Hypothetically speaking, a female student, who is also a mother, needs to breastfeed her child while she's in class. This new arrangement is suggesting that she should skip the common room a floor or two below her department, skip her resident halls just a short walk away and head across campus to sit behind a curtain in TSC instead. Is that what privacy should look like?

In my opinion, there's a subtler cost to designating one specific corner as the ‘Female Zone’. By naming it, the rest of the cafeteria, every other table gets coded as the default, the "normal" space. Which is to say, the male space, even if no one will call it that out loud. And the general space loses any obligation to be respectful or accommodating on its own, because as the logic now stands, if a woman wants comfort, she knows where the curtain is.

Put some curtains in a busy space. Low effort, high visibility and suddenly "the woman problem" feels solved. Meanwhile, the broken toilets, the malfunctioning sanitary pad machines, the patchy lighting after dark at the very same TSC, let alone the common room spaces, none of that needs to be dealt with today, because "the zone" now exists as a kind of moral alibi.
And it isn’t a Band Aid laid neatly over a fracture? It doesn''t heal anything, but it looks from a certain angle like care.