It’s not. You’re boring and stupid. Go read a book.

It isn’t. My sex is XY, but I would be allowed entry because I’m a (trans) woman. More importantly, it’s about the shared experience of being treated as a woman or being at risk of being treated as a woman in patriarchal society.

That said, the social status of someone who is known to have XX chromosomes or who is at risk of people learning they have XX chromosomes would also have a lot of overlap with women, so it would make sense in many cases to categorically allow everyone with XX chromosomes even if they are (cis) men.

(I don’t think cis men with XX chromosomes are medically possible, but you can have cis women with XY chromosomes because testosterone insensitivity isn’t lethal).

So these days, most of the time you would have more queer-inclusive categories like FLINTA, explicitly including everyone who has experience with patriarchy as “the woman”. Different exclusions make sense in different situations; sometimes it makes sense to exclude trans men, sometimes it makes sense to exclude people who don’t menstruate. Sometimes organisations are wrong/immoral about who they exclude, like TERFs. But a feminist meeting without men is going to be able to touch on a lot of topics they otherwise couldn’t safely and go a lot deeper than when having to explain things to men.

(There’s also the “sexism = prejudice + power” thing, which I don’t really vibe with as a rebuttal because it neglects the power of local institutions that may run askew from larger society; if you can host a conference, you have enough power for your prejudice to be sexist).

Yes. Because sex discrimination and sexism are not the same thing. And not all forms of discrimination are wrong. We just use “discrimination is wrong” as a useful first-pass mental hack. But every non-discrimination law is written with certain reasonable exceptions built into it. It is sex discrimination, but not sexism, to refuse to hire cis men as wet nurses. It is disability discrimination, but not illegal discrimination, to refuse to hire someone in a wheelchair to be a circus acrobat.

This is sex discrimination, but it is neither illegal or sexism. It’s not saying that men are inherently inferior to women. It’s saying that there is a bona fide reason to make this space woman-only, based on the lived experience of men vs women.

In above comic it’s not the whole movement of feminism being closed to men, it’s only one conference.

And let’s be honest, the men that get upset by a women only conference are exactly the men you didn’t want there in the first place to talk about feminism.

I’ll admit that I only know BLM from first hand experience (not a lot) and the news, so I should not speak on the movement as a whole. But I wanted to use it to illustrate my point.

if you believe being a man has some effect that means you can’t have something relevant to add to a conversation

I would not say that this is the problem. More in the lines of whataboutism?
You want to discuss something and other people (often men in the case of feminism, again, in my experience), tries to whataboutism their counterpart (for example a femenist) to make their counterparts arguments invalid in some way.

Back to OP’s comic, here is a real world example: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-46622772. Emma Knyckare (a Swedish comedian) organized a festival that was “male-free”.

The Sweden’s Discrimination Ombudsman (DO) said that describing an event as “male-free” breached the country’s anti-discrimination laws.

They understood being allied against billionaires but didnt understand “being allied against an entire group”

So i simplified it for them

Again, if you are suggesting it is legitimate for one, it becomes transitively legitimate for the other, regardless of whether you think it should. If you are saying it is a legitimate tactic, everyone can use it, even the people you don’t like, and you are just diving into a multigenerational, essentialist, retributive justice death spiral.

I don’t normally post on weekends but I left my lunch in the office fridge and your response has been a grain of sand in my brain. Figured I’d finish up writing my response.

I didn’t address this directly because you didn’t do the work to show you were actually interested in the conversation. That’s why didn’t have the right to be there. This response is more serious and worth giving you my attention and energy. Had you provided the context and thinking you provided in this response in the first response, I would have considered answering especially if you were able to support it’s relevancy.

It wasn’t clear how I could have responded to pull out the counter arguments I wanted to get to. I want to skip to the core of the discussion because if I used up time on initial 101 arguments, statistically the person I’m responding too gets bored, suspicious, or tired of the argument overall. Also, being flatly and snarkily blunt about a specific thing without additional details gives a chance for someone to reveal what they actually think in anger without tactical obfuscation of their actual beliefs, wasting time.

Its doesn’t work often but it has every once in a while. The alternative almost always seems like I get the same old same old boilerplate.

I won’t be addressing the anti-natalist because I don’t see how it’s connected and it seems like it’s emotionally charged for you. Emotionally charged politics are important, but only if they are connected to the topic and if I judge that I have any relevant position to make any intervention. So I won’t be sounding off on that.

Its emotional to be natalist as well. Its connected to the discussion at a fundamental level, to be natalist means you value certain things as an axiom that lead to a certain derrived perspectives, one that I think is arguably similar to yours. Which is why I brought it up.

