Anat Deracine
1 min readSep 30, 2020

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Every country must make a choice whether to lead from a place of the older generation's fears or the younger generation's hope. Given the average age of lawmakers, I know which way the laws will bend now around the world. As someone who went from extreme segregation to suddenly co-ed spaces in the West (and yes it is a culture shock) it's frightening at first. But over time you start to see that separate spaces perpetuate inequities and condescension and turn entering women's spaces into some sort of lewd forbidden fruit. I get the fear that many older women have due to their definitions of "woman-as-victim, man-as-default-rapist" which completely ignore the facts about assault and murder rates of trans women and perpetuate the narrative of womanhood as being defined by trauma. Anecdotally, I've been sexually harassed more in segregated spaces than in unified ones. Even in Saudi Arabia, the gender-unified KAUST university has lower incident rates than the segregated general population. But it looks, from your profile, that you're not really open to having your mind changed by facts or broadened so maybe it's best we end here.

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