Australia’s Mona asked a court to reverse its ruling that allowed men inside a women’s only space.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/oHT6U
So we need a space for women abused by men, women abused by women, men abused by men, men abused by women, and people abused by mascots.
How about if people who want to create safe spaces just create the safe spaces they want to create, and we try to respect their need instead of making sure they’ve covered every corner case an uninvolved third party can imagine?
I’m pretty sure that if there is a large enough community of people abused by mascots in a given locality, someone will create a safe space for those people. The presence of a “safe space for female rape survivors” doesn’t preclude someone who wants to from creating that, nor a safe space for male rape survivors.
The problem I see is bigots using that as cover for their bigotry. “Sorry, this golf club is a safe space for people triggered by black people and women.”
The government would have to decide that the discrimination we like is ok, but the discrimination we don’t like isn’t. Which has incredible potential for abuse when the wrong people end up in charge.
Here’s my problem with that (reasonable) viewpoint.
I think there is a fairly reasonable distinction that could be made between those two scenarios such that it should not be difficult to write the related laws in a way that handles both circumstances appropriately. You can phrase it as “the discrimination we like vs the discrimination we don’t like” but I think that’s overly reductive.
No one using this example (and there are a few) finds it hard to see the difference between a safe space for women and a club for bigots. If we can perceive that distinction, we can describe it with words, and we can legislate accordingly.
Otherwise, we’re deciding not to let people who need them have safe spaces because assholes might take advantage of our permissiveness. I’m not OK with that.
