Loopholes in single-sex spaces are always exploited by the worst people
Helen Joyce said:
“The people who use loopholes are precisely the worst people. So we have to be very clear. If you have a loophole, bad people go through it.”
The general principle that bad actors exploit gaps in rules is a familiar and intuitive idea from everyday life and policy, so applying it to single-sex spaces feels like common sense risk management.
The intuition that loopholes attract bad actors is real and worth taking seriously in policy design, but an intuition is not evidence, and this claim needs evidence because it asks us to exclude real people from safety on the basis of a predicted harm that has not materialised. Jurisdictions that have operated self-identification policies for years, including Canada and several US states, have not recorded the rise in incidents that this argument predicts: the data have been looked for, and they are not there. What is there, and well-documented, is the harm done to trans women who are turned away from women's spaces and directed instead into men's spaces, where the risks of harassment and violence they face are substantially higher. Treating an entire group of people as a vector for other people's crimes, without evidence that the pattern exists, is not risk management; it is exclusion with a borrowed justification, and the people who pay for it are the ones who were never the threat.
What I said at the time:
“I think it's a very dangerous thing to associate transgender women with predatory men.”
Trans women who are excluded from women's spaces and directed to men's spaces where they face documented elevated risks of harassment and violence.