Protect the dolls

That’s become the rallying-cry of those who think the Supreme Court stole the rights of trans people when it held in For Women Scotland that sex in the Equality Act bears its natural, biological meaning.

So who are these “dolls”? According to this video, “dolls” is “an endearing term that emerged in the 1960s and 70s… It was part of a powerful movement to reclaim and reframe the way that trans women were seen in a society that so often rejected them” and “by calling each other dolls, they affirmed their beauty, care and worth.”

So in plainer words, “dolls” refers to men who say they are women. And “protect the dolls” means “protect men who say they are women from being faced with the reality that they are men, and the consequences of that reality”.

What does that reality look like? Well, the thing about men is they’re not women. So if something is for women only, it’s not for men. That means that if you are a man who says he is a woman - one of the “dolls” needing this protection - one of the consequences of the reality that you are a man is that women are likely to object if you try to invade their single-sex spaces, take their scholarships or team places, “breast-feed” an infant (alas, I am not making this up), etc.

Women who object to the presence of men in women-only spaces are often met with a response along the lines “Bigot! You’re saying all trans women are predators, perverts, voyeurs, exhibitionists, creeps!” And they say patiently, over and over again: “No. We’re not saying all trans-identifying men are predators. We’re saying the overwhelming majority of predators are men. So if you’re a man, we can’t tell from looking at you whether you’re the decent kind or the predatory kind. If you catch our eye and smile at us by the mirror in the ladies’ or in the changing room, we can’t tell whether that’s the friendly smile of a colleague or the leer of a sex pest. So please just stay out.”

I am starting to think that response is unduly kind. Let me explain.

“Trans women” are a subcategory of men. They are men who for whatever reason (and we are not privy to their individual reasons) either wish actually to be mistaken for women, or would like other people at least to pretend to mistake them for women. They go to a variety of different lengths to be seen as women. Some do everything in their power to “pass” as women, including radical remodelling of their genitals, voice surgery, facial feminisation surgery, laser hair removal, and modifying their gait and social behaviour. I’ve heard tell that the anguished desperation of some of these men to be seen as women has even led some of them to go so far as trying to modify their habit of interrupting and talking over women.

Others don’t try so hard. Some (probably most) have an understandable preference to retain their male sexual function, so they leave their genitals and hormones alone. Some of those still do their best with clothes, hairstyle, make-up, maybe supplemented by what they imagine to be feminine mannerisms. Yet others simply declare themselves to be women, and expect everyone else to pretend along, even on days when they haven’t bothered to shave.

All of these varieties of men are men. And as I have already noted, we are not privy to their reasons for claiming to be women or performing their conception of womanhood. No doubt some proportion of these men feel a genuine distress that they were not born female, and are managing that distress by pretending as hard as they can that the reality they find unpalatable is not real. I couldn’t think that a healthy or a grown-up way of coping with the disappointments of reality even if it didn’t entail entitled demands to have everyone else join in with the pretence. But the demand is both delusional and oppressive.

Reality is disappointing sometimes. I get that, I really do. I’m quite disappointed that I’m not a brilliant musician. But I don’t get to manage my disappointment by giving toe-curlingly bad recitals at the Wigmore Hall which random members of the public are press-ganged into receiving with rapturous applause. I manage it by being a grown-up who knows that I don’t get everything I want.

So anyway: that’s the most benign subcategory of the class of men who say they are women: those genuinely upset and disappointed by the fact that they are men.

But there are other kinds of men who say they are women. There are men for whom dressing as women is a sexual fetish. There are men who are sexually aroused by invading supposedly women-only spaces. There are cross-dressing men who talk to each other on Reddit chats and other places about their “euphoria boners”. There are men who go into women’s toilets and changing rooms in order to masturbate, film themselves while they do so, and then post that footage online. It’s a porn category.

There are even men who take drugs to induce lactation, and either express the resulting milk or get infants to suck on their nipples. That’s a porn category too.

No doubt it will be thought indelicate of me to mention this. It’s a repulsive side of the world we’d all prefer to look away from. But these men exist. I don’t know what proportion of the men who say they are women and go to work dressed as women are fetishists, and what proportion are genuinely upset and disappointed by the fact of their male bodies; or indeed how much overlap there may be between those groups. I don’t even know the orders of magnitude involved: the fetishists may be 1% or 5% of the men who go to work dressed as women, or 50%, or more than 90%.

But you know what? I don’t really care. Whatever the proportions, there’s exactly one acceptable way for men to behave in relation to women-only spaces, and that is to stay out of them. That’s what decent men do. If a man doesn’t stay out, he’s not a decent man. Even if he’s genuinely distressed by his male body and invading women’s spaces with no more nefarious intent than to comfort himself for that distress by playing pretend, he’s showing a callous indifference to women’s privacy and boundaries by doing so. He’s behaving like a man who doesn’t think women have the right to privacy away from the male gaze. He’s behaving like a man who’s not good with the word “no”.

So forgive me, but I think women are entitled to be particularly wary around such a man. He may not, quite, be a proven sex pest; but he’s certainly displaying some pretty troubling red flags.

My message to the men who like to cross dress at work is simple. Fine. You do you. Keep it tolerably businesslike, and no employer now will dare tell you to go home and come back properly dressed; you’ve won that one. Whatever your reasons for cross-dressing at work, you’re going to be allowed to do it.

Just stay out of women’s spaces. If you don’t want to be thought a creep and a predator, don’t behave like one.