I stated it more to identify if this is a fundamental difference in our views. Something irreconcilable. Its a lonely feeling to have it confirmed. Very few have a conscious belief on the matter, pro or con. And default absent minded to natalist perspectives largely due to religion and cultural inertia.

On the face of it, an out group is not an adversary. If I attend a cancer survivor’s group and people who never had cancer show up, it changes things. People who never had cancer are not my adversaries. My goal isn’t to fight those people. I want to connect with others through a shared experience.

Segregation foments adversarial attitudes. Even with trivial or made up differences. It widens the empathy gap, creates perceived out-group homogeneity, and a sense of moral superiority. Group polarization absolutely can and probably will manifest in your suggested cancer survivor group, especially with an explicit ban on people joining who are not survivors of the disease. The goal is irrelevant, the result is what matters.

Men’s only groups in the past was often a place where real decisions for power and profit were made.

Statistically very true. Not a hard rule though, and to say there is no power in a woman’s only group that couldn’t further disenfranchise a dis-empowered non-woman would be disingenuous.

This is radically different from a the support some women may get in a women’s conference or the strategy and tactics developed from shared seed experiences for the political project of over throwing patriarchy.

“Over throwing patriarchy” is a vague goal at best though. What does that actually entail? Much like the rapture, the inevitable communist revolution, or judgement day this is just an in-group meta narrative, not really a goal at all.

Because there’s no reason why a shooting club needs to be gendered. If you can’t see the difference between a hobby club and a protected safe space for a certain group I don’t think we’ll see eye to eye on that issue.

The toilet thing is a bit more complicated. Generally, women take longer to use the washroom for mechanical reasons, and the same toilet space is usually allotted to both genders while men’s bathrooms have urinals as well as toilets, which take up less space - more pissers per square foot, if you will. That’s why the lineup to a women’s washroom is usually longer, and why I would absolutely use a men’s washroom rather than piss myself.

I’m fine with men using the women’s washroom when they need to. If there’s one thing everyone should be able to do regardless of the sign on the door, it’s taking a piss when they have to.

You were talking about toilets and shooting clubs.

What. The comment above me mentioned bathrooms and shooting clubs. How does that extrapolate to racism?

Rule 1, be nice.

Men aren’t excluded from the comm.

They’re just asked not to speak

The club isn’t allowing women to be present at all

Now do you see the false equivalence?

This here. I don’t quite get how someone can argue that safe spaces for one gender should exist but not for the other gender.

Everyone needs safe spaces, and women’s safe spaces aren’t threatened at all by the existence of men’s safe spaces.

There seems to exist a radical subsection of fundamental feminists who are against anything that might be good for men on principle. Kinda how there’s a radical subsection of male assholes who believe the same for women. People like that suck and are exactly why we can’t have nice things.

everyone can afford cocaine if you’re violent enough.

Men’s safe spaces are the default.

Taking some examples from my personal life : most gyms, many sports clubs, most gaming communities, barbershops, men’s addiction recovery groups, are places where men can feel very comfortable being themselves and taking all the space without little to no pushback. Some have alt right dipshits, some don’t. Find the right ones.

This comment thread is a prime example. Looking at the scores it’s implied that I should bow down to the needs of entitled men instead of having them work on themselves and curb their unhealthy need to have total control of everything everywhere. That’s what a male safe space looks like, so add Lemmy comment sections to the list above. Might feel hard to read, but I’m not one of those people who will pat you on the back just for existing. Being mad at the existence of women’s only spaces instead of looking for spaces that would fit you is unhealthy behavior. Other people are allowed to exist outside of your control. Work on yourself. If you can’t do it alone, try therapy. It worked for me.

Have you ever been sexually harassed at work or school?

Have a squizz for anything that mentions mental health. It’s like kryptonite to dipshits.

…

Why are men unable to put aside their emotions anyone someone points out that lots and lots of men do fucked up things, and are systematically supported?

You hear some men, and because you think emotionally, you hear “all men.”

Rapist in my state almost killed three teenage girls. He got court ordered therapy and community service.

Tulsa’s DA was just complaining about mandatory minimums for rapists.

And are we fucking forgetting that for 99% of human history, and still in most of the world, women didn’t get to learn to read? Go to school? Got married off as children?

Marital rape wasn’t illegal in every US state until 1993.

How many people are jerking to those videos on motherless right now?

When was the last time several thousand women organized groups to discuss raping men?

You simply do not have to identify with men.

I may be a man, but I remember what it was like to be a child and have a bigger person use their strength against me. So when I hear about a man doing that to a woman or white people doing that to minorities, I make the conscious decision to identify with the victims because I remember being a victim.

Your identity is your choice.