Updated 16 July 2026
The fear is not invented. That is the first thing to say, and the most important.
Women who have experienced sexual violence — particularly assault by a male stranger, or in a public or semi-public space — carry something in their bodies that statistics cannot reach. The nervous system does not distinguish carefully between sources of threat. It generalises. It was built to generalise. A body that resembles the one that hurt you will register as danger before your conscious mind has time to assess it. This is not prejudice. This is how trauma works. And it deserves to be taken seriously — not explained away, not redirected, not used as a debating point. Just heard.
I want to say that first because everything else I'm going to say sits underneath it, not on top of it.
The debate, as Percy has arranged it, is about threat. About what male-bodied people might do to women. About invasion and violation and the safety of female spaces. It starts from fear — a fear that is, in many women, entirely earned. And fear is easy to amplify, especially when it is real.
But the situations being described are not all the same situation, and the flattening is where Percy does his work.
I used to go to life drawing classes. Men and women in the same room, a naked human being at the centre of it, everyone looking carefully and without flinching. It was not a sexual experience. It was not a threatening one. It was simply human beings attending to the human form. The artist's eye, trained in that room, learns something important: that visibility is not always the problem. Context matters enormously.
Last year I was at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. The toilets were divided by sex — cubicles, and separate areas for washing hands on each side. It did not occur to me, drying my hands in the men's, that I might have been offended by a woman watching me do it. I would not have been. The only time I have ever felt genuine embarrassment in a public toilet was as a teenager, when I walked into the wrong one by accident. The embarrassment was entirely mine, and it was about nothing except my own mistake.
Temple Meads, waiting for a train. I needed a pee. I got one, straight in, no queue. I noticed the queue on the other side of the corridor — women, four or five deep, patient, checking phones. I'd seen the same thing at my local cinema. Not once. Every time.
It is not that fewer women travel, or fewer women watch films, or that women have found some biological workaround the rest of us don't know about. It is that the buildings were designed by people who gave men and women the same floor space, or the same number of fixtures, for a task that does not take the same amount of time. Urinals fit more men per square metre. Cubicles do not. Nobody sat down and decided women should queue. Somebody just never sat down and asked the question at all.
Caroline Criado Perez calls this the gender data gap: a world quietly built to one set of specifications and assumed to fit everyone. The toilet queue is one of her clearest examples, and one of the least dramatic. Nobody spent two hundred million dollars arguing about who gets to use which door at Temple Meads. Nobody needed to. The women just queue, quietly, and the building never gets fixed, because a queue is not a crisis. A queue does not make an attack ad. It just makes women late, forty years running, in every station and cinema Percy has never had to think about — because he was busy pointing everyone at the mirror and the handbasin instead.
A trans woman fixing her makeup at a mirror in a public toilet. For many people, this encounter is entirely ordinary. I understand that for some women — particularly those who have been hurt — it may not feel that way, and I don't want to dismiss that.
A physically intact male-bodied person in a women's prison, where the women are captive, many of them survivors of male violence, with nowhere else to go. That is a genuinely different situation. That concern is serious. There have been cases. It deserves a careful answer, not a dismissal.
Between these two there is a great deal of gradation — changing rooms, swimming pools, refuges, questions of context and vulnerability. Most people, if they are allowed to think carefully rather than choose a side, can navigate this. They can say: here, this seems manageable. Here, we need to think more carefully. Here, the safety of vulnerable women must come first.
Percy did not manufacture the fear. He found it, and he aimed it.
He aimed it at a group who are themselves far more likely to be victims of violence than its perpetrators. Researchers reviewing police records across multiple US cities found no documented pattern of men using transgender identity as cover to assault women in public bathrooms. The scenario exists as a fear. It does not yet exist as a pattern. Those are different things — and yet the fear is not irrational, because the underlying threat it is responding to, male violence, is entirely real. The fear simply cannot always locate where the danger actually lives.
In the 2024 American presidential election, Republicans spent over two hundred and twenty million dollars on attack ads targeting transgender people — more than on housing, the economy, or the cost of living combined. Meanwhile the planet continued to heat. The housing crisis ground on. The food banks multiplied. The health service crumbled. These are the things that affect everybody, every day — and they went unmentioned, underfunded, crowded out by a manufactured emergency about a mirror and a handbasin.
Percy didn't just choose a distraction. He chose the most expensive distraction in political advertising history. And we had the argument he wanted us to have, while everything else quietly got worse.
The Femicide Census has recorded over two thousand cases of women killed by men in the UK since 2009. One woman is killed every three days. Ninety percent of the killers are family members, partners, or people already known to the victim. The latest figures, published in March 2026, show that sons were suspected in almost one in five of all such killings in the past year alone — the highest rate in sixteen years of data collection.
This is not said to minimise what women fear in shared spaces. It is said because the women being killed every three days deserved political attention, advertising money, public outrage — and they got almost none of it.
A female friend of mine who lives in Brighton asked me what I was doing about women being murdered. She has four daughters and no man in her life.
She has, whether by accident or design, removed the two primary statistical pathways to femicide almost entirely. Sixty-one percent of women killed by men are killed by a current or former partner. Almost one in five of last year's recorded femicides were matricide — mothers killed by their sons. She has neither. That is not nothing. That is most of it.
Percy's story is the stranger in the dark. The data keeps finding the husband at the kitchen table.
The trans woman and the traumatised woman did not choose to be in opposition. That arrangement was made for them, by someone who needed them occupied.
I would like to know what it feels like to be a woman. Nobody will tell me — not fully, not in a way that truly bridges the gap. I find this a genuine loss. Half the human race has an experience I will never properly access, and I am aware of that absence.
If I knew what it felt like to be a woman, I think I would be a better man. Not because I think knowing would settle anything. But because the system that produces the violence, and then produces fear, and then uses that fear as a political instrument — that system does not ask permission. It uses what it finds. It used something real to do something dishonest.
The women on both sides of that door deserved better than to be handed to each other as a problem.
The life class taught me to look without fear. I know that is easier for me than it is for many people. I hold that.
The body that has just spent 340 pages deciding which toilet trans people may not use is called the Equality and Human Rights Commission. It is reassuring to know that a government body is keeping an eye on irony.