"I think it’s quite a healthy response to be wary of men." Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
The first time Sarah — a pseudonym — was sexually assaulted, she was eight years old and an adult family friend paid her to do things to him she was too young to understand. Her mum later asked what had happened, but Sarah knew her mother was too emotionally fragile to cope with the truth, so she said, “Nothing”, and the abuse continued for years.
When she was in her twenties, a man in her friendship group hit her and raped her when she was barely conscious. But when Sarah told her female friends, they insisted that he was a nice guy who wouldn’t do that. She told herself her friends couldn’t cope with the truth, and she learned to hide the panic attacks she has suffered ever since.
Last year, when Sarah walked into her weekly rape crisis support group in Brighton and saw a male sitting there, she felt anxious — but she had long perfected the art of suppressing her feelings to accommodate others.
“I thought, ‘It’s fine, I just won’t speak this week,’ because I didn’t want to talk about my rape in front of a male. But the group’s facilitator asked me to speak, so I did, because I felt under real pressure to make this person feel included. It’s so ingrained in women to do what’s expected of you,” she tells me from her home in Brighton.
But this time, Sarah’s body rebelled. She suffered a panic attack in the group, although she stayed until the end of the session, because she didn’t want to cause awkwardness.
“When you experience sexual violence, you often set aside your own needs and don’t set boundaries, and I couldn’t understand why I was being asked to do that in therapy,” she says. Having to describe the repercussions of her rape in front of a male, Sarah says, “felt like a third attack, and it was the final straw”. Previously in the group, she and the other women had talked freely about men’s feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies and spaces and found comfort in their shared experiences. No longer. Afterwards, she asked Survivors’ Network, the Brighton-based government-funded charity for victims of sexual violence that ran the group, if there could be a female-only group.
“It seemed like a reasonable thing to ask, because they had a group for trans women, and a trans-inclusive group for women, so two groups for people born male, but none just for females,” she says.
According to the Equality Act, sex is a protected characteristic, meaning that the provision of single-sex spaces is lawful where it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. But in correspondence seen by UnHerd, Survivors’ Network told Sarah that a single-sex group would be “problematic as we do not police gender”. Sarah had to leave the group where she had found, for the first time in her life, support, help and understanding. Survivors’ Network suggested that she get individual therapy, and was advised there was a two-year waiting list, then heard nothing further about that. They also suggested she seek help from “other services in the city”, but Survivors’ Network is the only service of its kind in the whole of Sussex, and she couldn’t find any group just for women. Sarah is now taking them to court for sex discrimination.
The backlash against her has been immense. Aside from the usual misogyny that happens every time a woman stands up for her rights (“The bitch suing [should be] made to pay all court and legal costs,” wrote one delightful gentleman), high-profile women on Twitter have pilloried her, with one saying: “If she really cares this much about women’s rights she wouldn’t be suing a rape crisis centre.” “If the anti-trans agenda has SO much money and SO much support and is SO right, why haven’t they set up their own services?” another tweeted, apparently unaware that in 2019 Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre, Vancouver Rape Relief, tried to stay female-only, only to then be stripped of its funding for refusing to accept trans women.
To a degree, Sarah agrees with her critics. “It sounds absolutely awful to sue a rape crisis centre, and a part of me asks, ‘What am I doing?’ Especially because I’m the most anxious person in the world and the anxiety has been awful since this whole thing started. I worry about how this will affect my job prospects, my partner’s job, everything,” she says.
For that reason, her name and any details that might reveal her true identity have been disguised. So why has she pursued this case, given the stakes against her? “Because this whole situation is so wrong and Survivors’ Network is not fit for purpose. It’s telling women to put aside their feelings in order to access help. Of course I’m not saying trans women shouldn’t be helped by rape services, and it’s great there are mixed-sex groups for people who feel comfortable with that. I don’t want to stop that at all. But there should also be single-sex ones. This is a government-funded service. We deserve to have the support we need.”
Survivors’ Network declined to give a comment for this article but instead directed me to a statement affirming their commitment to trans-inclusive feminism: “Trans women are women and as such they are welcome in women-only spaces.”
Until that day in her rape support group, Sarah had little interest in arguments about gender ideology. “You’d have to be living under a rock to not know discussions were happening online and in the media, but I wasn’t that involved. If pushed, I’d have described myself as an ally. I marched at Trans Pride and thought of trans women as my sisters. But I assumed there was respect for rape crisis groups and no one would try to cross that boundary. It seems quite naïve now,” she says.
When Sarah researched Survivors’ Network’s peer support group she discovered it was trans inclusive. She asked an assessor whether the group she would be attending was female-only and the assessor hesitated before saying yes, it was, so she was left unsure what to expect. “When I started at the group, it was all-female, so I then assumed that Survivors’ Network had a group for women and a group for trans women, and that’s how they were able to be inclusive but also treat women. That’s partly why I was so taken aback to see a man in the group two months later,” she says. The “man” was a self-identified trans woman, but, Sarah says, there was no indication that they were socially or medically transitioning — they looked simply like a man.
The reaction to Sarah’s case has been “enormously eye-opening”, she says: “The levels of anger and vitriol against me, all because I asked for a single-sex rape support group. I just don’t understand it.” To see so many women online empathise more with the trans person’s possible sense of exclusion than with her trauma felt, Sarah says, like when her female friends refused to believe that their male friend had raped her because they liked him. So many women care more about the feelings of men than the needs of other women.
