Nae Bams please @dooooop2 - Twitter Profile

The Staniland Question is a culture-war parlour trick dressed up as a safeguarding inquiry. Its usual form asks whether “male-sexed people” should be allowed to undress or shower in communal changing rooms with teenage girls. The intended answer is a screenshot, not information. The question works by loading the dice before anyone speaks. “Trans woman” is replaced with “male-sexed person,” which removes the identity under discussion. “Using a changing room” becomes “undressing with teenage girls,” which quietly converts access to a regulated facility into a personal demand for intimate proximity to children. The wording therefore supplies its own lurid conclusion and invites the respondent to confirm or deny it. This is the classic loaded-question manoeuvre, related to “Have you stopped beating your wife?” A simple yes accepts the framing. A simple no is presented as a confession. Any attempt to challenge the assumptions is then described as “refusing to answer,” because apparently the highest form of political courage is accepting whatever premises an activist has smuggled into a sentence. It also relies on a false dilemma. The audience is asked to imagine only two possible arrangements: unrestricted access for any predatory man who announces a female identity, or the total exclusion of every trans woman from every female facility. Missing from this exciting binary are cubicles, staff supervision, codes of conduct, alternative facilities, age restrictions, safeguarding procedures and the mundane fact that harassment remains harassment regardless of who commits it. The image of the trans woman changing clothes is replaced with the image of a male intruder theatrically exposing himself to frightened children. This is less a dog whistle than a foghorn. The sexual menace is not so much hidden as it is the entire sales pitch. The question also develops an inconvenient case of selective blindness around trans men. A strictly birth-sex rule would direct male, bearded trans men into women’s facilities. This outcome is usually waved away, because acknowledging it would reveal that the proposed rule is not a neat restoration of common sense. It is another policy choice with foreseeable conflicts, privacy problems and safeguarding complications. None of this means every trans-inclusive policy is sensible, or that every communal facility must operate identically. Real policy requires distinctions. A swimming pool, a school changing room, a domestic-abuse refuge and a private gym are different environments. Good rules consider behaviour, privacy, vulnerability, physical design and practical alternatives. The Staniland Question eliminates those distinctions because distinctions interfere with the stunt. It is not designed to discover what a politician believes about facility design or safeguarding. It is designed to force them into one of two hostile headlines. The rational answer is simple: nobody has a right to expose themselves to children, and permitting someone to use a facility does not grant such a right. The serious question is how institutions protect privacy, dignity and safety for everyone. The Staniland Question replaces that work with a verbal mousetrap, then congratulates itself when sensible people decline to put their fingers in it.

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Nae Bams please @dooooop2

2 days ago

@roisinmurphy @WomenReadWomen @owenjonesjourno I thought you said you wanted to be free from this, yet you literally can't help but go back, like an addict

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