“Woman-only Spaces are Inviolable”
Letter submitted by michael elizabeth jackson
I come to writing about woman-only spaces with one particular advantage.
My advantage? I worked as a social worker in batterer (men, that is) intervention programs for eleven years and learned from battered women, their advocates, and many generous and courageous feminist women. We paid our local battered women’s shelter staff to supervise us, teach us about male accountability, and how to hold ourselves accountable.
One of the privileges I was granted was sitting in on battered women’s support groups at the shelter, ostensibly to talk about our work with, and thinking about, batterers. Usually, however, it was two hours spent listening to women talk about their victimization by, and survival of, men. I soaked up their words and stories like a sponge. Note that I was invited into these spaces, and I went circumspectly.
If you have the good fortune of working/volunteering at a shelter, inevitably you will hear battered women in mutual support groups say, with astonishment, in response to another woman speaking: “Everything you just described is exactly what my batterer did; how do men learn this shit??”
This moment, this spark of awareness, this recognition of what is happening to them is larger than their personal predicament, is why woman-only spaces must be defended to our last breath. This is the spark that men, in the service of patriarchy, are absolutely committed to smothering and prohibiting women from experiencing. This knowledge, this awareness, this bonding with other women and understanding there are larger forces of patriarchy at work in their abuse is a direct threat to men.
This spark can only happen in a safe, woman-only space, whether that is in a shelter or your bedroom or your locker room. Under patriarchy the world over, the presence of men in the midst of women always serves to silence women, intended or not (and it is almost always intended). This is not a coincidence; this is the result of millennia of male privilege, male worship, and male oppression of women.
Trans women were brought up as males – with all the benefits of patriarchy whether they wanted them or not. These males were indoctrinated into patriarchy just as any man or boy would be. When they enter women-only spaces they bring their patriarchy with them.
I am a straight, white, upper middle class natal male and have, for decades, attempted to understand my privileges and throw my weight behind activism for victims, not perpetrators.
This led me decades ago to choose the queer community as my chosen family. All was going swimmingly until this gender identity subterfuge hit the fan. As I still attempt to understand the nuances of this schism on the fault line of gender identity, I bring the hard-won bedrock certainty of the necessity and sanctity of woman-only spaces in “choosing sides.” If natal females choose natal female-only space, then no means no. Period.
Woman-only spaces where I am not welcome, I might add! If we respect women’s plight-in-patriarchy, then we will accept making whatever accommodations necessary to empower women.
My fight about not being welcome is not with the women who claim the inviolable right to woman-only spaces, my fight is with men and patriarchy. Men and patriarchy cause women and children’s oppression, men inherit the privileges of that supremacy, and men benefit from it every day while pretending it doesn’t exist. We men are poison to woman-only spaces, and it is only logical that men in the service of patriarchy would want to violate them.
I have been a “friend of the family” of the queer community for over 40 years. I have marched in the streets alongside my queer family in Washington DC, and my hometown. I am an unshakable ally. However, I will never abide any argument about trans rights that ignores the patriarchal imperative of oppression and subjugation of women.
During the time I led batterer groups I was also in a men’s group for over ten years. The members were my peers: mostly social workers, mostly gay, generally well-off, and all white. As my feminism grew from seeing the tactics of batterers and what it meant in the larger picture, it finally dawned on me that accountability in batterers groups should be equally legitimate applied to a men’s group.
For my last two years in the men’s group, I determined to engage us to be accountable for our own sexism, male privilege, and male entitlement. Lo and behold, the men squealed and squirmed and obfuscated and threatened me just like the batterers did! I finally came to the realization that, to remain in the men’s group, our meetings must be supervised by women. In my last meeting with the men’s group, I told them of my requirement, and they literally laughed me out the door.
Am I contradicting myself about same-sex spaces? NO!!! We are all coping with LIFE UNDER PATRIARCHY. Under patriarchy, men have amply demonstrated for millennia we can’t be trusted in male-bonding exclusivity, secrecy, and fraternity. Under patriarchy, women need woman-only spaces and woman-only bonding as two tools to survive under, and revolt against, the tyranny of men.
