Harridans at the Hippodrome
How women standing up for women’s spaces look to the other side
In the absence of any lead from government or regulators, individual venues are having to decide how to handle clashes between men who believe — with plenty of evidence — that they will be allowed to use women’s spaces, and women who know that the logical implication of last year’s Supreme Court ruling is that spaces designated as women’s must be solely for women.
A vivid example was provided last Friday when a young woman went into the toilet at the Hippodrome casino in central London and saw two cross-dressing men inside. She left, asked a security guard to remove them and were told that they had the right to use the toilets because they were “dressed as women”. So she gathered some friends and they returned and challenged the men themselves.
Much of the altercation was videoed; security turned up and in the end the men left voluntarily. There’s a writeup in the Daily Mail, and one of the women involved talked about it to GB News. (As it happens, I was at the same event as the young women (the Hippodrome lets out private rooms), but I had left before it all kicked off. )
I’ve spent some time in the past couple of days looking at hostile responses on social media. Most posters sympathise with them and think they did a great job of standing up for themselves — as do I. But I always wonder how these things come across to people who either disagree with my position or aren’t sure what to think.
