(no subject)

[kaberett]

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

Comments

[sorrillia]

The way I read their policy was "no one identifying as male" and also "no one assigned male at birth", based on the whole focus on "brought up as women". It's not clear to me that transwomen are allowed.

I also feel like their use of quotes around hybrid and intersex, especially the latter, given it's a very standard term, is kind of patronizing and offensive. And their parenthetical translation of intersex seemed a bit problematic. (But I am not intersex, and don't know what hybrid means, but doubt it applies to me either.)

(Note about personal bias on this: as a neutrois person who was male-assigned at birth, policies phrased this way tend to make me uncomfortable in general because I feel like they're gendering me as male because I don't identify as and don't pass or try to present as female. If they want to be female-only and thus exclude me, I'd really prefer they not phrase it as "we're trying to exclude men", since that implies that as a non-woman, I must be a man.)

[kaberett]

Mmm. I agree that the wording is really, really bad. For what it's worth, I do read them as saying that trans* women are welcome, but this is probably in part because I already know they are; I think their focus was in part because it's (I understand) not unheard of for trans* guys to hang around women-only spaces they occupied pre-transition.

I agree that the scare quotes are REALLY SKEEVY.

And, yes, I know what you mean about the feeling of exclusion, albeit coming at it from the other side :-/

[gerald_duck]

I feel my objections to their policy can be summed up as:

• The TL;DR amounts to "Yes, but are you a male non-binary person or a female non-binary person?"
  
• The logic of "If our customers can reveal something as private as sexual abuse, then surely we have created a safe enough atmosphere to [out oneself as intersex]?" is objectionably flawed.

On the first point, they're very squarely between a rock and a hard place: "Sh! does not believe in restrictive labels of “female” OR “male” " is fundamentally at odds with their mission statement of "The UK's first sex store owned by, run by and dedicated to women". They are labelling people as "women" and "not-women" then restricting access on the basis of those labels. It's what they do.

Their document waffles a lot and attempts to exude good vibes without actually, so far as I can see, stating their policy. It seems to be their policy that their staff get to choose who is or is not female enough on a case by case basis according to criteria of their own devising. If so, that's going to cause a lot of problems. But it would also cause a lot of different problems to have a policy of admitting anyone prepared to say "I am female", or alternatively anyone prepared to say "I am not male". Going on some independent criterion such as birth certificates or passports would create a whole third set of problems — not least then creating a policy that was neither cumbersome nor demeaning on who should be challenged for proof. Even before someone turned up with a sex-"X" passport.

On the second point, what their claim amounts to is that they've created an atmosphere in which some people are willing to out themselves as sexual abuse survivors. To go from that to an inference that all sexual abuse survivors ought to feel safe outing themselves in Sh! is wrong. To go from that to an inference that all intersex people ought to feel safe outing themselves in Sh! is wrong. To go from that to saying it's acceptable to require intersex people to out themselves is even more wrong.

(And I'm not sure I like their choice of pronouns in the builder anecdote, either…)