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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31722 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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I am not aware of a single case of a trans woman assaulting a woman in a women's bathroom. This is purely hypothetical as far as I know. If it happened, I expect the anti-trans side would publicize it heavily.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/oklahoma-transgender-student-charged-assaulting-female-high-school-classmates-bathroom

This technically qualifies as "a trans woman assaulting a woman in a women's bathroom", but it is nothing like the hypothetical situation anti-trans activists warned about. For one, it was not a sexual assault. My comment said "assaulting" rather than "sexually assaulting", but the claim has always been that women would be sexually assaulted, by a pervert who is or claims to be trans.

More importantly, the fact that it happened in a bathroom isn't relevant because it had none of the characteristics of the stereotypical bathroom assault. The debate is focused on bathrooms because they're enclosed spaces where a victim may be alone, which makes them uniquely dangerous. The typical hypothetical bathroom assault scenario involves a woman, usually understood to be a random woman unknown to the assailant, who is alone in the bathroom with the assailant, who has followed her in or was waiting for her. This is dangerous because she can be cornered with no way to escape and no way to call for help.

But this case is nothing like that. The victim was with a group of friends who saw the entire thing. The fight was presumably stopped as soon as possible (apparently the friends tried to intervene but were unable to stop the fight; presumably they called someone who could). The perpetrator and the victim already knew each other, and the incident started as a verbal altercation when the perpetrator approached the victim and escalated into a fight. This exact scenario could have played out anywhere. It had nothing to do with the reasons why bathrooms are claimed to be uniquely dangerous and why bathroom bills are claimed to be necessary.

So trans women can assault women in the bathroom, away from the protection of men, but that's okay and totally not an issue unless

  1. the assault is sexual
  2. the assailant doesn't precede their assault with words
  3. they're assaulting someone they don't know
  4. they choose to assault women one at a time
  5. they couldn't possibly have found another venue at which to assault people

That sounds like an odd place to move the goalpost to, and I think there may have been a reason you didn't list all these criteria up front when saying I "I've never seen an example which meets all these criteria"

Regardless, it's not like I keep a file tracking these things, or even follow it intentionally at all; this is just the first example that met your criteria. If you can't think of any examples of things that most people would see as "the kind of thing anti-trans activists warn about", then it seems like you're not looking, and not noticing when it happens..

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