Gender Focus recently published an article about woman-only spaces which sprang from controversy surrounding an effort at McGill University to implement woman-only hours at the campus gym. The editors asked me to add a few words about my own experience of woman-only spaces. They appear at the end of the article: http://www.gender-focus.com/2015/03/10/mcgill-women-only-gym-time/
tended by poet Frances Donovan
Garden of Words 
Thanks for the heads-up, or I’d have missed that that second comment was from you! (I forget you don’t appear everywhere as “Okelle.”) I appreciated your observations about the importance woman-only spaces — and QUEER-women-only spaces — have held for you, and continue to. I feel very similarly.
I was also really struck, in the main post, by the different presumptions made in a Canadian context from a USian. Because no one in the States can any longer describe “affirmative action for racialized groups” as noncontroversial — or bring up the idea of affirmative action “for white people” with such an easy expectation that this phrase will be seen as the laughably backwards misunderstanding that it in fact is.
It is interesting writing for a Canadian publication. Most Americans go around thinking that Canadians are basically Americans in flannel, but that’s clearly not the case. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who remembers the golden age of queer women’s spaces. I just assumed that they’d always be there! Gay marriage ruined everything đŸ˜‰