Post #2779757

Sure, of course they are. I'll even go so far as to say that even more fine grained groups are okay. What becomes a problem is when every group excludes people that really shouldn't be. You get a chess club, why the fuck can't a woman join? Right? Calling it a men's club is just exclusionary for no purpose. Even the girl/boy Scout divide was pointless in any real sense, *and* was a missed opportunity for those scouts to have guidance on how a scout is supposed to treat others. Hell, when it comes right down to it, even a specific *cis* organization is fine, just the way trans specific ones are. The problem, again, is when a club is exclusionary just for the sake of it. We *all* have aspects of our lives that aren't shared by people with other genders and/or types of genitals. There's struggles and discrete experiences that a trans man can have that I never will, and vice versa. But, again, once it ceases to be about that kind of specificity, it starts being bigotry in disguise and needs to fuck right off. Ain't no good reason women shouldn't be allowed into things like community action groups. A gender division there is just pointless and stupid. If they also exclude trans men, it's as bad (maybe even worse). Hell, the masons are full of shit in that regard. Fraternal orders are hypothetically okay, but since when have the masons actually been about men sharing the unique aspects of life that men share? It's just exclusionary bullshit (and I've seen it from the inside, so I *know* it's utter bullshit). They're the best example of how *not* to be a gender based organization. I'm not saying that men shouldn't be able to gather and just hang out. We should, as should women. There really is a different vibe, and there's no way around that. But once you start *organizing* that on a bigger scale, you have a different threshold to meet. Since, historically, most of the men's organizations not only excluded women, but actively served to continue oppression of women, being a de facto patriarchal enforcement group, those groups get the worst attention. They weren't really men's groups, they were *power control* groups that men only could use to gain, maintain, and exploit control. That's why there's pushback on them, not the fact that they were/are gendered.