Ban TERFs from sports. Ban them from changing rooms. Ban them from public toilets. How ridiculous does that sound. Now ask yourself why it sounds ridiculous. Because it is targeting a group of people based on who they are rather than anything they have actually done. Because there is no evidence they pose a threat. Because singling out a category of person and removing their access to public life based on identity rather than behaviour is recognised immediately as wrong. So why is it acceptable when the target is transgender people. The answer is that it is not acceptable. It has never been acceptable. The logic that makes a TERF ban sound absurd is exactly the logic that makes a trans ban absurd. The reasoning is identical. The only difference is which group is being targeted. And somehow that difference is being treated as though it changes the principle entirely. It does not. There are zero recorded cases of a transgender woman attacking or harassing a cisgender woman in a public toilet in the United Kingdom. Zero. The ban on trans people in women’s spaces is not responding to a documented problem. It is creating a solution to something that has not happened while ignoring the 160,000 sexual assaults committed by men that happen every year in spaces nobody is proposing to restrict. In sport the argument shifts to competitive advantage. But the bans being implemented are not limited to elite athletics where physiological differences might theoretically be relevant. They extend to recreational football. Community swimming. Amateur leagues where nobody is competing for anything except the right to participate. A transgender woman playing five-a-side on a Sunday morning is not a threat to sporting integrity. She is just playing football. The principle being applied is not fairness. It is exclusion. The sport argument is the door. Once it is open the exclusion extends everywhere because the goal was never fairness in sport. The goal was removal from public life. Banning TERFs from toilets sounds ridiculous because targeting people based on identity rather than behaviour is ridiculous. That is the point. That is exactly the point.
