UK radical feminists; what to do?

[RealRoseCritic]

So there was a question earlier today in one of my groups about TERFs in the UK, why are they so strong there, etc. Let me elaborate on something.

There is something special in mainstream British feminism that is quite different from European feminism(s), but since the English speaking internet concerns mostly the Anglosphere and not Europe, due to us having separate, isolated debates in each country/language, you won't likely ever hear how the UK is substantially different.
It is important to understand the logic of British feminism. Unlike European feminism, which is mostly inclusive and focused on stuff like equal pay, care, safe design of public space and general equity, in the UK it was always about "separate but equal".

British centres of power were always men-only, and many British feminists didn't react the way European women did (aka pushed their way into male spaces, so that these became co-ed spaces), but created their own, separate spaces, which they then aggressively policed the same way British men did with theirs. Add some Victorian prudishness and bioessentialism, that was abandoned in Europe after WWII for obvious reasons, but not in the UK, and voilà, here come British second-wave radfems and the TERFs.

I am from the Czech Republic where I currently live; I lived in Norway, Poland and the Netherlands, I speak fluently multiple European languages and understand few others; I don't say that to brag, but to show my ability to do the comparative analysis, since I study the topic closely.

Out of EU member states, only in Bulgaria and Hungary are trans rights worse than in the UK at the moment, with Hungary being expected to get substantially better soon, and in neither of those two countries are trans people, and especially trans women, as demonised as in the UK.

In all EU member states transphobia comes exclusively from far right places; it is unheard of that liberals or anyone non-far right would say what is absolutely the mainstream in the UK, including Hungary and Bulgaria.
If you are saying the stuff JKR is saying, you are 100 % aligned with far right politics.

We had an attempt by a group of our far right senators to enact a bill proposal similar to what is in the UK, but the proposal was killed within a week before it could have been even voted upon in the Chamber of Deputies. Just for instance.
Scandinavian feminism is focused mostly on fair share of care and chores, German feminism focuses mostly on equal pay, Kita for everyone and the like, Polish feminism is mostly about access to abortion, Czech feminism is mostly about equal pay and safety from domestic violence - I could go on, but all in all, men are welcome to participate and the goal is to create equity for everyone, regardless of their gender. Together.
We don't get British obsession with separate spaces for women, women here are absolutely fine with the way things are, mostly because cultures in the Continent are far less prudish and overall we treat men and women as one people rather than different species.

Moreover, because of civil law rather than common law, we have different approach to legal texts and their interpretations; this makes it different too.
Not just regarding trans rights, but also regarding women's rights, I am often amazed by how much backward the UK is in so many ways compared to the EU (again, including places like Hungary, this needs to be stressed). I often see women in English-speaking debates saying things like "ugh, men" on things that actually concern problems that are specifically British and that stem mostly from both societies' tendency to separate already boys from girls, treating them differently and sexualising women in contexts we don't really see as sexual at all.

We can't really get this across the Channel, because we just don't have the power to do so. For instance Czech debate on feminism is quite isolated; it's interesting, but no more than 15 million people would ever be able to participate in it (CZ/SK) due to the language barrier, the same goes for Scandinavia (17 million), Benelux (28 million), Poland (38 million), or even DACH (95 million). It is nothing compared to half a billion people of the US, UK, CA, AU, NZ and IE that are giving tone to the worldwide debate in English.

So, if you are a British trans woman, you would do yourself a great favour if you moved to mainland Europe. You will be welcomed and cherished (for the most part).

Calling gender-critical feminism a “one trick pony” is an unsupported generalisation. A movement may concentrate on one neglected issue while its participants also campaign on rape, domestic abuse, employment and reproductive rights. Even if somebody worked on only one cause, that would not make the cause false.

Your “segregate everywhere or nowhere” demand is an all-or-nothing fallacy. Context is precisely what proportionality is supposed to consider. Men and women sharing streets, offices and classrooms does not ordinarily entail undressing, sleeping, receiving intimate care or being confined together.

Male teachers and carers occupy regulated professional roles, with recruitment checks, supervision, safeguarding duties and codes of conduct. That does not give them unrestricted access to female changing rooms as users or the right to provide intimate care over a woman’s objection. Employment and membership of a female-only user group are plainly different. Pretending otherwise is comparing apples with changing rooms.

