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My first ever volunteer post was back in 1980, at a Women’s Aid refuge for victims of domestic violence. I will never forget the sight of those women coming in through the doors, crying with desperate relief at having escaped abusive husbands; finding comfort in the company of other women who had experienced the same.
That safe environment, where women could flee and open up about their abuse without feeling frightened or belittled, saved many lives. The need for such services was recognised and acted upon by feminist movements back in the Sixties, at a time when the state did not recognise domestic violence or rape in marriage as a crime.
But, having provided necessary sanctuary for more than five decades, their continued existence is now in doubt, under attack from all sides. The Right slashes their funding. The Left, swept along by misogynistic transgender ideology, is moving to deny the safety and succour of sex-segregated services to women traumatised by male violence. It is welcoming transgender women – natal men – in their rape crisis centres and domestic violence shelters. It’s not a stretch to see why traumatised females, abused by men, wouldn’t want to share their safe space with male genitalia.
Under the UK Equality Act, it is perfectly lawful to provide discrete services for men and women if this is a better or more effective way of providing the said service. You’d think this would very much apply to rape refuge centres. But the bullying and harassment from trans-activists towards politicians, funders, sponsors and patrons has frightened them into opening their doors to transgender women. The law that is supposed to be protecting women is left hanging by a thread.
This is not actually new problem. It may be a new front in the transgender turf wars in the UK. But Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR) a women’s support and campaigning NGO in Canada, has been victimised by transgender activists since the mid 1990s. Now after their long struggle, this small, grassroots, volunteer-led organisation is under threat of losing its funding.
I first heard of VRR in December 2003 when I saw a news report about a long-running legal battle that the organisation had with a transgender person, Kimberly Nixon.
In 1995 Nixon, a former airline pilot who had lived as a man until the age of 33, applied to VRR to train as a counsellor for women who had experienced sexual violence. Nixon was rejected because, since she had not had the experience of growing up as a girl, she would not understand the impact of male violence and misogyny on the lives of the women who sought support from VRR.
The very next day, Nixon filed a formal Human Rights Complaint supported by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, claiming that she had been discriminated against for being transgender.
VRR tried everything humanly possible to prevent this complaint ending up in a lengthy legal battle. The organisation exists on a shoestring, and the last thing they needed was litigation. VRR offered a formal written apology, and suggested that Nixon could support the rape crisis line and shelter work by joining a fundraising committee. They also offered to apologise directly to Nixon as well as offering $500 in acknowledgement of ‘hurt feelings’, and requested mediation.
Nixon rejected the offers, and pursued the group through various stressful and expensive legal proceedings until it was finally resolved in 2007. In 2009, the Supreme Court awarded VRR costs, but Nixon has not, to this day, paid a cent.
After reading the 2003 Supreme Court ruling that VRR had not discriminated against Nixon, and did have the right to organise as women only, I wrote what has become an infamous column in the Guardian. I argued that Nixon, who was raised male, was arrogant to assume that she would be suitable to counsel women who had chosen to access a service that offers support from women who have suffered similar experiences.
The trans extremists came after me big style. Ever since, I have been classed as Top TERF and bullied, harangued, threatened, picketed, disinvited from university events, attacked on stage when speaking on violence against women and girls, called a bigot, a Nazi, and accused of being responsible for the deaths and attacks upon transgender people. This is their knee-jerk response whenever anyone points out the bald reality that because transwomen are not natal women, they require separate services when they suffer abuse and violence.
Every year, VRR helps 1,200 women escaping male violence, and provides shelter to 120 women and their children. It is the oldest and most celebrated organisation of its kind in the country; it does vital and invaluable work in educating the general public about sexual assault and other atrocities.
But the woke brigade pursues it because the workers and volunteers, mainly women who have survived all manner of male violence themselves, have stuck to their principles, and refused to shift from a women-only service to a generic ‘everyone welcome’ one.
