Excluding trans women from spaces is not a safety principle
Dr Helen Webberley on Robby Starbuck: transition and children, Robby Starbuck
Excluding trans women from women's spaces is a safety measure. If a woman has a penis, that is reason enough to keep her out. The body becomes the rule, and the rule is presented as protection.
What I was trying to say there is that we do not build exclusion policies around body parts, and we never have. Some women have been raped. Some women have a penis. Neither of those facts has ever been treated as grounds for removing someone from a women's space, because that is not how safety works and it is not how humanity works. The moment you say "this one physical characteristic disqualifies you from belonging here", you have stopped talking about safety and started talking about who you think deserves to exist in public life. Trans women are women. A policy that singles out their bodies is not a safeguarding principle. It is discrimination with a safety argument borrowed to cover it.
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