University gym "womxn only sessions"

I think you missed my point. My point is that some discrimination is legal and provideing a women only gym session does discriminate against men - but is perfectly legal.

I used to teach an 'Equality and diversity' unit and I would start by asking the class if discrimination is a good or a bad thing.

@sashh we all agree with discrimination against murderers and Nazis - indeed this is built into the Equality Act with the idea of beliefs that are worthy of respect in a democratic society, hence the importance of the Forstater judgment.

Unfortunately this action does not discriminate against murderers. It discriminates against Muslims, Orthodox Jews, victims of sexual assault and, frankly, anyone who would like to exercise in a penis free space.

Given that, a defence of discrimination in this context citing murderers is irrelevant and more than a little disingenuous.

Indeed. They introduce a racist policy that excludes some groups of women of colour and then have the nerve to say they're doing it for anti-racist reasons.

Horribly racist! I’d complain about that because it’s revolting. As for the ‘womxn’ crap, I despair. So regressive and idiotic.

It is discrimination but it is perfectly legal.

Society NEEDS discrimination to work.

I keep saying this, I want murderers in prison, I don't want children and blind adults driving, I don't want to be on a plane with a pilot who doesn't know how to fly.

So we all (and it will take all of us) say "ok, you're woman, you can have that word all to yourselves, we're going to use womxn now". Within a week I predict that they'll have abandoned the word entirely, and we can take it back, clean it up and restore it to It's former glory. Truth is, they only want it BECAUSE it's ours.

I think this is what happened with the word “womxn” though! This poster is 2019 retro - the word was in fashion a few years ago and then dropped out of use rapidly.

I think the biggest reason is that normies started hearing the word and thought it was stupid (so the trans movement tried blaming TERFs for inventing it.)

But also, TERFs had started using the word sarcastically to refer to non-women who identify as women. I think there was a kind of collective realisation that the trans movement endorsing the word might mean that they would be stuck with it and they wouldn’t get “woman.”

Love how they're "including women of colour" by including men, thus preventing, say, muslim women from attending. Five stars geniusing.

"It is better for vulnerable and minority women to be excluded from society, than that men have to feel miffed'.

Rather interesting link thinking about it, to the article on the other thread by the medic with serious concerns about research into medical transition.

His hypothesis is that harm is created when a child is told that yes, they are right to feel that there is something wrong with their body, and yes, things can be done to fix it. And then a cascade starts of the next step to transition and then the next step becomes the target which will result in feeling satisfied and better, and then when that is achieved without the wanted feelings, the next step becomes the target. Where had there been a firm boundary of no, it's about learning to live with and accept the body you have, the focus would not have been on 'there is an escape you have to keep running towards, and we thought it was this but no it must be the next step'.

This is the same chase after words to try and trap womanhood into something that can be entirely owned, subsuming reality.

Addictive behaviour works in much the same way as this incidentally.

A local gym to where I lived before had women only sessions, female instructors only on duty, very popular with Asian women then they got told it was discriminatory against men! Trans wasn't even involved ... those women stopped going

The cycle in this movement is 'chase, own and destroy, look for next target'.

Woman has been emptied of meaning now it often means a mixed sex group. Women shrugged and said 'fine, we're all women, and I'm an adult human female'. Now watch female at the 'own and destroy' stage. Unfortunately biologically male people cannot cross the boundary into being a biologically female person whatever they do. There are always going to be words and actions and natural groupings based on sex, however you mess about with language.

It's been said since very, very early on, if women said 'fine, but biologically female women are blups', we'd have biological males identifying as blups by tea time.

Remember when you thought intersectionality was a good idea and you were inside the tent pissing out onto white men and Christians?

Mel ClewlowDirector of Sport
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 01227 (82)7673

Email of the gym: [email protected]

I don’t live anywhere near the gym but might still write as I find the poster shocking.
If I did live near and if I knew any non-“captured” young men, I would encourage them to attend these “womxn” sessions en masse — just to see how staff react and point out the absurdity of the policy. They would all have to maintain straight faces and say they “identify” as “womxn”!

(btw how nos “womxn” pronounced?
“wim -x -em”????)

And, @Igmum, not even this continent.