As a result, last week, the City of Vancouver decided that it would withdraw its annual grant to VRR, unless it caves in and accepts transwomen as clients, staff members and volunteers. The centre is already being boycotted by the BC Federation of Labour for pretty much the same reason. In this concerted effort to harm the group and remove support for the women who rely on its vital service, the transgender ideologues are behaving just like the misogynistic ‘men’s rights movement’.
On hearing the news about VRR, many of those feminists who run women-only services in the UK are naturally worried about what to expect. There is already a battle raging here between transgender extremists and feminists about the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). A similar ‘self-identification’ policy is already in place in Vancouver where there are hardly any women only services for those in street prostitution because homeless men would walk into the drop-in centres, claiming to be women. There was little the staff could do about it. I fear this is what we could be looking at in the UK if we don’t challenge this madness.
I spoke to one CEO of a sexual violence service in the UK which is also being told its funding is at risk unless it opens its doors to trans women. She asked not to be named, for fear of being targeted. “Would Rachel Dolezal be welcomed into a Black Lives Matter group?,” she asks. “Of course not! Why, then, do we think it’s OK to insist that abused and traumatised women should share their precious refuge space with natal men?”
We must take care not to forget the reason feminists set up such services in the first place: to save women’s lives. For if the bullies keep winning, leaving the refuges with no choice but to close, those desperate women and girls will have no where to go. They will return home, straight back in to the arms of danger.
Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation. She also writes on Substack.
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SubscribeWhat’s so disheartening about his whole thing is the fact that, no matter how bad it gets, the left simply will not learn. Of course the homeless are going to go where it’s easiest for them. If you don’t prosecute shoplifters because you have some weird idea they deserve what the rob on the grounds that the people they steal from are wealthier than they are, then of course they’ll steal. And nothing that happens seems to shake them out of their stupidity.
The woke religion seems to view “shoplifting” as a form of reparations. Back to the East Coast, NYC actress and politician Cynthia Nixon tweeted how outrageous it is that major US drug stores, vital to the communities they serve–are closing multiple stores and locking up high value items that are frequently stolen–for example, razor blades, nappies, detergent. Kit should be free!
The woke simply have no understanding how the world works: people who see rampant theft know they are being played for being law-abiding, and they are in real danger in an environment of complete and utter lawlessness. And of course daily life is much more inconvenient with things locked up, stores closing, etc. and the price of goods goes up for all–well, all who pay for the goods. No such thing as a free lunch!
This is a bit like those who glorified graffiti in the 70s, when every subway car was covered in graffiti. The woke, before that term existed, celebrated this “street art” and “artists,” while normal people were horrified, terrorized. This is absolutely consistent with their worship of COWs, Citizens of Wakanda, who will lead the woke to the promised land.
Sickening!
Funny story, in middle and rural America, we have not seen a massive crime wave. Our police departments just do the same job they have always done. We know police will not always be there and there are times when they fail or abuse their authority. They are not perfect but they keep chaos at bay and allow society to function.
“You can be mad but I guess I don’t personally view my car as an extension of myself and I’ve never felt violated any of the 15 or so times my car was broken in to.”
“Once a guy accidentally left a cool knife in my car so if it keeps happening you might get a little treat.”
–SETH ROGEN
This is actor and LA resident Seth Rogen’s view on crime. He also said “It’s called living in a big city.”
The extreme left–99.9% of Hollywood, and huge media influencers–is simply unconnected to the reality of daily life in a big city. So my car is broken into for the 16th time–have my PA deal with it, call the insurance company, maybe buy a new car. And Wow…., it’s like so, cool, dude, that some robber dude left a really cool knife in the car…..”
The good news is that this serious, violent crime is starting to hit home in the wealthy neighborhoods. One half or a black power couple was killed in her home by an intruder with an automatic rifle (he went on to commit more crimes, but was stopped when he shot himself in the foot), and a home in a very upscale neighborhood–Pacific Pallisades–suffered a home invason robbery where the guests were held and robbed at gunpoint inside the home during the party.
