Trans women are not a threat to women's spaces. But cis men are.

The anti-trans right consistently claims that trans-inclusive policies are akin to letting “men” take over women’s spaces, and a recent experience at a Brandi Carlile concert reminded me of the real issue here: cis men who are unable to let women have a space, even for an evening.

From bathrooms to basketball courts to sorority houses to women’s shelters, the anti-trans movement has convinced itself that trans women are a threat to cis women, despite unending data (not to mention common sense) disproving their claims and proving, instead, that it has always been cisgender men who are overwhelmingly a threat to all women.

Which is why if there is anyone who needs to be reigned in from “taking over” women’s spaces, it’s certainly not trans women; it’s the cisgender men who burst into these spaces with no ability to decenter themselves.

A few weeks ago, I attended a Brandi Carlile concert at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival with my wife, my sister, and some friends. I had never seen her perform live before, but my sister had, and she told me it was exactly the type of empowering, women-centered lovefest you’d expect from a lesbian headliner with a majority lesbian and women fan base.

I’d seen the Indigo Girls in concert enough times to know exactly what she meant. The safety, the kindness, the pure, unadulterated queer joy – there’s nothing like it. In the days leading up to the event, we kept joking with one another that we’d better not lay eyes on a single man that night, and if we do, he’d better be gay.

It was our way of communicating how excited we were to be in a public space dominated by women rather than cis straight men, even if only for a few hours. Because it’s still so rare to find that. And because everyone is so thrilled to feel safe and secure and dance together to their favorite songs, it builds a camaraderie like no other.

But one concertgoer in the row in front of us did not seem to get the message.

He was an older man with his wife, both in their late sixties, maybe early seventies. I hadn’t noticed him at all as I chatted with my sister while the opening band performed. The pavilion was ripe with energy as fans (overwhelmingly women, as we’d expected) eagerly greeted one another and toasted the night with beers in plastic cups.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Every single person in that pavilion was talking. But that didn’t stop this man from turning to face me, deep loathing in his eyes, and sniping, “Excuse me, I’d like to hear this. I can hear your voice more than I can hear the band.”

I was so shell-shocked that I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I just silently nodded. I’d never been shushed at a loud, rowdy concert before, let alone during the opening act, and let alone so intensely. He came in so hot, as if he’d already asked me to quiet down several times. Instead, it was clear he believed I should have inherently known how to make sure he had his ideal concert experience.

I didn’t know whether to change my behavior, considering, as I said, the arena was already filled with loud, boisterous voices, and I clearly wasn’t in the wrong.

All I knew was that suddenly, I felt watched, perceived, monitored. I wasn’t just another anonymous woman in the crowd. I was a woman this man was paying attention to, and it made me squirm in my seat.

It turned out, I wasn’t the only one. A few minutes later, he turned around again and snapped at the group of women next to us.

“SHHHH!” he said, jamming his finger up to his lips. “My wife and I want to hear this!” The group was equally gobsmacked. They rolled their eyes at him and tried to move on with their night, but he didn’t back down. He told them his wife had a hearing aid and needed quiet, and while, of course, accommodations should be made for people who are hard of hearing, asking an entire pavilion of people to quiet down didn’t seem like the obvious solution. The staff, for example, were allowing people to gather directly in front of the stage. We thought perhaps they should try it.

I kept wondering how this man felt so comfortable angrily shushing everyone around him without at all considering that, if everyone else was doing the same thing, perhaps he was the outlier.

His wife largely let him do the talking, but eventually she joined the tussle. When the women next to us kept chatting away, she stood up and intentionally perched herself on the back of her seat to block their view of the stage.

We couldn’t believe it. Were they children? As my sister put it, “These people clearly came tonight looking for a fight.”

They all began to argue. One of the women beside us asked if they really expected the thousands of people around them to quiet down. “Have you ever been in public before?” she shouted, as my wife leaned over and snapped her fingers in support of our new comrades.

We began betting on when security would be called and who would be calling it on whom. We had to laugh about it a little bit, but my sister also expressed genuine sadness that the community of loving kindness she advertised wasn’t what we were experiencing.

