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September 13, 2024 - 10:00am
So the feminists — the terfs, the bigots, the bullies — were right. According to a report commissioned by Rape Crisis Scotland, Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) has not been putting rape survivors first. For the past 16 months, women-only services have not been made available for those who need them. Meanwhile, ERCC’s former chief executive officer, Mridul Wadhwa, has now resigned after being accused of “not understand[ing] the limits of her role” and “fail[ing] to set professional standards of behaviour”.
That is putting it mildly. The problem here is not one of disorganisation or managerial overreach. As anyone who followed the tribunal of former ERCC caseworker Roz Adams will know, it is one of deliberate sabotage. It is not that the need for women-only spaces somehow fell off Wadhwa’s radar. It’s more that Wadhwa — a trans-identified male who does not have a Gender Recognition Certificate — did not approve of the kind of survivor who requests them.
When, in a 2021 podcast, Wadhwa claimed that rape survivors desiring female-only spaces should “expect to be challenged on [their] prejudices”, it was clear this was someone who possessed neither empathy nor a basic understanding of the politics of sexual violence. Those comments should have provoked universal outrage, yet they did not. On the contrary, all those who objected were told that they were the ones who needed to #bekind.
There is nothing about the damage Wadhwa has done to ERCC that could not have been predicted several years ago. The tragedy is that plenty of those who enabled the sabotage still claim to be feminists. For women such as Nicola Sturgeon, Mhairi Black and Shona Robison, trans activism’s infiltration of the women’s movement provided the ideal way to prove how forward-thinking and progressive they were. There is, after all, more status in claiming to be a trans ally than in aligning yourself with the women of the past, those drudges who built up the very things that you are now free to trash.
For this is a story of letting a thing be wrecked because you think so little of those who created it. Reading the past few years’ discourse on female-only spaces and inclusion, one could be forgiven for thinking women were handed rape crisis centres as part of some luxury “cis privilege” benefits package. The truth is that they fought for them. It is shameful that such a small thing — not the end of rape, nor even a meaningful reduction in rape, merely the resources to support women in its aftermath — should have had to be fought for at all. “Good” men should have been desperate to support women in their efforts, providing financial backup while keeping well away. Then, as now, few actually did.
As Karen Ingala Smith notes in Defending Women’s Spaces, early women’s refuges and rape crisis centres were “run by women on the ground, often with very little, if any, funding, little experience of providing support outside friends and family and without government backing”. Since then, male violence against women and girls has become a mainstream policy concern, but this, Smith writes, “has come at a cost. The price we have paid is depoliticisation — specifically, a watering down of feminist politics.” In Edinburgh, a boundary was crossed from watered-down feminism into explicit anti-feminism.
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SubscribeWell overdue and it should be the first of many resignations.
That this abhorrent betrayal of abuse victims has happened under the guise of “inclusion” is the very dictionary definition of doing evil behind the masquerade of doing good.
Women-only spaces – such as refuges, changing rooms, and sports – are necessary to protect and promote women’s safety, dignity and fairness. Allowing men-who-identify-as-women (for whatever reason) entry not only creates immediate risks to individual women, but in the longer term will inevitably destroy the ability to define and understand when women need separate spaces at all and what form they should take.
Well said.
I agree, but would make this point too: If this piece had been published, say, 20 years ago, hardly a person would be able to understand a word of it. I, for one, can hardly understand it even now. To read is to ask: “Say what?” We have progressed beyond common sense, if indeed “progress” is the right word.
He. This is a man who does not even possess a GRC (not that a certificate can change reality – we aren’t seahorses).
I was going to point out the fact that the article continues to call the culprit a ‘her’ after pointing out that this is not true. By pandering to the lunatics, we encourage them.
What the hell is going on in Scotland?
“Shame on Mridul Wadhwa, but shame, too, on every “feminist” who boosted her status..”. It is his status; HIS not her.
The pronoun her is referring to the feminists who boasted their status by pretending this man was a woman who was competent to do the job.
As CEO there is no reason why a man could not competently and empathically do the job, as the CEO does not need to come into contact with survivors. The problem was, as stated in the article, that he was more interested in promoting his own twisted ideology than he was in supporting rape survivors. Whilst it is not a given that a trans identified man would behave in this way, it was always extremely likely.
In Wadhwa’s case, though, he did come into contact with rape survivors, even sitting in on counselling sessions and asking them if they experienced orgasm while being raped.
