Women's rights are under threat says the Guardian. The big gender elephant is in the room.

I don't agree that the Guardian is gaslighting us by referring only to the worst treatment of women globally. It feels that way, because we know about their other views, but this particular article could equally well have been published in a more gender-critical outlet, without remark.

I think that it would have been hard to include the UK, or trans issues, in the article, not because the problems are trivial, but because they are of a different type, arising as they do at a point when women have already achieved notional equality, but it is being subtly undermined by resentful males.

Hard, but not impossible? I drafted a letter which I can't send, because there would be repercussions in my own life. Any of you who wants to use it in any way is welcome to.

In your article, you fail to mention the situation in the UK. After more than a hundred years of progress, that progress has stalled. Women have legal equality, but real life inequality, and violence against women is still rife. Worst of all, the protections that women need because of their physical vulnerability and child-bearing potential are being systematically removed, because of a naive belief that biological sex is irrelevant to outcomes for women as a political class.

A British newspaper talking about global women's rights without even mentioning the UK, is quite indicative of their misogynistic attitudes towards women. But to read further back that we should be lucky that we live in the UK, I find ignorant and dismissive of the everyday lives of women in the UK today. I don't wish to go into too much detail, but I have been left in a position where I am frightened of the dark, of travelling on quiet trains, where I find it difficult to share a space with an unfamiliar man and where I have to take my husband with me to some appointments. We may not face being stoned to death but violence/abuse against girls and women is still happening in the UK today leading to death or long-term impacts. And against that context, of course we will want to discuss the issue of males entering our spaces not just with regard to our own safety but that of future generations. The Guard not recognising British women being part of a global discussion on women's rights feels chillingly oppressive.

In a slight tangent, I would like to know how to help the poor women of Afghanistan. Is it donating to charities? Letter writing to politicians? How do women here help women abroad?

The point being , that whilst you are focused on poor oppressed women in global 'patriarchies' women's rights are being eroded here too. Though because of your/our relative privilege and your obvious feelings of security - you don't consider that women here are still in need of protections. I don't think we should ever take for granted that the integrity of women and girls will always be respected, in law, and in social custom.

Once the boundary has been crossed and you permit some men to be included as women - no matter how limited the initial context or scenario is - it is inevitable that the boundaries and the line will be further pushed.

What we need is clarity around women's sex based rights and protections not a muddying of the waters. That is why knowing what a woman is is fundamental to women's rights.

The UN have done this because they don't think women are important. It's not a bug, it's a feature of the misogyny in society. The same misogyny which coddles men wailing that they are women because they like wearing their wife's tights, while calling rape survivors bigots for saying they don't want those same men in their female only spaces.

It is not " off topic" - it's bang "on topic". I'm giving examples of where those who purport to be all for women's rights and against 'violence against women' but aren't quite so feminist when it comes to women in groups they don't approve of, who they consider less worthy - and how the violence these women suffer is somehow made light of, or excused, or even denied.

I also gave examples earlier on of the women who have been subject to random street attacks in New York who have been encouraged maybe not to report to the police because of the imagined 'vulnerablity' and victim status of their attacker.....

Guardian publishes article about women's rights globally.

Women on a British site reflect on the article with reference to perceived omissions that may contribute to the bigger picture (women's spaces in the western world). Other posters tell them this isn't relevant, &, indeed, morally dubious.

Women on a British site reflect on the article with reference to global political trends that may contribute to the bigger picture (reductive hierarchies of oppression). Other posters tell them this isn't relevant, &, in fact, downright inappropriate.

Hm.

That overall trend of women's voices, concerns & needs being dismissed & minimised certainly does seem quite relevant over here after all...

Thats tomorrow.

Joy.

I couldn't watch all that. Frightening stuff.

Yes all around the world governments are rowing back on women's rights. Including in the UK. We should discuss that.

Maaate.

If it’s hate to even state the definition of woman then how can women have rights? You can’t defend what you can’t define.

Why on earth are you talking about Hamas? There are plenty of threads on the ME board to discuss that on. BTW, making the Gaza war about "progressives" is really distasteful, as well as being off topic.

All around the world, governments are,rowing back on women's rights. The UN have made Saudi Arabia the chair of women's rights, which is laughable. That is worth discussing, rather than political point scoring and purity spiralling about "progressives"/the left.

