Quoting this again as it is such a solid point, it was absolutely cynical, intentional, a hostile take over, an act of deliberate colonisation. Intended to be done quietly without public understanding to avoid women being protected or able to resist. And in the full belief that women's interests, privacy and even their safety was absolutely worthless, the only purpose they had was in how men could use them.
Women have been harmed by men doing this. It has taken YEARS to overturn this to stop the harm to women, while men threatened to rape them and kill them, doxxed them, blocked them from services, had them arrested, women have managed to fight through despite a profoundly misogynist state that would much have preferred to go on enabling men to harm them while women were gagged from resisting or complaining about it.
I have no sympathy to spare for sadness that the access to continuing this harm has finally been thwarted. Absolutely none. I could search through and find examples of the posts that made it very clear the person who wants sympathy and apology now for women having finally managed to get their existing bloody rights in law to work against men has been and is fully invested in this trampling of women and their rights in order to be able to use them for their own agenda.
It's a huge victory for women, this was a David and Goliath fight all the way - it still is - but the fucking tragedy of it is that all they did was force the state to admit to their existing legal rights. That's it. That's all.
They have the right to get undressed without having to put up with a man who wants to be there with them regardless of how they feel. They have the right to meet other lesbians without men who want to use them in their lesbian fantasies and disrupt their groups.
They can meet other women and talk about issues such as life threatening and disabling illness that only affects women, without being blown apart by men who want to shout a lot of political crap at them about how women talking about their biology and claiming the reality of their health disaster being women only, invalidates them and <insert male rage, threats and awful behaviour here>. Groups have been destroyed that women needed, by men who didn't care about anything but controlling and using the word woman.
I could go on and on, about the woman who was multiply raped and so badly injured that she may never have children, by a man who was in her locked mental health ward having self IDd there, and was then put in a womens prison where he chalked up a few more women victims to entertain himself while awaiting trial.
About the women who lost all access to toilets, gyms, changing rooms, public spaces, because men didn't care if women had nothing and couldn't pee at all so long as THEY could be where they wanted. The women in tears being laughed at in a rape crisis service as they tried to explain the distress they felt at men in the groups and buildings, and told that the price of help was to pretend for a man. And subordinate themselves as they had to subordinate themselves to the man who abused them.
And a man dares to tell those women how very sad they've made him by managing to prove they have the right to say no?
Thank you for the proof, yet again, of WHY women need rock solid protections from men in law to be able to function in society and be permitted anything at all, even basic safety, never mind equality. And the reminder of why women should STILL be bloody raging that this was ever allowed never mind so enabled against them by agencies and services like the police and government who they should have been able to trust.