No, you do not have a right to trans exclusionary safe spaces

A topic of significant discussion in the UK during the last week has been “why can’t biological women have something for themselves?”

Ask yourself this: Why does the UK not officially allow men to set up clubs that exclude women? Why does this country not allow white supremacists to set up white only parties?

All of our equality legislation is designed around preventing the exclusion of marginalised groups in society through discrimination. Banning a group of people from a space is not automatically acceptable in any circumstance. What we have instead is a system where by default all discrimination is illegal, but some protected groups of people are allowed, under limited circumstances to exclude the dominant social group. That has a test attached — this discrimination has to be proportionate and it has to be for a legitimate aim. For instance a women’s domestic violence group therapy session has the legitimate aim of providing a space where women can share their vulnerability together after violence from men, and that can’t happen freely if their abusers are able to sit in on the session. That’s a legitimate aim. The proportionality test is achieved by proving that there isn’t a different less severe form of discrimination that balances the rights of those involved.

More open, general-public oriented spaces are almost always non discriminatory — consider for example the gay bars and clubs that straight people frequently come to because they like the vibe even though most LGBTQ people have had negative experiences with straight people (including frequent enough reports of straight cisgender women behaving inappropriately towards queer people in those very clubs). The reasons for this aren’t just legal. An LGBTQ space that strictly policed whether patrons were LGBTQ would be unsafe for most LGBTQ people who would be forced to prove it in some degrading way. Many of us have experienced creepy bouncers insisting on making girls kiss each other to prove they are gay to get in. A space for disabled people that required everyone to prove their illnesses would be unsafe for disabled people. The vast majority of real world “safe spaces” are constructed primarily by communicating who the space is intended for, and then secondarily by using codes of conduct to exclude people based on their behaviour, not their identity. Someone might pretend to have cancer to go to a workshop for cancer survivors and that’s inappropriate if they do, but they’re likely only to be actively excluded at the point that they start behaving actively inappropriate towards others present because hard bars on proving yourself are bad for everyone involved.

When this comes back to trans people in women’s spaces, the question you really should be asking yourself is not “can’t we get a space that’s free for non trans people” but on what planet are you from that trans people are somehow so dominant that you can’t escape us anywhere? On what planet are trans people doing so much violence that you need a trans free space to recover and feel safe? At the root of this demand for trans exclusion is a lie — the lie that trans women are somehow dominating society, controlling everyone and everything. It doesn’t get stated so explicitly as that most of the time but it underpins the logic of the question of our removal in the first place.