So true. If Eddie Izzard is a woman then I'm not because I have nothing in common with him that I don't have in common with every other man. But then whatever I am is what he wants to be. TW can chase and bully till the end of time but the reality is they are trying to control my thinking such that I come to believe that magically I am like them so they can be like me. It's gas lighting and it's abusive. And it's nothing to do with the suffragettes having been a bunch of racists like most people of their time.

Interesting @NotTerfNorCis - so not this country, not this century and not widespread.

as though they aren't really women.

Obviously they're not, I'm just using their version of logic.

The thing is they've effectively already done this. Seeing a thread about "womxn" is odd as it was a fad about 5 years ago and I think trans activists themselves dropped it because, rather than being more inclusive of them, it "others" them, as though they aren't really women.

What black women think about the word womxn or woman doesn't appear to have ever been considered.

The mindless grabbing of anything that can be broken down for parts and used to push the agenda is a standard feature of this politics. It includes zero respect for the actual events or people involved in the historical event, and weaponises other people's abuse and even murders without the faintest conscience. 'Nazi' for example. There's usually zero actual knowledge at all of the real events, and less interest; the purpose is to use Words That Make Other People Jump When You Say, and it relies on the other person being a nice person who is horrified by those historic events and can be swayed by mention of them.

I wish I had not been forced to become so vilely cynical by this wretched political style.

Women wanting women-only spaces is framed as apartheid against biologically male people of all gender identity choices on the grounds that, I suppose, it is seeing 'another woman' as lesser because - well. They're male. It's pushing the idea that male biology is a form of disability or disadvantage to the women 'trapped' in the wrong body.

This wholly ignores the logic that this requires joining in a religious belief that:

1. the body and soul are somehow different and that you have a religious duty to the soul above the body (see about 2 thousand years of Catholicism for details)

2. women have a duty to sacrifice their privacy, dignity, feelings and perceptions to biologically male people as an offering to redeem themselves because of their born 'privilege' (again see about 2 thousand years of Catholicism, including 'Original sin' and 'the sin of Eve'

3. you are required to enact a belief at all times that the male bodied person identifying as a man is a man, and it is perfectly right and proper for you as a woman to refuse to undress in their vicinity because awful abuse of privacy and dignity BUT the male bodied person identifying as something other than a man is absolutely different (even though in no perceptible way) and it is a sin to with hold your body in demonstration of your faith.

This all, of course, rests on the fundamental belief that the woman must at all times predicate what she sees, hears, thinks, feels and does, entirely upon what the biologically male person in front of her says is going on in their head at the time. And while doing all this, the woman must also pretend that this sex based power imbalance doesn't exist.

What's that bit again about oppression involving required labour?

Controversial idea here, so before I start I'd like to say that I'm as GC as they come...
So they want the word "woman"? I say let them have it! I mean they've spent over a decade dragging it through the mud and it's all tatty and looks nothing more the beautiful, dignified noun they nicked from us. So we all (and it will take all of us) say "ok, you're woman, you can have that word all to yourselves, we're going to use womxn now". Within a week I predict that they'll have abandoned the word entirely, and we can take it back, clean it up and restore it to It's former glory. Truth is, they only want it BECAUSE it's ours.

Yes, I have and got a standard reply, talking about safespaces, encouraging sport etc.

However, didn’t enter the central question about how can a session designed to train without men include men, so I sent another email.

(Name changed, so not identified, but long term user).

Rushed response as got to get to work.

If they have to give an example, it usually comes back to the suffrage movement a century ago in the American South, where white women refused to march with black women. Hideous yes, but a product of its time, and hardly typical of the entire feminist movement.

Vile. Why do women of colour have some made up alien-sounding word?!

And even if they have previously been excluded from mainstream feminism (I really don’t know enough about feminist history, but no longer know where to trust to find out!) - surely the correct thing to do is to point out the bleeding obvious, that they are, what’s that word again, women. Not continue othering them by giving them an x in their name.

Wonder if the sessions will be well attended - by actual women. So many supposedly-for-women-but-actually-mixed sessions are far more subtle, not outright advertising like this.

Might peak lots of women in Canterbury at least…