The excellent article by Miranda Roberts (Sun 22nd July 2018) was a forceful plea against giving support to feminist groups who are anti-transgender rights because of the risks this supposedly creates for non-transgender women. I am conflicted, and I suspect a lot of people are in the same place. From where I stand (I confess I am a happily married hetero-sexual middle class white pensioner, not so old age if you please though I have to admit I am probably horribly old to some) there are genuine concerns but more importantly attitudes need to change.
When I was young boys and men changed for the swimming pool in open spaces. No one thought twice about the naked man next to them, although you did of course not stare. When I was a teenager and young adult I believe that many clothes shops had open changing rooms for women, though I never came across one for men, you always had a cubicle. But this was not a problem for the ladies (as far as I know, much as I would have liked to check for myself). Now I am older (or rather actually old), I find it strange that my (adult) son will only undress in a cubicle and is shy about his body in front of me or the general public.
I don't have the advantage of seeing what happens in the ladies changing room, but I wonder what would happen when a self-identifying woman with a penis gets naked in the ladies? You can guess the range of reactions if someone with a woman's body, however they self-identified, did the same in the gents. This is all a bit light-hearted but when you think of men crossdressing to gain access to women-only environments then it becomes serious.
We seem to have arrived at a point in society when we are questioning what it means to be a man or a woman. Is it physical attributes, genetic or a psychological outlook? The terms man and woman were for millennia ways of talking about males and females of the species; indeed the dictionary definition of a woman was "adult human female", a term that had moved into the centre of the storm of transgender rights. (The same should be true pari passu for "man = adult human male", but somehow trans men don't figure so much in the highly visible so-called "trans debate" - either because they are not so problematic to men as trans women are to women, or possibly just because they are female and therefore don't count so much in a misogynistic world. I don't think this is farfetched; most people considering transition are young females, yet most fuss is made about trans women).
But once man and woman were redefined as representing social constructs of "what it means to be a man or woman in society", the door was open to arguments about whether the concept of gender represented anything physical or was just about ways of expressing oneself. It was not long before trans advocates moved on from there to the idea that sex itself was no more a biological fact than gender. Now I can see one may argue that if gender is not equal to sex it can be a matter of personal interpretation, though I cannot see the point of language that has no meaning other than to the user, the same is not true of biological sex that is determined by genes from the point of conception. It is ironic that the trans argument, that sex is subjective, brings us full circle to gender and sex being the same thing, but then if Sex and gender are the same, at least one of those terms is pointless and if what the terms mean to you is different to what they mean to me, as elements of our language they become useless.
Of course biological sex has not gone away. It cannot be wished away by someone who has a preference, or a psychological need, to be a different sex than the one they are born with. This is the reality for trans people and instead of arguing that sex, like gender, is a social construct, it would be better to accept that gender and sex are different things and move on to address the issues that this gives rise to, including discrimination faced by trans people, the safety and identity of women, the way transition is and should be dealt with in young people, and so on.
It is time that we moved on. Sex is not gender is not sexuality. Society should treat everyone as human beings and respect their needs as far as possible and where there are conflicts, then discuss and resolve them as far as possible. But demands are not the same as needs. Biological males who would like to present themselves as women, no matter how deep seated this feeling is in their psychology, cannot demand that they are treated as female, and cannot be treated as women in every respect. Medical science cannot work if epidemiology does not distinguish between male and female. National statistics on crime, welfare, income and many other topics are less meaningful if trans people are merely counted in their preferred gender, though data would be interesting if we identified both gender and sex. Competitive sport cannot be fair if females are expected to compete, in those sports where physical characteristics are relevant, with males, irrespective of how much hormone therapy those males are subject to. Sex based rights are generally in place to protect females from male aggression and competition, but no matter how much trans women are potentially subject to the same threats when they are based on sex they cannot include trans women.
All that is said about protecting the rights and safety of women, might equally apply to trans women, because it is probably true that the main threat to women is men and the main threat to trans women is men too. Concerns about the welfare and safety of trans women are of course important but need their own solutions. Practical solutions in some areas may include differentiating on the basis of preferred gender rather than sex, but that cannot be applied as a generalisation across the board without significantly disadvantaging biological females.
I am a heterosexual male, but am called out for occasionally wearing a dress because I am being disrespectful, of transgender women, who by the way are allowed to wear trousers like any other woman. Why? What you wear does not define your sex. Whether you want to pee sitting down or standing up does not define your sex. Whether you wear make up or not does not define your sex. That is not to say that men and women are the same, or that trans people and cis people are the same. And the trans acronym should not be TWAW, but TWAT. Trans Women are Trans, not women.
Politicians of many parties have been captured by a view that trans people are a minority; "the most oppressed minority" in society. This does not help society to move forward. They should start to think not how they can garner votes from one minority or from a particular political caucus, but should ask how we can move forward without removing protection from another group in society - which happens to be a majority - Women. If they don't then they will lose the votes af a majority of the population.
