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Notes -
For the purpose of this post I will use the following terms in the following ways:
Woman = Biological woman. Man = Biological man
Well it seems like we are on episode >9000 "transgender bathrooms".
There is currently a man named Sarah McBride who has been elected to congress. This person (a man), who wishes to be seen as female, has caused another member of congress named Nancy Mace (a woman) to start whining and complaining on various social media videos and news interviews about her (Nancy's) concern that Sarah will try to use the female bathrooms, lockerrooms, etc. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said that the policy of the House is that women's restrooms/lockerrooms are for women, and men's restrooms lockerrooms are for men. There are a number of non-gender specific bathrooms around the house grounds that are open to anybody who doesn't want to abide by this.
Here is what I actually think a reasonable framing of this question is: "can men with a cross dressing fetish involve non-consenting women in their crossdress-play?" In a reasonable society I think the answer to this question should be: no, obviously.
Everybody seems intent on being dishonest towards each other when talking about this, so here is what I think is a reasonable answer to "why does anybody care? Just let everybody pee in peace!".
Bathrooms are extremely vulnerable places; they usually have one exit, you are often in there alone, and you are often doing something which makes you physically vulnerable (using the toilet). It seems completely reasonable for women to want to keep men out of these spaces.
To put some additonal context here: I think that the tide is turning pretty sharply on gender ideology within the democratic party (at least for anybody mildly near the center). I've seen several prominent-ish democrat spokespeople openly blame transgender people for the 2024 presidential loss. You also have the UK making it illegal to trans your kids, as well as a recent, prominent NYT article that was critical of transing your children (unfortunately the google index seems very intent on not showing me links to the article, but has plenty of links to people talking about it.
I think it was Aella that wrote about how passing was actually meaningfully important in the whole trans issue, and I have to agree. If a man can successfully pass as a woman then he should be allowed to use women's restroom, although it seems like saying we "allow" that is pretty meaningless in that case. If we can't tell that it's a man how could we stop him? To me this basically feels like the norm thirty years ago, kind of an unofficial don't ask don't tell restroom policy. If you look like an absolute freak then yes women should be able to scream and shout at you and summon security to harass you for an hour or so.
Edit: In a way it reminds me of this classic. I feel like they both come down to "know your place" and act accordingly. Now how do we codify that into law? I'm not sure how, but I'm not sure it needs to be.
The problem here is that the percentage of MtF who “pass” is vanishingly low. It’s nearly always spectacularly easy to “clock” an MtF - especially once you hear the voice.
I’m actually agnostic about so-called “bathroom bills” myself, but however we end up resolving the issue, “an MtF can enter the women’s bathroom if nobody notices it’s an MtF” is not a solution, because it will lead to 98% of the same outcome as “no man can enter the women’s bathroom.”
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The problem this creates it that any tomboyish looking woman is now a target for harassment.
Why do trans people need to use the bathroom they don’t belong in so badly? We literally have them sex segregated to protect women. Why do these men need to be in the enclosed, single exit room with women?
The grace here should be going both ways: I’ll call you the name you are asking me to, but you need to realize that your fetish is your own fetish, and shouldn’t be imposed on women who are simply trying to exist. Just let them have the bathroom FFS.
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I think a better formulation of the question is: Can men who pretend to be women justifiably expect identical treatment as women? I'd say the answer is no, they can't expect it, they can attempt it and expect push back if/when their pretence is revealed.
Can men walk around dressed in women's clothes? Yes, I don't think a person's outfit requires the consent of other people assuming it adheres to basic modesty. That doesn't mean other people have to approve of it though, they just can't formally prevent it.
Can men wearing women's outfits walk into a women's toilet and expect to be treated as if they belong there? No.
Can men become so skilled at pretending to be women that they successfully deceive people into thinking they belong there? Yes, some of them can.
Does that mean they really do belong there? No, they're men.
