Anonymous asked:
Confession: I don’t actually understand the appeal of women’s spaces. I personally feel extremely uncomfortable in them and have avoided them as often as I can; when I am unable to avoid them I have still not had any experiences that clarified what people got out of them. I know that people are different, and I can guess from how much fighting over access to women’s spaces is going on all the time that they clearly do fill a need for lots of people, but I am a bad person to figure out how that need can be met because I don’t have it.
That said, transition is very hard even without immediately losing your whole social circle. Lots of people don’t figure out they’re trans until college, and lots of those people have unsafe home environments where it would suck to be stuck if they were disenrolled from college. I think at this least it is harmful to force people to transfer colleges when transitioning. (Not accepting trans men in the first place makes perfect sense to me and I am also confused about why trans men would want to go to an all-women’s college.)
But really the answer here is, like with the endless debates over who counts as LGBT enough for LGBT spaces, what the space is supposed to achieve. If you go with ‘women’s spaces’ as ‘spaces for people who are or have been mistreated because of misogyny’, they best fulfill their purpose by letting some nonwomen in; if you think ‘women’s spaces’ are ‘spaces for people who want to be doing womanhood as a social role in a way that makes them happy, and need communities dedicated to that project’ then obviously trans men and nonbinary people don’t belong; if you think ‘women’s spaces’ are mostly for ‘spaces in which people can expect to experience a lower rate of gender-related behavior that is unpleasant for them or contextually inappropriate to the work happening in the group and more common among men’ then you probably want to boot people for the specific unpleasant behavior.
Oh man, the last paragraph really gets at all my feelings about women’s spaces.
Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a push by women’s spaces to rebrand themselves as “women and nonbinary” spaces or even “women and trans people” spaces. In the women’s spaces that I was in, no one seemed to question this at all, even though it seemed totally nonobvious to me that women’s spaces should include nonbinaries (and especially trans men). I realized that other people were conceiving of them as thing 1 (spaces for people who are or have been mistreated by misogyny), while I wanted them to be thing 2 (spaces for people who want to be doing womanhood as a social role in a way that makes them happy, and need communities dedicated to that project).
My theory is that all spaces that are explicitly “women’s spaces” eventually converge to thing 1, unless they are literally /r/RedPillWomen or something. You’d think that if you were a woman who liked a thing that was mostly liked by men, you could find a group of women who also liked Thing, and all hang out and chat about Thing together, maybe while getting your nails done, and without interrupting each other or getting into really combative arguments or making sports references or … but no, the laws of the universe apparently make this impossible.