The violence women face is real, serious, and happening every week. It does not come from trans people in bathrooms. It comes from the same sources it has always come from, and naming that clearly is not a diversion from feminism. It is the point of it.
Kate Nash said it at Mighty Hoopla, and she was right
At the Mighty Hoopla Festival, Kate Nash took the stage and said what needed saying. Women are in danger. Real danger. Weekly danger. Not from a trans woman needing to use the loo, not from a boxing match, but from actual violence, the kind that fills court reports and crisis shelters and coroner's records. You can watch her say it here.
It was a short, sharp, furious statement of the obvious, and the crowd understood it immediately. That is what happens when somebody finally says the thing out loud.
Who is actually at risk
Trans people make up roughly 0.5 percent of the UK population, according to Catherine Gromwich writing in the Guardian, and they are twice as likely to be victims of crime as cisgender people. Twice as likely. That is not a marginal statistical quirk. That is a community under consistent, documented threat.
When we talk about danger to women, trans women are included in that conversation. They face the same structural violence, compounded by the specific hostility directed at them for being trans. Excluding them from the category of "women at risk" does not make women safer. It just makes the picture incomplete.
The real threat does not need a bathroom to hide in
The framing that has dominated the last few years, that women's safety depends on keeping trans women out of toilets, has consumed enormous political and media energy while the actual sources of violence against women have continued unchanged. Domestic abuse. Sexual violence. Street harassment. Coercive control. These are the things killing women. These are the things that fill the statistics.
Trans women have been using women's facilities for decades. There is no documented pattern of harm arising from that. The danger women face is not located there, and pretending otherwise does not protect anyone. It redirects attention and resource away from the things that actually would.
Feminist energy deserves better targets
Kate Nash is one of a number of women in public life who have been willing to say this clearly and take the consequences for it. That takes something. The pressure to stay quiet, or to perform concern about trans inclusion as a form of feminist credential, is real. Pushing back on that framing and pointing at actual violence is the braver and more useful thing to do.
Women's rights and trans rights are not competing claims. They are the same project. Safety, dignity, freedom from violence, the right to exist in public without fear. Those things belong to all of us, and the movement that fights for them is stronger when it includes everyone who needs them.
If there is a topic that you would like me to cover, just let Sammy know.
Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and equality.