I can think of nothing more callous than essentially tactfully saying “men can assault you whenever they want anyway, what’s the problem?” Yeah, honestly, fuck off. If you identified with literally anything to do with actual women (not lip gloss and high heels), you could not casually say some shit like that with a straight face. I have never once told my friends “idk why you carry pepper spray, if a man wants to assault you, he can 🤷♀️.” They would rightfully ask wtf my problem was.
True, the social barrier is a thing, and if removed, women and girls will be put at risk. We've seen that already, with the Loudon monster.
I have been reading True Crime since the 1970s, and watching True Crime since its inception, which I put at the release of Unsolved Mysteries. And in all those decades , I can think of only two cases in which a man assaulted a woman in a women's restroom. That's not saying that's the only cases that exist...just that the social barrier works; if attacking women in the women's restroom were all that common, surely we all would have heard/read of many more cases prior to Loudon.
They always think that saying things like "What is stopping cis men from assaulting them anyways?" is such a gotchya. No, there is no physical barrier preventing predatory men from entering the women's bathroom, but there is a social barrier.
People know that it's weird and and that something shady is afoot when an obvious man purposely walks into the ladies room. Women know to put their guard up and get the hell out to safety, and they know that if they sound the alarm that some dude is exposing himself in the bathroom that they will be taken seriously. What TIMs are telling us to do is to suppress our self-preserving instincts and shut up about it.