I don’t think any man should be CEO of a rape crisis centre that carers for women. Like Beira’s Place, funded by J K Rowling, they should be run entirely by women, for women. This provides reassurance for the women using the service, and acts as an extra safeguard against the harms done by men like Wadhwa. It is a sad truth that men who want to predate on women, will I sert themselves into positions of trust.
And anyway, why shouldn’t women have a women-run service?
Wadhwa was a total monster and should never have been appointed. That would not be discrimination on grounds of biological sex or even gender identity, but because he is totally unsuitable for the role.
The issue is about the “feminists” who appointed him and the “feminists” that supported him when he justifiably came under fire. Have these biological women actually learned any lessons from the incident? Have they hell, he has now resigned (he should have been sacked the day after the Roz Adams judgment came out, if not well before) so they can all just ignore it.
I don’t think it would be practical. However competent and empathetic (I hope) most men would be, as CEO he would inevitably have access to sensitive information about the service and service users and a level of authority which could easily be used to create a imbalance of power over staff.
When I worked in local government our department funded a county-wide women’s refuge service. My job was to evaluate grant-funded services. The rule was that no men were allowed to go inside the safe houses (except blue light responders in an emergency) or even know their precise locations. Nor were male council employees allowed to handle any information which could reveal details about service users.
These rules weren’t in place because of the majority of men who would not be a danger. They were in place because otherwise the men who are a danger would seek to use this access to do bad things.
It is about finding the right person for the job. The monster that got the job to tick DEI boxes and make people who were never likely to need the service feel good about themselves, was entirely the wrong person for the job.
I had to read that sentence a few times. One thing for sure, the author NEVER uses pronouns when referring to TIMs, and that made me realize who she was actually referring to (in fairness, that sentence is easy to misunderstand)
This is enough to drive anyone to despair, really is insanity, reality is now the most fantastic fiction! Mridul Wadhwa Is a man??? He claimed rape victims were prejudiced?? What did Chesterton say; “when man refuses to believe in God , he’ll believe in anything.” This is going to take a century to overturn if man hasn’t destroyed himself…
Again… we see this type of view espoused, and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with not believing in your or any other god. Try thinking of some original reasons for why humans behave as they do, rather than relying on hoary old quotes.
Absolutely correct and well put. There are a lot of gods about but they always work through interpreters and so cannot be trusted.
And there lies the crux ; pick and mix gods, all of them false, all of them shallow, mere deceptions. There is only one true God ; Jesus Christ.
Again we see this type of comment of denial. Denial of the Almighty, to whom you and all will be accountable. Try thinking of why the obvious and simple truths are rejected and demeaned rather than confronting the truth.
Perhaps the solution to this madness is to stop being kind, to stop being polite, to stop being nice; this is what brought about this madness in the first place.
Couldn’t agree more. It’s like when someone says “Trust me”. My instinct is to think “why even say that?”
Being civil is different from being “kind” or “nice”. I can be perfectly civil to others until they abuse that civility. Kindness, as with trust, has to be earned.
I desperately need revenge and punishment. Not to him, to those, who made it possible. No nice, no polite, no kind. Revenge!
I got flamed on Twitter for posting something similar about the bonfire of public money caleld paralympic games. At a macro level, kindess is not a prosocial value.
This is plain evil. Deliberately hurting raped women for gratification.
““Good” men should have been desperate to support women in their efforts, providing financial backup while keeping well away.”
The need to insert quotation marks around the word “good” leads me to believe Ms. Smith is a “Yes, ALL men!” type of gal; the sort accountable for this deluded madness that is now a new, modern threat to all we women and the consequences of the assertions of 3rd+ wave feminism. She and her opinions are as welcome as they are from the men in wigs, lipstick and skirts.
That’s a nice catch. In reality, good men – which is the vast majority of men – WERE desperate to support women, mostly because they all have women in their lives they would do anything to protect. Also telling is how the author goes along with the pronoun madness as if this guy is somehow a “she.”
Except that her point is that men who would call think themselves good did nothing. That includes only banging on about pronouns as diversion from the message.
Exactly. The men she means are the virtue-signalling, “progressive”, look-how-much-of-a-feminist-I-am types. Hence the quote marks around the word good. The silence and complicity from these guys has been shameful.
