Mick Hartley

Bridget Phetasy on Why women need to feel fear:

Feminists, when I was growing up, used to encourage girls to “get loud” and rail against the social pressure to be compliant and “nice”. We were taught to push back against the idea that women need to be appealing to men because their comfort mattered more than ours.

Now, we live in a radically different world. A world in which a generation of young women is being taught to disregard the fear they might feel in a threatening situation. They are told not to trust their intuition. And they are called bigots and sent death threats if they suggest that they feel uncomfortable in their bathrooms and changing rooms — or even in shelters for survivors of sexual abuse.

As a sexual assault survivor myself, I fought back tears while watching Paula Scanlan testify before a House Judiciary subcommittee about her experience of being on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team — with the transgender athlete Lia Thomas. “I know of women with sexual trauma who are adversely impacted by having biological males in their locker room without their consent. I know this because I am one of these women.”

I felt rage, too. How outrageous that Scanlan should have to defend her desire to be free of biological males in a female changing room. How dare her university send her to psychotherapy in an “attempt to reeducate [me] to become comfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a male”? 

The insanity could hardly be starker. Women who complain about naked men in the women's changing room are given therapy to persuade them that these men are really women, complete with female penises. The clocks are striking thirteen, and 2 + 2 = 5.

The message today’s young women are getting is that if their inner voice says it feels wrong when someone with a penis undresses in front of them, or is present when they undress, in a space designated for women, there is something wrong with them. Scanlan said in her testimony: “We, the women, were the problem, not the victims. We were expected to conform, to move over and shut up. Our feelings didn’t matter. The university was gaslighting and fearmongering women to validate the feelings and identity of a male.”…

We are setting a dangerous precedent. Think about the young women watching the way that Scanlan and Gaines are being treated. They will surely conclude that they must suffer to accommodate the small handful of males that want to make everything about them. They are now being given access to female prisons, domestic abuse shelters, rape centres, locker rooms, spas and public toilets, as well as changing rooms.

It would be absurd to assume that all trans-identified male-bodied people are looking for ways to abuse girls or women; it is equally absurd — and naïve — to think that male predators won’t exploit this system. But what I find particularly alarming is that it teaches women in general not to trust themselves. It tells us to ignore the discomfort triggered at a subconscious level. It encourages us to ignore our instincts. When a woman senses danger the last thing she needs is for her judgment to be clouded by another fear: the fear of social death if she acts to protect herself.

And all of us who witness the abuse that women who speak up are being subjected to are expected to remain silent. All of us whose little voices are telling us that there’s something wrong with prioritising men’s feelings over women’s safety are told we are wrong.