medal – if this was a huge advantage, there would be lots of examples of trans women with Olympic medals. A few trans women have succeeded in sport, at lower levels, but not out of proportion with the (small) numbers of trans women involved in sport. The idea that trans women are going to dominate women’s sport is bunk – if that was going to happen, it already would have happened.
There is quite a long list of trans women who have won various competitions, which can easily look like trans women dominating sport to someone who doesn’t pay much attention to sport. Just as an example of how many competitions there are in sport: In the UK, there is an annual event run by the BBC called “Sports Personality of the Year” which celebrates British sporting success. One segment of that is a montage of every British world champion individual or team from the year. The segment is usually about ten minutes long and goes through hundreds of champions, about half of whom are women. That’s just British world champions. There are an astonishingly large number of women who win sporting competitions in a year. A tiny fraction of them are trans.
At some junior levels of sport, trans women and (especially) trans girls are allowed to compete before they have completed the usual 1-2 years on hormone therapy. This is so that a teenager doesn’t have to give up sport entirely for a year or two when they transition (which is, for obvious reasons, more of an issue with teenagers than older sportspeople). These trans girls do absolutely have an advantage if they went through male puberty (if they had puberty blockers before puberty, then they don’t) until the testosterone gets out of their system and their muscles reform in the changed hormonal environment. At these levels, though, sport is not simply a competition; it’s also a case of encouraging people to exercise and participate – and excluding people from participation for years goes directly against the spirit of sporting participation.
Q: Speaking of puberty blockers, aren’t there problems with giving them to relatively young people (ie starting before puberty, that, presumably, being the point)?
A: Like all medication, they do have side-effects, but not using them means committing to irreversible changes to the body. If those changes will be distressing (because of gender dysphoria) for the rest of that child’s life, then the risks are pretty small in comparison. There are a few medium-term (ie trying to be long-term, but they haven’t had enough time to complete) studies into health effects, which have not found significant effects with puberty blockers in general. There is currently a study (by the FDA in the US) into one specific blocker (lupron) which may have negative side effects – but that doesn’t affect the other dozen or so puberty blockers. Lupron is not the recommended first-line puberty blocker anyway; it’s getting on for 20 years since it was commonly used for trans-related health care.
Puberty blockers (which can be started around 10-12 years of age) are reversible. Children of that age do sometimes change their minds, which is why making an irreversible decision either to use hormone therapy, or to continue with an unblocked puberty is not recommended by medical best practice.
Q: Don’t trans women commit more crimes than cis women?
A: No. There is a Swedish study that shows that they did until 1989 but haven’t done so since. The assumption (there’s no way to be sure about what was going on that far back without having looked into it at the time, and no-one did) is that the problem was more that trans women were much poorer and faced much more discrimination before the late 1980s than they have since, and it’s well-known that people in poverty and people who are discriminated against commit more crimes than people who aren’t. Incidentally, the study was on the period 1975-2003 and 1989 was just the halfway point through their study. There’s no particular reason to pick that year – but “somewhere between the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties” is what the evidence points to.
This was based on trans women who had entered into the official Swedish medical and legal transition system, so yes, it’s possible that trans women who haven’t started official legal and medical processes are more likely to commit crimes than ones that haven’t. If they are more likely to enter transition after going to prison than closeted trans women who are not imprisoned, that would mean that the numbers of trans women in prison would be somewhat elevated. But there’s no way to know that, because there is no way to know how many closeted trans women there are, so you can’t measure the base rate. But trans women who don’t enter the official systems won’t be able to get changed ID (for obvious reasons) so any changes to the process for getting ID clearly can’t make them more dangerous.
Importantly, the study was into all crime, not specifically violent crime. There is no evidence (either way) on violent crime or sex crime specifically.
Q: What about trans women working with children? Especially in women-only jobs like Girl Guide (Girl Scout in the US) leaders?
A: Are trans women a greater threat to children than cis women? The basic safeguarding principle here is that some groups (e.g. people with criminal convictions) are a higher risk than the general population and therefore should be prevented from having positions of authority over children. There are, of course, some cases of trans women abusing children. There are also cases of cis women abusing children. Unless there is some evidence of the numbers of trans women being statistically significantly higher than the numbers of cis women (hint: there isn’t), then there’s no reason to stop trans women from working with children. One case is not enough, unless you’d accept that one case of a cis woman abusing children is enough to ban all cis women from working with children.
As for women-only jobs, there clearly needs to be a rule in those jobs about at what point in transition a woman can apply for the job.
Q: What about trans men?
Trans men are often left out of this discussion. Trans men are, of course, men and therefore, when facilities are segregated, use the men’s facilities. Early transition trans men are at some risk from transphobic and/or misogynistic (cis) men when doing so. They choose their own timing to start using the men’s facilities, based on when they feel safe to do so. This means that some early-transition trans men will be using women’s facilities.
Most transphobes concentrate on trans women, so there are many fewer claims going around about trans men that need debunking, which is why this is shorter than the long section about trans women.
But, just to be clear (especially because I’m a cis man writing this), trans men are men; where there are sex or gender segregated facilities, they should use the men’s facilities.
Q: So why are people making a fuss about this?
A: Because there are a lot of people who don’t want to acknowledge that a trans woman is an actual woman. There are a very few who will acknowledge some trans women and not others, and want to ensure that only the ones they regard as being transitioned enough are treated as women (exactly what they think the women are who are on the way but aren’t that transitioned yet is something they never specify), but the vast majority of the opposition comes from people who regard all trans women as being men (or, in some cases, a separate category of “transwomen who are male but not men”). They know that saying what they believe in straightforward language is going to get them dismissed as transphobes, so they put out scare stories about men (by which they mean trans women, but they want you to think they mean cis men) “pretending” to be women and going into women’s toilets or changing rooms, etc.
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