And finally, some men and women are not accepted in their own toilets. You should't start masturbating at the sink or shitting on the floor, grabbing people to dance with them, asking them to show you their dick, tipping the bin over, smashing the fixtures or offering around a plate of finger foods. Being the correct sex is not an unrestricted licence to misbehave in a single sex area. Pretending to be the opposite sex is one of those unacceptable behaviours.
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Why is this such an issue? Restrooms have stalls. I couldn't tell what gender was in one if I tried.
I hear that women tend to change & reveal more skin in women's locker rooms. In men's restrooms, we pretty much do their business and leave. From that perspective, the men's locker room is more 'gender neutral'.
Yes, it was a woke rallying-cry. But in 2024, it's become a tier-1 losing issue.
AOC is the democrat's weathervane. She's scarily opportunist and makes radical position changes right before a movement runs out of gas. She broke rank with the squad on Israel right before the campus protests turned ugly. She recently removed pronouns from her twitter bio. It's Joever.
As for people being naked in locker rooms, I'd be happy to see the practice die out. Trans people or not. I don't wanna be looking at random dick and balls. It's the old men who're the worst. Dude, don't spread your legs on the bench to clean your saggy balls, and what the fuck's up with being naked while having socks on !! Please No !
If it's any consolation, my wife has told me that old women are just as bad in their locker rooms. IDK what it is with old people and nudity, but it seems to apply to both genders.
What's with old people is that if you have had a serious medical issue you lose all sense of embarrassment and shame concerning your naked body because you deal with doctors and nurses looking at it, and you stop caring about how you appear when naked in front of others.
No serious medical issue needed, just reach the age for routine colonoscopies and you're there.
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Bathrooms are extremely vulnerable places; they usually have one exit, you are often in there alone, and you are often doing something which makes you physically vulnerable (using the toilet). It seems completely reasonable for women to want to keep men out of these spaces.
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Then how the fuck are you supposed to change out of your wet/sweaty/dirty clothes?
Assuming you're taking a shower. In the shower.....
If no shower, changing clothes without flashing is a standard skill. Just need a towel.
If no towel. I'm fine seeing butt cheeks in my peripheral vision for a couple of seconds. But, don't stand there with your dick hanging out for ages. Get it done.
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To me, it’s the lack of understanding. I don’t think Transgender people in general get how dangerous it is to open the door to the idea that any man can put on a dress and walk into the women’s restroom anytime they want to. There are safety issues here. Men can so easily overpower women that it’s not even a contest. And without the very firm rule of “biological men are not allowed in women’s spaces, particularly where dressing and undressing are happening, it’s impossible to prevent a rape from happening. If you’ve ever wondered why women generally use the public restrooms in pairs, the reason is men who might enter the restroom and try to rape a woman. And the trans community hasn’t even glanced in the direction of understanding the issue or reassuring women that they too are opposed to men in the women’s restrooms and locker rooms being an issue. If anything, their attitude is “women, you aren’t allowed to object to this for any reason. The only reason you care is that you hate trans women.” Followed by using authority to force women to shut up about it. Not a thought about rape, secretly being photographed naked for porn, or being harassed, or worse these things happening to children. I feel like the entire rest of society, particularly the woke end has decided that the rape of women is a small price to pay for feeling progressive about letting transgender women into women’s spaces — without vetting at all.
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If I’m allowed into the women’s bathroom, I’m 100% going to listen to women pee and it’s going in my spank bank for later. So if women don’t want that, they should keep men out of their bathrooms!
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Sadly relevant The Oatmeal
My eyes are burning. It's so graphic.
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The WaPo article you cite is from June last year, and the three NYT articles it discusses (all first result on Google for their titles) are from over two years ago.
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I would propose an alternative framing of the question: "Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes. Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
What is your proposal for how trans men (biological women) who have medically and legally transitioned should be dealt with? Do you think most women who are scared of men would be comfortable with this guy sharing a bathroom with them? While I certainly could imagine a standard that looks like:
I can't see how you could actually write or enforce the laws and social norms around that in a consistent way that actually works out in pratice. The only two reasonable standards are "biological" or "legal documents" in my opinion. Either standard will involve some women sharing a bathroom with some people that they might read as "men", so that can't be the deciding factor.
