Uneven distribution of household duties and the caring burden
Male-on-female domestic abuse (I know of many cases, all of the perpetrators cis men)
Universal credit and its impact on lone parents (disproportionately mothers)
Entrenched sexist attitudes in, for example, schools.
Increasing misogyny on social media being adopted by teens and younger men
The incredibly low rape conviction rate.
How do you know any of these are happening? How do you know these are systemic social patterns that advantage men and disadvantage women and not just isolated experiences of unlucky people?
Because the difference in male and female outcomes show up in statistics. Because women talk and realise it's not just a thing that happened to happen to one unlucky person who met the wrong other person, it's happening to her, and her, and her, and what those people have in common is their sex. Because right now we do know who are male and who are female.
How did women gain legislation that said "no, you can't not employ someone, or not promote her, because you believe women can't work as effectively as men"? How did women gain the social protections that say "no, men can't go in there because women may be undressing?" How did women gain the right to insist the men who father children support them (meagre though that may be in practice)? How did women gain maternity leave, andchild support? How did women overturn the right of their husbands to rape them? How did women gain the courage to stand up, at work, in pubs, in their communities and say "this is not fair and if you are a reasonable human you will stop doing it and stop looking away when others do it?"
Because women could talk together, create social and political spaces where they were not talked over by men, and found their voices, and their anger, and they created movements and they refined their arguments and they pooled their resources and they build what they needed.
Your ability to identify and fight for the injustices you care about today exists exactly because we do still know, in reality, who a woman is and we have the structures and tools the women who came before us built.
But our identity, our right to name ourselves, and our needs, and our experiences, as different to men, and to get together without male voices and recognise our own shared experience and create the resources we need, and to be counted for who we are and to have our reality reflected in research and statistics, is being changed. Eroded.
So my fear is not about what more GRCs, or unpapered male women, or males in women's spaces means today, or next week. It's what it means in a year, or 5 years, or ten years, when women (as we know them today) still suffer the challenges we always did, or worse, but have lost the tools, analysis and voice to name it and fight it. When our non violent, non sexual patterns of offending are invisible within a group that includes offenses of our male sisters. When our silent fear and fury at being catcalled and groped is offset by male people whose womanhood is centred in submission. When maternity rights are not obviously a women's issue because not all mothers are women and not all women have a female reproductive system.