How TERFs Became Such Terrible, Hateful, Evil, Bigots

A few weeks ago, while visiting a wine museum, I got an unexpected insight into the trans experience.

I'd eaten light that day and had drunk such uncharacteristic amounts of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo that I needed to use the toilet, which might explain why, when I pushed open the door, I found a woman standing on the other side.

She looked at me, horrified, I looked back, even more horrified, and it was only when she realised that my stumbling into the women's bathroom was accidental that the tension drained from her face.

She smiled, pointed to a door across the lobby, and said:

The men's is right over there.

But as I walked away, relieved to be relieving myself in the appropriate location, it occurred to me that every trans woman has experienced, or at least feared, a moment like this; when they opened the bathroom door and found a horrified-looking woman looking back at them. And they feared it precisely because they wouldn't be happy to walk away.

Every male human being knows they're not supposed to enter women's spaces. We know it as fundamentally as we know not to be the first to fall asleep at a party and to always eat a banana with appropriate manliness.

And while there are inevitably some men who get off on intruding where they're not welcome, most men, at least in the beginning, will need a little help.

Luckily, all you need to do is convince yourself that this affable, perfectly reasonable woman is a hateful, evil bigot.

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Of course, no matter how unreasonable your position is, you can always find someone on the internet who’ll help you to justify it.

In fact, online forums like Reddit are brimming with trans women learning to override their innate decency so they can knowingly violate women's boundaries.

“Is anyone else uncomfortable about using the women's restroom?” asks one user, admitting that he’d “feel like a total creep” using the women's restroom and manages to use gender-neutral facilities instead.

Or “I finally used the women's bathroom at work...mostly out of spite,” says another, telling the story of how a “stereotypical boomer's” irritation with enforced pronouns provided the push he needed to overcome his lingering discomfort with using the women's bathroom at work (this despite also having a gender-neutral option).

And my personal favourite, “How did you build up the courage to use the right bathroom?”

Not only because one of the most reliable clues you’re using the “right” bathroom is that it doesn’t require any courage, but also because the trans woman in question admits to never having been hassled in the men’s room. He just wants help working up a strong enough sense of entitlement to use the women's.

And the easiest way to generate that entitlement is to convince yourself that anybody who questions you is a monster.

You claim that people like JK Rowling “have blood on their hands” (or threaten to rape and/or kill them) for stubbornly pointing out that women exist and that men should stay out of their spaces.

You tell yourself that walking into a women's bathroom is not an act of intrusion but of bravery. That making women uncomfortable is a way of sticking it to the "boomers" who have a problem with strangers policing their speech.

And you convince yourself that women like the one who directed me to the men's room aren’t understandably uncomfortable with the presence of a strange man, but “wishing death on you” by asking you to respect a simple, well-established boundary (a boundary so well-established that it's written into three separate articles of the Geneva Convention).

Because if you can believe all this, maybe you can believe that the discomfort you're feeling isn’t about knowing the difference between right and wrong, it's not because you're forcing your way into a place you’re not supposed to be, it's because every woman who dares say no to you is “vermin” or “scum” or a “subhuman dumpster fire.”

And this trick, for the record, is one that every man who decided to ignore a woman saying “no” has to pull.

Ever since that visit to the wine museum, I've been asking myself how I'd feel if I genuinely believed I belonged in that bathroom. If I’d gone there, not because I was a little tipsy, but because someone had convinced me that I was a woman stuck in a man's body.

And the truth is, I don't know.

Maybe I’d be angry at the people who insisted on reminding me that a man who wishes he were a woman, no matter how sincere he is, is still, irrevocably, a man.

Maybe I’d be one of the trans women who’s honest enough to admit that using the men’s bathroom isn’t a death sentence.

Or maybe I’d be among those who claim it's cruel, nay, genocidal, to ask a man to accept that some spaces in the world aren’t for them.

But wherever I landed, I hope I’d also see that it’s cruel to call female rape victims "bigots" and tell them to “reframe their trauma” because they want to recuperate in a female-only rape crisis centre.

I hope I’d admit that it's cruel to gaslight lesbians into “feeling like failures” because they couldn't bring themselves to have penetrative sex with a member of the opposite sex.

I hope I’d acknowledge that it's cruel and dangerous to demand that women suppress their perfectly natural discomfort with men who hide behind luxury beliefs while threatening them with the most grotesque depictions of violence and murder.

Because the entire reason women's spaces exist is to offer women privacy and protection from men who think like this. They exist so women can have a few places where they don’t have to worry about what’s going through the mind of the guy next to them. They exist because we know, not suspect, but know, that the risk men pose to women with regard to sexual assault and violence doesn't decrease if the men wear dresses.

So, to anyone who struggles to understand this, or worse, who doesn't care, to anybody who believes it's "hysterical" to want a female-only space, please feel free to stop using them.

The men’s is right over there.

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