Thread by @Passie_Kracht

So as I was looking into a grubby outfit's misogynistic policies (i.e. removing women from premises for expressing unwanted opinions) I found the Met Police's page on the "Ask for Angela" campaign.

@grubmcr referred to the Everyone Welcome Initiative it adheres to (it's unclear who's behind this initiative but it firmly declares it's "not PC gone mad") that refers to this page. everyonewelcomeinitiative.com

The Everyone Welcome Initiative aims to protect patrons from discrimination on the basis of a number of grounds, including gender but not sex. It mistakenly states this conforms to the Equality Act. The Equality Act cites sex, not gender as a protected category.

In other words, women are not considered a protected category by @GRUBMCR, which it has confirmed by stating publicly on twitter that it considers the definition of woman hateful.

The argument is that a woman wearing a T-shirt with the definition of woman on it could make other patrons uncomfortable. When asked if men who make women uncomfortable will be removed @GRUBMCR refers to the Everyone Welcome Initiative as its policy.

@GRUBMCR doesn't appear to be applying its policy to the letter as it has blocked me and others who have criticised it for calling the definition of woman "transphobic".

Unsurprisingly the Everyone Welcome Initiative advocates for the installation of gender-neutral bathrooms. It also states that it seeks to protect customers by using the format of the Met Police's "Ask for Angela" campaign.

Which got me thinking... what is this campaign based on? It's based on a safe word for FEMALE customers to protect them from harassment - by MEN. This safe word obviously should not be known by men. It's not a safe word if the harasser knows it. met.police.uk/AskforAngela

The idea of the "Ask for Angela" campaign is to ask a staff member for "Angela", which is code for "This person is harassing me, please get me safely out of this situation". It all rests on the harasser being unaware that his victim is asking for help.

The only way to inform female customers of the safe word without men finding out is to post them in the women's toilets. So how is this policy supposed to be enacted when there are unisex toilets or when the women's toilets are accessible to men?

The policy is clearly based on the correct premise that it is mainly men who do the harassing and mainly women who are harassed. However, with the new tendency of following the belief that men can be women and vv such policies become unpracticable.

Once more it becomes clear that policies that protect women from male violence are not compatible with the practice of gender ideology. Gender ideology demands that women-only toilets are abolished. All men wishing to have access to them should have it at their say-so.

This means a campaign like "Asking for Angela" becomes utterly useless. A woman who's being harassed could just as well tell bar staff straight up that the guy next to her is harassing her. A safe word has to be, well, safe.

Interestingly, the "Ask for Angela" campaign is not intended to remove the harasser from the premises, as I thought. Instead the woman is safely ushered out a back exit and put in a taxi. This article talks of a bar that even has a discreet room. thetab.com/uk/soton/2018/…

To which my first thought was: Great, a bartender will lead me to a back room, alone... that doesn't sound like a safe option when I'm already feeling uncomfortable!

This is how the A4A campaign is described. No action is taken against the harasser, who can enjoy the rest of his evening at the bar and is free to harass other women there. The woman who feels uncomfortable, on the other hand, is removed from the premises.

No one is standing up for her. No one is publicly telling the harasser his behaviour is unacceptable and he is not welcome there. The harasser, however, WILL know the woman snuck out. He will know he was rejected. Rejection makes men dangerous. The woman is left to deal with that

To be clear it can be her partner or some other man she knows who has access to her - in her house, at work, at school... Just getting her out of that particular situation does not necessarily make her safe. It definitely does not change his sense of entitlement to her.

And of course the irony of all this is that the A4A campaign is based on the person feeling uncomfortable - not due to an opinion but due to an ACTUAL UNSAFE situation - is removed from the premises. The woman is removed in this scenario.

In @grubmcr's policy when someone makes someone else uncomfortable or even when customers might potentially become uncomfortable, e.g. by stating the definition of woman, it is not the person who's uncomfortable who's ushered out the back door.

It's, once again, the WOMAN who's removed. Funny that, innit? I mean, if these people really thought certain men were women and seeing a definition would hurt them, surely these "women" would be ushered out the back door and put in a taxi?

So here you see the misogyny in two policies that are supposedly intended to protect the vulnerable. The most vulnerable population, one that contains all other vulnerable categories, is thrown under the bus. Both these policies purport to be "feminist". Well, fuck that feminism.