Separating bathrooms by sex is about physical safety
Andrew Gold said:
“By virtue of being significantly weaker, there there's there's much less concern about how that might end up, and and particularly less sexual violence from women to men than men to women. That is why we separate them. So it's about sex. It's not about gender.”
The statistical gap in rates of sexual violence between men and women is real, and the argument that sex-segregated spaces exist to protect women from male violence is widely repeated and feels intuitive to many people.
The statistical difference in rates of sexual violence between men and women is real, and nobody is disputing that. What the argument does with that fact is where it goes wrong: it treats the presence of a trans woman in a bathroom as equivalent to the presence of a predatory man, which is not a logical step, it is a conflation. Research that has actually looked at what happens when bathroom access is trans-inclusive finds no increase in crime, and yet trans women directed to use male facilities face genuine, documented risk of harassment and assault. The people who pay the cost of this reasoning are not hypothetical: they are trans women, pushed into spaces where they are far less safe, to protect other women from a threat the evidence does not show they pose.
What I said at the time:
“Do know what? I really worry about this, that we're continuing to portray men as sexual predators, people who are violent, people who are able to overcome the weak, feeble woman.”
Trans women who are denied access to facilities matching their gender, and who face real risk of harassment and violence when directed to use male facilities instead.