If enough good men spoke out, marched, organised and raised awareness among their fellow men that rape and abuse are completely unacceptable, it could potentially make a difference. I’ve never seen men collectively organise or take action on behalf of the women and girls they love, in order to prevent abuse or rape. . Of course most men think it’s abhorrent on an individual level, but thinking it is very different from collectively challenging it in a way that abusive men might pay attention to. Abusive men need to hear this from *other men* – it’s not a problem that women can solve.
The issue with your desired suggestion is that you’re inviting men to a battlefield that they’ve been obnoxiously prohibited from, unless, seemingly, they prefer to parade around in a dress and a half-reared attempt to obscure a receding hairline…”NO uterus, NO opinion,” the bear and Butker fiasco of the summer, etc. into oblivion.
The author doesn’t actually, though you’re not the only one to misinterpret the final paragraph (I did too on first reading). The “her” at the end doesn’t refer to Wadhwa, but to the “feminists” in question who appointed and/or supported him.
I misread it too, but it means the author was not very clear and obviously didn’t read the ambiguous statement.
Read it again. ‘She’ refer to feminists not to Wadhwa.
It’s perfectly obvious to anyone without an agenda that not all men are “good” hence the need to spell it out.
Define “good”.
Mr Wadhwa and progressive supported by the elite.
The aim of this man was to destroy women only spaces and in Scotland insane men who pretend to be women are important
As we know some animals are more important than others
One just can’t make this stuff up.
And if one can, one is sick in the head.
Wow. So the degenerates actually placed a delusional, violence-supporting thug in charge of a rape center. For multiple years.
In the United States a very similar person was placed in charge of medical care by Biden-Harris. This person has damaged health care for children by manipulating medical groups into endorsing surgical, pharmaceutical, and psychological abuse of children under guise of “medical care”.
The American Acadeny of Pediatrics has invited Admiral Richard/ Rachel Levine, US Assistant Secretary for Health to be the keynote speaker at their annual convention in Florida later in September. The AAP is in favour of medical trasitioning for children and has pretty much ignored the Cass report. Levine seems to also want there not to age restrictions on who gets ‘gender affirmation’ surgery. https://nypost.com/2024/08/27/us-news/house-panel-probes-if-biden-admin-officials-pressured-medical-experts-to-nix-age-limit-guidelines-for-transgender-surgery/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
He is a dangerous monster, and those enabling/joining in with him are despicable.
Vote for Harris/Walz and we’ll have more of this, only worse.
There is nothing about the damage Wadhwa has done to ERCC that could not have been predicted several years ago.
Foreseeable consequences are not accidental, yet in droves, people in official circles went along with and, even now, continue the charade. Whatever schadenfreude value may have existed has long since vanished; it has become impossible to chastise people for getting what they wished for because so many who did not wish it were also caught in the madness. What does it take for this stop?
Indeed. And those who have caused this entirely predictable, entirely preventable disaster are still in charge. And now they turn to censorship, thought police and jail for those who point out who is culpable.
An important step and on balance excellent article. Now to point out how Orwellian and abusive pronoun misuse by delusional thugs and their enablers helped create this mess.
The only pronoun usage is in a quote so not quite.
That said, as I read I thought “Is avoiding pronouns altogether Victoria’s actual choice, or is it the UnHerd editorial requirement?”
Either way, if this case doesn’t show the importance of not “just” saying man, but shouting it loudly, I don’t know what will.
Oh, sorry. Just found the “her”.
FFS, I give up.
It doesn’t refer to Wadhwa, but to the “feminists” in question who appointed and/or supported him.
Not directly relate to this essay. Haven’t read anything by Debbie Heyton recently on Unherd. No longer contributing?
I like to think that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen in the States…that’s what I’d like to think.
Look at Dr. Levine. It has happened.
Is Mridul even a female name? Mr Idul Wadhwa is a biologically intact male without even so much as a gender recognition certificate, making him as plainly and simply a man in a sari as I would be if I were to don such a garment on a stag night, an image that is now in your mind.
Yet Mridul Wadhwa was appointed to a job that was legally reserved for a woman, and without any professional qualification in the field. But appointed by whom? If Wadhwa is a trustee of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, then he is the only man who ever has been. div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>Few of their names have ever screamed “global majority”, either, and their occupations have been as one would have expected. Wadhwa was appointed and protected by middle-aged, middle-class, white women who were practically indistinguishable from the dreaded TERFs. Likewise, the Russell Group has apologised for having sought, “examples of unlawful speech which universities would be expected to take steps to restrict, including antisemitic, Islamophobic or gender critical speech.” And who runs the Russell Group?
