Someone has replied to you with documented examples covered in the news, but I can also add that I (a cis woman) have personally experienced harassment of this sort a few times (including being forcibly groped by a TERF when trying to enter a city-centre public restroom. This was in the UK a few years ago, and they were campaigning outside)
I shoved her away, and I did consider punching her, but I realised that I was being read as a trans woman in this context, and that my actions could reflect poorly on the trans community. Like, I didn’t want to feed into the rhetoric of “trans women are violent”.
It was surreal to realise how identity and perception work together in weird ways. There’s been a few other times where I’ve been read as being trans, and I ended up just sorting of accepting it because if I protested and said that I wasn’t trans, that it would risk coming across badly — as if I am implicitly agreeing with them that trans people are bad.
So yeah, this results in the bizarre scenario in which I am a cis person who sometimes identifies as trans
Based re: the last sentence, but also I feel sorry that that happened to you. Terfs are transphobes, I still go to the women’s bathroom, and if there’s a long queue, fuck it, whatever bathroom is emptier.
You know what I noticed? Often the bathrooms for women and men seem the same “size” from outside, but when you enter them, there’s much fewer. At my work, there’s 2 toilets for women, and 4 for men + 3 urinals. If that isn’t sexist, then I don’t know what is!
If I need to pee I need to pee, Karen. And sometimes, my head wonders why I don’t just pee on those transphobes as they want to prevent me from doing a basic need.
Someone has replied to you with documented examples covered in the news, but I can also add that I (a cis woman) have personally experienced harassment of this sort a few times (including being forcibly groped by a TERF when trying to enter a city-centre public restroom. This was in the UK a few years ago, and they were campaigning outside)
I hope you punched her and broke her jaw
And if you didn’t I hope another victim did
Actually I hope another did regardless of whether you did
I shoved her away, and I did consider punching her, but I realised that I was being read as a trans woman in this context, and that my actions could reflect poorly on the trans community. Like, I didn’t want to feed into the rhetoric of “trans women are violent”.
It was surreal to realise how identity and perception work together in weird ways. There’s been a few other times where I’ve been read as being trans, and I ended up just sorting of accepting it because if I protested and said that I wasn’t trans, that it would risk coming across badly — as if I am implicitly agreeing with them that trans people are bad.
So yeah, this results in the bizarre scenario in which I am a cis person who sometimes identifies as trans
Based re: the last sentence, but also I feel sorry that that happened to you. Terfs are transphobes, I still go to the women’s bathroom, and if there’s a long queue, fuck it, whatever bathroom is emptier.
You know what I noticed? Often the bathrooms for women and men seem the same “size” from outside, but when you enter them, there’s much fewer. At my work, there’s 2 toilets for women, and 4 for men + 3 urinals. If that isn’t sexist, then I don’t know what is!
If I need to pee I need to pee, Karen. And sometimes, my head wonders why I don’t just pee on those transphobes as they want to prevent me from doing a basic need.