Safe spaces

 A lot of the heat in the gender debate is around women’s need, and indeed their claimed right, to safe spaces, and about how trans women would compromise their safety, or at least their feeling of safety. 


Alas some women suffer domestic abuse at the hands of their partners and they need safe spaces. I don’t believe any trans sympathiser would argue with that. 


Trans exclusionary feminists say that  trans women aren’t women. Whether or not you agree with that, excluding trans women from safe spaces only makes sense if you believe cis women and trans women behave differently, ie if you have a lurking fear that trans women represent a threat to cis women and that they might perpetrate sexual assault or worse. 


I have searched the web and haven’t been able to find a single instance of a violent assault of a cis woman by a trans woman. And I think it safe to say that if such an incident occurred, the Daily Mail would splash it across its front page and declare a national emergency. 


While it is possible that isolated cases may exist and are unreported, there is no evidence to suggest a significant prevalence of sexual assaults by transgender women against cisgender women in the UK. 


But cis women are not the only people to worry about here. 


Between April 2018 and March 2023, police in England and Wales recorded a significant rise in hate crimes against transgender individuals. In the year ending March 2023 alone, there were 4,732 such offences, marking an 11% increase from the previous year and the highest annual figure since records began. I can’t say for sure but I think it is a reasonable assumption that the vast majority of those assaults were by cis men. 


In the last census there were 262,000 people who identified as trans. That means that if you’re trans in the UK there’s an almost 2% change of being violently assaulted every year. 


I am sure that for many cis women there is a real fear of the unknown when it comes to trans women. Rather than stoking that fear, surely it would be kinder to allay their fear by pointing out the facts? 


There is nothing to suggest that cis women need protecting against trans women. However it’s clear that both cis women and trans women need protecting against some cis men. 


In that way cis and trans women are exactly the same. 

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