Arguments over single-sex spaces have raged over the past decade as gender ideology —which argues that a person’s gender identity, which is how they feel inside, is at least as significant as their biological sex — has taken hold. Over the past few months, sports organisations, including World Rugby and FINA, the International Swimming Federation, have banned trans women from competing against female athletes, after years of protests from feminist campaigners and multiple women athletes. But sport takes place in public, meaning outsiders can see that women are at an obvious physical disadvantage against people who have gone through male puberty. The issue is easier to ignore when it comes to prisons (where trans women can be incarcerated with female prisoners) and rape services, as they aren’t under any kind of public spotlight, and people tend to have less interest in female prisoners and rape victims than in elite athletes.
Since Sarah launched her case, Survivors’ Network have doubled down on their stance and in April they co-wrote an open letter to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission criticising them for saying that single-sex spaces are lawful. Survivors’ Network wrote that it is “very unusual for cis service users to object to trans women joining a support group”; the EHRC, they say, “frames the needs of cis women as more important than the support needs of trans people”.
Gender activists claim that trans people are the most oppressed minority in the world, therefore women’s spaces need to include them, and any woman who objects is putting trans people at risk. It is true there are high rates of violence against trans women in Central, South America and North America, especially among trans sex workers. In the UK, it’s a very different story. The ONS says the sample size of people who identified as transgender and were victims of sexual offences is too “insufficient” to record; Channel 4 News has said that, on average, one trans person was murdered a year in the UK between 2008 and 2017. By contrast, a woman in this country is murdered by a man every two days and one in four women is sexually assaulted as an adult. The perpetrator is invariably male, because 98% of sex offenders are male. Multiple studies have shown that patterns of offending do not change just because the male person has transitioned their gender. So while certainly not all trans women are predators, just as not all men are predators, they are far more likely to commit a violent crime than women, just as men are.
Last August, Mridul Wadhwa, the head of one of Scotland’s biggest rape crisis centres who is herself transgender, said that any victims of rape who were fearful of transgender women in women’s organisations needed to “reframe your trauma”: “If you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature, we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma, but please expect to be challenged on your prejudices,” she said.
I ask what Sarah thinks of Wadhwa’s argument. “I was abused by a man, I was raped by a man. I think it’s quite a healthy response to be wary of men, and to not assume they always have the best of intentions, because I made that mistake. I think that should be encouraged by rape crisis centres, rather than them telling us to take down our boundaries and ignore our instincts. It feels like an inconvenience to Survivors’ Network that lots of women have PTSD caused by men, so therefore don’t want to talk about it with men.”
In an article last month, a woman called Janey Starling, who says she “supports survivors of domestic abuse”, wrote a piece titled “Why Trans Women Belong in Women’s Spaces”, in which she compared abused women’s fear of males to anti-black racism. I ask Sarah about this commonly cited argument. “Black people don’t commit over 90% of sex crimes. No race does. But males do,” she says.
But gender activists would say that trans people are so marginalised that it doesn’t matter that they’re male: women should accommodate them. “I’m sure they are marginalised in some places, but where I live there are ten organisations with dedicated groups for the wellbeing of trans women, and none just for women. So I wouldn’t say they’re marginalised here,” she says.
It took a long time for Sarah to stop denying to herself that she had been raped, and even longer to understand what had happened to her as a child. “But when I understood that, I started to think, oh, maybe I can trust my instincts, maybe I do know when something isn’t right, because I’d suppressed that for so long.”
She has also started to understand how her experiences have affected her psychologically in the long term. “I didn’t know that, as a woman, I could say no, which sounds really stupid, but I didn’t know I had options. I thought sex was something that was done to you and that part of life as a woman was to make males feel included, because they’re the priority,” she says.
That day in her rape support group — her last day, it turned out — she realised none of this was true: she could say no. “This isn’t about money for me — I don’t care about the money. I just want a change of policy and for there to be female-only services, without taking away the mixed-sex services. Since I launched my case I’ve heard from so many women who say they stopped going to their groups for the same reason, but they didn’t want to say anything, and I thought about doing that — just going away and staying quiet. But I couldn’t do that anymore. It’s enough.”
Hadley Freeman is a staff writer at The Guardian. She was recently named Columnist of the Year by the British Society of Magazine Editors. Her last book, House of Glass, was published by 4th Estate in 2020. Her next will be published by 4th Estate in 2023.
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SubscribeAs a man this story seems to be a horror story in its insensitivity to a woman’s feelings. Indeed it is profoundly shocking. I hope Sarah wins her case.
Women as a rule are infinitely more sensitive to the feelings of others and a raped woman must be entitled to discuss rape with other women and not with self-proclaimed women with a “Willie”. You don’t have to be Julie Bindel to think that. I am sure most of us stale males think so too.
I have noted that soi-disant ‘Jeremy Bray’ invariably writes powerful comments, which I ‘like’.. Why is this?
I am not sure why you think me “soi-disant”, but my answer to your question must be because you are intelligent and sensible. But of course I am a prejudice observer and others may have different answers.
Seeing the writer, Hadley Freeman, is described as a staff writer for the Guardian, where trans activism is known to be dominant, I’d love to see her write about what it’s like at the Guardian.
The Guardian which seems to me to be Stonewall’s press HQ, and the trans homeworld, and her colleagues must also have these extremist anti-woman views.
As regards Sarah – she’s a hero (heroine?) and I expect she will win her case as Survivors Network is clearly in breach of Equality Law. The damages will be huge as they’ve obviously made no effort to accommodate a vulnerable person. I’ll ask my MP, Suella Braverman, why they are in receipt of government funding. Now she has more time on her hands she might pick this up!
Hmm, I wonder too. It’s interesting US Guardian writers wrote an open letter to UK Guardian writers accusing them of encouraging transphobia. I think it was in 2018/19.
I’m not sure if the Equality Act is breached by this group – I suppose it would depend on whether the law says sex-separate services are permitted or must be provided. I suspect the former, unfortunately.
