Mick Hartley

Joan Smith has a comprehensive piece at Quillette on Mridul Wadhwa and the Edinbugh Rape Crisis Centre. It's basically, I suppose, aimed at Australian/Canadian readers who may not be familiar with a saga which should be well-known by now to UK readers, but it provides a useful overview of the whole wretched business. Gaslighting Scottish Rape Victims in the Name of ‘Trans Inclusion’:

Few countries have surrendered so completely to the maximalist demands of transgender activists as Scotland, where two former First Ministers, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf, both recently had their careers cut short after they supported unpopular legislation permitting men to self-identify as women. And yet, even in Scotland, the latest example of men taking over women’s spaces has left jaws hanging open.

You might think that one of the United Kingdom’s most venerable rape-crisis centres, founded almost half a century ago, would be safe from the incursions of trans-identified men. But the social-service sector in Scotland has been captured by gender activists just as thoroughly as the country’s political class—as illustrated by a bizarre sequence of events that ended in court last month, when someone who accessed support services at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) was exposed as a sexual predator.

Naturally, both principal characters here are biological men. One is Cameron Downing, a 24-year-old “non-binary” former drama student and onetime darling of the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP), who was able to attend the ERCC for several months even as he was abusing half a dozen men and women.

The other is Mridul Wadhwa, a trans-identified man who was hired as the centre’s CEO in 2021, and who then went on a campaign to punish a female counsellor on his staff named Roz Adams, who’d suggested that perhaps rape victims visiting the centre were entitled to know the biological sex of the staff members they were talking to. In May, an employment tribunal ruled in Adams’ favour, denouncing Wadhwa and the rest of the ERCC’s management for conducting a “heresy hunt” aimed at anyone who questioned trans-activist shibboleths. This would be a scandal even if the ERCC didn’t receive generous funding from a long list of public entities….