kaberett | (no subject) (Reply)

Sh! [NSFW], the "UK’s first ever sex shop for women, trading since 1992", has recently made its policy on trans* customers explicit [content warning: cissexist language, mention of rape]. There's some good stuff in there, but there's also a lot that's really, really bad.

I composed & left a comment, pointing out aspects I considered problematic. Turns out they have comment moderation on, so I reproduce it below.

Hiya. I’m genderqueer and found this post somewhat uncomfortable reading, honestly, and I don’t know where it leaves me. I feel like the executive summary is that the policy is closer to “no unaccompanied male-identified people except at Gent’s Nite” than to “female-identified people only”. Is that accurate?

Regardless of how accurate it is, I’d like to urge you to reconsider phrases like “male-born men” - “male assigned at birth” is the generally preferred construction, and avoids echos of the trans-exclusionary phrase “womyn born womyn”. I’d also ask that you consider that being required to out oneself as trans* is a very different situation to choosing to out oneself as a survivor of sexual assault or abuse, in terms of an individual’s perceived safety and general self-confidence. “You don’t pass”[1] is not exactly a message that’s conducive to most people feeling good about themselves.

[TRIGGER WARNING on this next bit]
Fundamentally, as a trans* person with a history of sexual assaults, I feel about as comfortable with the idea of being required to state my gender identity as I do with having to out myself as a sexual assault survivor in order to get people to stop telling rape jokes about me. Neither situation feels safe.
[END TRIGGER WARNING]

Ironically enough, I’m not even someone who’s likely to be challenged in Sh! - because 99% of the time I’m perceived as female.

… and in closing, as the number of groups for non-binary people is rising rapidly (we’re currently at Practical Androgyny, NonBinary.org, Think Outside The Box & genderqueerintheUK, as far as I know most of which were created in the past 18 months), I think it’s quite important for you to revisit the question of non-binary-identified folk very soon.

* the asterisk represents a wildcard, indicating that this is an umbrella term intended to cover a wide range of people
[1] For all that the idea of “passing” is itself problematic :-s