I wish Sarah the best of luck, regardless.
She left the Guardian precisely because of this.
Men that fetishize wearing women’s underwear listening in to r*pe stories. How absolutely ghoulish.
Oh yeah, this whole scene is a boon for perverted and predatory men.
…the condition is correctly described as “Autogynephilia”…female-attracted males deriving pleasure from either imagining themselves in, or actually wearing women’s clothing…so imagine how tumultuous their enjoyment must become if allowed by law to do so amongst unclothed women…and much more so if allowed to listen to actual women in real distress sharing their experience of acts of sexual violence perpetrated against them by men…
…the words “pervert” and “sadistic pervert” spring to mind…
Men like this are truly sick and a society that allows this is as sick as they are.
By allowing them into women’s spaces flashing and voyeurism have been decriminalised.
The perverts are winning.
Debbie Hayden, who often writes for Unherd, has a lot of sensible comments to make on this matter.
I remember Deborah Soh describing this as a paraphilia. It seems to me that what is happening is a form of treatment in the community. But it involves most of the community in the treatment, without their consent. That is unethical IMO.
Yes – I used to be involved in the fetish scene (bdsm specifically) and there were always three categories. Men who liked to wear women’s clothes (cross dressers), men who liked to look like women but did not wish to be them (transvestites) and a tiny minority of a minority of what used to be called transexuals, ie those who thought they were born in the wrong body. It seems the tranvestite and transexual categories have been merged – which does nobody any favours, least of all biological women.
I didn’t used to employ words like pervert and degenerate until I began exploring this topic. A man sitting in a group of women and getting aroused at their suffering is one of the most depraved concepts I can imagine.
We don’t know whether the man was in the group because he found it arousing (for the record, I suspect that was probably the reason – I’m just saying we don’t know the content of his mind). But, his very presence as a male gatecrashing this group shows a complete disregard for boundaries and lack of empathy.
I don’t know how these groups are run but I presume he would have claimed to be a fellow victim of sexual assault. However, the fact that he saw no problem in presenting himself in such a group shows a lack of feminine sensitivity that should have excluded him from a properly run group.
If you believe yourself to be a woman you should at least try to put yourself in a woman’s shoes and think how others in the group might feel about your presence instead of standing on your “rights” as a “woman”.
Yes, exactly.
Brilliant, guys! Adult transwomen are really creepy (mostly).
I gleaned from this article how difficult this whole process must be for You and how easy it would have been to stay in your comfort zone and “not make a fuss”. Good for you Sarah. I hope you win your case and inspire other women to stand up for their rights by your heroic example.
Tragic but entirely expected; the on-the-ground effects of the pursuit of lunatic ideolgy, made all the more depressing by the willful blindness or – as is increasingly becoming the case whenever glaring problems are spotted with this new fundamentalist religion of ‘progressive’ leftism – outward hostility and hatred towards anybody daring to point problems out, and not the slightest change in attitude to those clearly suffering directly from them.
There’s surely no better way to demonstrate how empathy and deep concern over notions of harm is but a cynical bludgeon, for, time and again, it is only to be applied to those falling in line with, and futhering by their actions, the perpetuation and agressive enforcement of identity leftism.
This rot needs to be cut off at the knees, and though probably a lost cause, a good practical start would be to ditch the entire wimsical notion of gender. A return to sanity, built on the reality of life, that there are two – and only two sexes – and that its possible and perfectly acceptable to have feminine men and mascuine women, and that pinning a word on and labelling someone according to their postion along this spectrum (regardless of how they feel or how much surgery they may have had) is not only pointless but changes the reality of sex type not one iota.
“that its possible and perfectly acceptable to have feminine men and mascuine women”
The bigger issue is that it has become unacceptable to have feminine women and masculine men.
Worse still, the concept that men and women might voluntarily, happily behave or make choices in a certain way, or might have strengths in specific areas.
That concept has become verboten, almost an insult.
It seems somewhat ironic whilst being very much against stereotyping (racist stereotypes, sexist stereotypes etc); the left are busy creating new pigeonholes to put themselves in. “I don’t conform to gender stereotypes therefore I must be a member of the Heinz beans gender club!” The mind boggles, I fear these people have too much time on their hands!
“but, Sarah says, there was no indication that they were socially or medically transitioning — they looked simply like a man.”
*but, Sarah says, there was no indication that he was socially or medically transitioning — he looked simply like a man.
I too found that sentence grating as I was reading. If I correctly remember there is another example with “she”.
I would like to ask the author what she meant by that “they” and the quotation mark above.
Quite!
Aha, the fetishisation of pronouns to debase all meaning. Perhaps we should all learn the language of Sami folk, who we are told seem to recognise that gender identity is fluid and transient.
It might be Unhed policy?
I thought that to. Misgendering is the greatest sin now, especially on twitter.
This is a very cruel movement.
I wish the best for Sarah, and I hope she’s successful in her case against Survivors’ Network. Unfortunately, I think the only way we’ll see some moderation from these groups is through litigation and public shaming.
Fwiw, in my office, the biggest trans activists who peddle gender-woo and who police speech and thought are almost all women in their 20s and 30s. I see some male ‘allies’, but in my experience no one pushes this with more vigour than women.
Why is that? I don’t think it’s simply because women are socialised to be nice, as many feminists suggest. I’m sure this is part of it, but all of it? Some of the women have shown themselves to be quite willing to publicly call out those who don’t agree with them, there’s no niceness shown there.
For the same reason that we have an epidemic of trans men, they don’t want to be hated for how they were born; white cis and heterosexual. The Full House of privilege.
