Mick Hartley

Naomi Cunningham on Protect the Dolls:

So in plainer words, “dolls” refers to men who say they are women. And “protect the dolls” means “protect men who say they are women from being faced with the reality that they are men, and the consequences of that reality”.

What does that reality look like? Well, the thing about men is they’re not women. So if something is for women only, it’s not for men. That means that if you are a man who says he is a woman – one of the “dolls” needing this protection – one of the consequences of the reality that you are a man is that women are likely to object if you try to invade their single-sex spaces, take their scholarships or team places, “breast-feed” an infant (alas, I am not making this up), etc.

They’re either delusional, or predatory – or both. And women aren’t in a position to tell the difference.

Reality is disappointing sometimes. I get that, I really do. I’m quite disappointed that I’m not a brilliant musician. But I don’t get to manage my disappointment by giving toe-curlingly bad recitals at the Wigmore Hall which random members of the public are press-ganged into receiving with rapturous applause. I manage it by being a grown-up who knows that I don’t get everything I want.

So anyway: that’s the most benign subcategory of the class of men who say they are women: those genuinely upset and disappointed by the fact that they are men.

But there are other kinds of men who say they are women. There are men for whom dressing as women is a sexual fetish. There are men who are sexually aroused by invading supposedly women-only spaces. There are cross-dressing men who talk to each other on Reddit chats and other places about their “euphoria boners”. There are men who go into women’s toilets and changing rooms in order to masturbate, film themselves while they do so, and then post that footage online. It’s a porn category.

There are even men who take drugs to induce lactation, and either express the resulting milk or get infants to suck on their nipples. That’s a porn category too.

No doubt it will be thought indelicate of me to mention this. It’s a repulsive side of the world we’d all prefer to look away from. But these men exist. I don’t know what proportion of the men who say they are women and go to work dressed as women are fetishists, and what proportion are genuinely upset and disappointed by the fact of their male bodies; or indeed how much overlap there may be between those groups. I don’t even know the orders of magnitude involved: the fetishists may be 1% or 5% of the men who go to work dressed as women, or 50%, or more than 90%.

But you know what? I don’t really care. Whatever the proportions, there’s exactly one acceptable way for men to behave in relation to women-only spaces, and that is to stay out of them. That’s what decent men do. If a man doesn’t stay out, he’s not a decent man. Even if he’s genuinely distressed by his male body and invading women’s spaces with no more nefarious intent than to comfort himself for that distress by playing pretend, he’s showing a callous indifference to women’s privacy and boundaries by doing so. He’s behaving like a man who doesn’t think women have the right to privacy away from the male gaze. He’s behaving like a man who’s not good with the word “no”.…

My message to the men who like to cross dress at work is simple. Fine. You do you. Keep it tolerably businesslike, and no employer now will dare tell you to go home and come back properly dressed; you’ve won that one. Whatever your reasons for cross-dressing at work, you’re going to be allowed to do it.

Just stay out of women’s spaces. If you don’t want to be thought a creep and a predator, don’t behave like one.

The point about cross-dressing men – like Allana yesterday – is that they’re encouraged by this “Protect the Dolls” nonsense, and by the efforts of so many who’ve been duped into thinking that this is the latest civil rights movement and the T belongs next to the LGB, to believe that they really are women. Which means they’re encouraged to use women-only facilities. Toilets and changing rooms and the like. They shouldn’t – because they’re not women. Obviously.