Like several other regular contributors on matters of gender identity, Victoria Smith bears more than a passing resemblance to the middle-aged, middle-class women who are conspicuous at trans events. Young men tend to be sceptical of this as much as of #MeToo, as well as tending to be very left-wing economically, and strongly anti-war internationally; all those things are connected. But behind a small number of mostly older male transvestites march hordes of young women, a large minority but still a minority of whom think that they are men. Alongside those young women march a goodly number of their academic instructors and administrators of the same sex, as such instructors and administrators do now tend to be. Whether she likes it or not, Judith Butler is a woman. By some distance, she is the most cited female academic in the world. And who is citing her? Humanities academia is ever more heavily female.
It was a Conservative Government that presided over gender self-identification day in and day out. The public sector and its vast network of contractors simply presupposed it. It came to be treated as already the law only after 2015. Go back to 2010, and the concept itself was unheard of. This happened entirely under the Conservatives. In 2022, there was a rare television depiction of Margaret Thatcher. In Prince Andrew: The Musical, she was played by one Baga Chipz, a drag queen. Gender self-identification is the inexorable logic of the self-made man or the self-made woman, and a figure comparable to Thatcher, emerging in the Britain of the 2020s, would be assumed to be a transwoman, just as Thatcher herself emerged in the Britain of everything from Danny La Rue and D**k Emery to David Bowie and The Rocky Horror Show. In a generation’s time, everyone will be saying out loud that Tony Blair had always been as androgynous as Thatcher. Leo Abse wrote eye-opening books on both.
Still in thrall to one of the two most androgynous figures ever to have emerged in British public life, who destroyed the stockades of working-class male employment while creating a new ruling elite of middle-class women funded and empowered by the State, the Right produces almost none of its own gender critics, and of course ignores the absolute soundness of the Morning Star and of Counterfire on gender self-identification, or the fact that both the Alba Party, and the Workers Party of Britain, have been founded in no small measure because of this issue. Instead, a platform is given to ostensible refugees from a Left from which their economic views had often suggested a dislocation, and their foreign policy views even more so, long before anyone remotely mainstream had ever suggested that human beings could change sex, or that biological sex did not exist.
Knowing their new audience and that it paid a lot better than their old one, and manifesting the fact that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, the permitted voices of gender criticism joined gleefully in the takedown of Jeremy Corbyn, are gearing up for another round of that against his Independent candidacy, broadly hint that they think that Alex Salmond was a rapist, simply call Julian Assange a rapist in so many words, therefore never miss an opportunity to brand George Galloway “a rape apologist”, and parrot the #IBelieveHer case for the genocide of Gaza, a case that several of them have made for every previous neoconservative war, and most of them for at least one.
Those of a certain age have dusted down the file of lurid allegations that they deployed against white working-class men during the Satanic panic of the Thatcher years, and which have been levelled, practically word for word, against every designated enemy since. At best, they raise no objection to the same treatment of racialised communities in Britain, who are today’s Enemy Within, which is why that status will very soon be enjoyed again by the working class in general and by working-class men in particular, insofar as that has ever ceased to be the case. That said, the General Election campaign revived the Enemy Within of the better part of the last decade, and the role of the likes of Hadley Freeman, previously a catwalk correspondent but apparently now a Reith Lecturer in waiting, gives them no right to complain about the lack of impact of the Cass Review.
The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were div > p:nth-of-type(15) > a”>complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases of anti-Semitism in entire report into the Labour Party, neither of them involved Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of that party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.”
Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed. But it does now. Labour has expelled more Jews under Keir Starmer than under all its previous Leaders put together, most or all of them for what has been found to be the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism; there would not be enough time left in this Parliament to change the law on that. It was no wonder that Andrew Feinstein stood against the Leader who had turned Labour into an anti-Semitic party, halving his vote.
Yet the EHRC report may as well never have been published for all the difference that it is making to the political debate, and those who revel in that sorry fact are therefore in no position to object that the Cass Report may as well never have been published for all the difference that it is making to the popular culture in which these matters are decided. The soaps and the nine o’clock flagship dramas are of course filmed long in advance, but things that are broadcast much sooner after completion, or even live, are making it quite clear that that Report is to be filed alongside those Declarations which the anti-vaxxers used to issue to each other and then assume that everyone had heard of them. Through popular culture, it was immediately made a commonplace that Dr Hilary Cass had disregarded 98 per cent of the literature in the field because it had not matched her preordained conclusion.
