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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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If there is any hope for preserving female-only spaces (in public) then it must be by re-asserting that the legal protections for women are for members of the female sex, and not anyone who identifies as a woman. There really is no other way out.

There should be no hope for preserving female-only spaces or legal protections. The west has adopted "equality of the sexes" as foundational and women should have to bear the cost of that as much as men do. They shouldn't get to simultaneously claim equality and special treatment as it suits them.

EDIT: Grammar.

There is a lot to be said for that. After all, feminists (both liberal and radical) have relentlessly attacked male-only spaces to the point where they have all but disappeared, so abolishing female-only spaces too seems only fair. I do have some other views though.

One is that if you abolish female-only spaces entirely, then they should be accessible by all males, not just the ones that happen to identify as women. Instead of allowing transwomen into women's bathrooms, make bathrooms unisex. Instead of allowing transwomen to compete against women in the olympics, abolish the women's division. Instead of allowing transwomen into women-only train compartments, abolish women-only train compartments. And so on. Currently we are not seeing any such principled attack on women's spaces. Instead, it's all about letting males in provided that they identify as women, which is not the same as abolishing female-only spaces, it's just redefining what “female” means.

The other view is that maybe feminists are just wrong. Maybe it's good for society to have both male-only and female-only spaces. I think a lot of boys would benefit from male-only spaces and not in ways that are detrimental to women. And obviously women benefit from female-only spaces too: when it comes to sexual harassment etc. the most common configuration involves a male perpetrator and a female victim. Rather than accept the naive liberal feminist frame that the sexes are indistinguishable, we could embrace the idea that the sexes are equal but different, and support sex-segregated spaces for both.

Radical feminists are particularly hypocritical on this topic, in that they defend female spaces, but attack male spaces. I don't see why I should accept their frame entirely, even though I agree with their view on sex as being defined biologically.