Do you mean men who pretend to be women here?? Due to the capture of language transwomen are men, and transmen are female, often very young, possibly lesbian, but appalled at what a grown woman is supposed to be so try and opt out. 4000% increase in this group
It’s not just about being nice and polite in a general sense. Women are more likely to be concerned about protecting what they consider to be vulnerable and marginalised people, and won’t necessarily be nice to those who they consider to have “harmful” opinions. I don’t think it’s all entirely due to socialisation either.
I tend to agree. I think women – this is a generalization – tend to be very attuned to things like social hierarchies, language trends, and they also tend to be the people who are moral enforcers socially. In another age women like this might be part of the Temperance movement, maybe out of real care about the horrors of cheap industrial liquor, but also perhaps as a way to gain social power.
I remember seeing feminists in America with banners like ‘we’re the descendents of the witches you didn’t burn’ and I can’t help but think they’re more likely to be descendents of women who encouraged the witch burning.
I think upper middle class white women know that they are in fact very privileged and so they cheerlead for others as a means of retaining their victim credentials.
Yes I think class is a big part of it. generational conflict too. Being on twitter and seeing the trans rights versus TERFs arguments there’s a lot of ‘TERFs are thick and uneducated’ and ‘they just can’t cope with times changing’
When the TRAs told us to educate ourselves, we all did. That’s why rationality is a hallmark of terfdom!!!
With women against women, the Churchill quote about tossing others to the crocodiles in hope you will be spared, comes to mind.
There are male trans allies, they tend to be Antifa types. Check out this video https://youtu.be/AIp0QbZcZPM
What are the bets that the man who attends the rape crisis centre is autogynephilic and likes listening to these stories as some sort of perverted fantasy?
Very unlikely I would have thought. Actually men are far more perverted than women.
US crime stats show that 99% of those convicted of accessing child sexual abuse material online are male. Nobody knows who is responsible until the police come knocking – yet over and over, it’s found to be overwhelmingly male, just as in the real world. 98% of sexual violence is male, and 95% of all prisoners are male. Most crime, especially violent, is male. Women simply do not commit much violent crime, and almost no sexual offending.
People often comment that they read stories about women sex offenders in the news all the time. Firstly, women committing such offences makes it news – men do it so often, it isn’t. And secondly, quite frequently if you look for a photograph, a woman sex offender is in fact trans, and biologically male. There are now almost as many transwomen in prison for such offending as there are women.
Shocking.
The situation of “Sarah” is a very egregious one, but some conclusions are unwarranted. These statistics don’t tell the whole story of how women and men interact. Worse, citing them here, in connection specifically with men who call themselves women, perpetuates an ideological notion of women as archetypal victims and men as archetypal villains.
Women have always had their own distinctive forms of aggression, including but by no means limited to passive aggression. Women do bully those who seem weaker than they are instead of those who seem more powerful (which is common sense). They do abuse children, for instance, or other women. And they have ways of attacking men, too, sometimes with household weapons or by paying men to act for them, but usually, and most effectively, by mobilizing resentment among women in democratic societies (and their male supporters), thus changing laws and policies to favor women and to deny due process to men (as American women are now doing, again, in connection with Title IX).
I meant to up-tick your comment, but it went down instead for some reason. See my comment below.
“The “man” was a self-identified trans woman”
He was a man, so why the quote marks?
Isn’t it obvious?
Let me propose a thought experiment. Taking it to the extreme on a dystopia level to make a point. This is just a hypothetical. I do not want this to happen. I do not support this.
Imagine a group of two types of people. Women and Trans women. And imagine that the Trans woman are all currently biological males who identify as women.
Now imagine this group gets abducted and are held hostage by a group of men with weapons in a remote sealed off location. By biological men.
Now imagine, that these men, the abductors, decide they want to rape the women. They don’t know or care about Trans women. They only see males and females.
Now imagine they round the group up, and announce their intentions and command the women to form a line. Do you think the Trans women will line up?
Now imagine that the abductors just don’t care and proceed to physically grab some of the Trans women and start to sexually assault them. How many will immediately protest saying that they aren’t women but are men?
You know the answers to both questions.
The above, extremely crude, hypothetical, at its core exposes the fragility and hypocrisy of biological males claiming to be women.
weird
….but the most probable outcome. See some of the (alleged) happenings in Ukraine just now.
Not only would they immediately claim to be men, but they would fight back using all their innate male aggression and muscle strength.
Very well laid out, to expose the hypocrisy and evil of the “trans” movement as well as it’s supporters.
But take another example. Not extreme, not hypothetical, actually happening.
Imagine if you took this group of women (real ones). And showed them a picture of the US women’s football team, or Serena Williams.
And tell them that these women are exactly as strong and physically capable as the top male counterparts and should be paid equally.
Do you think any of them would disagree?
Even a single one?
How many women do you know who said, hold on, maybe men might be better or more keen at Physics or coding, maybe boys need their own space and girls shouldn’t be pushed into boy scouts, etc etc.
How many?
Blame those women who were silent then for the normalisation of the hideous state of the world.
Are you always this misogynist or only in public? Women playing women’s sport should be paid much better than they are. Generally they are paid a third of what men are. Why? They train from children. They put the rest of their lives on hold. They represent their country. They are treated like second class citizens. Why? Please explain why this is okay. Even in employment which has traditionally been women’s work, position ls of “power” now tend to be taken by men so men get the higher wages. Nursing is a prime example of that. Why?
“And imagine that the Trans woman are all currently biological males who identify as women.”
Perhaps I am just being obtuse, but when I read that my reaction was that by definition trans women are biological males. Just because he/she has an operation, a biological male (XY chromosome) remains a biological male. Or did you mean something else by ‘biological male’? ‘Unlopped male’ perhaps?