Preventative rules do not imply that every member of a risk class will offend or that identical precautions belong everywhere. We lock our homes without excluding strangers from every street. We use seatbelts without banning cars. Contextual precautions are not hypocrisy.

Most importantly, a woman does not have to prove that an assault is imminent before her privacy matters. She is entitled to say no to male presence in an intimate female space because it is her body and her boundary.

Why does your balancing exercise always begin with the male person’s desire for access and end with women being told to accommodate it? Why must women choose between total separation from men and having no meaningful boundaries at all?

Is it because you're a dude?

Women have the same status as men. Their “no” is not less valid because a male person dislikes it. Treating women’s consent as an obstacle to be argued away is misogyny, not inclusion.

"misled"

Greta will tell us next the apparent "third genders" in so many developing nations are something other than the reality, extreme effeminate men in extreme homophobic nations, their lives made Hell in their own country, often transsexual prostitutes abroad, strangely enough then sexually exploited by nations that Greta would consider progressive and liberal.
And it's the attitudes of those non Western non developed countries, and men in the West who reside in progressive nations, that Greta would contend are more advanced that the awful hellhole that is colonialist transphobic Britain.

There is a glaring contradiction here. You accuse women of “deciding for others” while repeatedly declaring that Australian women do not care, based largely on the absence of a campaign sufficiently visible to you.

Apparently silence becomes reliable evidence of consent whenever it supports your conclusion. It is not. You cannot speak for every Australian woman any more than I can.

Arguing publicly for a policy is not personally imposing it. That is what democratic debate is for. Female rights also do not require unanimity. One woman being willing to share female provision with males cannot give every other woman’s privacy and boundaries away.

Your excursion through Sal Grover’s biography is an exceptionally long scenic route around the argument. Her former ambitions, the age at which she began campaigning, your opinion of her business and her use of crowdfunding do not determine whether sex is real or whether women may associate as females.
People frequently become campaigners when a law first affects them. That is not evidence of dishonesty. Even if every allegation you made about one campaigner’s motives were true, it would remain irrelevant: an imperfect advocate can make a correct argument, and an admirable advocate can make a false one.
Why should female rights depend on whether you approve of one woman’s CV? Why are allegations about her motives supposed to answer whether women may exclude males from a female association?

They do not. You have replaced the substantive issue with personal speculation, the very tactic you object to when directed elsewhere.

The question you just won't answer remains: why should a male person’s identity override a woman’s right to say no? Calling one woman a grifter is not an answer. It is an admission that you would rather discuss almost anything else and all you have is insults, not reasoning.

First, it was the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia—not an Australian “Supreme Court”. It applied the Australian Sex Discrimination Act to a particular service and found direct gender-identity discrimination.

Within that statutory context, the majority treated post-surgery Tickle as a woman/female. That was an interpretation of legislation and Australian usage. It was not a scientific discovery that reproductive sex had changed. Courts determine what statutes mean; they do not rearrange human reproductive biology.

Just legal paper, not reality.

Harassment of gender-nonconforming women is wrong. It does not follow that sex categories must be abolished. A sex-based rule recognises a masculine woman as female and a feminine man as male. It does not define either person by hair, clothing or conformity to stereotypes.

Indeed, self-identification invites more appearance-based reasoning: observers are expected to infer an invisible gender identity from presentation. Sex realism requires no such fashion-based guesswork. Humans can sex another human with staggeringly high accuracy

Nor does single-sex provision require officials to conduct any inspections. Most rules depend upon clarity and ordinary compliance, with evidence considered when a genuine dispute arises. Shops do not demand identification from every adult before selling an age-restricted product, yet age remains real. Imperfect enforcement does not make a category imaginary.

So answer my straightforward question: may women ever associate as females without admitting males?

If yes, you concede that sex sometimes can and should governs access. If no, you are saying women possess less freedom of association than men and that a woman’s “no” can always be overridden by a male identity.

Why is the male person’s demand more important than the woman’s boundary? That is the misogyny your argument continually circles without acknowledging. You think men are more important than women.

While I agree with most of what you say it really rubs me wrong when you accuse other posters or being a "dude" while arguing, when you refuse to identify yourself on your username as a dude while you dominate thread where od love to hear more from the women on here, not "the dudes"

The reason I could pull out a few more facts about Australian toilets on a previous post was because of Howse. We had a previous 1000 posts thread that became about toilets, and he said men weren’t a problem for women in the same toilets. So I picked a city where it implied he was from and the first story that came up in Google was the doctor taking hidden video footage of 100s of women in different hospital toilets. It was ongoing at the time.

