Here's that same point again. Victoria Smith (previous post) - "The argument against trans women in sex-segregated spaces is not based on their transness, but their maleness."
And here's Karen Ingala Smith, author of Defending Women's Spaces, interviewed by Janice Turner:
The question of whether a trans woman can safely be accommodated alongside women has riven the refuge movement. “They [trans women] are not a potential risk to women because they are trans,” she writes, “but because they are male.” She cites cases of trans prisoners like Karen White who were allowed into female jails and sexually abused inmates. “Prison officers, who are really good at risk-assessing violent men, get it wrong. So how can we screen [people] in five-minute phone calls?”
Sexual abusers will game the system if they can: that's the point. And allowing men to become women just on their say-so, and so have access to women-only spaces, is an obvious magnet for these abusers.
Besides, this is about more than safety. Many women in refuges endured sexual abuse, often as children. Being housed with any males generates a debilitating and involuntary post-traumatic response in the brain. “It’s not hate. It’s not bigotry. It’s not transphobia,” she says. “It is an impact of abuse by men… The presence of a male-bodied person among vulnerable women causes distress and consternation.” She is aghast that Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman who heads Edinburgh Rape Crisis, told The Guilty Feminist podcast last year that female survivors who demand male-free spaces should work to “reframe their trauma”.
In group counselling, she says, male people have been socialised to dominate groups, to ask more questions and take up space, while women have learnt to serve and make way for them. “I remember talking to a woman about what her options were and she started crying. I asked why. She said, ‘Nobody’s ever given me a choice before.’ To recover, women have to centre themselves in their own lives.”
Ingala Smith is CEO of Nia, the women’s refuge charity, and compiles the Counting Dead Women Twitter account. In 2016 she was asked by Labour MP Jess Phillips if she, Phillips, could read out the names of the murdered women on International Women’s Day in parliament. It's now become an annual commemoration. The list not only put male violence in the national spotlight but, says Ingala Smith, “Family after family have said how important it is to hear their loved one’s name read out in parliament, and know it is recorded in Hansard for ever.”
The irony here is that, as far as I'm aware, the Labour Party - very much including Jess Phillips - is still committed to gender ideology, and clings to the mantra "trans women are women". So they would presumably not support Ingala Smith's conviction that women-only spaces must be based on biological sex and should exclude trans women. Indeed, at the end of the article: "the Labour Party has already refused her application for membership".
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