Sheila Noakes

Just as most men aren't rapists, voyeurs or domestic abusers, so there are plenty of trans women who pose no risk to women and girls. However, some trans-identified men provably are a risk. We know this because it's a matter of public record. Trans women have been convicted of all the crimes listed above, and of femicide. No study has ever proven that trans-identified men don't have the same pattern of criminality as every other kind of man. All available evidence points the other way: they are just as likely as any other man to be a rapist or a woman-killer. The evidence is plain to see in government statistics and court reports, however much you'd like to pretend none of those exist. Demanding that women and girls pretend there is no risk to themselves, which you do constantly, is itself abusive. Your insistence that you belong in women-only spaces, and your pretence that the likelihood of harm to females in those spaces doesn't increase with every man who's allowed inside, mark you out as precisely the kind of man who should be nowhere near women's and girls' locker rooms. Decent men, however they identify, respect women's boundaries. Even if they themselves would never dream of harming a girl or woman, they are under no illusions about what some of their fellow men will do if given access to spaces where women and girls are undressed or otherwise vulnerable. As for women who commit terrible crimes: I have literally never heard any woman deny that Myra Hindley, Karla Homolka or Joanna Dennehy are female. Nor have I ever seen a woman argue that being a woman entitles them to enter spaces reserved for vulnerable people, without having a professional or family-related reason for being there. Yet another difference between women and trans-identified men of your type is that the former aren't demanding, en masse, the right to go where they clearly don't belong - for instance, into a nursery where they have neither a child nor a job, or onto an intensive care ward when they know nobody and have no medical qualifications, purely because they consider themselves to be especially kind and nurturing. Even if such an interloper didn't hurt a child or a critically ill person, women as a class understand how inappropriate it would be to push themselves into those spaces and just how much justified disquiet they'd cause by doing so. The entitlement and disregard you show for the feelings and boundaries of women and girls are of those of an unfortunately all-too-common type of male. You believe you have the right to demand that women sacrifice their own personal safety to validate your feelings about yourself. You're either indifferent to the fact that you might make women and girls uneasy at best, and scared at worst, or you're well aware that you'll have that effect, and the thought gives you a thrill. Nothing about that makes you a woman. On the contrary, you just keep proving, over and over again, that you are a man.