Eleanor Penny, for Novara Media, on “bathroom bills” and anti-trans scaremongering:

It seems to matter little that all this has been repeatedly debunked as statistical nonsense or swivel-eyed conspiracism. They aren’t really propositions to be proved true or false – they are ways of telegraphing disgust. Of signalling to those who fall outside normative conceptions of gender: ‘you don’t belong here’. This may be where we empty our bladders – but the real filth is you.

There are zero confirmed cases of a man pretending to be a trans woman to commit sexual assault. It’s a fever dream of conservative culture war strategists and overly-online obsessives determined to forge a cover story for their own reheated prejudice. There are, however, many cases of cis men assaulting people in women’s bathrooms without such a pretence. As journalist Paris Lees has charted, there are many cases of gender-non-conforming cis women being stopped in public bathrooms on suspicion of existing-while-trans.