Mick Hartley

We heard about Mridul Wadhwa back in May, when he was appointed Chief Executive at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. Wadhwa is a transwoman who'd previously worked as manager at Forth Valley and Stirling Rape Crisis Centre – a position he obtained, despite a supposedly all-women shortlist, by concealing his biological sex. But no matter: these things seem to happen now in Scotland, and to point out that perhaps a biological male was not the best person to run a rape crisis centre would open you up to a charge of transphobia.

Now Wadhwa has been interviewed at Guilty Feminist by a fawning Deborah Frances-White, and addresses the question of women who've been raped coming along to the crisis centre and expecting to be seen by a biological woman. Frankly, they're bigots, and need to be educated.

"But 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 also expect to be challenged on your prejudices, because how can you heal from trauma and build a new relationship with your trauma, because you can't forget, and you can't go back to life before traumatic incident or traumatic incidents. And some of us never, ever had a life before traumatic incidents. But if you have to reframe your trauma, I think it is important as part of that reframing, having a more positive relationship with it, where it becomes a story that empowers you and allows you to go and do other more beautiful things with your life, you also have to rethink your relationship with prejudice. Otherwise, you can't really, in my view, recover from trauma and I think that's a very important message that I am often discussing with my colleagues that in various places. Because you know, to me, therapy is political, and it isn’t always seen as that."

So Wadhwa is using his position to push his trans agenda: the only way you can overcome the trauma of your rape is to "reframe your trauma" by rethinking your relationship with prejudice, and by accepting trans dogma. Because, to him, "therapy is political".

Not surprisingly, this hasn't gone down too well. With For Women Scotland, for instance:

 A podcast interviewing the CEO of a rape centre becomes an exercise in proving that the person in charge of the centre is a more vulnerable person than the women accessing the service….

Wadhwa’s statement quoted in the opening paragraph has distressed many women who are survivors of violence. The “bigots” Wadhwa identifies are women who want female only spaces in rape or domestic violence shelter and female only counselling. In a series of bizarre and insulting arguments, Wadhwa claims that women shouldn’t be concerned about male people in supposedly female spaces because we already operate in “a man’s world” and, outlandishly seems to suggest that because a planning officer or a finance minister might be male, women have no excuse to resist the presence of men in spaces specifically designed to protect women at an extreme moment: “my argument is that men are already in these women’s spaces, like, for example, a Rape Crisis Centre or a Women’s Aid, because who is making the decisions about how much money we get. About who you know, who gives us planning permission, it is not women alone.”

It also concerned those with a background in counselling and mental health who wondered about the professional qualifications of one who apparently failed to understand that therapy must be non-judgemental. They also worried Wadhwa had reinvented or misunderstood the concept of “reframing trauma” which is supposed to enable a survivor to understand their natural response to attack and “reframe” any residual guilt they might feel in not having fought off the attacker or for having frozen. It is not supposed to be a vehicle for re-education or for making victims think they carry “prejudice” as suggested in the opening extract.

It's a man telling women who've been raped not only that he, as a transwoman, has suffered more than they – "some of us never, ever had a life before traumatic incidents" – but that they need to accept his political understanding before they can learn to heal. "Therapy is political".

It's extraordinary. How on earth did we get to this point?