Marilyn Frye on access is a very compelling read. She points out that those with power have access to those without power, but not vice versa. So parents can enter their children's rooms, but not vice versa, CEOs have immediate access to their staff but not vice versa, etc.

There are two things to grasp about that:
1) the powerful have access to the less powerful (the king can enter the harem at will)
2) the powerful can *deny* access to the less powerful (the king can segregate women in the harem and deny them access to the rest of the palace).

So power says: I can enter your spaces at will. I can deny you access to my spaces.

Males have power over women in society (which is why so much of our social customs are about denial of how badly women are treated).

So males were able to deny women access to the vote, to education, to the social sphere, and keep us sequestered in the home until fairly recently, using the threat of violence as a coercive tool to ensure compliance.

An individual man doesn't have to be violent for this to work. The threat of violence from other men, and the refusal to deal with the social mechanisms that make such violence permissible, is enough to maintain his power. As Susan Griffin said, chivalry is a protection racket.

The fight for the vote, to be able to to work, for access to the public sphere, was women's rebellion against being *denied access*. The fight for women's public toilets etc, apart from the practical freedom from the urinary leash, was women denying men access to us.

Both met with spectacular pushback from men. See eg https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/History-of-Womens-Public-Toilets-in-Britain/

Men wanted to retain the power to segregate us where and when it suited them; we were not permitted to sequester ourselves from them though.

As Frye wrote: "It is always the privilege of the master to enter the slave's hut. The slave who decides to exclude the master from her hut is declaring herself not a slave."

Those of us insisting that women's sex-based rights belong to women are declaring ourselves not slaves.

The men trying to give our spaces away with such frothing, gaslighting abandon are furious about something they can't admit to; that we believe we have the right to exclude them, and that we have the temerity to do so. Transwomen are their proxies.

So they make up all sorts of nonsense about excluding transwomen being like whites excluding blacks; but they're all enraged for the same reason. We're excluding males, and they don't want us to have the right to do that.

The other thing to note is that if and when we acknowledge the righteousness of such a rebellion, it is the rights of the former slaves that matter, not the feelings of the former masters who wish to invade their spaces.

We see this immediately with Rachel Dolezal. No-one talks about her feelings (fwiw I happen to think she's completely sincere). This is not because her feelings don't count; it is because they don't prevail over the rights of black people to their own organisations (like NAACP)

In the case of the assault on women's rights, it is *only* the feelings of male women which seem to count. Women are supposed to give up all the gains of feminism, and even our word, to become mental health nurses and provide unconditional validation to transwomen.

This tells you who has the power, and it isn't women. This is deep-rooted, largely unconscious structural sexism; an attitude which says women exist to support and reflect males, including those males who regard themselves as women, or who wish to be women.

An attitude which will make up all kinds of bizarre rationalisations, including accusing us of the equivalent of racism, to avoid acknowledging that this is just men violating women's boundaries. Because then they might have to admit that we have a right to those boundaries.

When the NAACP say "we have rights", Dolezal is removed (perhaps because racism affects men too). When women say "we have rights", we're told to be nicer, while excuses for politicians like Jo Swinson openly discuss removing those rights; we're not supposed to object to this.

When we *do* object, we are treated to all the usual vilification hurled at "unnatural women" - those who refuse to abandon self and live for others, meaning males.

Male supremacy is alive and well and living in Britain. Don't underestimate it.