We don’t need the adjective “biological “. Transwomen are male, male is a biological term used to describe the producers of small motile gametes, or having a body which is organised to be able to do so at appropriate times!
Poor lass. Is she crowd-funding? I’d contribute
“Trans-inclusive feminism”
Authentic Woke gibberish. And vile, evil and a plague.
Sick of this ****ing cult and Trans worship. Half are people who do have problems that therapy can help, but woke has provided an opportunity for the very nasty and misogynistic autogynephiles (aka Pigs in Wigs) to crawl out into open and harass women.
Putting a male sex offender in a woman’s prison. Hell, we’ve had it as a society. FUBAR. All done Last one out etc. I’m 70 so …well, no, the average lifespan of three of my grandparents (the other died aged 70 or so, WWI damage) is 98. So looks like I’ll be joining you all on the ride to hell in a bucket. But not enjoying the ride.
Sue me if you like Transy people, I don’t give a flying duck. Time to say – enough.
Yes she is crowdfunding; I’ve contributed. I just searched Survivors’ Network Sussex lawsuit crowdfund and found it on CrowdJustice.
I have 2 friends who are transsexual women who are a bit older than you. They have been transsexual for almost 60 years. They are two of the most respectful people I know. Both grew up in the Bible Belt in the USA and both were gay when being homosexual got you the jail. Both families paid for a trip to see an ex-German surgeon in Argentina. They met there. I first met them when I was 8. My mother brought them home for tea. When I asked why Ada had on a dress, she explained that she is a biological man who presents as a woman, a transsexual woman. Later she and Ray told their stories. Both support women and their right to women only spaces. Both support women and their rights. Both have been harassed and abused for having the audacity to say they are biological men who present as women. They are good people and there are many more of them about. Living their lives quietly and with dignity and paying their taxes like the rest of us.
A gentle reminder for women (I mean real women) that the identity politics people are not— and never were— their friends.
They aren’t anyone’s friends.
A trans-woman is a man who pretends to be a woman, it is not a woman.
A trans-man is a woman who pretends to be a man, it is not a man.
There is no such thing as a cis-woman, there is just woman born with XX chromosomes, just as there is just man, born with XY chromosomes.
How has society allowed itself to be led down the rabbit hole into the depths of depravity? Quite shocking.
All you said is obvious but given that we live in absurd times, it sounds revolucionary or even mad.
Quite true. But some people seem to fall for some weird ideas. Do you remember how Harriet Harmon and other then Labour Party members were lending support to PIE Paedophile Information Exchange during their time in office. It’s amazing how gullible people can be taken in by some really destructive ideas?
Well done Sarah for taking this group to court – of course you have a right to a place to share your experiences with other women who have been born female and have been victims of sexual violence from men – I just truly don’t understand the lack of compassion in the world on this issue of late.
Any person of moral worth who has chosen due to mental stress to undergo what must be a very difficult process to take female identity should surely have empathy with the discrimination women have long-faced, and understand that their rights should not infringe upon those of women – especially those who have carried the burden of male violence against them through life.
If people feel they must make changes to their gender they must do so with compassion – for others as well as for themselves. This is the way we can really accommodate differences – through genuine respect for the needs of all, and a move away from name-calling, hatred and meanness by those who are refusing to think issues through fairly and objectively and are just following a flow of fashion rather than real empathy for anyone.
Again – I’m so sorry and sad to hear your story – you are a very brave person and I wish you all the very best in achieving your aim – a fight you make for all women who have been harmed by men.
Anyone — including MPs (or PMs) — who says ‘transwomen are women’ is either delusional (pathologically so) or malignant (toxically so).
Yes – I am closely following the Conservative leadership contest and Penny Mordaunt gives me particular concern in this area.
Well done Sarah. I’m holding the vision that you win and set a precedent for women’s safety.
“reframe your trauma” – wow, unbelievable! That’s the quote of the century.
It reminds me of Ernest Bevin telling Jewish survivors to put the past behind them and settle down in Europe
Agreed. It leaps off the page.
Even if that were true, is it wrong? If the needs of women and the needs of trans people conflict with one another then surely one will have to be prioritised. In which case the needs of the many would have to outweigh the needs of the few.
It is extraordinary that the institutional capture has gone as far as rape support groups, which one would have thought would be the last bastions of traditional feminism.
I completely agree.
Untilitarian based rights based on the what is most beneficial to the greater number of people should trump the rights of this mentally ill minority.
Let them form their own ‘rape crisis’ centers.
But then it seems they have no need for them.
So what are these creepy misogynists doing hanging around women’s rape crisis centers?
“Rape victims need female-only spaces” It’s tragic that an article like this needs to be written. In 1990 in my coming of age, that’s not what I saw when I looked into the future.
I totally support Sarah. It has taken many years to establish rights for women, and the provision of single sex facilities- toilets, wards in hospitals, prisons, and sports etc. all for sensible sound reasons. Girls and women must be kept safe from that small minority of deviant and criminal men who wish to predate them.
Victim support groups are not fit for purpose if they fail to respect their members sensitivities, and any charitable status or funding withdrawn.
Sadly self-declared trans “women” equipped with male genitalia have taken advantage of the wonderful opportunities provided by the misguided move to unisex facilities.
Litigation and compensation may shock the authorities concerned into reverting to providing the safer, separate facilities provided previously.
Sadly some real biological women will have to be test cases and I wish Sarah strength and resilience in her just campaign.
Sex Matters and the Free Speech Union may be helpful contacts for her.
This story made me cry, and then it made me check to see if “Sarah” is crowdfunding her case, and contribute to it, and for the first time, allow my name to be published and will send crowdfunding information to my friends. I am a private person, but like “Sarah”, this has crossed a line for me. As someone who was sexually abused, I think both that she is incredibly brave, and that it is truly staggering that she has to be about this issue. I cannot wrap my mind around the fact that there are people who think it is unreasonable for women to need women-only spaces, especially this one. Thank you, Hadley. I count on you to keep me up on what’s happening in the insane world of trans ideology.
