Safe spaces for women (and anyone else who says they’re a woman) help by completing Leeds survey

[Ouchiebum]

Leeds council are consulting on creating safe spaces for women. But not just for women. For anyone who identifies as a woman ie men and women, therefore giving people who are most likely to harm women ie men access to the space designed to keep them safe.

I am really annoyed about this survey and am asking as many of you as possible to complete it to point out that women needs safe spaces based on sex. Not on how people feel.
https://surveys.leeds.gov.uk/s/OWA2023/?dm_i=7IRL,39I6,19VMAF,C5JW,1

Thanks for posting OP.

In addition to this I would advise Leeds mumsnetters to send a copy of this to your MP and explain exactly how this is wildly unhelpful - when they allow anyone to 'identify' as a women, it takes any element of safety away from women and girls completely.

Whoever wrote this survey has no respect for women whatsoever. I'm not surprised you're furious OP.

I wrote My sex as a woman in the 'other' box

Done, thanks for highlighting it so that we can get our comments in.

Done!

Not wishing to get in the way of a good rant, but whatever your view is on trans, the survey is actually NOT about "safe spaces for women" or "women only spaces". It is about making the city centre - the public areas - safer for women and girls. And says that very clearly. Surely that would be an aim that everyone could unite on agreeing - that women and girls should be able to go out out at all times of the day and night and enjoy themselves without being or feeling threatened? Or is that not as important as point scoring?

What idiots.

Absolutely. And the way you make spaces safer for women and girls is by excluding men. However those men identify.

As soon as you say 'some men can access women's spaces' you've made those spaces mixed sex.

Unfortunately a lot of us have Alex Sobel as our MP. His constituency is huge. And whilst I would love to be able to email him about this I may well need to contact him over something equally important (personally not on this scale) and so feel I need to avoid outing myself as a bigot and whatever else it was he calls women who believe in womens safe spaces.

Done. Also pointed out the very clear misogyny in Leeds prioritising the safety of men in frocks over actual women- not that they can be bothered actually mentioning the female sex, despite it the most relevant category in a survey about women’s safety.

I think we can all agree that it's biological men, no matter how they identify, who pose the biggest risk to women and girls.

The way you make the city centre safer for women and girls is to make it unacceptable socially for men (no matter how they identify) to harass, intimidate and attack women and to have legal repercussions for those who do. Unfortunately we don't live in fairy land and men harassing/intimidating women is seen as "typical men" or banter and attacks on women are either blamed on women (she was drunk/asking for it/lying), brushed under the rug or not properly investigated due to lack of police.

The way to make it safer in the real world is to have spaces for biological women and girls only so they can get away from biological men regardless how they identify.

By all means have mixed sex safe spaces for anyone who is vulnerable but the priority needs to be single sex spaces for the more vulnerable half of society which are women and girls.

It's not about point scoring it's about safety for biological women and girls.

Did you read ANYTHING in my post or just continue the rant?

The survey is about PUBLIC SPACES - streets and stuff like that. You may think it's a great idea to exclude men and boys from public places but it's not realistic.

Look, I happen to agree with you that single sex should mean single sex. Full stop. But this cult like adherence to reading what you want to read and seeing what you want to see makes you all look like raving lunatics. The survey IS NOT ABOUT SINGLE SEX SPACES. It is about where you go shopping or clubbing or eating. You have missed the point entirely and are actually hurting the opportunities for making places safer for women and girls by focussing on the wrong thing.

I guess when it comes down to it I should have known better than to expect rationale, lietracy or common sense to prevail, but at least I tried. This survey is about making our streets safer for women and girls, and the least important thing about that is what a few people define themselves as. It is about dressing how you like, being the person you want to be, enjoying the amentities of day time and night time facilities, whether that's shopping, eating, clubbing, drinking or just standing on a stret corner chatting to your mates, and being able to do that safely and without harassement because you are a woman, Does that not matter to anyone here?

I'm out. If you lot want to ruin an attempt to improve the safety for women on streets because of point scoring, shame on you. You could make your points without deliberately setting out to damage attempts to make women and girtls safer on the streets of cities.

I wish it was just idiocy: we might have a hope of educating them and them putting that right. It's mendacious. It's a clear application of a male-centred ideology.

They're pretending to be concerned about women while denying that sex matters and women need women-only safe spaces.

Absolutely ridiculous that sex wasn’t listed as a characteristic. What planet are these people on? Done.

Survey done.
Had an absolute rant.
What a biased survey
Particularly disgusted by the suggestion of an app.
Leeds clearly think all women are happy being tracked every minute of their lives, this isn’t Afghanistan.

I've now managed to complete the survey, I had a pop up blocker on, that's why I had problems trying to do the survey yesterday.

They got a response from me, in which I was completely open about being male.

Thanks all. Am bumping to get some more responses

@Somanyquestionstoaskaboutthis its awful that in a democracy where we pay MP’s wages you feel you can’t express your lawful view that’s completely in line with the Equality Act because your MP might withhold help.

he’s an absolute cunt.

I've had my say on it. Thanks so much OP for bringing up.

Also bumping

For others, it takes maybe 4 minutes even if you manage a blistering response.

Even before you enter the survey, they’ve set their stall out. As @BaronMunchausen says, they’ve pre-framed any comments as ‘hate speech’.

“*If you’re non-binary and you feel you have something to contribute to the conversation, please fill in the survey and share your views. We are inclusive of all trans, non binary and cis women. We stand against hate speech and want the views from this survey to support the end of gender oppression and inequality”

There’s precisely zero chance of them properly analysing the survey in relation to the views you want to express.

Enjoyed filling that in. Thanks.

Why is it that I feel unsafe doing something as basic as wearing a skirt to catch a train to a wedding reception, @Quveas ? It's not because of special gender feels, because I don't have those. It's because I have been sexually assaulted and harassed on public transport before, wearing a variety of outfits, and I am aware that conforming to the gendered clothing expectations associated with being female at a wedding, namely wearing a skirt, makes it easier for a man to sexually assault me again.

Men target me because they can see that I am female, not because of how I dress or how I feel about being female. Any efforts to reduce sexual assault and harassment in public spaces are doomed to fail when the council refuse to acknowledge the underlying sex-based power that men have over women. You cannot address what you refuse to even name.

The survey ended with asking if I would consider installing an app on my phone. Because that's gonna help. 😒 And of course, there's no risk at all to women of the (mostly male because IT is mostly male) app developers and monitors using the location data to stalk us. 😒 There's another recent thread criticising the "safe" spaces set up in London that will be staffed by overwhelmingly male Met officers. The same Met that employed the rapist-murderer of Sarah Everard. Again failure to consider that sex-based power imbalance is the root of all sexism drives these laughable decisions.

Consider it a protest.

I mentioned the Holbeck red light district in my response. Nothing says "we hate women" like having a literal red light district in your city.