In San Francisco, a restaurant refused to serve police officers in uniforms because part of their required kit is a gun. The restaurant apparently needed a “safe space,” gun-free. Perhaps they will re-think this if armed intruders come for them. Would they welcome armed police then?
The US is completely out of control–like a dystopian Hollywood film. In NYC during the Golden Age of Crack (late 80s, early 90s), the NYPD institued a policy called “Broken Windows,” which essentially meant zero tolerance for little things. It mostly worked. The radical left has now instituted a policy that might be called “Break the Windows, It’s OK,” and the world can see the results. Burn, baby, burn!
People who call for “law and order,” people who want to be safe in their homes, have their cars unmolested in the street, free to live their lives, are not necessarily “hard right,” nazis, gun-toting vigilantes, or freelance lunatics, they are mostly people of good will who don’t recognize their country any more.
This article could have looped back to De Blasio’s utterly dysfunctional New York City, where an Italian Ph.d. student at Columbia–once one of the world’s premier unis–was stabbed to death and another student wounded by the same criminal. This follows the stabbing death of Tessa Majors in essentially the same place in Dec. 2019.
This must stop. Civil War soon!
Seth Rogan? The guy who gave us Santa Inc?
If any question of listening to actors giving everyone else lessons on life was remaining, just view the Alec Baldwin incident. Not his fault, someone else’s responsibility, he didn’t need to check the gun first, he was told it was cold, so pointing it at someone is fine.
And of course Seth Rogan doesn’t feel that much attachment to his car. He’ll get another one. Probably has more than one anyway. All privileges that 90% of the population do not have.
Yet for some reason, those with the least skin in the game, as it were, are leading the public debate on these ridiculous policies.
Team America World Police nailed this attitude: “It’s our job as actors to read the paper in the morning and then go on TV and talk about it like it’s our opinion.”
Touche! Well said. Yes, the same Seth Rogen, who by the way, said that white supremacists were “review bombing” Santa Inc.
Mediocre actor. World class c@3t!
Please go back to Lock and Load
Unfortunately most of the so called libertarians are pathetic blowhards. Probably the US does ideally need now a period of authoritarian right wing government who would suppress Antifa and violent protests, take control of America-hating, crime supporting ‘mainstream’ media. Etc. It probably won’t get it!
China has already won. A nation that loathes its history and culture, and teaches its children to do this, has a cancer eating itself from the inside. One that considers that appointing ‘trans’ admirals is more important than defending the country, allows vast numbers of people to illegally cross its borders, will not have any will to defend itself in any confrontation.
Are the Chinese doing any of this? No, they are not.
You forgot to say Lock and Load!
Asking Cynthia Nixon and Seth Rogen about social issues is like seeking the opinion of Marie Antoinette on the issues facing the poor before the French Revolution. Of course their wealth so insulates them that they spout the equivalent of “let them eat cake”.
Dr Thomas Sowell, who knows something about growing up poor and black, states that he has given up appearing before congressional committees because he knows that whatever evidence he gives will be disregarded and the politicians will simply enact what they wanted to enact before seeking evidence on the basis of ideology.
You mean seeking the opinion of Marie Antoinette’s poodle.
Possibly a racist remark?
The problem is that they have become so good at what they do. The sophisticated, urbane, and articulate left does propaganda way better than the crass, uneducated, Neanderthal right. They do it so well that they have come to believe it themselves. They have chosen to live in a bright and sunny land of make-believe and illusion. The entire universe is a tabula rasa, where Hollywood movies serve to inform and instruct, and where any inconveniently disruptive vestige of objective reality, any pain which might awaken the woke, can be whisked away on a cloud of pacifying drugs… for now; but there will come a day of reckoning, as there always does.
“Soma” in Brave New World.
As a NYC Republican, though living in the Midwest for 5 decades, it’s easy to be dismissive of the left’s self-inflicted wounds. But I have long-time friends in major cities who are in real danger. Unfortunately, I just don’t see my friends embracing a new Ed Koch. It would be a major repudiation of their expressed values. So the road to safety and sanity will be slow and hard.
A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.