“Survivors’ Network told Sarah that a single-sex group would be “problematic as we do not police gender”. “ All they have to do is police biological sex!
If there is a group for trans-women why does this individual not go there? I thought that being with people who have had a similar experiences is what group theapy is about, and a trans-woman who is raped would have probably had a different experience from a (natal) woman. While I’m on the subject, there is no mention about all male groups (or indeed trans-male groups); unfortunately men also suffer rape, and far too few come forward, they need their own spaces to deal with their trauma, which is very different from womens’s.
There is a stock reply to your question .. it is that it would pressure a trans-woman into identifying as something other than a woman.
Well the transwomen in the groups are men ……..
Exactly. The motive of transwomen to invade female help spaces is often to use these groups as props to affirm their self-delusion, rather to find people who have experienced trauma similar to their own. Even worse, some are self-identified perverts who are excited by the possibility of further traumatizing female sex-abuse victims.
“I marched at Trans Pride and thought of trans women as my sisters.”
It’s very difficult for me to understand how someone could support a cause but not support the consequences of supporting the cause. If she truly believes the delusion that men can be woman, simply by saying so, then I feel very sorry for her.
Anyone can make a mistake, but perhaps she was supporting the notion that people should live and let live, not realising that these new allies would seek to subvert women’s sex based rights.
I think many people assumed that it was so obvious that certain things would be crazy, that it would never happen. No transwoman would ask to be in such a space and if one did, it would be refused.
I’m glad she’s suing. I’d be horrified if I was in this position. Trauma is individual. Women are not required to agree on everything. We are all different and that’s a good thing. The only way things will change is if we speak up for ourselves and sue these groups and organizations, if necessary.
I get wanting to go along to get along, but In situations like this, you’d think that social workers would be more sensitive and aware of the needs of everyone who needs services, not just one group. Having two groups really makes practical sense, in the long term. Not sure how pragmatic thinking got to be controversial. This is the kind of service we want victimized women to use, so if they aren’t using it, then it only seems right that we look at how services are delivered.
This story is truly disgusting – expecting a woman who has been raped to be in a support group which includes a man (and this was clearly a man, not a fully transitioned trans woman which may not have been such a problem) is completely unacceptable. It is no surprise that this disgusting ignorance of women’s rights is taking place in Brighton. As the lady in question said, there were mixed groups for people who felt happy to partipate in those groups. There should always be female only spaces for women who have been abused – there should not even be a discussion about this, and I hope she wins her court case.
Good for you Sarah, please keep fighting for the truth!
“Trans-women” are men who for whatever reason choose to deny that reality and prefer to live as a woman. But they are not women. Any group intended as women-only should have every right to deny entry to trans-women.
The trans invasion and destruction of women’s spaces is fueled by AGP demagogues with no respect for anything but their fetish. Worse, this includes disrespect for children’s lack of ability to consent and shades smoothly into paedophilia. It’s a disaster for women and children, perpetrated by the usual suspects, male bullies. The entire intellectual edifice of transgender politics has no other value and we will not be a rational species until it has been utterly swept away. There is no compromising with it; this is an ideological struggle to the death between domination and freedom.
I believe she recenty parted ways with The Guardian. As you suggest, its perhaps wrong to speculate, but one could probably place a safe bet as to why.
“So while certainly not all trans women are predators, just as not all men are predators, they are far more likely to commit a violent crime than women, just as men are.”
Are “transwomen” more likely to commit sexual offences than other men?
It appears probable going by the stats from ‘so called’ womens’ prisons housing trans women
I can’t understand why they aren’t being chemically castrated on admittance. It would certainly stop them wanting to go to a woman’s prison and reduce the damage done once in there.
Some of them have tried to physically castrate themselves because they want to get in to women’s prisons so much and they thought it would speed the process.
Some others have a castration fetish, chemical and/or physical, so would be pleased at the offer.
This is the mistake often made about “true trans”, ie. the idea that any man willing to undergo castration must surely be “truly trans”. This idea suggests that women are castrated men. Some men have to have an orchidectomy and/or penile amputation due to cancer. They do not become women any more than a man who claims to be “trans”.
Castration fetish is also coming out of the closet with the latest WPATH “standards” including “Eunuch” as a “gender identity”.
It does not matter what bodily modifications or hormone treatments they have had, they are men and should not be imprisoned with women – or allowed to attend women-only rape counselling sessions.
I wasn’t meaning that by castration they would become women, merely seeing it as a deterrent as there are many who would prefer to remain intact.
Personally I would prefer that any adult who is biologically male are kept out of all female spaces for obvious reasons. Nor was I aware of castration fetishes although I’m quite happy for them to crack on with it as long as they’re consenting adults.
I agree.
You generally can’t extrapolate from prison populations to the general population. There are higher numbers of all kinds of things, and people are there because they are offendors.
If I recall correctly there is some indication that in the general population transwomen offend at similar rates at least, but there aren’t any really robust studies.
13 of 24 police forces allow suspects to choose their own sex in recording offences. Rape, by statute, requires a p***s. Trans people (of both sexes) constitute between 0.6% and 0.3% of the population. Yet latest figures state that 1.8% of those charged with rape are women – who necessarily are ‘women with a p***s’. This information was all reported quite recently in the Times, when the outcry about the police advice on this issue was topical.
Only half of all forces allow sex to be chosen, rather than as on the birth certificate, meaning the true incidence for transwomen is a great deal higher than 1.8%. Yet population prevalence for those identifying as trans is multiple times below that.
