True, I guess immutable wasn’t the right term. It’s mutable, but it’s not really a choice.

I do disagree that banning men is necessarily helpful for the discussion of women’s issues though. Yes, some women’s issues are so far removed from our experience that most male advice wouldn’t be helpful. But I believe there is always value to be found, even-- actually, especially-- from the outgroup. This is the exact rationale for DEI, or at least the one that I find reasonable, which is that having perspectives from people with a wider variety of experiences represented in a space can improve the discussions within it. When done correctly, this improves the experience of the people who the group is “for”. Mixing perspectives with outgroup members like this also improves the mutual understanding between the group’s members and nonmembers, which in this case especially is important. And it allows people to more easily become allies.

What we don’t want is people with a hostile view of the group to be free to participate as much as they want. Maybe banning all men from the community is necessary, or maybe just efficient, to fulfill this purpose. In this case the ban might be worth it, but the loss of external perspectives is a downside and that should be considered here and always.

Like another user replied, there’s a difference between “this isn’t for you” and “you aren’t allowed here”. There aren’t a lot of other public high-quality places to discuss women’s issues, so as a man your options are to:

• Not discuss them, at most trying to understand by watching
• Start your own community for men to discuss women’s issues, which without womens’ perspectives is not likely to go well
• Start a community for all genders to discuss it – maybe I should do this one tbh, although maybe it might be smarter to expand the topic a little