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

[Lovelyview]

The Guardian thinks that women's rights are under threat - but no mention of women's spaces in the UK. Anyone with the arguments at their fingertips want to write a letter to the editor? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/29/the-guardian-view-on-global-womens-rights-saudi-arabia-isnt-the-only-problem

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.