How far are you willing to take this? Should we systematically look at how certain rooms are used, and if it would ever be the case that there's a woman alone in the room with a man, should we relocate activities or force the man to stand outside or something? Should we have far more women's only spaces than we currently do in society? What rooms besides bathrooms should we be sex-seggregating?
I feel like this is the unofficial rule for everything, or at least it should be in our intuition. Like the NBA is not the men's basketball league, it's the open basketball league and no women are good enough to play there. So we have 2 leagues, open (NBA) and women (WNBA). At my college there were two kinds of recruiting events for computer science majors, job fairs for all and job fairs for women only.
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You'd have to codify the actual-but-unspeakable moral intuition that most people have, which is something like: the only sacred/protected category is femininity, and once it has been tainted with masculinity it forfeits its protections. Gender segregation, discrimination and reservations all only serve the purpose of elevating "pure" females.
This is why the anti-trans faction is primarily concerned with MtF as an intrusion upon female privileges and FtM as a threat to impressionable girls, while the pro-trans faction (to a lesser degree) exhibits a preference for focussing on MtF rights as something that men must be compelled to grant and FtM rights as a freedom that women ought to have (and why radfems are a massive nuisance that they would rather forget about). Both sides understand that "protect women" is the only widely shared moral foundation.
In some ways, I kind of want to reject the idea that all of our social policies should be aimed at minimizing female deaths like an autistic actuary.
As a simple example from another domain, I kind of don't care if the facts on the ground are maximally unfavorable to me in, say, the gun control debate because I am pro-liberty and am willing to bite the bullet on this. Even if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets that showed with 100% certainty that we could reliably remove, say, all ~40,000 gun deaths per year in the United States by repealling the 2nd Amendment (and the vast majority won't convert to knife deaths or whatever), I would still say we should prefer 40,000 annual deaths to the infringement of liberty that would involve.
I don't want to empower the government to enforce any kind of bathroom policy, and so I'm willing to put up with a few women falling victim to men and ex-men in the name of liberty. My opinion wouldn't change if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets showing that such a policy reliably leads to X female victims of violence each year.
I feel the same way about casual sex with strangers, and a number of other issues. I'm willing to bite the bullet on the idea that freedom often comes with negative consequences for part of the population. I still think the government should enforce contracts that turned out to have been bad bets (which is why I was angry when Scarlett Johansson was succesfully able to cow Disney during the pandemic when they shifted movies to streaming where she got a worse deal - she made a bet, and it turned out to be a bad bet. If Disney wants to smooth things over with her, they can do that outside of the context of a contract dispute as a show of good will, but in an ideal world Scarlett Johansson should have been forced to live with the original bad deal, because that's what contracts are for.)
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Yes. Although this is not a stable equilibrium either. A society that enshrines "protect women" but doesn't enshrine "respect men" ends up becoming horribly biased against men.
Example #1: Ukraine. Women flee the country and are living their best life clubbing with rich Germans. Men are press ganged against their will and go die in a ditch somewhere.
Example #2: Men perform nearly all the dangerous jobs in the U.S. (Probably 99%+). These jobs, which have high rates of death and dismemberment, often pay more. However, any time men make more money than women, there is talk of a "wage gap" which must be corrected.
The recognition that sexes are different must come paired with the recognition that both sexes have special needs and duties. Women are not inherently morally superior, but we've evolved as a species to see them this way because of the intense demands and vulnerability of motherhood. In an anti-natal society women might as well just be weak men.
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How is that an obvious answer?
Why do you think we even have "man" and "woman" as a legal category? I never got the impression they're a permission to perform masculinity / femininity the way a driver's license is a permission to drive, or an arbitrary badge of honor like knighthood in the UK. I always thought they're meant to reflect physical reality. If you're saying that giving a man government documents that document them as a woman necessarily implies that they get to use women's facilities, and take advantage of all the special rights and privileges we grant women, that just sounds like an argument for never giving a man government documents that document them as a woman.
