Men can simply put on a wig and access women's spaces
Lucy Johnston said:
“So it is okay for a man to put on a wig, say I identify as a woman and go to a, well I don't think a loo is a necessarily good example, but to go into any female space, to go into a refuge for women for domestic abuse.”
The scenario of a predatory man exploiting self-identification to access women's spaces is vivid and easy to imagine, and it attaches to a genuine concern about safety in refuges and similar settings.
The concern about women's refuges is real, and it deserves a real answer rather than a hypothetical villain. What the claim describes, a man entering a space to harm women, is already a criminal act, and it remains one regardless of what he is wearing or what he says about his identity. Trans women are not that man: they are women seeking the same safety that every other woman in those spaces needs. The Equality Act already allows services to exclude any individual where there is a specific, proportionate reason to do so, which means the protection exists without requiring a policy that sweeps out every trans woman as a precondition. Countries that have had self-identification laws for years have not seen the wave of predatory abuse this scenario predicts, because the scenario is not how abuse works and not how trans women live. The cost of treating it as though it were is that real trans women, many of them fleeing the same violence those refuges exist to address, are turned away from the one place designed to help them.
What I said at the time:
“Will not you to say to me that I think it's okay for a man to put on a wig, pretend to be a woman and go and hurt somebody.”
Trans women who are denied access to services they need, and the broader public debate which is distorted by a threat that evidence does not show is materialising.