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October 16, 2024 - 7:00am
Pity Sandy Brindley, chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS). Since October last year, she has been wrestling with the problem of defining “woman” within the context of providing support for survivors of sexual violence. That is despite a tribunal judge ordered Scotland’s national rape crisis service to enforce a clear definition of “woman” across all its centres.
This might not seem very difficult. I’m certain, for instance, that the stranger who assaulted me wasn’t a woman, despite never having had the chance to ask him his gender identity. Then again, I’m probably not as much of an “intersectional feminist” as Brindley — that’s “intersectional” not in the helpful sense of recognising that women experience intersecting oppressions, but in the off-the-wall one of deciding that “being a woman” can intersect with “not being one”.
Earlier this year, there was reason to hope that ideological capture of rape crisis services by trans activists might have been coming to an end in Scotland. In May Roz Adams won her claim for constructive dismissal against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), having endured a “heresy hunt” after requesting clarity for abuse survivors regarding the sex of support workers. Last month, a damning report into ERCC led to the resignation of Mridul Wadhwa, the male CEO who told female rape survivors requiring single-sex support to “please expect to be challenged on your prejudices”.
This week Adams was awarded £35,000 in damages, a substantial amount in recognition of the hounding she suffered. By this point, one might hope to have seen plenty of fulsome, unqualified apologies, starting with those at the very top of RCS. Yet, as Adams has noted, there has been no real taking of responsibility, let alone any attempt to question the ideology which led to this crisis. On the contrary, statements offered by RCS perpetuate the very obfuscation that Adams identified. Even now, RCS and Brindley simply do not get it.
“It is important,” RCS’s website states, “that survivors can make informed choices about the services they access”, before adding that “at present, how women only spaces are defined is decided by individual rape crisis centres.” They might as well add “Ha! Gotcha! Don’t go thinking that when we say ‘woman only spaces’ we mean anything at all.”
If there has been any movement at all within RCS, it has been from total denial to performative ignorance. We all know what a woman is, and we all know why many women seek single-sex spaces in the aftermath of sexual assault. It should not be remotely difficult for someone such as Brindley to defend their boundaries and choices. Yet instead she makes meaningless statements about “recognising different women have different needs”, as if everyone will forget that if the need is for a woman-only space, you must still be clear about what a woman is.
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SubscribeIn regard to another story on Unherd about a foetus and abortion, calling the killing of a foetus/baby murder, I received this response;
Nope. No more so than removing an appendix is “murder”.
So good luck with defining a woman. And good luck with anything having a definition from here on.
Obfuscation has been such a successful strategy for trans activism that they will never give it up willingly.
So long as they continue to receive funding from government to support their activist-careers, they will continue to destroy women’s rights and services in pursuit of their ideology.
Right there is the answer. Remove their funding and they’ll shrivel up and blow away.
Yes – it is an ideological fight between groups of people who seem more concerned with the rightness of their own dodgy ideas than about either truth or practicality. And perhaps that’s not a bad thing if it keeps them occupied.
Is it really any surprise to anyone that these organisations are filled with strange people from the fringes of society who get involved in ideological bun fights?
The side defending women-only services for rape victims is not engaging in an “ideological bun fight”.
The article above is full of ideological set phrases which reveal an unthinking commitment to a now rather dated ideology. I’m not taking sides. I’d like to see less ideology and more professionalism. And yes – filtering out of people who just have an ideological axe to grind.
Without you being specific, I don’t know what phrases you think are ideological.
But there is nothing “rather dated” about women who have suffered sexual assault at the hands of men wanting to access women-only services.
They’re easy enough to spot. Indeed they jump off the page.
I took the time to look at the crisis scotland website. Some of the educational materials are a little too ideological, but by and large the approach is pretty sane. Specifically it does not foreground the politics of …, male power and female subjugation etc etc – but focussed on offering a support service to people who have had a terrible experience.
And perhaps that’s the real issue for the author: just not enough old style feminist politics.
Hmmm… and one might wonder what your ‘real’ issue is. It’s perfectly clear what the author has written, except to those with some other agenda, whatever it might be…
The Trans lobby are a well funded marketing tool of global corporates that want to eradicate biological sex. The aim is to remove personal reproduction and the first step toward this is the eradication of the female sex. This will pave the way for an infinite gender spectrum. Having silenced dissent by the masses of the validity of trans rights as human rights through corporate HR policies and NGOs, the facilitation of total dependance on medically enabled human reproduction will be established. Welcome to the £Tr business of private financing human reproduction and the fusion of human and machine.
I’m surprised that during an attempted rape the victim’s first reaction is not to ask the attacker’s identity! Who would have imagined this?
You joke but we are not a million miles away from a world where a rape victim is more likely to be punished for misgendering their assailant than a rapist is for assaulting their victim.
Just wait an see what happens to you if you try to stop a potential rapist entering a women only space.
Yes, just like decent people are more likely to be charged with assult for trying to defend their family and property from a burglar that he is to be arrested and charged with break and enter, theft, and aggravated assult. ‘Uman rights, you see’. We certainly do live in a topsy-turvy world.
In Germany, a rape victim received a longer prison term than the rapist because she called him a “freak” and a “pig” in a text.
You’ve got to hand it to them, trans activists do a grand job of repurposing the feminism slogans of yesteryear. “Biology is not destiny” indeed.
“predatory men exploit loopholes”
Yes and as we have seen, immigrants know how to exploit loopholes…. so not only do they have a “woman” problem they likely also have challenges identifying the men who are committing rapes.
Yes, there are already cases of immigrant men using “I didn’t know it was illegal here” as a mitigating factor in child sex abuse cases, and judges seemingly accepting this as an excuse. Yet for everyone else, ignorance if the law is no defence.
People are being paid to push this kind of stupidity.
Agree, never knew how much or who by until now…
I fully expect this disastrous Labour government to sell out women over women only spaces as the quid pro quo to trans activists for maintaining the ban on the mutilation of children. They have already refused to make a minor amendment to the Equality Act, which allows for things like RCCs to be women only, to clarify that women only means biological women.
They are just waiting for the opportunity to sneak out some guidance that muddies the waters sufficiently so everywhere will feel they have no choice but to let men who claim to be women into women only spaces. GCFs like Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock will only have themselves to blame for not only voting for Starmer but not getting all GCFs together to force him to make a clear commitment he could not go back on prior to the election.
And again in normal English. RCC? GCF?
Rape Crisis Centre Gender Critical Feminist
Services for victims of rape were started by women volunteers back in the 1970s. They were initially independent of public funding. However, relying on donations meant they couldn’t possibly meet the needs of all women victims, and they started to receive public funding. With that, though, came a loss of control and we are now seeing a significant consequent problem.
There was also the issue of providing a service for men, and it seems this was a requirement placed on the formerly women-only services in return for funding. In retrospect, that was a mistake, and a separate service would have necessitated a clear definition of women and men.
Trans is about destroying the female sex and commoditising it for private profit. Consider Monsanto which, before it became BASF, tried (failed) to own the genetic code for wheat in India. Trans is the invisible hand funded by Martine Rothblatt, Stryker Corporation and a myriad feminising clinics that will one day become Tyrell Corporation. Female reproduction biology must be destroyed and denied for trans humanism to flourish. Rape and brutalising of women is necessary to achieve ownership of the human genetic code. People can’t be trusted to reproduce unless they pay. Tran whatever that means isn’t what the Trans suckers think it is, they’re just the eugenisist’s tool…..
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-york-proposition-one-parents-rights
It’s impossible to understand how this started never mind was allowed to continue.