The right-wing claim that trans people exist simply to harass women and take away their designated spaces has gained a disturbing amount of ground in this administration. But it’s not hard to see that behind the anti-trans rhetoric, a more terrifying reality hides in plain sight. We do have a problem with men in women’s spaces, and it has absolutely nothing to do with trans people.
YouTuber and TikToker Kat Blaque broke it down in a recent video where she explains that anti-trans hysteria around bathroom access have actually created an atmosphere where cis men—the true predators—are free to enter women’s bathrooms on narc missions.
“A lot of states now have bans on transgender people using the restroom that matches their gender,” Blaque explained in a TikTok posted yesterday, “and in almost every circumstance I’ve seen where someone has barged into a restroom to prevent a trans person from using the restroom, they were actually accosting cis women.”
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This was the case at a Boston hotel this week, where two cis lesbians were accosted and asked to “prove” their gender by a security guard. It’s from an isolated example: when you create trans panic, eventually that panic is going to circle back around to cis people who don’t perform their gender in a way that matches the perceived cis-hetero norm.
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“We need to be thoughtful about the fear that the sudden appearance of multiple armed officers can cause.”
“It’s almost always a male security guard barging into the restroom to ‘protect women from being harassed’, by harassing women they don’t see as sufficiently feminine enough to be in the women’s restroom,” Blaque explains in her video.
Obviously most people with good sense understand that trans people are not a threat and don’t threaten the sanctity of women’s spaces. But for the people that do fear the idea of a “man” feeling free to enter a women’s bathroom, congratulations, we’re now under an administration that actively encourages cis men entering and policing women’s bathrooms.
“Really all this was was a ruse to justify men barging into the women’s restroom,” Blaque says. And she’s absolutely right. Over the past few years, we’ve seen cis women accosted in bathrooms because they were presumed to be trans. We’ve seen cis athletes asked to “prove” their cisness to compete on high school sports teams. So many of the attacks on trans people have widespread ramifications for cis women as well.
As Blaque points out, it’s never been about keeping women safe. It’s always been about patriarchal control over women’s bodies.
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