Equality gone

This is NOT an anti-trans argument. It’s an anti-male argument. I have no problem sharing a toilet with trans-man (ie another woman).

The minute you allow one set of men into women’s safe spaces you let them all in. It’s the hole in the dam. Men, as a sex species, commit most of the sexual and violent crime. It’s perfectly logical and sensible to keep girls and women separate when they’re in a state where they’re vulnerable and undressed.

Why the government and institutions want to deny this is baffling. It’s just misogny in plain sight.

Couldn't agree more

It’s all part of the same issue.

I find it incredibly depressing that what little women carved out for ourselves in a male dominated world has so easily been taken away from us and handed back to men. Its shameful.

What exactly about women’s rights equate to “anti trans”?

There is equal, everyone the same, and there is fair, everyone to their specific needs or to compensate for sth.

We fought very hard to be recognised as equal, to be seen as just people from a legal perspective. It was the first and most important battle for women's liberation.

But if we got there legally, socially, this approach has been a lot less successful and we are still failing at seeing it. Women's liberation has been like sexual liberation, we got rights and freedom but we do all the work and pay all the price.

I remember the gaslight of the 90s "why are you complaining about now you have the right to vote?", we should have understood better then because they were spelling it out loud.

We wanted to be equal, then equal we would be: no more efforts from the men, no more chivalry, no more special efforts for women because they are women, no more "fairness" (as in some measures to compensate for the facts women were living in a men's world)

And we even tried to go along with it, thinking it was progress to pay our own half of the bill and to forget about the whole man/woman thing and try to pretend we would start again like "homo novus/mulier nova" from scratch, not realising it was 1/ impossible 2/ that what women were getting on one side, they were losing it on the other.

I am no tradwife, I am not very girly, or even uxorious, I have always been a bit of a tomboy in my interests, I am very happy to have been born in a society where I was able to do more and different from the traditional expectations of being a woman.

But I have also seen that seeing ourselves as just "people" (with only a subset of sex-based rights) is not what happens. All my life, the treatment I have received was based on me being a woman. And like an idiot, I tried to make my way in this world like a "person", to make my sex irrelevant, neutral. Well, I wouldn t do it like that again.

I think we lose so much by trying to see ourselves as citizens with sex-based rights rather than women as a sex class, by seeing things only through the prism of equality rather than fairness or by thinking that laws are enough to change behaviours.

It is all rational, measured, scientific, reasonable etc, but it waters us down to nothing. No story, no vision. And it doesn't work.

We are women, we have the power to give life, we make the world go round practically and emotionally, on our heels and backwards, compared to men. And we are 52% of the population.

Women and girls should awake every morning thinking like that, infused with their own identity, their own vision, their sense of power.

Waking up like a "person" who is only trying to get her sex-based rights respected, it really doesn't carry the same dream... And it surely does not work any better.

How long has it taken for the GC movement to be heard? Way, way too long.

And why was that our only recourse was the courts? Because, to be brutally honest, we have no standing politically or socially as a sex class.

THe UK Census 2021 Gender question data has been withdrawn
as the results were utter rubbish

the highest areas for Trans Identification were immigrant English as a Second Language.

Women and men are different.
Nobody can ever change from one to the other.
Accepting difference in an egalitarian manner
without the division caused by identity politics
should be the goal.

I also have an issue with men in women’s spaces but i dont think this is predominantly a trans-issue.

There was a post on here recently about male partners staying overnight in maternity wards and a lot of posters thought that new mothers should just put up with the presence of other women’s partners because of father’s rights. Same with the communal changing villages at most council-run swimming pools - it’s to facilitate Dads taking their children swimming.

In a way, i think the trans-issue is a red herring - and is being used by men with a very bad agenda to deflect attention from male violence perpetrated by non-trans people . Most men who mock the feminist agenda are extremely anti-trans. The reality is that women’s safety is rarely prioritised over men’s convenience and this is the real issue.

As someone who worked in what was previously a "male" dominated job (engineering), I spent a lot of time fighting to be treated as an equal. In one interview I even got asked if I'd be OK getting my nails dirty, and reminding I wouldn't be able to wear a skirt.

No one should be treated differently because of what they have between their legs.

What I do now hate, having fought for equal rights, is this obsession to "be" a gender, or gender neutral, or non binary etc... Why does it matter? Why can't people just be people? What is this obsession with having to have a label?? What is wrong with just being a kind human being?

Part YABU, part YANBU.

Yes to single sex (biological) changing rooms, toilets, sports, etc.

But not to a right to have women doctors and nurses which I think is unreasonable except for gynae and other "women's" issues and GPs, certainly not for general health and care and not for any emergencies i.e. paramedics and A&E or urgent operations etc as it's simply unreasonable to have duplicated staff available on immediate call. But I also think men have the right for male doctors and nurses for non urgent/routine things too if they want it, i.e. male GP appointments rather than having to have a female especially for "male" issues like prostrate! It has to work both ways.

Hospital wards are different, again, definitely single sex for maternity and gynae wards obviously, but given the high demand and low supply of hospital beds, I think that some form of segregation is acceptable at busy times, i.e. males at one end of the ward, females at the other, with the nurses station in the middle etc., but certainly not shared clusters of 4/6 beds in smaller side rooms etc. In a perfect world, there'd be spare beds so that people could be admitted to a single sex ward, but in reality, a bed on a ward is better than a trolley in a corridor!