I can’t see any positive way to interpret that data, in terms of claiming no elevated risk. There is an elevated risk, quite clearly. Yet women are told mentioning any risk at all is hateful.
It’s quite extraordinary.
Weird, isn’t it. No doubt providing evidence to incels and other misogynists that women are as evil as men.
98% of sexual crimes are committed by men I think 80% of victims are women the rest other men and children. Half of the men in gaol for such crimes are now identifying as women. You can do the thinking on that……
It’s certain that self-identified “transwomen” who want to transfer from male prisons to female prisons are very often sex offenders. Male sex offenders really have little reason not to self-i.d. as women and transfer to female prisons, where the will usually do easier time and have access to victims. “But,” you may say, “these offenders aren’t really transwomen.” Well, yes, indeed, they are transwomen, if the standard is self-i.d.
All this trans stuff and the question of who we are really, beneath the flesh (I have a niece who wants to be called by a boy’s name and a friend up the road, whose daughter wants to be called this same name by coincidence). As well as all this is the social media inferiority complexes and suicides because you are not good enough (again), if you don’t resemble a vacuous celebrity.
This verbal insanity isn’t just about women alone is it but men with tarpaulin eyelets stamped through their ears and nose, teeth replaced by veneers, tongue piercings and (teeth loss through both), threaded eyebrows, Then there’s tummy tucks, cheek implants, face lifts, sun beds, spray tans botoxed foreheads, steroids, breast and bum implants, p***s and nipple rings, the lizard man and others with ‘enhancements.’
Shallow, juvenile, self destructive, attention seeking, primitive tribalism, unlike the rest of Europe (American imports and the advertising by Freud’s nephew, to make people feel inferior, unless they follow the current trend). In the words of William Thurber, only twisting the title of his book slightly, ‘Leave Your Body Alone.’ It works perfectly well on its own.
Am I prejudiced? Yes against stupidity but the choice isn’t mine and I cannot change the minds (or through this) the bodies of others, only they can by growing up and maturing into adults and I don’t think this generation will. They will just go down in history as another lot lost, not to physical warfare and following the crowd into the trenches but through loss of their own identities.
The deeply ironic trend of being “original” whilst also creating new pigeonholes to be put in because for all their supposed non conformity they’re actually incapable of thinking for themselves. “Yeah, what she said!”, “It’s true! I read it on Facebook!” “I’m a non binary, neurodiverse Elfkin and I use the pronouns Fook and Nut!”
There are two types of transgendered – heterosexual / pseudo-bisexual Autogynephiles and autoandrophiles and the other are homosexual transexuals. Autogynephilia / autoandrophilia is a sexual paraphilia. They often heavily fantasize about rape. They are obviously biological males.
Read more about transgenderism as well as the social contagion called transtrenders at http://www.rodfleming.com
I hope Sarah wins her case. I think her treatment has been appalling. It is essential that women who have been abused like this have a safe space where they can find support free from the anxiety-inducing presence of any man (trans or otherwise).
Broader than this, it is essential that the provision of single-sex spaces remains lawful.
How can our society have come to this? Vitriol is hurled at people who dare to question untruths and injustices imposed by warped regimes and philosophies. I agree with you. I sincerely hope that Sarah wins her case, though that won’t stop the vitriol, death threats and other evils to which she is subjected.
I fully support Sarah and completely understand how difficult it is for her to go forward with the court case. I have lost female friendships over my strong objections to trans ideaology and black lives matter ideaology: both are a form of brainwashing, insisting others believe what they know not to be true. I was raised in a strict Catholic family and attended a convent. I rebelled against Catholicism because of its attitude towards women and sex, the glorification of virginity which has an extremely negative effect on the sexually abused, but I will not genuflect (take the knee) to anyone apart from God, if such a being exists. I think truth matters. Trans women are not women and I do wonder what lies behind the insistence of those who believe they are. Their arguments are a form of bullying – if you don’t agree with me, you are transphobic (an evil person). But, and this is a big but, the same arguments are used by feminists (female) against those who don’t agree with them. Below is a comment I posted on Unherd previously, the response it received and my response:
I know she [Julie Bindel] is a walking talking contradiction. Women are equal to men, no real difference, but when it comes to domestic violence, women’s violence, if it exists at all, is reactive. Men are always considered the instigators. All relationships are incredibly complex, abusive ones even more so. The female victim, male abuser dichotomy is simplistic and devoid of any explanatory power. The key is in the word relationship. The dynamics of the relationship are created by the participants in the relationship. Which is not to say that within a relationship, one partner is never more culpable than the other. Victim narratives by their very nature are unreliable. Those with victim mentality see themselves as the victim within any situation and are extremely unlikely to take any responsibility.
Sophie P.
3 days ago
Reply to Aphrodite Rises
You are saying what abusers always say: “She asked for it.” Sure, he never would have hit her if the had his dinner ready on time.
Aphrodite Rises
1 day ago
Reply to Sophie P.
Not at all. I know exactly what I am talking about. You clearly have victim mindset and cannot be objective, you are trivialising my comment which is akin to name calling. It is equivalent to the trans lobby calling anyone who does not completely accept their ideaology transphobic. I did state Which is not to say that within a relationship, one partner is never more culpable than the other.
your reaction suggests you are a bigot.