Kim Fox, the Cook County (Chicago) State’s Attorney (D, Soros) won reelection in 2020. Her bad deeds weren’t enough to defeat her. She can continue not to prosecute the survivors of gang shootouts because everybody was shooting, so no one’s at fault. Fox chose not to prosecute the Jusse Smollet hoax, until public outcry forced her to do it.
The explanation is identity voting. If you vote your identity, bad governance is irrelevant. It doesn’t change your identity. So you keep voting your identity, even though the government gets worse and worse. If you’re convinced your identity means you vote for Democrats, you continue to vote for Democrats, regardless of how bad they do in governing.
The reason Democrats call all Republicans racist is because it maintains identity voting in minority communities. Democrats wouldn’t have a chance if people voted on the issues, like crime and school choice. So Democrats make sure that minorities think all Republicans are racist, so minorities won’t even consider voting for them. This leads to silly comments like saying Larry Elder, a black conservative running for Governor of California, is the black face of white supremacy. (You can check the LA Times for this whopper.) The need to preserve identity voting leads to Sen. Tim Scott (R, SC) and Lt. Gov. Elect Winsome Sears (R, VA) to be called house negros or tokens, even though their elections show Republicans vote on issues, not skin color.
All according to plan………
“are places with progressive prosecutors working to limit punishments for looters, organised thieves and the unruly, occasionally violent, homeless.”
Soros funded prosecutors most likely, and PostModernist, Neo-Marxist Liberal/Left intelligentsia backed. This is 100% useful Idiots fallowing great Evil in destroying their nation, and them self, in a planned movement – to ultimately allow the Elites to take real control of the West, instead of just their soft control.
It works like this – More Crime = Greater calls from the public to protect them. = More cameras, more monitoring of every thing said and written, more GPS, Spending monitoring, tracking, more spying, more data harvesting and meta-data crunching, facial recognition, bio-metric records, more gait – Syntax AI monitoring…
This is all to cause 1984. And increasing crime causes much to advance that. Surveillance obviously, then division as the predatory class are hated by the prey class, and also the other way – and all are suspicious and angry and scared – and so all become captured as society breaks and democracy is just bought and sold. The capture of the entire education system, the MSM and Social Media – it is far along the track…
I presume the tourist industry in these cities benefits from tourists flying in to loot $1,000 a day of free merchandise, or are only locals allowed to steal? “Come to San Francisco and help yourself” sounds like a good advertising slogan for buses and airlines to run. No need to bring your own tent, just help yourself to one.
I’m embarrassed that I had not considered hopping a flight to San Fran or LA to do my Christmas shopping. If I plan on reselling I think the travel expenses would be tax deductible, right?
More on this from Michael Shellenberger https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-violent-crime-is-rising
The Left has used criminals ever since they released them during the French Revolution to create The Terror of 1791 to 1793. Lenin used criminals to murder opponents post 1917 and they ran the Gulags.
The next step is to put criminals in uniform, such as The Cheka, to undertake officialextermination of the opposition.
Wakanda does not exist. Its denizens in reality only destroy they don’t create.
Being woke, is a state of mind that requires one to deny that humans need structure and order. One has to deny that there are sociopaths that live among us in order to believe that anarchy is the proper way societies should be structured. The Progressive Left reimagining of crime and punishment doesn’t come from a place of evil. It comes from a good heart, that being poor in and of itself should not be a crime. That the stealing of a loaf of bread is not a crime that deserves punishment. The problem with this is that we are NOT dealing with a Jean Valjean. We are dealing with mental illness, drug addiction, sociopaths. Real criminals who are willing to commit violence. Real criminals who are not capable of living and prospering amongst us. Progressives are living in a state of mind that doesn’t exist. So in the end they create hell for the rest of us to live in.
Trump wins next time.
I assume the wealthy Californians who support all this have private security…
The oddly-named mainstream media — it is far from it — thinks and acts like a cult, particularly the San Francisco Chronicle. It used to be a rather decent newspaper when I worked there.