Transphobia is very popular these days.
Oh, they don’t call it transphobia. Of course not. Perish the thought. They call it “protecting women’s spaces” or “ensuring fairness in women’s sport”. They hold forth passionately with incoherent screeds that assume all trans folk are trans women, and therefore men, and therefore inherently dangerous to “real” women. This, they claim, is why governments must pass laws forbidding trans folk from using women’s toilets, and sports organisations must ban trans folk from participating in women’s sport. To protect the womenfolk. As God intended.
You can’t argue with this, they assert. If you do, you’re a sexist. You’re a misogynist. You are colluding with “men” to undo women’s hard-won equality. If you “really” support women, you’ll join them in their self-appointed gatekeeping. After all, you don’t want people to think you are okay with “men dressing up as women” in order to sexually assault “real women” in the toilet, do you? What kind of a monster are you? Why do you hate women and Jesus?
And if you don’t happen to be religious, transphobes are happy to trot out pseudo-science to back up their prejudice. They’ll send you links to internet video rants from people who have no qualifications in any field of science whatsoever – that’ll explain to you why it’s “unfair” to let trans women into any sport (including, if you can believe it, competitive chess).
Of course, this is nothing but an attempt to dress up hate in socially acceptable clothing.1Which, presumably, involves covering up one’s ankles and buttoning one’s shirt so as not to – horrors! – show any skin below the neck. It’s faux feminism and performative piety. And it relies on the idea that you will be so eager to show that you are not some kind of sexist dinosaur that you won’t look too closely at what they’re alleging, and the “solutions” they’re proposing. That you’ll just go along with the idea that there should be a law against trans folk using a public toilet that corresponds to their gender, and you’ll agree it’s “reasonable” to ban trans women from taking part in women’s sports.
There’s something that transphobes don’t talk about when they’re calling for these laws, though. How on earth they could be enforced – particularly their proposed bathroom bans.
Perhaps every public toilet can be manned – or should I say, “real-womanned” – by a police officer ready to strip-search people to see if they have the “right” genitals. Presumably said officer will be trained to recognise the signs of vaginoplasty. Oh wait, you can’t do that without an invasive internal examination. Guess we’ll have to train them to use a speculum. Oh, but we’d need to build a special foyer in all public toilets with an examination table and good lighting as well. Probably not doable.
Maybe we should appoint doorkeepers armed with handy-dandy instant chromosome testing kits. What’s that, you say? Such kits don’t exist? Well, let’s just say they do, and hope someone invents one quick smart. Oh, wait. What happens when someone’s chromosomal assay comes back with a result that isn’t XX or XY? It’s more common than you’d think, and science has long realised that these particular chromosomes are not the be all and end all of sex identification. 2As this 2018 article in Scientific American explains. Guess that idea’s out, too.
Well, then, shall we have 24/7 bathroom guardians whose job it is to subject everyone who wants to use the loo to an on-the-spot gender assessment? You know, measure jawlines, boob size, watch how someone walks. Decide if they’re attractive enough to be a “real” woman. (This one is particularly disgusting. One of the favoured forms of bullying against trans women is to tell them they’re ugly.) If they pass the test, they can go in. If not – well, I guess the bathroom guardians can make a citizen’s arrest and call the police?
Or maybe we should just let the good citizens of Transphobia make those decisions. Let them appoint themselves the bathroom police. That way, they can swing into action when they happen to need the toilet at the same time as a suspected trans woman, or see someone walking into the bathroom in the food court who might be trans. Nothing could go wrong with that, surely. After all, we know how to spot someone who isn’t a “real” woman, don’t we?
Here’s the thing: we don’t. Because the “real” woman that transphobes say they’re protecting doesn’t exist.
Transphobes will tell you they can spot the difference between trans and cis women easily. Cis women are shorter and slighter of build. Their hips are wider. Their “Adam’s apple” doesn’t protrude, they don’t have much body hair, and their breasts are “normal”. The hair on their head is also a “normal” colour. They’ll probably wear dresses, or at least jeans that don’t look too “mannish”. And don’t forget the voice. A “real” woman has a higher voice. See? Easy?
I feel fairly confident in saying that by the time you read that paragraph, you already thought of half a dozen cis women who would fail that test. And several trans women who would pass it.
Take these two images, for instance. One is of a trans woman. The other is of a cis woman. Which one would be more likely to fail the test?
Cis women come in all shapes and sizes, and so do trans women. 3And, contrary to popular transphobe belief, not all trans folk have blue hair. How, then, could anyone ever presume to know which is which?