Now take a look at who controls the cultural sector. People whose intersection of sex, class and generation matches the gender critics’ perfectly, and who are usually the same colour as well, just like the people who expel pro-ceasefire students, who send in thugs to give them a beating, who connive to revoke their visas, and so on. All while driving out or keeping down the gender critics, and while marching with those who threatened them with extreme violence. Those centrist mums and centrist aunties need to have a word with their own peers.
Why refer to that man as “her”?
Tell it as it is, not as they’d like it to be
It doesn’t refer to Wadhwa, but to the “feminists” in question who appointed and/or supported him.
Thanks. I hadn’t seen it could be read as you did; I and others read it as Pamela Booker did.
This all has the odour of pedophile cleansing and cover up. Does anyone else remember the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in the 1980s, patron one Harriet Harmen, later MP? A serious attempt to normalise adult sex with children. Back then we had a press that hounded them off the stage. Unfortunately in these woke times a tame media just goes with the ‘progressive’ flow
This is revisit to an issue which was discussed probably a year ago.
This was always a bloke who for some reason was appointed to an obviously sensitive position by those who haven’t any genuine interest in providing support for distressed women.
The truth is that this bloke should never have been appointed and any of those who supported the appointment should be immediately sacked.
The fact that he was able to ‘resign’ after an investigation is bizarre.
The realisation of SNP politicians openly supporting this situation only adds to the parody.
” …this is a story of letting a thing be wrecked because you think so little of those who created it.” True of trans-identified male activism across all single-sex spaces it insists on trespassing. The women who created those spaces, who need them, who benefit immeasurably from them — for reasons these men will never understand and don’t try to — don’t matter. The willingness of trans activists to throw actual females under the bus to get what they want should by now be abundantly clear to observers.
An excellent article, though the female pronouns in the last sentence are confusing. I took them to refer to Wadhwa, though another commenter read them as referring to “feminists” who support him. Upon re-reading, I think that’s what Smith intended, but it’s ambiguous.
Yes, needed an edit, the run-on sentence in the original makes it hard to parse at first blush. I think it should have been:
Shame on Mridul Wadhwa. Shame, too, on every “feminist” who boosted her status by casually unpicking the work of every unknown, unpaid, unsung woman who achieved things she never will.
It’s still unclear and shows how subverting the language can be very hard to undo.
What on earth was anyone thinking of appointing such a person to the critical leadership role? A male! To lord it over women and “challenge their prejudices “. Were they outright barking mad?
Just evil.
And yet, just like all your other articles on this subject, you studiously avoid to use pronouns for TIMs. You have no such qualms for other “less contentious” individuals, but for Wadhwa that would be a step too far.
Someone recently asked why is there a need for women’s rights, while we have equal rights?
The answer is: equal rights exist on the basis of equal power. Only.
Power is meant to be applied predictably, based on the shared understanding of right & wrong across society in Western democracies like Australia, except it isn’t. In Australia MIGHT = RIGHT, likely always was, since the first ship began its long journey to the penal colony, will remain for a long time to come. Crime victims have no power. Abused, broken women are easy punch bags for any psycho in need of a power trip. I know. I am an abused woman, even though I never chose to have anything to do with any MARCUCCI.
I don’t know about Scotland, but in Australia crime victims are assumed to be responsible for whatever they are forced to endure. Since 2009 in my case, last crime today (14 September 2024) by a stalker ex-coworker, whom I never even dated. Thousands of MARCUCCI crimes don’t show up in any statistics.
In Australia crime victims are expected to accept whatever they are forced to suffer with obedient resignation & silent dignity. Out of sight. At all times. In Australia each crime is taken as an erosion step of the victim’s value as a human being. We are sent to charities for one-size-fits-all infantilising counselling, sedation, even institutionalisation offers OF THE VICTIM – no one has ever tried to stop the stalker’s crimes, even though I was 1 of at least 7 of his concurrent stalking targets just from our shared workplace, the Victorian Electoral Commission 2009-2012 – to the endless delight of the Head of the IT Department, a man in his late 50s, to whom my manager reported to.
See my ‘Perfect Crimes’ LinkedIn article for some details. Last crime less than an hour ago (I am writing this at 4:24pm on the 14th of September 2024) in the home I have owned since 2001 in Clare O’Neil’s leafy electorate. There is no point in moving, the MARCUCCI will always know where I live via their government jobs.
“she”?? wtf? its a ‘he’, end of story!