Over the last several weeks, there have been a series of stories about alleged "indecent exposure" incidents in public change rooms involving transgender women.
*Note: Dates are first time that articles were published, not necessarily the actual dates of the alleged events.
With the exception of the event in Nanaimo, the complainant is anonymous. That's the first red flag here. The article doesn't say that the complainant asked to be anonymous, so we can assume that the writer is simply drawing from other unverified sources. In the case of the incident in Calgary, the story seems to have started a few days before Western Standard picks it up, and it's carefully anonymous.
It's quite notable that the Western Standard appears to have basically copied this directly, and there's no sign of actual effort to contact the original source or to otherwise verify the content of the story. At least with the Nanaimo story we have an actual person named and (in theory) we could make some efforts to further corroborate their story.
The degree of truth here is immediately suspect. We have essentially anonymous claims about the actions of another person, and no corroboration from other sources. There are a number of other issues here, including the use of language like "transgender man", when the more probable identity of the person being discussed here is female. Did the events described here take place at all, much less as described?
I would add to this that events like this are really prone to "telephone game" effects where it may change or become dramatically different as it travels around. So, what starts out as "I saw a trans person in the locker room" with one person goes through a few different sources, and becomes "I saw a transgender man in the locker room, and I saw their penis!" ... and you can imagine from there where it might go as further embellishment gets added.
When we examine the Nanaimo story, the ChekNews article and the Western Standard article diverge from each other dramatically, and we should pay attention to the details. First, ChekNews actually reached out to the local Pride organization, who commented as follows:
The comments of the Pride Society are absolutely reasonable and correct. We don't actually know anything about the alleged offender, or their motivations. I'll come back to this a bit later, but transgender people have very complex relationships with their body, and there can be any number of explanations for the described behaviour that are completely benign. It is very dangerous to leap from "there was a transgender person in the locker room" to "they were being a sexual predator".
In comparison, the Western Standard article on the same subject does not contain any reference to the Nanaimo Pride organization's statement, and more importantly immediately jumps to connecting the event with pedophilia:
Further, Western Standard does some very sly "word weighting" here, by talking about the government's legislation and then noting that the Minister is now the Minister for Child care:
In my opinion, this is not accidental. First, the role of that minister today is irrelevant to the story. Second, it clearly feeds a false narrative that there are connections between transgender people and pedophilia.
The role of using pedophilia here is clear: pedophilia provokes strong emotional reactions in most people, in particular reactions of disgust. It's an old trick to link people to pedophilia in order to justify marginalizing them.
To be absolutely clear, there is no evidence that suggests that someone being transgender makes them more likely to be a pedophile, or hebephile. Assuming that a person who is transgender is somehow a "threat" in a change room is really unfounded. Further, I must point out that these accusations are almost always aimed at transgender women, and rarely at transgender men, which is more reflective of the attitudes of their accusers than of transgender women as a group.
The fact that there is little, or no, corroborating evidence attached to any of these stories, including statements from police beyond "we're investigating", one is left with the distinct probability that the stories themselves are significantly embellished in their particulars. When the news media carrying the story has failed entirely to reach out to community organizations and experts on the subject, it becomes even more suspicious that these stories are really part of a propaganda campaign.
Earlier, I said that transgender people have extremely complex relationships with their bodies. That is something of an understatement, perhaps even more so for transgender women. Transgender women often face a multi-faceted set of obstacles relating to their bodies, combining both social and physical elements.
Socially, transgender women face internal and external taboos about changing genders. The "feminine male" is a common subject of ridicule, and then there are the implicit and explicit barriers around clothing and make-up (although those are much less daunting than they used to be). There is enormous social and psychological conditioning around these barriers that make the early stages of transition particularly daunting for transgender women. (Ironically, transgender men often have a much easier time of it because society has always made room for "masculine women").
Places like locker rooms, washrooms, and so on, are strongly gendered spaces. This can make being transgender in one of them even more emotionally fraught. Many transgender people go through enormous amounts of anxiety learning to navigate highly gendered spaces like public washrooms or changing rooms. Add to that the degrees of discomfort with various aspects of their bodies, and many transgender women refuse to enter any space where nudity is likely until after they have had surgery to correct their body's configuration.
Reflecting further on the Nanaimo story, there are several possibilities. Yes, it is possible that this was a case of what used to be called a “peeping Tom” who decided to appropriate a transgender identity. Another possibility is that this is an anti-transgender activist who decided to “create the problem” - discussions of doing just that have rolled around various corners of the religious right for years.
If the person in Nanaimo is legitimately transgender, then we have to consider the possibility that they tried to take a step that was bigger than they were really prepared for, and they panicked. In which case, the mother’s reaction may have done an enormous amount of damage. Their behaviour is arguably inappropriate, but inappropriate behaviour is not the same thing as being a predator or being a pedophile.
While there are some transgender women who take delight in having a penis, even there the vast majority reserve that for the most intimate of situations. So far, to this writer's knowledge, there has never been a confirmed case of a transgender woman exposing their male genitalia to others in a context like a locker room. Such allegations are far more likely to turn out to be vastly exaggerated by their accuser.
As with all such matters, the majority of transgender women are no more likely to be offenders in this regard than any other adults. The simple reality is that while they unquestionably challenge many societal norms and expectations, there is very little evidence that they represent an objective threat to others.
