Yesterday, Caroline Flint used parliament’s historic first debate on transgender equality to claim that gender-neutral toilets put women at risk. Responding to Maria Miller, chair of the women and equalities committee, Flint said she welcomed the debate, “but would [Miller] agree with me that we also need to be mindful of creating neutral-gender environments that actually may prove more of a risk to women themselves?”

I can get where Flint is coming from. Many women are afraid of being sexually assaulted and I’m one of them. In 2009 I was harassed in a women’s toilet. A woman I did not know came up to me and asked me if my breasts were real. As a trans woman, I’m used to other people feeling like they have a right to interrogate me, so her rude and invasive questions weren’t a surprise but what happened next was. She pulled down my top and bra, exposing my nipple. There was someone else in the loo at the time, which added to my humiliation. I have a skin graft across my chest after I accidentally burned myself as a toddler. I’m no longer ashamed of my scar, but it’s an area I used to keep covered for years so I felt doubly mortified – and yes, violated.

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Forgive me, then, for not buying into this lovely idea that same-sex loos are magical places where bad things never happen. If only. In 2011, a trans woman called Chrissy Lee Polis was beaten until she had a seizure by two girls in a women’s toilet in McDonald’s, Baltimore. They dragged Polis out of the restroom by her hair as staff looked on and filmed the incident. As Polis lay on the floor convulsing, blood pouring from her mouth, onlookers warned her attackers to flee before the police arrived. She could have died. She’d have been in good company.

Trans people suffer terrible violence and discrimination: in the year to 30 September at least 295 trans people were murdered worldwide – including 16-year-old Kedarie/Kandicee Johnson, who was found dead in March in Iowa. Keisha Jenkins, 22, was shot in the back in Philadelphia, but not before she was beaten to the ground by a group of five or six men. Orange is the new Black’s Laverne Cox has accurately described the situation for trans people as a “state of emergency”.

Research from the US reveals that trans women are nearly twice as likely to suffer sexual violence as other women: having reported such crimes, they are also considerably more likely to go on and experience violence from the police. Here’s another fact for you: 48% of young trans people in Britain have attempted suicide. Not “thought about”. Attempted. But who cares about facts and figures on the violence and discrimination trans people face when we could just talk about people’s imagined fears instead?

Flint justified her concerns yesterday by bringing up the voyeurism conviction of student Luke Mallaband, who placed phones to secretly record women at a number of toilets and shower rooms – including female-only facilities. The SNP’s John Nicolson replied sensibly that: “The point that has just been raised is a matter for criminal law. This has nothing whatsoever to do with transgender equality.”

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Miller also gave a very reasonable response: “It’s not a zero-sum game. Giving rights or enforcing rights that one group has does not mean that we have to see those rights taken away from another group … we have to be careful in this place that we don’t appear to be undermining the rights of trans people.”

The horrible truth is that, if a man wants to assault a woman, he can do so anywhere. The idea that making toilets gender-neutral puts women at risk is a classic “slippery slope” argument. Where’s the evidence? If Flint has proof that gender-neutral toilets put women at risk, I’m all ears. If not, I’m rather bored by people such as her playing devil’s advocate and whipping up unnecessary panic. Trans women like me have been using female toilets for decades without causing anyone any problems whatsoever. If you’re living in Britain in 2016 you have almost certainly used a public toilet at the same time as a trans person and not even realised. It doesn’t have to be a big deal unless you make it one.

The biggest irony? While making bathrooms more trans-friendly hasn’t led to any problems, the fabricated “debate” surrounding this progress has. Take 22-year-old Aimee Toms, who was washing her hands in the women’s bathroom at a branch of Walmart in Connecticut when someone approached her and said, “You’re disgusting!” and “You don’t belong here.” Toms – who was born with a uterus and identifies as a woman – believes she was harassed because of the current panic about trans people in bathrooms.

A fuss about a problem that doesn’t exist has become a problem in and of itself, with more and more women who don’t look traditionally “feminine” now facing greater scrutiny in public. Earlier this year, a 16-year-old lesbian was thrown out of a McDonald’s in Hull because, she says, staff believed she was a boy and she had been using the women’s toilets. McDonald’s said she was being disruptive.

It’s time to stop panicking about imaginary fears – and focus on the very real violence and discrimination gender-variant people face every day.