Because of this thread, I looked up the latest news in that case:
this is the facts:
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/australianz/singaporean-doctor-in-melbourne-pleads-guilty-to-secretly-filming-colleagues-in-toilets

and this explains how the hospitals are dealing with it - ‘a Cho day’ is insulting.
https://www.nine.com.au/australia-news/a-current-affair/victims-of-creep-doctor-speak-out-20260730-p60k5t.html

Doctors and teachers seem to have a particular ‘problem’ with this, all over the world, including the UK. Guess what sex they all are. Annoyingly I spent a couple of hours collating a list of UK teachers who had been barred then lost the list. Got up to double figures. All male.

At some point it would be useful to do an FOI for figures with the relevant medical and education bodies.

I did do FOIs with the Department for Education about the number of incidents in school toilets. Not only could they not tell me about what goes on for an FOI request because it would take too long, they also said it would take so long to find out even if they was a way of collecting the data that would take too long to collate.

Calling women “phallophobic” pathologises their boundaries. A woman can recognise that somebody is male without fearing him, and she can decline male presence in an intimate space without believing every male is dangerous.

“No” is a boundary, not a psychiatric diagnosis.

Your assertion that gender-critical women have “lost all entitlement” to object to sexualised insults is exceptionally revealing. Rights and dignity apparently belong only to women whose opinions meet with your approval. Declaring dissenting women legitimate targets for contempt is not equality.

You invoke proportionality, but it behaves rather like a magic spell in your argument: say the word often enough and female rights are supposed to vanish.

Actual proportionality is context-sensitive. Male teachers and carers perform regulated professional roles subject to recruitment checks, supervision and safeguarding duties. That is materially different from using female toilets, changing rooms and sleeping accommodation or providing intimate care over a woman’s objection.

A male doctor being employed by a hospital does not abolish a female patient’s right to request a woman for intimate treatment. Role, purpose, vulnerability and alternatives all matter.

A genuine balance must count female privacy, dignity, trauma and freedom of association. Your version begins by counting male distress as harm while dismissing female distress as “phobia”. Why is the man’s discomfort important while the woman’s is irrational? Why is his desired access a right while her refusal is prejudice? (I think we know why you think this)

You still have not identified which female right you recognise (any?), what weight you give it or when women may legitimately say no. Unless you can answer, “proportionality” is not an argument. It is a decorative label you don't understand placed over the predetermined conclusion that women must give way.

I mean, I am not refusing, nor have I hidden it, should I wear a badge?

I make the accusation because it feels legitimate, not because it's any sort of sex based insult. And I don't think I am the only one to make the assertion? Either way, no offence intended.

Culturally enforced (or otherwise) misogyny seems alive and well in some women, as a glimpse into my personal life, one thats probably going to make me single today! But that's another story....

Cambridge Dictionary is not a biology laboratory. Its primary definition is “an adult female human being”. Its additional entry merely records a contested recent usage and even acknowledges that the person may be a different sex. Dictionaries record usage. They do not change biology.

Sex is not subjective. Human reproduction involves two gamete types: ova and sperm. Females are organised around producing ova; males around producing sperm. There is no third gamete or third sex. A woman is an adult human female. A male may identify as a woman, but he cannot become female.

Nor do clothes, make-up or mannerisms make somebody a woman. That reduces women to the sexist stereotypes feminism opposed. Feminine men are men. Masculine women are women.

You also plainly do not understand “fascism”. Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology centred on dictatorial power and suppression. It does not mean somebody refusing to agree with your subjective belief. You are using “fascism” as carelessly as you use “woman” and “female”: stripping words of their meanings whenever those meanings become inconvenient.

The subjective claim here is gender identity, not sex. Yet you expect a man’s subjective identity to redefine every woman objectively, alter female categories and override female boundaries.

Why is his belief binding, while a woman’s refusal is “fascist”? Why is his identity more important than her right to say no?

That hierarchy always places the male claim above the female boundary. It is not progressive. It is straightforward misogyny.

Gosh, even if that's the only possible outcome, sorry it came to that.

Repeating “proportionality” does not demonstrate that you understand it. Proportionality requires a genuine assessment of the objective, competing rights, necessity, available alternatives and overall balance. It does not mean “the male person gets access unless women can prove an assault is imminent”.

