Transgender rights & women’s rights
For some time, a debate has been raging among feminists on the subject of women’s rights and transgender rights. While most progressives regard trans equality as a top priority, dissenting “gender-critical” feminists believe some aspects of transgender acceptance — particularly new norms under which gender is determined by self-identification, regardless of anatomy or appearance — jeopardize women’s privacy and safety in single-sex spaces.
An ongoing controversy in Los Angeles highlights those issues — and raises thorny questions with no easy answers.
In late June, a viral Instagram video showed a woman complaining to staff at Wi Spa that “a man with a penis” was “exposing himself” in female-only nude facilities; a staffer said the person was entitled to use the women’s section “if they identify as female.” The online polemics turned to real-life violence when an odd alliance of right-wing and radical feminist protesters clashed with pro-transgender demonstrators.
Subsequently, there were widely repeated claims that the incident was an anti-transgender hoax. But earlier this month, criminal charges were filed based on complaints from five women, and a warrant was issued against 52-year-old Darren Agee Merager, who apparently identifies as female and has decried the charges as “transphobic harassment” (and is currently evading capture).
In another twist, it turns out Merager is a registered sex offender with indecent exposure convictions in 2002 and 2003 — and faces charges stemming from a December 2018 episode in the women’s locker room at an area swimming pool. According to the New York Post, Merager was also reported for nudity in front of teenage girls in another pool’s shower area in a separate incident that month, but avoided arrest by claiming transgender status. At the time, a law enforcement alert described Merager, using male pronouns, as a sex offender who “claims to identify as female” to “access women’s locker rooms and showers.”
The aforementioned gender-critical feminists have been often slammed as “transphobic” for warning that laws allowing gender transition by “self-identification” — currently in effect in California, and in New York State since June — can be abused by sexual predators. This may be just such a case.
Yet even if Merager really identifies as female, there are still problems posed by someone with intact male anatomy using intimate all-female spaces — not just a bathroom with enclosed stalls, but a locker room or nude sauna. Gender segregation in such spaces, based on the near-universal taboo on mixedsex nudity for adults, then becomes meaningless. One may believe that such conventions are outdated and unenlightened, but public policy should not aim to reengineer such attitudes by coercion.
Have some conservatives and feminists peddled hyperbole and hysteria about male predators using transgender rights to invade women’s spaces? No doubt. But just because the problem has been exaggerated doesn’t mean it’s non-existent. Several credible reports around the time of the Wi Spa incident point to other episodes in which exposure of male genitalia in women’s facilities at local spas by people claiming to be transgender caused disruption and distress.
Meanwhile, progressive rhetoric seems to be a mix of denial that such exposure happens (hence the eagerness to dismiss the Wi Spa story as a hoax and subsequent lack of interest in it from progressive media) and insistence that it should be simply accepted. Some Twitter posters have asserted that it’s just a matter of women with “different” bodies in a women’s bath — as if male genitalia were equivalent to, say, surgical scars. British feminist Laurie Penny even suggests that if a young girl in a locker room is bothered by a penis, it’s her fault for staring.
Such comments reflect an extreme ideology that goes far beyond civil rights, often denying the reality of biological sex and insisting that only subjective gender identity matters. Some transgender rights activists such as American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio even reject terms like “male-bodied,” asserting that since transgender women are women, they are “biologically female,” just with less typical female bodies. In other words, a transgender person with typical male anatomy in a women’s facility must be treated like any woman, and women who feel uncomfortable must get over their prejudice, end of story.
That’s a disturbing stance, especially in an era that emphasizes consent. Transgender self-identification in prisons, hospitals and shelters raises even more troubling issues. One need not be a religious conservative, a radical feminist or a bigot to be concerned.
In a less absolutist framework, one could find practical compromises to accommodate the needs of different groups — from special units in prisons or shelters to special areas or hours for mixed-gender use in spas and gyms. Such compromises would appeal to the majority of Americans who support transgender rights, and the majority of transgender people who respect other people’s comfort levels. But we need a dialogue on these issues, not monologues by zealots.