EVE

Westerners genuinely can't grasp women from third world countries are against self ID based policies. I am glad to explain only men benefit from your bourgeois ideology, we can’t announce our alignment to manhood and expect our material reality to reorganize itself around our pronouns. We are not so privileged like you unfortunately, only to change your insta bio and expect the sex hierarchy to shift by itself. That's not how it works in here, it only conceals female oppression your folks seem to like to appropriate too.

Stalking me is enough, creep. You can peddle your Cartesian dualism to support your fellow males now. 🤡

When I competed in the Regional Culture and Arts Festival, we were housed inside the host university’s facilities because there was not enough funding to accommodate delegates in proper hotels. One evening, while several of us were taking a bath in the women’s restroom, two men walked in. There was no hint of the expectation of rejection, they only said the men’s restroom was crowded.

“Hello, we are going to pee here, okay? Men's restroom is too crowded right now,” they said casually, as if that somehow justified entering a space where women were bathing.

This was not a private facility. It was a typical public restroom with wide gaps above and below the stall doors for ventilation and cost efficiency. Anyone inside could easily tell that people were bathing because of the water hitting the cemented floors. A female professor in the next stall immediately confronted them and said, “You are still men. Why are you here? Don’t you realize we are all bathing in here?”

And she was right.

Femininity is not a free pass into women’s spaces. Being effeminate does not erase the fact that you are male, nor does it override the boundaries women are entitled to expect in places where they are vulnerable.

What frustrates me is having to explain this over and over again to people who insist these concerns are imaginary. Do you really think women willingly invite backlash, ridicule, and accusations of bigotry because they are desperate for attention? There are far easier ways to get attention than speaking about an issue that often results in social and professional consequences.

The fear and disgust many women feel in situations like this are difficult to understand if you have never had to experience them. If you have spent your life assuming you belong in every space, then perhaps it is easy to overlook what it feels like to lose one. I told my coach about the incident afterward, and we considered reporting the men involved. Unfortunately, we never identified which university they came from because we were in the middle of bathing and could not see their delegate tags or university shirts. 

That, by the way, is the kind of situation people defend when they dismiss women’s concerns. Not some abstract theoretical debate, but real instances where men gain access to spaces reserved for women, while women are expected to suppress their discomfort for the sake of appearing inclusive. I am grateful that someone in a position of authority spoke up. Had it been us, the female delegates, there was a real possibility that we would have been painted as the problem for objecting. 

Today, we call it freedom, sometimes the more sophisticated "agency", but a decade ago, this is regarded as “idealism"— changing a social reality by reasoning it does not exist, transforming the world by modifying perception. The irony lies on the premise that ‘decriminalization’ in actuality aims to destabilize ‘inequality' within a contract, the same contract which would not exist if women are recognized as distinct, independent creatures, and equally deserving of the rights designated to those who are not only constitutionally considered human but is in the Real, in the flesh, in the experiential layer of being, human.

Accepting prostitution (AKA “sex work” rebranded by the patriarchal - capitalist industry) as inevitable and natural is essentializing women’s already subordinated status. This was never the case in the varying class antagonisms in existence, the proletariat despite the class antagonism spanning decades, has never assimilated to the bourgeoisie’s conception of freedom or safety net, neither people of color bowed down to the legalization of slavery despite white supremacists having the upperhand, Filipino ancestors died to contest their sovereignty during the Spanish colonization, and no revolutionary homosexual accepted heteronormative narratives of “default” sexuality. Now, why do we accept safety born from the hands that suffocate us, and why is ‘dehumanization’ the only reality possible when the class fighting and to be fought for are women?

Every time you think to yourself, you are doing women good by nodding to the industry that profits from their abuse. Remember, you are not calling for adequate structural support in order for women and children to exit the industry, you're calling for the legalization of their exploitation. In layman’s terms, you are not only permitting rape culture to absorb everything in existence, you are advocating for the constitutional protection of the male, the male gaze, and the male institution to subordinate, objectify, and dehumanize women by recognizing their “right” to buy women as worthy of legislation and debate.