This argument worked great.... right up until the point that the issue gained more prominence and people got a good look at what trans men actually look like, rather than when they're photographed or filmed from flattering angles and favorable lighting. The majority look like manlets, have a funny voice, and distinctly feminine mannerisms, they might pass as a gay man on a good day.
To your question - unironically yes, even with non-zero amount of transmen passing convincingly IRL, I think fewer women would end up uncomfortable with trans men in women's bathroom, than with trans women in women's bathrooms. Especially when everyone is aware the law only allows females to use them, and a male would be penalized for trying to slip in, if caught.
You kind of bury the lede here, but this is an equity question.
The problem with ex-men and ex-women are that they double-dip in an extremely and intentionally obnoxious -> harmful way.
Ex-men retain the biological specialization for toil while claiming the social benefits we give the people whose sex enables them to birth children. (Men's specialization is general toil, women's specialization is childbirth.) This is why "it's ma'am" and the male schoolteacher with fake breasts so large they'd be a serious medical condition were they real are problems, and it's the root of why their using the wrong bathroom is a big deal (sure, it pattern matches to being a sex pest, but this is the root of why we [can] instinctively only treat men as sex pests when they do this).
Ex-women are a reflection of this, but importantly, not a mirror image- because they become a problem when they assert the advantages men have don't matter, and then can't perform. The mirror image of the obnoxious ex-man screaming "wax my balls, it's ma'am" is not the self-aware/competent tomboy, or even the average ex-woman [that's what the steroids are for], it's the "I'm just as strong as you, that's why I belong on the front lines, there's nothing special about this ability, therefore womankind should not honor men but men should continue to honor womankind".
This is why, instinctively, it's not really an issue for ex-women to use the men's room (especially the ones on steroids), while it is an issue for ex-men to use the women's room. The problem comes from refusing to negotiate this problem in pairs (because we don't understand that men and women are different, or our sociopolitical standing is contingent upon not understanding it).
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I think we do it for similar reasons to why we track whether people are married, whether they've adopted a child, etc. Because it gives the otherwise blind goverment a way to see what's happening with its citizens.
I also just don't take the bathroom argument too seriously. The best case I've seen people come up with is that one high school bathroom assault, and that involved a couple who had met up for consensual trysts several times in the same bathroom. To put it bluntly, no woman who is afraid of this sort of thing seriously fears that it will be someone they knowingly meet up with for sex that will assault them when they change their mind and say "no" this time.
I'm about as okay with trans women using the women's restroom, as I am with fathers using the women's restroom to change their baby's diaper when there is only a changing table in the women's bathroom. Both cases involve biological men in women's restrooms, and both have plausible ways they could be abused (men using realistic baby dolls, or men cross-dressing), but I don't think any of that kind of thinking is necessary. If women are vulnerable in restrooms, then men will use whatever attack vector society leaves open. On the marigin, I don't think anti-trans bathroom bills make women safer.
And besides, the object level question in this case is "should congresswoman Sarah McBride be allowed to use the women's restroom?", and I think it is reasonable to answer, "She should have the same right that an XY androgen-insensitve cis woman should have to use the restroom, based on the government's tracking of her as a woman." Certainly, I don't think anyone's fears that Sarah McBride would sexually assault someone in the bathroom are super justified.
I just don't see it. We're talking about the kind of hysterical women who would answer "bear" to the infamous "Would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods?" I think even a manlet would trigger such women. Or do you think their answers would change if the questions was changed to, "Would you rather meet a 5' 4'' man or a bear in the woods?"
I think there is also the problem that there are far more "mannish" biological women than there are either trans men or trans women. I don't pretend to have any way to independently verify it, but this is an example of a story about a butch lesbian getting negative confrontations from her use of the women's toilet. I'm not sure how policing bathrooms in this way doesn't end up harming "ugly" women and non-gender conforming women, which seems to go against the stated goal of helping women.