You have ignored nearly every female interest raised: privacy, dignity, safety, trauma, fairness and freedom of association. You have ignored private and unisex alternatives. You have ignored the difference between working alongside men and undressing, sleeping or receiving intimate care in their presence.

That is not balancing competing rights. It is removing the female side from the scales and still calling the result “proportionate”.

You also misuse “transphobia”. Defending female rights is not fear or hatred of trans people. Saying that a trans woman is male, or that a woman may refuse male presence in female provision, does not deny anybody’s humanity or ordinary civil rights. “Transphobia” is not a magic veto that makes every male demand legitimate and every female boundary hateful.

Your own acceptance that trans women may be excluded from some female services proves that gender identity does not automatically override sex. So answer the question you keep avoiding: when may women say no?

Why is a male person’s wish for access treated as a right, while a female person’s refusal is dismissed as prejudice? Why must women justify their boundaries to men at all?

You have not applied proportionality. You have not answered the arguments. You have simply used several important-sounding words incorrectly and hoped they would conceal the same conclusion every time: the man matters more and the woman must give way.

That is not equality. It is misogyny.

Eh, everyone has a different opinion, mine is that those men on here that have had it pointed out by people they were unaware they were speaking with a male and then continue to choose usernames that don't specify it are aware they'll be mistaken or assumed to be women and are happy for that to be the case. And then to accuse others of being "dudes" while not referring to your own sex is weird. I would expect men on here to have an understanding of the need to amplify women's voices and how the beat way to do that is for their sex to be obvious when partaking in discussions.

Should I tell people I like football and Stella?
(I actually don't like either)

I suppose I'd say that I didn't think it mattered, in most situations as we keep arguing, sex does not matter a jot, only in some, clearly delineated circumstances, should it be considered and is important.

Either way not trying to hide it.

Regular posters who have been following SSSiS's sterling work re schools are fully aware, he hasn't ever hidden it. Does he have to say 'man here' on every thread in case someone new turns up?

There are several men who frequent this board whose contributions I for one welcome.

And anyway, when it's an analysis of an argument, does it matter?

To be fair, he made it really clear several times a while ago. Newer posters might have missed that, which is understandable. It would be weird to state it in every post though? He'd probably then get accused of proclaiming "I AM A MAN". I don't think putting it in a user name is the answer - anyone can call themselves anything on here, doesn't mean it's true.

Well quite, I'm clearly not a 12th century Japanese poet.

Who said you like football and Stella...? I don't see why reminding you that women prefer to discuss certain things amongst primarily women and therefore appreciate the courtesy of men picking a username such as Mrsinglesexspacesinschools so they know a poster is male is asking you to list of your likes and dislikes.

It's weird how more than one male poster on here says they won't change it because they as males don't think it matters. Even when posters have commented they feel perturbed they were for example disclosing sexual trauma thinking they were speaking to female posters. It's also relevant to many of us when engaging with a poster to know if they understand our lived experience and also to see when a man is dominating a thread where he doesn't have the necessary experience for example.

Typical male entitlement though to only do you you think matters though.

Why can't he be Mrsinglesexspaces then he doesn't need to state it everytime...?

Of course it doesn't mean it's true but I don't think a woman using a male username on here is as common or troubling as men repeatedly insisting their sex isn't relevant when female posters have explicitly said they felt uncomfortable that they had posted details on threads not knowing some were male.

😄oh I'm disappointed now!

Re: SSSiS - the fact that he's a man even got commented on on Reddit IIRC!

Because that looks like Mrs inglesexspaces
A user name does not prove one's sex

It does show courtesy that you aren't trying to be perceived as a woman though....especially when accusing others of being dudes. I'd also be surprised if you'd genuinely misread that username so badly...

Yes, sorry about that. She was a massive feminist and I fell in love with the tale of Genji many years ago, so that's why.

And yes the 'you can never tell' cesspool of Reddit managed to tell re SSSiS! And yet seem surprised that we can tell....

When I initially posted here "...as a male...", I was told in no uncertain terms by several women that I didn't need to stress that, it created a mansplaining persona.
Other women have requested I just leave. Again, after revealing I'm a male.

He isn't trying to be perceived as a woman. He stated several times when he started posting that he is a man with a daughter. OK, we have to take him at his word about that. Advanced search can be useful.

Anyway, I'm out. SSSiS can fight his own battles on this front, which I'm sure he's capable of doing.