Judging by column inches alone, you might be forgiven for thinking that the thing keeping women awake at night is not femicide, sexual assault, plummeting rape convictions, stalking, unequal pay, the erosion of reproductive rights, workplace discrimination, rampant online misogyny, an institutionally sexist police force, healthcare inequality, insufficient childcare provisions, or never being allowed to age.
While all these issues do get reported, a disproportionate amount of attention is given to another topic: men masquerading as trans women in order to gain access to single-sex spaces.
Over the past few years this idea has become so pervasive it is now inescapable in the media, culture, higher education, politics and sports; Ipso research shows that reporting of trans issues increased by 400% between 2009 and 2019. It is worth noting that trans people make up roughly 0.5% of the UK population; instances of men infiltrating women-only spaces are few and far between (in Ireland, where self-identification has been legal since 2015, there has been no discernible adverse impact).
Yet it is precisely because these cases are so unusual that they become newsworthy: journalism’s “man bites dog” principle means that an event’s rarity determines its priority in the news agenda. If every single reported sexual assault got this kind of coverage – 199,021 sexual offences and 70,633 rapes last year – it would simply never end.
With so many real threats to women’s safety, it is confounding that this much time and attention is being lavished on a largely hypothetical risk. Every single case of someone being attacked is unacceptable, and everything must be done to protect women’s safety. Many cisgender women who support trans rights, myself included, have personal experience of sexual assault and take the topic extremely seriously. But the main threat to women comes overwhelmingly from men, not from trans women, who should not be penalised for the actions of predatory men. As a result, trans women and non-binary people are being excluded from single-sex spaces, putting them at a greatly increased risk of violence.
Transgender people are far more likely to be survivors of sexual assault than perpetrators. The US Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime reports that 50% of transgender individuals are sexually abused or assaulted at one point in their lives, with some reports estimating the figure at 66% and even higher for groups such as transgender people of colour or with disabilities.
Office for National Statistics data shows that trans people are twice as likely as cisgender people to be victims of crime; and, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, they are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime, including rape and sexual assault. Home Office statistics reveal that hate crimes against transgender people in England and Wales increased by 56% last year. But if transgender people are excluded from safe spaces, where exactly are they supposed to go? As history has shown us, “separate but equal” facilities are not a viable option.
Of course, some trans people commit crimes, as do individuals from all demographics, including cisgender women. This should not invalidate the claims of everyone else from that group. If a handful of individuals take advantage of a system they should be held accountable, but it does not mean the service ought to be dismantled altogether, or rights stripped away from a whole community.
Just because a tiny minority of rape accusations are false, it doesn’t mean all rape cases should be thrown out (although this does seem to be the way our penal system operates). Men continue to attack women and children at home, in the workplace and in public, often with no repercussions; they have no need to resort to impersonating trans women. Far from making women feel safer, controversies about single-sex bathrooms have led to increased harassment and hostility towards cis women who do not present in a traditionally feminine way.
Much discussion around trans identity tends to focus insistently on genitalia. But where exactly does womanhood reside? In your ovaries, your cervix, your womb, your breasts? There are women who, for all sorts of reasons – illness, surgery, rare medical conditions – are missing one part or another of the female anatomy (Angelina Jolie, for example), and yet they do not cease to be women.
Excluding anyone on the basis of biological difference demonstrates a spectacular failure of empathy; worse, it reduces women to their reproductive systems, which is surely something we should be trying to move on from.
If women are united by anything – and there are 3.8 billion of us, so there is going to be little common ground – it is the risk of sexual violence, from which no woman is safe, especially not trans women. No rapist is going to stop to check whether you have fallopian tubes. The fact that we are all targets of this particular kind of violence should only increase cis women’s solidarity towards our trans sisters.
With gender and sexuality becoming increasingly fluid, feminism should aim to be more inclusive rather than less: welcoming trans men and women as well as non-binary, queer, intersex and gender-nonconforming people. While it may be true that trans women do not have the exact same lived experience as cis women growing up, cis women do not know what it is like to grow up as a trans woman, to be born in the wrong body and experience transphobia.
Our increasingly polarised online discourse means that women often feel pitted against one another, based on age, size, education, wealth, politics, whether we are mothers or not. But there is no one correct way to be a woman: what we need to remember is that we are stronger together than when we are apart.
• Kathryn Bromwich is a commissioning editor and writer on the Observer
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
