Men. Brothers:

I absolutely, unreservedly support women in defending their sex-based rights to women-only spaces, services & opportunities for a host of reasons.

Among them:

1. If SOME males obtain the right to those things, on the basis of ‘self-identitifying’ 1/

as having a nebulous #genderidentity which functions as a magic key, then ALL males obtain the right, irrefutably. ALL men would acquire the right which we could choose to exercise or not. Like masters of everywhere & everything. No checks, no balances. Just our choices. 2/
If we are capable of empathy we will know that that’s an intolerable assault on the safety and dignity of women and girls. A sexual totalitarianism laid on top of the already deeply misogynistic cultures we have developed.

Do we have empathy enough with women to see this? 3/
2. The idea that only gentle, vulnerable, harmless males -whether they believe themselves to qualify as ‘women’ or not - would exercise that new universal right is so absurd as to not deserve consideration. History shows us why.

3. A let’s ask ourselves why some men are so 4/
Very keen to tell women to accept males in their spaces, services and opportunities. What are the motives? On the surface they are a desire for ‘kindness’, ‘acceptance’ - by women, toward men. Hmmm... So women are the nurse-class of humans, the sponges, the buffers?

Sexism 5/
Why don’t we think about how we men regulate our own spaces, rules of ‘manhood’, ‘masculinity’ & ‘maleness’? What is it that some of our brothers cannot bear to live in / as? Our suffocating expectations, demands, limitations, judgements? If someone wanted to leave your social 6/
group wouldn’t you be curious as to why? Or would you tell another social group that they should accept them ‘or else’? No reflection? No soul-searching? Just ‘good riddance’ & ‘let them in or face our wrath?’. Hmmm...

Maybe we find men performing ‘woman’ (femininity tropes) 7/
Threatening of our own sense of ‘man-ness’ - maybe it scares, confuses and disgusts us because it goes against our own socialization as males? Maybe that’s not something we want - or are able - to acknowledge? Easier to tell the women to accept them than we do that, right? 8/
That’s women’s work anyway, looking after us. Right?

4. Women need space away from the male gaze, respite from vulnerability, chance 2 relax, enjoy, organise, think, talk without us. We respect that - right? When I was younger I might have felt somehow rejected or slighted 9/
But we grow up & learn. Men who don’t accept boundaries are dangerous, regardless of whether those men are perpetrators or merely immature - cognitively & emotionally. The former enacts abuse, the latter facilitates it. The damage is the same.

There’s so much more to say... 10/

More from Society

@danielashby @AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd I'll bite. Let's try to keep it factual. There's a reasonable basis to some aspects of this question, that it might be possible to agree on. Then there are other, more variable, elements which depend on external factors such as transport and energy policy. /1

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd First up, we know reasonably well how much energy it takes to propel a high-speed train along the HS2 route. We can translate that into effective CO2 generated by making some assumptions about how green the electricity grid is. /2

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd Secondly, we have a reasonable grasp of how much CO2 is going to be generated by building HS2 - there are standard methods of working this out, based on the amount of steel, concrete, earthmoving, machine-fuelling etc required. /3

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd Thirdly, we can estimate how much CO2 is generated by cutting down trees, and how much is captured by planting new trees. We can also estimate how much CO2 is needed to keep the railway running and generated by maintaining the track /4

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd We know how much CO2 is saved by moving goods by freight train on the lines freed up by moving the express trains on to HS2, rather than by truck. /5

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