Holly

Good for you! Many women, for many reasons, do want and need female spaces and it’s important to respect that, is it not?https://twitter.com/RadFemLawyer/status/1004423438419800065?s=20 …

Sure it's important, my point is just that women-only spaces includes trans women as well as cis women on account of us all being women.

what about the trans women who are sexual predators, or men pretending to be trans and violating women's privacy. They just found a camera in a unisex bathroom in Starbucks. Only men do stuff like this, if trans women get access to women's spaces this will be a normal event.

Your incoherent and misplaced animosity is totally lacking in evidence. Trans women are women, and even more than cis women are the victims of sexual predation not the perpetrators of it. I feel safer around any number of trans women than I am around anyone talking like you.

Transwomen are male. No changing it.

I mean I've sometimes needed a space for people with PCOS, but that =/= "a space for cis women", trans men and AFAB NB people might need that space too.

Exactly. There's no experience that all and only cis women have. So there's no reason to insist we need "our own spaces", except bigotry.

The only potential reason I can think of is to discuss and interrogate the ways cis womanhood is weaponised by transphobes and ways to stand against that, without dragging trans women in to do emotional labour. But that isn't what the transphobes are calling for, obviously.

If you would be open to trans mascs I'd love to come as an ally and work on ways to stop my birth assignment being weaponised against trans women.

Oh its not a real meeting. :) But I think anyone able and willing to do the emotional labor should be able to be part of these conversations. I just think it's most incumbent on cis women to make sure womanhood isn't policed and (as you so rightly say!) weaponized like this.

Heck, I would be 100% up for making an online space to discuss this :) (irl might be tricky just because of logistics). And yeah, it would be totally open to trans men, trans masculine people and AFAB NB people.

I think it’s possible that there are traumatised and vulnerable women who do feel the need for cis-women-only spaces, or women with particular marginalised religious affiliations who’d avoid certain spaces rather than encounter a trans person.

They're free to avoid those spaces then, they don't get to tell other women they can't use them.

Telling a woman who has been abused and raped that she has to accept accessing a refuge that has people with penises in or go away is fuckin outrageous. Dont trans women have any empathy?

Like I said, you want to have a conversation about the conflicting needs of cis women who’ve experienced abuse and trans women - both marginalised groups - you’ve got to start from a place that respects both and recognises that both have needs which are valid.

GCF, and particularly the ManFriday group, are doing the exact opposite of that. Making sure the needs of two marginalised groups get heard and accommodated needs sensitivity and care.

And it’s not fair to require empathy ONLY from trans women, a group that Dworkin describes as being in “a state of primary emergency”, especially whilst they are experiencing attacks from so-called feminists.

Trans women arent bejng expected to have any empathy thats the problem. Not men, not trans women - only women are being expected to accomodate

Trans women are women, so that tweet doesn’t make any sense.