That's not how rules or heuristics work. If a person is volunteering at an event and there's a possibility that they may have to supervise children, the person is generally required to undergo police vetting to ensure that they can be trusted to supervise children. It's irrelevant if the person truthfull says "I shouldn't need to go through the police vetting, I'm not a child molester" - an actual child molester would say the same thing. That's what the police vetting is for: to determine who is a bad actor and who isn't.
Likewise if a woman is walking home alone at night and notices a lone male person walking some distance behind her, and begins to form a suspicion that said person may be following her. I doubt very much that she would be consoled if said male person yelled out "don't worry, I'm not a rapist!" And even if the male person yelled out "don't worry, I'm a trans woman!", I don't think she should be consoled by this either - trans women commit violent crimes at the same rates as cis men, so this male person revealing how he "identifies" has provided the woman with zero additional actionable information.
And you might scoff "maybe some trans people are creepy perverts, but surely a high-ranking politician would know better". Think again.
David Cross came up with a jingle to properly communicate this notion over a decade ago.
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As an aside, you reminded me of a lecture I once listened to about the brilliance of Odysseus' first words to Nausicaa after washing up on the beach naked.
He's an older male addressing a young girl, and he can't say something like, "Don't worry, I won't rape you," since that will just make her more worried by bringing the possibility out in the open. So instead he says, "I beseech thee, O queen,—a goddess art thou, or art thou mortal? If thou art a goddess, one of those who hold broad heaven, to Artemis, the daughter of great Zeus, do I liken thee most nearly in comeliness and in stature and in form."
This immediately does a few things:
Clever. I wonder what the modern equivalent would be. Asking a woman if she's X, where X is an Instagram influencer famous for demonstrating self-defense techniques women can use to escape from dangerous men?
How about "I think I know your father, he is a police officer, right?"
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I don't think this answers my question. When they keep track of marriage, they're keeping track of which couples have entered a specific relationship with sweeping implications on rights to each others' property, and duties to one another. When someone adopts a child they're declaring they're assuming responsibility for them until they come of age, which grants them power to make decisions for that child until they grow up. What are they keeping track of when they designate someone a "man" or a "woman", and why is it important to not remain blind about it?
Alright, then why are you arguing for letting men-documented-as-women into women's bathrooms instead of just abolishing sex segregated facilities?
These kinds of laws aren't about specific people, they're broad rules.
I can only pity the fool that took that meme literally (as opposed to seriously).
I'm saying most of them could tell a difference between a trans man, and a 5'4" male, and the event where they couldn't would be less frequent than the event where they clock a trans woman.
Personally I'm pretty sure it's a temporary state resulting from the ambiguities that come from blurring the category of "man" and "woman" to begin with. Once it becomes clear that men entering women's bathrooms are penalized, people will be more likely to trust that whoever entered a woman's bathroom is a woman.
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When I wrote my post criticising Freddie deBoer's stance on trans issues, I admitted that, of all the demands made by trans activists, "using our preferred bathrooms" is the one I find least objectionable, even though I understand why it makes some women uncomfortable.
Many feminists appeared in the comments of the Substack article providing sources which suggested that my agnosticism on this issue was misplaced, and in fact women are at far greater risk of sexual assault in gender-neutral bathrooms than in single-sex bathrooms:
Unisex changing rooms put women at danger of sexual assault, data reveals:
As I also pointed out in the post, it's no good saying "we're not advocating for gender-neutral bathrooms - we just want trans women to be able to use the ladies' room". There is zero practical difference between the two. After all, trans women don't owe you femininity, so if you're a female person in the ladies' room and an obviously male person walks in, you're not allowed to kick up a fuss about it even if said "trans woman" is making zero effort to pass and has fully intact male genitalia.
"How dare you say that trans women are rapists?!" trans activists will howl. No - a policy of gender-neutral or trans-inclusive bathrooms poses obvious risks for female safeguarding even if literally every trans woman in the world is just a delicate little flower who wants to use the stalls in peace. (At least some demonstrably are not.) If you're taking the stance that
an inevitable byproduct of that is that perverts will exploit trans-inclusive policies for their own nefarious ends. It is literally unavoidable under this rubric.
