I swim. Regularly. It’s my preferred form of exercise for a variety of reasons. I like to think the staff and other patrons at the pool know me, and respect me. We don’t have lots of deep conversations, but we do talk, and I’ve known most of them for years - decades in some cases. I tend to go to the pool midday, and it’s not uncommon for a school group to be getting out of the pool as I’m changing and going in - it’s kind of how scheduling works, and the public swimming pools in this city are pretty busy places.
So, on Monday, after I got home from my swim, I started seeing a story from a rag called “The Western Standard” (The Western Standard is a right wing propaganda mill currently owned by Derek Fildebrandt, but started by Ezra Levant in the wake of the collapse of the Byfield family’s “Alberta Report” publication). The story recounted an alleged incident where some anonymous father was incensed that there was a transgender woman in the women’s changing room when his daughter might have been in there.
There are a number of red flags that go up on this story that need to be discussed.
- The anonymity of the complainant. It’s extremely rare for a story like that to be so completely ambiguous about who is making what allegations.
- The specificity of the details are lacking, and what details there are don’t exactly make sense, especially if you know anything about transgender people.
- The story closely mirrors one from Saskatoon that came out a little more than a week before.
- To put it kindly, the articles rely on the oldest accusation levelled at LGBTQ people: “they’re coming for your children”. It was false when it started, it’s false today.
* I’m not going to link directly to Western Standard for these stories - I consider them hate literature. I have taken copies of them into my records for future consideration. I will provide a few screen grabs here to underline my points.
Yesterday, snooping about further online, I discovered that (surprise, surprise), that there is now a campaign to organize protests at this pool demanding changes to the policies “because ‘men’ shouldn’t be around little girls” (we’ll come back to this).
The silence on who the complainant is hugely problematic. In reasonable journalism, sources are named unless there’s a specific need for the person to be anonymous. Efforts are made to validate that this is a real person, and that other people actually saw the events described. (Not always possible, but I’m talking very generally here).
I went digging online, and the story appeared on Facebook practically verbatim, and it comes out a few days before the Western Standard story:
This is all but word for word what is in the Western Standard article, and it appears on Facebook about 4 days before the Western Standard published their story. It looks to me like Western Standard was trawling through Facebook groups and found this and decided to publish it verbatim.
The fact that this story starts circulating just a few days after the alleged incident in Saskatoon is also somewhat suspicious. Suddenly we have a “wave” of transgender women exposing themselves in public locker rooms across the country? Very odd, considering people have been transitioning without incident in this country for decades, and even with the increased visibility today, the numbers are still very small - in Calgary, if it even reaches 1% of the population is transgender, and that’s more or less evenly split between those Assigned Male At Birth (AMAB), and those Assigned Female At Birth (AFAB), that would mean a few thousand people are transgender. Among those, only a small fraction are likely to be swimmers, or willing to use public recreation facilities at all. Then you would have to pick a time when one of those transgender women is at the pool? More than passing strange that within 2 weeks of each other, we have incidents in two separate cities with very similar narratives.
The other thing about these narratives that is hugely suspicious is the common refrain that they were “waving their penis about”. This kind of claim is designed to make you, the reader, think that transgender women are really just “men in dresses” who are out looking for the next thrill. Nothing could be further from the reality of the situation. The relationship of transgender people with their bodies is complex.
Many transgender women have deeply conflicted relationships with their bodies. There is a reason for the clinical language of gender dysphoria. The distress experienced covers a wide range of issues, including bodies, socialization, and so on. In my own discussions with other transgender women, few are willing to use shared spaces like changing rooms prior to surgery. This is often a combination of their own discomfort with their bodies and a recognition of the social pressures that they face both to integrate into women’s spaces socially. Not all, there are some transgender women who delight in their bodies, and do not choose to have surgeries to change them, but they likely take hormones to help both mood and to allow their bodies to take on a more generally feminine shape.
Of course, a big part of the issue here really is centred around societal attitudes towards nudity in general. North America as a whole has utterly ridiculous hang-ups about nudity - almost to the extent of seeing it as some kind of moral depravity. The idea of a nude body is somehow shameful, and worse, adults being nude around children is seen as a sign of being predatory - especially if one has a penis.
One thing to consider is that it’s perfectly normal to see mothers taking their young sons into the women’s change facility, and equally I’ve seen fathers take their daughters into the men’s change facility in these places. Strangely, nothing ever seems to happen in these situations, so one can arrive at the conclusion that the risk is in fact minimal.
This isn’t to minimize the harm done by sexual predators, but it’s long past time that we quit assuming that anyone who has a penis is a probable predator. It simply does not make any sense. We are at a point now where a lot of male professionals feel that they either have to have a woman in the room with them, or that there is a camera monitoring the room actively while they are with a female, or underage, client. This is ultimately detrimental to society.
The simple fact is that you cannot reasonably attribute motives to someone based solely on their anatomy. Further, you cannot assert that someone is a probable sexual predator simply because they are transgender. As I note above, transgender people have been transitioning without incident for decades. I would suspect that a population level study would turn up that the proportion of transgender people who are sexual predators is more or less the same as the proportion in the general population (that is to say, not very many at all).
What we are seeing here is the fomenting of a moral panic aimed at transgender people. It’s based on the oldest trick in the book: create a sense of disgust by connecting transgender identities with sexual predation. It is wrong - both in that it is incorrect to do so, and in the sense that it is a moral and ethical violation to assume a group of people is a threat based on their identity.
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