You’re fine with it but the vast majority of women are sadly sexually assaulted in their lifetime. To many of these survivors men are a threat. These women don’t want men in their single sex spaces thanks. Are you ok with saying to these women ‘shut up bigot. Your feelings don’t count!” Because that what it sounds like.

How is it anti-trans? Wanting to maintain women’s rights is not denying trans rights.

Power corrupts and no one cedes power willingly.
We should not be surprised that men are trying to put women back into the places that they would like them to stay in.
We have to keep pushing back and facing them down.
Trans women are NOT women. Trans women are a subset of men.

If there is no definition of woman that doesn’t include males then women do not exist as a sex class.

If women do not exist as a sex class then all the issues and discrimination we suffer due to our biology cannot be recognised.

If the issues and discrimination due to biology including risk of sexual assault, pregnancy, motherhood, menstruation, menopause, higher risk of autoimmune diseases, different responses to medication, different heart attack symptoms, size and strength differences in sport including greater concussion risk, different dementia and osteoporosis risk, even the way seatbelts fit etc are not recognised then women’s needs will be sidelined.

This is why we must actively protect the definition of woman to mean an adult human female otherwise the world will revert to focusing on males as the default and women’s needs will be secondary.

It was never just about toilets or even changing rooms - it is about women’s rights and needs having equal status and recognition to those of men.

Your two groups are the same thing - sexist Men.

Celestialmoods · Today 02:13
There are valid reasons why trans women shouldn’t be in female
sports of prisons etc, but they have nothing to do with rights to abortion, equal pay and all the rest of it.

Once you have redefined woman to include men it becomes a meaningless term. It means that any rights that women have become invalid because it also includes men.

Interesting that you believe that you can consent for other people.

And just FYI Trans women are men.

To reframe this for a sec: in the last sensus (2021) only 0.1% of the population of England and Wales came up as transwomen. Last year, an Ipsos study found that 59% of UK male respondents thought that promoting women's equality has gone too far and discriminates against men.
So we have:

• Males who identify with/as us (0.1%, tiny segment of the population)
• a SIZEABLE majority of men who would like to see us LESS equal and more controlled.

I think I know which category is the main problem here.

Do I? I am not bothered in the slightest about trans women (aka men) using women's changing rooms or joining sports teams etc

FTFY, @BigYellowBus.

Same. I think the ultra right BS spouted across the internet on a daily basis is a much bigger threat. Reading about the US turning into Gilead in real time gives me the creeps and it IS coming for us if we don't watch out. (The below is just a tiny sample of the BS I'm talking about)
newrepublic.com/article/204519/right-taking-aim-undoing-coeduation

I’m sorry, but this is extraordinarily naive.

Male predators can spot chinks in an armour from 200 miles away. Once ‘men’ are allowed into women’s (supposedly) safe spaces, we’re all under threat. All women, and all good men.

Given that the person who introduced trans peiple into the thread was, presumably, a supporter of trans rights you might want to take it up with them rather than women talking about women's issues

It is depressingly tiresome to have every discussion about womens rights turned into a "what about trans" argument

Try not to do that again

I think female equality remains something of an illusion. Which is why the entire idea of it hangs by such a delicate thread.

For example, women achieved equality in the work place but habitually not in the home. The majority of women still take primary responsibility of the family home, and in lone parent households the majority of said lone parents are women.

I think the reasons for this lack of continuity between work/home are complex. I did the career and, when I became a Mum, I wanted to leave and be a SAHM. I wasn't expected or pressured to do the latter, indeed everything was geared against it. All my child care options/incentives involved someone else caring for my child. In addition, it was deemed entirely socially unacceptable to adopt 'gender roles' (for want of a better expression!) where my husband was earning and I was looking after our daughter (even though that was what I wanted).

I felt obliged to do it by stealth almost, dropping days gradually. I left entirely 6 or so years ago, and (even though my daughter is now almost 16) I have no intention of resuming my career. I have my own savings and pension pot, and I could resume my career at any point by choice. I don't want to though, I like being a housewife (I love it actually, much as that will horrify some!).

I think women (with children) are conflicted, many want to be their child's primary care giver, but society has made it nigh on impossible in both a practical (financial) sense and in the socially acceptable sense (being a SAHM is perceived as almost a shameful pursuit). That's why I describe the situation as complex, because I think women have gone from being obliged to stay at home to being obliged to be in the workplace (reluctantly I think, for many women. Most of my female friends would chuck it tomorrow if they could. I can't think of any male friends who willingly would, indeed none of them want to retire).

Has female equality (or the perception of it) inadvertantly contributed to this 'gender melting pot'? I'm not giving an opinion here by the way, just trying to make sense of how we've arrived at this crazy juncture.

When you look at who benefits from trans rights activism (males) and who loses (females), it’s very clear that it’s just another men’s rights movement but with a ‘progressive’ sticker on it. The push back on women’s human rights is coming from the political right and left, they just frame it differently.

OP, if you've been here more than a few hours then you'd know that you'd be told you were NBU.