Eventually, the angry couple just switched seats with another pair farther away from us all, though it’s unclear if moving half a row down made their night any quieter. Nevertheless, the women next to us cheered, and the night became exactly what we originally hoped – one filled with joy and girl power.

But we ended up spending a great deal of time talking about the man’s intensity, and I jokingly began referring to him as the Enes Kanter Freedom of the concert. Kanter Freedom, a former NBA star, has inserted himself into the WNBA trans athlete debate, creating a media spectacle out of the league’s current inclusive guidelines and repeatedly threatening to pretend to be a trans woman and try out for a team unless the league updates its policy to declare only “biological” women eligible.

Progressives have slammed Kanter Freedom for centering himself in a women’s space while claiming to be fighting for them. He even sparred with a player during a game and got himself ejected from the arena.

“He says he’s doing all of this because he wants to protect women,” commentator Charlamagne the God said in an episode of his radio show. “So you go into a space built around women… and you create a situation where one of the women playing basketball ends up arguing with you. Now the headline coming out of the game isn’t about the women’s basketball game. It’s about you, Enes Kanter Freedom.”

“How did protecting women become making yourself the main character in women’s spaces? That’s what I don’t understand. You don’t protect women’s spaces by walking into women’s spaces and making the whole damn space about you.”

Earlier this week, WNBA player Brianna Turner also called out Kanter Freedom, saying it’s clear he doesn’t care about the WNBA and is just making a mockery of it for his own personal gain.

Of course, it’s not a direct comparison, and the stakes are seismically higher for trans athletes than they are for a few gal pals trying to enjoy a concert.

But it all stems from the same core issue: straight, cisgender men entering women’s spaces and sucking all the oxygen out of the room – men who seem to have no awareness that they are guests in those rooms, who cannot decenter themselves or understand that their mere existence can make women feel less safe, let alone when they use their presence to actively harass them and attempt to make themselves the victims, or perhaps worse, the heroes trying to protect us from something we never felt endangered by.

As Turner put it in a 2023 post on X, “I promise I don’t need to be protected/ saved from trans women. I’m not afraid of trans women being included. I support trans inclusion. I don’t support this fake outrage directed at the minuscule % of trans athletes.”

Supporting women means actually listening to them. But for men like Kanter Freedom or the big mad man in front of me, it seems actually hearing our voices is simply too ear-piercing. If that’s indeed the case, then they are lucky enough to be able to retreat to one of the thousands upon thousands of spaces designed to celebrate men.

It’s hard enough these days to find women- and lesbian-centered spaces. The Lesbian Bar Project counts only 36 lesbian bars left in the entire United States out of a total of about 750 gay bars, mapped in a 2025 analysis by Uncloseted Media.

That analysis also found that only 4.8% of queer bars cater exclusively to women (and I am talking about all women – cis, trans, and nonbinary), while 24% cater to men, and 66% cater to people of all genders.

“There are now individuals, increasingly, who identify as LGBTQ+ who don’t necessarily feel safe or empowered or that they are with others like themselves when they walk through the doors of a gay bar,” Amin Ghaziani, an urban sexualities researcher at the University of British Columbia, told the publication.

Beyond bars, women in workplaces outside healthcare and education constantly find themselves in rooms full of men. In fact, one of the friends who was with us that night texted us eagerly on her way to the concert to say it would be “the only antidote” to spending the last 48 hours in an 18-person meeting with only one other woman. And who should she find when she arrives? An angry man trying to ruin her fun.

And no, I am not some sort of man-hater, nor are my friends. But like most women, I do feel safer, more supported, and more understood when I am not surrounded exclusively by men, who, I believe, have a responsibility to understand that they are inherently threatening and make themselves as unthreatening as possible if that’s how they want to be perceived.

Also, like most women, I feel rejuvenated by a night centered on female empowerment, where I am reminded that in a world not built for us, we have the power to build our own.

So whether it’s the WNBA court, the Brandi Carlile concert, or anything in between, men need to take it upon themselves to understand when it’s not about them. And act like it.

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Originally published here.