Delimiting transwomen's claim on womens spaces

The force of arguments for transwomen's claim rests upon oppression: that these particular males are at risk in males' spaces. Without that it is only about wanting/wishing/preference – and that will neither overcome the plain fact that they are men, nor outweigh women's own want for segregation as already legislatively established.

The question then is: how do men know who the transwomen are, so as to victimise them? That is the decider in this dispute. The criterion for transwomen entering women's spaces is the criterion for them leaving men's spaces. If they are not recognisable targets in this relevant characteristic, they do not need, so do not qualify for, this provision.

First, one can see that the answer is certainly not self-ID. Do the persecutors find who to attack by asking how everyone identifies? Of course not – and even if they did, any potential targets could simply deny it: problem solved.

Second, if it is clothing style and such like, the remedy is to be sought in efforts to liberalise social standards. If you think you can make substantial claims on bystanders merely to assuage wishes to dress a particular way, you are misguided. Society's restrictions on presentation are not women's responsibility to compensate for.

So we are left with bodily modification. A transwoman must be sufficiently modified to clearly diverge from the normal range of maleness. Otherwise the grounds of victimisation are not credible, and there is no need for them to be elsewhere than with other men.

Does this require that transwomen, to ‘live as they want’, must pursue surgery? No: people can make their choice; the purpose here is to clarify how different choices have different consequences and effects on other people, and so support different reciprocal claims upon them.

In practice this regulation depends mostly not on enforcement but social norms. Is anyone pleading that transwomen are especially immoral? Presumably and hopefully not. So we might expect their conscience to override their self-interested preferences and follow the rules.

All in all, this is only the minimum threshold to reach to be then considered and balanced against women's own interests. And we may still assert that the qualification for women’s designated rights is nothing else than to be a woman, and transwomen simply are not.

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For more authoritative thoughts see:

• https://kathleenstock.com
• https://hollylawford-smith.org
• https://medium.com/@s.r.allen
• https://rebeccarc.com
• https://janeclarejones.com