This might come as a shock to transphobes, but all of us see people every day who are trans. We could be sitting near you on the train, or running the cash register at your local supermarket. We could be your hairdresser, your cleaner, the person who delivers your mail or drives the Uber you booked to take you home from the club last Saturday. We might have been dancing mere inches away at said club.
We’re your work colleagues, and we’re those friends-of-friends you see at parties occasionally. We’re picking up our kids from school, too, and you might even have given us a smile and nod as we both tried to wrangle those kids into our respective cars. We passed you that magazine when we were both waiting for our doctor’s appointments. We’ve sat in the next cubicle to you in a public toilet, and washed our hands in adjacent sinks.
Do you understand? We are part of your everyday community, and always have been.
I’m sure there’s someone out there saying, “Aha! But I recognised Dylan Mulvaney in that photo, and therefore that is the trans one!” Yes, but how do we know that? Because someone measured her proportions against some concocted standard? Because she was subjected to invasive procedures to inspect her body? Because someone analysed her blood and spotted a Y chromosome? No.
Because she told us so herself.
And that’s what these proposed bathroom bans depend on, really – the idea that we, as trans folk, will police ourselves. The only possible way these bans could be enforced is if every trans woman chooses to obey them. It’s an impossible choice. Risk getting caught, or risk using a men’s toilet.
Transphobes like to claim that cis women are in danger of being sexually assaulted by trans women, but the truth is that trans women – particularly those of colour – are far, far more likely to suffer sexual assault, at the hands of cis men. The statistics are there. Look them up. A trans woman entering a public men’s toilet, even at a school, puts herself at risk.
If she decides to ignore the ban, and someone else decides that their civic duty is to report her, then she faces the humiliation of being forced to answer questions that violate her right to privacy, whether they’re posed by shopping centre security or police. Even if she then agrees not to enter the bathroom, transphobes insist that prosecution would be necessary under their ban, and so the woman faces the prospect of paying a fine for the “crime” of being trans, or – worst case – being forced to justify her existence in court.
Think it couldn’t happen? Think again. Even before this latest round of bathroom hysteria, transphobes were taking it upon themselves to police who entered women’s bathrooms. There are also numerous recorded cases of cis women being harassed for “looking trans”, by both other cis women and by men. In one case, a cis man barged into a women’s toilet because he thought the cis woman he saw going in “dressed like a man”. In another, a cis woman with short hair was subject to an aggressive, transphobic rant from another cis woman who had concluded “that’s a boy”.
Clearly, then, transphobes cannot tell who is cis and who is trans – and they appear to be of the opinion that it’s better to apologise later than to take the risk a trans woman might fool them. This isn’t just completely unacceptable behaviour – it’s exactly the kind of sexism transphobes say they are fighting against. They want the right to say who is and isn’t allowed to be in the “real women” club, and if you don’t conform to clearly sexist criteria, then you won’t get given even the most basic courtesy of being allowed to go to the bathroom in peace. That’s what happens to cis women; think about what happens when the woman subjected to this harassment really is trans.
Bathroom bans protect no one. Not even cis women. The threat of sexual assault from cis men who attack women in public toilets is a terrible reality, and banning trans women from those spaces will not make cis women any safer. Transphobes know this. They have always known this. Any claim of concern for women’s safety is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to make their hatred of trans folk seem justified.
What, then, is a trans woman supposed to do? Have herself fitted with a urinary catheter? Cross her legs and hold it until she gets home? Not leave home in the first place?
Transphobes don’t care. Just like they don’t acknowledge that they can’t possibly enforce their proposed bans, they don’t care how badly trans women are hurt. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that is what they want.
In the transphobes’ perfect world, trans folk wouldn’t exist at all. Unfortunately for them, we do – and so transphobes dream up increasingly vicious ways to make our lives as miserable as possible. All in the name of their baseless prejudice. And if their bullying and harassment and violence kills some of us, or makes us take our own lives out of despair? That’s a win for them, because it means there are less trans folk in the world.
Next time someone tells you that it’s important to “protect women’s spaces” by banning trans women, ask them how they think such a ban would work. Ask them how’d they feel if someone harassed them, their daughters, their sisters, or their friends. Ask them how they like the idea that they might have to reassure a complete stranger or an open court that their genitals conform to some imaginary idea of “normal”. Ask them to demonstrate how banning trans women will make cis men stop attacking cis women.
Ask the questions that transphobes don’t want you to ask. Don’t let them hide behind their faux feminism and performative piety. Expose this for what it is – just another attempt to co-opt reasonable people into supporting their prejudices.
