Bathrooms, Boundaries, & Bullies
Why women and girls are still fighting for single-sex facilities
The recent case of Tish Hyman, whose gym membership was revoked after she objected to a man (a so-called “transwoman”) in the women’s locker room. Hopefully, this will renew a conversation that women have been trying to have over the problems of how trans identified men violate women’s boundaries, privacy, and dignity when they invade women’s intimate spaces against our consent.
Women have been fighting a public war over bathrooms for over 200 years all around the globe. While the Suffragettes won this war in the late 1800s for women in most European countries, North America, and Australia, it has never stopped being a battle for many women in South America, Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Why have women been fighting for sex-designated bathrooms? For the privacy, safety, and dignity of our female bodies. This is about protecting women and girls based on the characteristic of sex. It’s 2023 and bathrooms are still a global issue for women and girls. While women in economically impoverished counties are still fighting for safe places to use the bathroom, women who once enjoyed the benefits our Suffragette sisters fought hard for and won are now losing all the sex-based provisions we previously enjoyed.
Through the 1850’s-80’s our foremothers like the Suffragettes, Ladies Sanitary Association, and women’s work unions like the Union of Women’s Liberal and Radical Associations fought for women’s right to have public bathrooms for women and women’s bathrooms in mixed-sex work environments. Although women were instrumental in the war effort working in munitions factories, when the men returned to work, one of the reasons owners and foremen gave for not allowing women to work was that there were no bathrooms for ladies. Public bathrooms for women did not become popularized until the late 1800’s. Before this, women’s ability to participate in public life was restricted by what was termed the “urinary leash” which determined how far a woman could travel and still be able to return home or to the house of friends or family to relieve herself. This was an effective way to control women’s movements and political participation.
To this day, women around the globe still face the “urinary leash.” In sub-Saharan Africa 1 in 10 girls miss school because of a lack of bathrooms during their periods.1 UNICEF reports that in places like Ethopia, Kenya, India women face rates of sexual assaults 40-50% more than women with access to sex-designated bathrooms. In India, female gig-workers went on strike over the issue of sex-segregated bathrooms.2 I created this bathroom thread on Twitter to archive many of the articles which describe why sex-based bathrooms for women & girls are so important:
Public bathrooms for women and girls remain a global issue especially in rural or economically disadvantaged areas, but it’s become an issue once again even in places where sex-designated facilities exist in plenty. Although the signage on the doors haven’t changed from men/women, boys/girls, spaces that were once sex-designated are now mixed-sex because of the newly introduced category of “gender identity.” The immutable category of sex has been replaced in language and law by the undefinable category of “gender identity.” In many places this change has taken place with no pubic commentary, debate, or due process. For example, on President Biden’s very first day in office he signed an executive order, (EO 13988) Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation. This order effectively redefined the word “sex” at the federal level to include “gender identity.” This meant that all federally funded agencies had to act in compliance with the order in order to continue to receive funding, where compliance meant allowing men/boys into women/girls sex-designated provisions like bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, prisons, and shelters based on their personal self declarations of any number of special identity categories.
The term “gender identity” has no discrete definition. It is a tautological maze of meaninglessness. There are 100’s of claimed identities, all of them are self-defined and self-prescribed. These identities include not just “transwoman” and “transman,” but also non-binary, agender, gender fluid, demi flux, nutrios gender, demiboy/demigirl, and on and on… wherever someone has use of an imagination and a flare for creating nonsensical language new “gender identities” spawn into being. Regardless of arguments for “gender identity” that appeal to emotions, psychology, brain chemistry, or “born in the wrong body,” there is no compelling reason why any spaces should be segregated by identity categories. The reason we have had sex-segregated spaces and sports in the first place was for the privacy, safety, and fairness of women’s bodies. Our foremothers did not create this provisions so we could have places for shared identity, nor places for brain chemistry, nor shared psychology, but because of our shared developmental pathway, aka, our sex. Women and men have different bodies, and this is the reason we segregate bathrooms and locker rooms by sex.
Sex-based safeguarding remains an important factor for women/girls. In fact sexual crimes are on the rise. While men commit the overwhelming majority of rape, nearly 97%, women/girls make up the majority of victims, roughly 70%. Thus sex recognition remains an important factor in sex-based safeguarding.
