Reconciling competing rights

If you are on a Feminist and Women's Rights forum arguing that the Feminist position that gender is a hierarchy is what perpetuates the hierarchy you are demonstrating the 1st rule of misogyny: Women are responsible for what men do.

12th rule of misogyny: Women's ability to recognize male behavior patterns is misandry!

Naming the behavior perpetuates the behavior? No, it does not.

10th rule of misogyny: The worst thing about male violence is that it makes men look bad.

GaspingShark - could you give definitions for 'feminism' and 'gender', as you understand those words? I don't want to have to quote from The Princess Bride, but...

(This is a lie, I always want to quote from The Princess Bride)

Gender is not a loop. It is a hierarchy.

This. This is a core philosophy in feminism...

Gender is not a loop. It is a hierarchy. Transgender identified males are trying to create a new class of privileged males while transgender advocates are trying to transitition away the Gay and Lesbians.
They will blow up the democratic process to do it if we refuse to submit willingly.

When an obviously male got changed next to me behind a flimsy curtain with obvious gaps in.

I felt really uncomfortable. Never happened before.

t is privacy and dignity for women too. Even the nicest most harmless man on the planet shouldn't be intruding on our spaces, or expecting women to undress or ablute in front of him. But of course no decent man would want that either.

This x 100. The privacy and dignity of women seems to be considered less important than hurting male feelings. It is not.

Do you think rape is about competing rights?

Men’s spaces are less for safety and more for privacy and dignity. But women space is a safety thing.

It is privacy and dignity for women too. Even the nicest most harmless man on the planet shouldn't be intruding on our spaces, or expecting women to undress or ablute in front of him. But of course no decent man would want that either.

Males defining themselves as women is a violation in itself. By redefining 'woman' they place themselves firmly within a male supremacist worldview that women are whatever men say they are, that our lives and our bodies belong to them to define and control. This is central to womens oppression historically, internationally, and right here right now. There is no way round this.

When dysphoric males who do not have this understanding become aware of it, it is their responsibility to find ways of redefining themselves instead of continuing to expect us to move over and make space for them. I can empathise with how difficult this might be for them but it is essential for any male who wants to show solidarity with women. We owe them nothing.

The competing rights are these:

men's right to violate women
women's right to not be violated

I really wish people would stop treating this as if they were the same thing.

I don't tend to use public changing rooms and toilets if I can help it now. I buy clothes online and try them on at home.

When I saw the camera lens. When I read about the two way mirrors and the observation rooms.

We need to get the cultural forces lined up cohesively. What this is symptomatic of is how so many people answer this basic question: which is more important to you liberty or equality?

Unfortunately this is often (but not always!) mutually exclusive, to enforce equality one needs to restrict liberties. By one I really mean the state, and well if you 100% believe the government to be free from bias and to be able to act in good faith wrt equality then you're golden.

However this trans issue just reveals the limits of state power to be able to act responsibly, as one of the often unseen effects of the fight for equality is it just then becomes a race to the bottom for everyone to identify themselves into some sort of protected specialist interest group. Then we end up losing both our liberties AND don't really achieve equality either.

The line in the sand in these competing rights has to be imo the language. Trans women are not women, cis is not a thing. That does not mean trans women should be treated with anything other than dignity and respect.

There is the idea that society has to have grey areas in law, and a sign of oppressive state is the diminishing of the grey areas. It has been said before in other posts but it feels like we should go back to the "grey area" days when everyone muddled through by respecting each other and allowing trans people to use segregated spaces on the proviso they were respectful.
...but reading some trans peoples comments I realise the vulnerability they must feel being the tolerated other.

Personally as above I would hold fast the position of biological reality/ a man cannot become a woman just because he says so.

For goodness sake. The 'house' isn't a 'toilet' it's not a 'communal space' it's not 'womanhood' it's any woman's individual boundary. It's our own boundary. And we are not operating a 'bigoted' boundary. It's a boundary for males. All males. No exceptions for 'gender'. The only males allowed are those each woman chooses personally. In a shared female space all women know that means no males whatsoever.

DN4

Rat for what it's worth, I did not read Jonathan as trans at all. I read him as the egotistical grabby type of bloke that doesn't even consider that anyone else has any rights ( exactly the type to take advantage of self-id ). They are all his rights.

God, I can even picture 'Jonathan', oh wait, nope that's my ex.

This is why we need honest, open discussion. We need to be clear on what everyone's legal rights are. Everyone seems to have different interpretations of the law both in terms of rights and even definition of words.

I think we are pussyfooting around clearly stating the facts because no one wants to take responsibility for the upset that will cause.

Women need to know exactly what is meant legally by women only and female only spaces. If they just mean we try to keep them for women only, or its based on identity or something else completely, we need to know to make informed decisions.

Geek
I agree about the difference between how we define ourselves and how we are defined in law.
There is a scarcity issue, but I don't get the impression that it underlies the disagreements between those of us who are GC and those campaigning for trans rights. They insist we must redefine our language and accept that they are the opposite sex. A third space would not be acceptable to the trans lobby.

CritEqual
Disagreement should be cause for celebration, as it reveals somebody somewhere has the opportunity to learn something! And that is just as likely to be me as anyone else.

I love this - I will probably steal it.

rat
You know that much of the reason for segregation by sex is to do with female safety from males. As trans is now an ill-defined umbrella containing so many identities there is no logical way to seggregate by gender identity. The logical extension, therefore, if we define people by self-defined gender, rather than sex, is that there will be no segregated spaces, and women will lose hard-won protections.