I actually think 'progressives' more and more are giving less and less of a shit about women, and about what happens to women, if those women 'belong' to a supposed oppressor category. Hence the way that the atrocities committed against Israeli women and girls were minimised because apparently 'Hamas' could "only take so much without snapping". Hamas were seen as the real victims - even as they paraded the bodies of naked, dead women around to be spat on.

'Karens' are fair game too; as is JK Rowling, and so on.

Here's an example of women in a UK public organisation paid for by the tax payer being threatened with disciplinary action for exercising their legal right to have their privacy and dignity considered and respected in the workplace.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/5039445-disciplinary-action-for-ons-female-employees-if-they-object-to-trans-colleagues-using-their-lavatories

We don't have to talk about women's spaces/gender politics every time feminism/womens rights are mentioned.

This is also another example of forced teaming. "We" don't have to do anything. You do you, other people might choose to do otherwise.

What is the "forced teaming" you see here?

That the majority of staff at the Guardian give a shit about women, wherever in the world they are, absent another more "important" identity label.

Excuse the bold, but, to make these points clearly...:

Adam, it's precisely* because of the loss of women's spaces in the western world* that, in the next week or so, the rights of women in many of the countries mentioned above - including some of those you appear to suggest we should focus on to the exclusion of our own - will, effectively, be debated in court in Australia, in Tickle v. Giggle.

186 of 193 countries worldwide have ratified CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women).

Because a man wants to enter a female-only virtual space in Australia, the interpretation of CEDAW and its intersection with Australian law is up for debate, with implications for women's rights globally.

Because, in Scotland, the government includes gender identity but not sex in the forthcoming Hate Crime Act (thereby potentially enabling men to silence women who seek to distinguish between the sexes to uphold their sex-based rights in online spaces), there's the potential for a chilling effect in debate about the Australian case, with implications for women's rights globally.

The Guardian identifies a global pattern. In highlighting what it - rather starkly - omits, and exploring its relevance to this global pattern, posters aren't disregarding these other countries! They're contributing to a bigger picture that seeks to understand them. And only through open debate seeking understanding can we hope to effect change.

Why -* *why?!? - suggest we shouldn't voice issues the Guardian is already troublingly silent on? Why seek to minimise any link in this overall patchwork of oppression?

I sponsored a girl from Tanzania via Plan until a decade ago. The money was used to build single sex toilets as that was a limiting factor in getting the village girls to school. Plan had real success with more girls getting an education. Wonderful to see.

Bizarre that school girls in Tanzania have got what some British school girls haven’t anymore.

In Ireland women don't have any sex based rights any more, because 'sex' has been removed from the equality legislation and replaced with 'gender'. Gender is a means of robbing women of the rights we had gained and the progress we have made.

There is a thread on this board which discusses another recent Guardian article, in which random violent acts against women on the streets of New York were being rationalised away, as not being worthy of reporting to the police, because the man/men that attcked the women were probably 'more of a victim' than the victim herself, and the woman reporting the crime must be cognisant of the harm that would be done to the attacker should they be arrested.

When women, especially white, 'cis' women are victimised they are apparently to be viewed as less of a victim if the perpertrator is a man who is black, mentally ill, or perhaps a vulnerable TW. When you start playing Oppressed Victim Olympics in this way in this way, you'll find that women are no longer viewed as being necessarily oppressed, and in fact may be part of the oppressor group and so less worthy of empathy, sympathy or consideration.

It's utterly vile to suggest that the women who have suffered real harm at the hands of those who think they have the right to welcome males into female spaces should not complain because women have it worse elsewhere in the world. Absolutely disgusting.

In the UK the Labour Party is actively campaigning against the clarity needed to ensure that protections for women are clearly based on biological sex and not a niche, sexist concept of a gender identity. Women have been raped by males welcomed into their hospital wards by entitled men and mislead women, and in Scotland, those in power are trying to make it a hate crime to state the reality of biological sex and the harm which people do when they pretend a male is a woman.

No you haven't. You've also made a straw man.

What is the "forced teaming" you see here?

That whole article is about how women are being treated by governments around the world and the backlash to feminism and how womens rights are being eroded. All the rights it mentions are sex based. I can't see anything that indicates gaslighting or forced teaming.

We don't have to talk about women's spaces/gender politics every time feminism/womens rights are mentioned.

And before someone says "you can't protect women's rights if you can't say what a woman is" - do you seriously think that's going to have any impact at all on rates of FGM in Gambia? Or females being stoned to death in Afghanistan?