Re-reading Sophie P’s comment, she is just doing to me what Cathy Newman did to Jordan Peterson – so your saying that when he clearly wasn’t and neither was I. I remember being extremely disappointed by Cathy Newman and Oxford university (I believe she has a first class degree in English from Oxford university), I would have expected Cathy Newman to be delighted to have the opportunity to engage with and challenge Jordan Peterson and I would have very much enjoyed the debate. I expected her to want to demonstrate women are in no way inferior to men when it comes to debating. It was probably unfair to have those kind of expectations of a single woman, expecting her to represent all women, but she appears to consider her thoughts to be representative of feminist thought and was deluded enough to view her reprehensible behaviour as a triumph. I believe it is through genuine unprejudiced debate we arrive at the truth or as close to it as possible. At the moment, to suggest some men are exploiting self id and reduce their testosterone to participate in women’s sports because they have a better chance of winning is to be transphobic. Lea Thomas claimed the joy of winning shut out all the comments of transphobic nay sayers. This comment reveals the thing that mattered most to him was winning and it is not surprising he chose to reduce his testosterone so he could compete against women. He had no consideration for women when he walked naked around the women’s changing room. A lot of women are extremely uncomfortable in the presence of naked men outside an intimate or private situation – ordinarily, it would have been classified as exposing himself. It was all about how he felt and what made him feel good, and because he had reduced his testosterone levels, his feelings mattered more than anyone else’s. By winning in the victimhood olympics, he hoped to win a medal in the actual olympics.
This is news to me – but wraps you are privy to information that I do not have.
So do you have any evidence to support your claim that the women you list “subscribe(s) fully to all other aspects of the insane transgender ideology?”
Ask any if “trans women” are women.
Ask any if sex roles are a social construct.
Ask any if gender identity is real.
Ask any what is a woman?
They are feminists. Transgender ideology is just the next step in their worldview.
“Being a woman is not a natural fact. It’s the result of a certain history. There is no biological or psychological destiny that defines a woman as such.”
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Penny Maudant – what say you?
She’s a liar. Vote Kemi who has been consistently on the side of women in this
Maybe he’s becoming a woman for cheaper car insurance.
That doesn’t work any more. My insurance rocketed when I think the EU decreed that different rates for men and women we’re discriminatory despite clear data showing women are far safer drivers!!!
Sex changes are for the 21st century what lobotomies were for the 20th century. We will be regarded as monsters by our descendants for encouraging this disgusting fad. Thank God for the women who are fighting against it.
Indeed, and it was not just lobotomies. A whole range of psycho surgical treatments were performed in the mid 20th century that have now been abandoned as largely ineffective and indeed harmful that were supported by evangelical psychiatrists such as William Sargant.
I think that when ideology comes before care and support for the needs of the victim we only compound trauma. We need to build care around the victim not try to make the victim change to fit the care.
REDIRECTED MALE*
Return to gender.
No such sex. No such erogenous zone.
I gave a sex test to the postman
He put it in his sack.
Bright and early next morning
He brought me my sex test back.
They wrote upon it
Return to gender.
No such sex. No such erogenous zone.
I had a quarrel with the government
I told them they were wrong
But my results keep coming back.
They wrote upon it
Return to gender
No such sex. No such erogenous zone.
I dropped my test in the mailbox.
Sent it special D
Bright and early next morning
It came right back to me.
They wrote upon it
Return to gender
No such sex. No such erogenous zone
This time I’m gonna take it in myself
And put it right in their hand
And if it comes right back again
Then I will finally understand
No such sex. No such erogenous zone.
No such sex. No such erogenous zone.
* With apologies to Elvis Presley
I too hope this woman wins her case. It is beyond belief that women are having to fight a culture war to maintain single-sex spaces in public places. That rape victims and women who’ve experienced domestic violence cannot guarantee that the spaces they seek help/refuge won’t be single-sex just shows how far down the rabbit hole we have gone. Misogyny disguised as ‘virtue’.
My comment seems to have been pulled. I merely inquired why Hadley Freeman had published this piece here, in Unherd, rather than in The Guardian, that bastion of progressive free speech. Perhaps Hadley is a delicate flower.
To see so many women online empathise more with the trans person’s possible sense of exclusion than with her trauma felt,[…] So many women care more about the feelings of men than the needs of other women.
Caring more about the feelings of men may be the case. But perhaps there are women who, for whatever reason, perceive men identifying as a women to be women? If so, to them the feelings of empathy produced by exclusion are more profound than the feelings of empathy produced by the the plight of an included member.
Anyone wanting to support her see Sarah surviving crowd justice
Was this man there because he had been raped? It appears male rape victims are mocked rather than counselled in many cases. All the same, separate groups should be set up.at
The organisation she is suing do offer men a single sex group already. There is also a trans group. This individual had two alternative options, but preferred, for whatever reason, to sit amongst women as those women discussed their rapes.
Thanks for the info.
Do they allow transmen in the men’s group?
I don’t know, but I would imagine so?
Many men suffer rape, particularly in correctional settings, but are offered nothing in the way of services of any kind. It seems from the data cited above that a very small number of men with gender dysphoria who identify themselves as female also suffer this kind of assault. There is no information about how often women with gender dysphoria suffer this experience, but it is probably not zero. Given the inherently sexual nature of these very traumatic and damaging experiences, it seems quite reasonable that victims seeking services might have strong and differing feelings about the composition of the therapy or support groups they seek out. Rather than making this an ideological test, a ’cause’ for those who are not seeking these services but are seeking a political cudgel to pursue a social agenda, or trying to address this question through the crude instrument of legislation and litigation, why not allow the patients and their professional caregivers to form different kinds of groups and offer them to the people seeking services on the basis of their clinical judgment about what would best serve them? Or does that seem too simple?
I also found this by ‘Support After Rape – Leeds’, which says “transgender women and girls are female and have the right to self-identify as such in accordance with the Equality Act (2010)”. It makes a nonsense of the definition of sex *and* of what transsexuality is.
https://supportafterrapeleeds.org.uk/about/sarsvl-why-women-only/