Hell, trans activists even acknowledge that "genderfluidity" is a thing, and one can "identify as" a man at some times and identify as a woman at other times, perhaps hopping back and forth multiple times a day. What's to stop a pre-transition male person from "identifying as" a woman just long enough to go into the ladies' and sexually assault someone, then walk out and immediately resume "identifying as" a man? (I say "what's to stop" like it's some far-out hypothetical; obviously I'm sure this has already happened somewhere.)
One thing to note is that, for at least some men identifying as women, part of the fetish appears to be that women are made uncomfortable by their presence. That is, they don't want to be accepted as women, but rather they want women to be intimidated into pretending to accept them as women. If people actually just perceived them as women without a second look, then it would lose some of the appeal. I think any man who wants to go into the women's toilets should need to disclose their porn consumption habits. If they did I am quite sure, in most cases, women wouldn't even want them on the same planet never mind in the same bathroom.
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My preferred standard is based on legal status, not mere identification. That's what stops your "just long enough self-ID" hypothetical scenario.
That's just kicking the can down the road. No bathroom has a bouncer stationed outside checking people's IDs to ensure that their legal sex matches that of the bathroom they wish to use (and if such a policy was proposed, you and I both know that trans activists would be the most fervently opposed to it). Once you've established that at least some obviously male people are permitted to use the ladies' room (because they've legally transitioned), inevitably perverts will take advantage of this by trying to pass themselves off as people who've legally transitioned when they haven't.
Addendum to my "genderfluidity" hypothetical: an obviously male person walks into the ladies' room, gets some funny looks, and falsely asserts "don't worry, I've got a gender recognition certificate". The women in the bathroom aren't entirely satisfied by this, but what can they do? It's not like they can demand that he produce his gender recognition certificate on the spot. Shortly afterwards, the obviously male person sexually assaults someone/spies on someone without their knowledge etc., then walks out of the ladies' room and goes about his day.
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Transgender woman, 18, sexually assaulted girl, 10, in Morrisons toilet
Here, now you have a better case.
Here are a few more.
Fair enough, my mental model was not that trans women are perfect little angels who never do anything wrong ever. (Though investigating one of your second link's cases at random showed that the assailant, Hannah Tubbs, hadn't transitioned until after the assault. So it's not exactly a central case of what I argue for - which is legal sex seggregation, not self-ID or biological sex.)
I'm also not convinced that the fig leaf of "(bio)sex seggregating" bathrooms makes much of a difference here. A quick Google search was able to show there are some cases of cis men sexually assaulting women in bathrooms without the need of cross dressing. The problem seems to be more a function of having a semi-private space, than anything involving society leaving specific openings. I would be against turning every bathroom into a Panopticon, even if it would make people safer, and I would be against banning fathers from using changing tables in the women's restroom if they need to. Why would I be against trans women in women's bathrooms?
I don't think it nudges women's safety much in either direction.
To quote myself:
You'll never get sexual assaults in bathrooms down to zero, but as argued in my other comment, there's some evidence suggesting that they're more common in gender-neutral bathrooms compared to sex-segregated bathrooms. A common understanding that male people are not supposed to be in a particular space (and hence that any male person who violates that rule is up to no good) seems to go a long way towards preventing sexual misconduct.
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If the question was changed to "would you rather meet a boy [as in, non-adult male human] or a bear in the woods" the answers change, because boys are by definition not capable of being a physical -> sexual threat.
This is the reason why some women accept/welcome ex-men in their bathrooms. They, at least figuratively and sometimes very literally, cut off the part of their body that makes them capable of being a sexual threat- they're no different than a 3 year old boy who needs to use the women's room for pragmatic reasons. Historically, [male] eunuchs had the same kinds of privileges, for the exact same reasons; women have a more limited version of this for gay men.
Women who understand this are currently incentivized (through a bunch of other social mechanisms) to use this knowledge for the purpose of bullying other women who haven't yet figured this out. The cost to their safety, as you noted, does not exist.
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