Mick Hartley

Jo Bartosch at The Critic, on the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) and the Mridul Wadhwa affair that I posted on yesterday.

A plea to the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the appointment of Wadhwa to a female-only post was dismissed on grounds of lack of resources. Today, ERCC is advertising a post for a chief operating officer. In the blurb ERCC refer to the single-sex exemption in the Equality Act 2010 explaining “only women need apply”, before adding that as a “diverse organisation”, applications from “trans women” (i.e. males) are “especially welcome”. It is entirely possible that the upper echelons of the “women’s sector” in Scotland could soon be filled by men.

Wadhwa, remember, said that some women who approached the ERCC – traumatised after suffering sexual violence – were bigoted and needed to confront their prejudices (on the matter of transwomen) before the healing could begin. Therapy, he said, is political.

Wadhwa’s words have highlighted a growing fracture between a “professional” class of feminist (those who are paid to run services to support victims of male violence) and grassroots feminists (many of whom have been service-users). It is telling that the professional class of feminist prioritises the feelings of their peers above the fears of those they are paid to support.

The activist group Women and Girls in Scotland (WGS) have been researching which organisations offer survivors single-sex services. In 2019 WGS, which is run solely by volunteers, researched and produced a report entitled Female Only Provision: A Women and Girls in Scotland Report which they shared with RCS “in the hope this might help them understand the kinds of reasons women are self-excluding from their services”. 

WGS claimed on Twitter that RCS “refused to provide any statement at national level to clarify whether its network of providers can offer their services on a female-only basis where women need it. It is because of this failure, and because it’s preventing women from accessing potentially life-saving support, that we decided to contact RCS’ network, and other providers, for the purposes of clarifying where women can access female-only services they need.”

On 9 August WGS tweeted a list of organisations that it had been in touch with, confirming which were genuinely single-sex and which included men.

This drew a furious response from Rape Crisis Scotland, which released a statement condemning what it described as “coordinated and harmful claims circulating about Rape Crisis services in Scotland, stemming from a Twitter thread that questioned the provision of women-only spaces in Rape Crisis Centres”.

In a stunning reversal, the professional feminist class at RCS claimed to be under attack from survivors of rape. Other government-funded groups including Engender leapt to their defence, effectively dismissing those asking questions as trolls….

While preparing to write this piece, I turned to social media to ask for survivors of sexual violence in Scotland to get in touch. Within minutes I had deleted my tweet because I was overwhelmed; women in direct messages and emails wanted to tell me their stories, to share with me why it mattered to have women-only spaces. Their experiences differed in the detail, but the fear they expressed was the same. These women, survivors of male sexual violence, told me they felt betrayed by RCS; they were angry at being made to feel powerless once again, this time by the very organisation charged with their protection. The most bitter blow for some was how the paid professional feminist class had tried to recast themselves as the victims.

I shall leave the final words to Amanda: “Therapy is not political, and it isn’t bigoted to need a female only space.”

It's strange that rape crisis centres feature so prominently in the history of trans activism. Remember the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, where a decision to operate a woman-only environment resulted in violent demonstrations, graffiti ( ‘Kill TERFs,’ ‘Fuck TERFs,’ ‘TERFs go home, you are not welcome,’), dead animals nailed to doors, and the eventual cancellation of the Shelter's funding from the city council? You'd think that trans activists, however keen to push their "trans women are women" agenda, would draw back at rape centres. It's where traumatised women clearly need a space free from men, and even if you might object from the point of view of your trans ideology, surely you'd pull back on this one simply out of a sense of decency. Rape centres and women's refuges are, you'd think, not the battlegrounds you should be choosing. Yet they do.

Perhaps the answer lied with Wadhwa's comment that "some of us never, ever had a life before traumatic incidents". In other words, apart from the sheer contempt for women's experience this demonstrates, there's the point the activists never give up stressing: that trans people suffer like no other group has ever suffered before. Rape crisis centres are a clear challenge to that claim, so they need to be confronted: they need to be politicised.