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

No I'm not. I'm suggesting the article is important and it's frustrating the OP has missed that in her rush to be focussed on "women's spaces" and the Guardian.

Before you tell me I've "missed the point" it might help to confirm whether or not my point is what you think it is. Otherwise you are arguing with a strawman.

We're at the point where women in Scotland may be landed with criminal records for saying that a man is a man or might be arrested for not suffering male voyeurs and flashers in their intimate spaces, so we can hardly be too smug about things. I'm surprised The Guardian hasn't run an article scolding Afghan women for not having the wit to identify out of being stoned to death or cancelling Gambian mothers for not recognising that their daughters' screams of terror are actually an inchoate expression of the desire to be a boy.

I vote we find all those men with a fetish for identifying as a woman and a Muslim (because for them it's the ultimate subjugation fantasy) and we do some kind of swap. Let's see how sexy and submissive you feel when you're dropped in Tora Bora and you can't get your Next drip-dry trousers out of your wardrobe.

So because some women in other places in the world have a horrific time, because of their sex, we shouldn't be fighting to retain the sex based rights we have, have I got that right?

And even then in the grand hierarchy, male trans people are going to score higher in the Guardian's catalogue of the oppressed than any women.

Because when your young teenager is unable to get out of a hospital bed for weeks and completely dependent on the nurses around her for everything then you want to make sure those caring for her every need are women and that no laws are changed so that it’s men instead. Because the care she had by other young women was so gentle and dignified and I want that to be for her future in this country and all other girls and women too.

It's not whether it mentions women's spaces, it's the forced teaming and the gaslighting I don't appreciate. The Guardian doesn't give a fuck about women as a sex, unless there are other issues involved.

What, you think because women are stoned in Afghanistan, that means we shouldn’t raise concerns about conditions for women here? Like that’s some kind of temerity we’re not entitled to and we should just hush up?

Catch yourself on.

Because the article was supposedly about the rolling back of women's rights....but the big elephant in the room was how they are being rolled back here too - in ways in which you are dismissive, and in which so called 'progressives' who are supposedly so focused on women's rights completely over-look or even deny.

You were trying to suggest that we effectively can't complain because women elsewhere have it so much worse.

You are completely missing the point.

What we are starting to see here, though, are crimes against women by men being recorded as crimes committed by 'women'. And also what is being encouraged is permitting, or shrugging off, male presence in female protected spaces in which women are vulnerable.

Anyway I'm not here for a fight. I just don't understand how anyone can read that article and think "I know, I'll make a thread about how it doesn't mention womens spaces in the UK".

No crimes in this country are recorded as "femicide". That's why the work Karen Ingala Smith and Jess Phillips do is so important to track how many women and girls actually die at the hands of men.

Maybe you aren't in the UK of course.

@AdamRyan it’s about the toilets and changing rooms and hospitals for me. The toilets especially. I have spent a lot of time in paediatric neurology wards as the result of my (previously well) child having her first seizure in a place no one saw her so it was prolonged. Which has meant she had part of her brain removed. And in the years before surgery, had to deal with hundreds of her seizures. So yes it’s about the toilets.

Years ago I also saved the life of a young woman in a nightclub who’s blue arm was sticking out the gap.

Mixed toilets= no door gaps and floor to ceiling partitions. So no being able to get over the top if a body is pushed against a door.

So yes think it through - it’s life and death for the most vulnerable.

You have no understanding nor compassion.

Many of the countries which have brought in Self Id are already some of the places in which being a woman is a burden, and are places in which violence against women is epidemic in proportion. Take the South American countries for a start. it is so bad that when a woman is murdered it is also recorded as a 'femicide'.

There was an incident in which a woman was murdered by a TW - both were working in prostitution. The crime was not recorded as 'femicide' because the man ( the murderer) identified as a woman. Whereas in another incident, a gay man murdered his TW lover. This was recorded as a 'femicide' because the the murdered party identified as a woman.

All of these things are happening because women and girls are female. It doesn’t matter whether it manifests as stoning or not allowing children in schools or making female bodies invisible in medical literature. They all happen for the same reason.

Of course we fucking can.....You are totally missing the point. And what happens here happens later in less developed countries too. Gender ideology has been exported everywhere. Somoene posted a clip of an Indian film director talking about the damaging effect of gender ideology on a population of women and girls ( in India) who are already oppressed and under-privileged.

It is you who is unconscious of privilege - don't take it for granted.

Quite.

The irony of the Guardian publishing that piece, while failing to mention its own contribution to undermining the rights of women in the UK.

What we are dealing with is the erasure of women as a human category with its own integrity and requirments for dignity.

Relieving themselves and 'going to the toilet' for women in many cultures is fraught with risk and potential for violence as well as for shame, certainly where there are no facilities provided.

In the West we have accorded women some basic protections which respect the conditions of their sex. This is fundamental women's rights stuff - not a frilly addition.

Im not really sure what happened to you, Adam. You used to be a good poster before you namechanged, you engaged in good faith and were thoughtful.

This is the house that man built, and it the same model the world over regardless of creed or culture.

Exactly.

Yes I do. But it really is extremely privileged to take that article and complain that it does not mention UK "womens spaces". We are so lucky.

It's all part of the whole.

It's not missing the point. Just because you don't think women's sex based rights are important enough you feel able to dismiss it. I don't. I see the Guardian as misogynistic and this article as gaslighting. Yes, worse things happen to other women abroad, but they are also sex based too.

As pp said, it's the elephant in the room.

In Somalia, the government is discussing proposals that would undermine the efforts to eliminate child marriage. In Scotland, the government refuses to comply with the UN resolution to eliminate child marriage, and so won't raise the minimum age to 18. And in UK schools, teenage girls have been forced to undress in front of male peers.

Women in Europe and the US are also no longer allowed to have an identity as the words to describe us are taken from us (woman, mother).

Quite some hyperbole. It's not like they are banned words. Our prime minister is clear that women don't have penises and "a man is a man and a woman is a woman".

We aren't being stoned to death, prevented from being in public without a male chaperone, banished to freeze in a hut when we are on our period, locked up in prison "for our own safety" if we are a victim of domestic violence etc etc.

I think that article is saying something important and homing in on "well it doesn't mention womens spaces in the UK" is missing the point.

Yes I do. But it really is extremely privileged to take that article and complain that it does not mention UK "womens spaces". We are so lucky.

Actually lots of those examples are a case study of what governments "that know what a woman is" choose to do with that knowledge.

I'm just irritated really that people can't see past gender politics to the serious harm being done to women globally.