Briefly during #MeToo, women and girls were encouraged to speak out and speak up about their sexual assaults, to demand consent, and put up clear boundaries around their bodies. Ironically, just a few years later, women and girls are being told to do the exact opposite, rather than demand respect for their bodies and boundaries, they are being told to respect men’s rights to violate their boundaries based on men’s self declared identity claims. They are faced with signs like the ones below where they are told that if they see someone who they think is in the wrong bathroom to “respect their privacy/identity” and to “protect them from harm.” Women and girls, rather than being encouraged to speak up and out about their own discomfort, are told it is their responsibility to make men feel comfortable in women’s spaces. Women and girls are no longer told to trust the authority of their bodies when it comes to safeguarding, but instead to deny the authority of their bodies and not to challenge intruders.
Women have no way of discerning good men from bad men, that is why we have had sex designated spaces. As @Exluansic (on twitter) as reminded us, “good men stay out so bad men stand out.” This has been a largely effective way to safeguard women’s spaces in the past. Data such as the Target Study show that when women’s sex designated spaces are switched to “gender identity” designated spaces instances of sexual assault, voyeurism, and exhibitionism increase by 190%. Fair Play for women shows that mixed-sex spaces are far less safe than single-sex spaces for women and girls.
The emotional manipulation placed on women and girls constitutes abuse. Women and girls are told that men who claim special identity categories are less safe in men’s spaces. We are meant to have compassion for the discomfort of these men and deny our own discomfort and need for safety. Some men may feel more vulnerable in men’s spaces; gay men, young men, pretty men, disabled men, sex stereotype nonconforming men, or men who claim special identities. This is an issue for men to resolve amongst themselves. Women and girls are not human shields for vulnerable men. There is never a reason for men to violate women and girls’ boundaries around our bodies. It is not women/girls’ job to have to mentally analyze men’s reasons for being in a sex designated space, it is women/girls’ responsibility to trust their own bodies and respond to their own instincts when it comes to safeguarding.
Sites like Reduxx Magazine, the facebook group This Never Happens, as well as the twitter hashtag #ThisNeverHappens, document and archive instances of men who rape, kill, and sexually abuse women and girls while claiming special gender identities. Two girls in Louden County Virginia were raped in a school bathroom by a boy claiming to be “gender fluid,” 80 year old Julie Jaman in Port Townsend, WA, and 17 year old Rebecca Philips in Santee, CA were both gaslit by the YMCA when they alerted management to a man in the women’s locker room showers. Both were told they couldn’t trust their own bodies and they didn’t see what they saw, that the men in question were not men at all but instead “transwomen.” Instances such as these are few among the thousands of cases. These archives underscore the need for sex recognition when it comes to sex-based crimes and sex-based safeguarding provisions. Although women are accused of equating all men claiming to be “tranwomen” of being predators, this is not the case. We are simply including ALL MEN in the category of men when it comes to sex.
There is so much DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) when it comes to women/girls standing up for boundaries around our bodies. Women and girls who do stand up and speak out are often accused of being bigots, of being the harassers of “transwomen,” we are the ones accused of discrimination, and often the ones punished in the end. Julie Jaman was banned from the YMCA for life after calling attention to a man who was helping little girls with their bathing suits. We are also accused of not being “inclusive,” but here is the thing, boundaries necessarily require EXCLUSION. Women/girls demand boundaries based on the immutable characteristic of sex. We don’t demand boundaries on the basis of our shared identity, but on the basis of sex. We don’t exclude men/boys in our sex-designated spaces on the basis of their identity but on the basis of sex. We are saying that regardless of identity claims, women girls demand sex designated spaces, we demand the right of consent, the right to say NO to men/boys on the basis of sex and on that alone.
https://ideas4development.org/en/unexpected-link-access-toilets-womens-rights/
https://theleaflet.in/no-bathrooms-no-safety-no-formalisation-for-indias-women-gig-workers-companies-promises-ring-hollow/
this piece starts out with a comment about tish hyman. in the follow up tmz interviews with the gold's gym agp, when asked if he'd use a third unisex space if offered, he hedged and said no there'd have to be mtf and ftm rooms and then tapered off prolly thinking about the nbs. wish someone had pointed out his own hypocritical discomfort at being forced into a 'trans inclusive' space, just as he demands women be now.
I love this! But one historical thing you should be aware of, Amy, is that the best term to use is "suffragists," not "suffragettes." This was something I learned in a presentation about the fight for women's voting rights in the US. the activists called themselves "suffragists," but their opponents coined the term "suffragettes," using the feminine diminutive suffix to mock them.