Reframe your trauma
The CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis, you may recall, is a man. From the Glinner Update May 5:
Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre has just appointed its new CEO. He’s a man.
But “she” is a man.
Mridul Wadhwa is a trans-identified male. He has no gender recognition certificate so, not only is he biologically male, he’s also legally male.
He was formerly the manager of Forth Valley Rape Crisis Centre, a job he appears to have secured by lying about his sex.
Now he’s telling women how they get to react to their own rapes.
The 56 there is 56 minutes, not seconds, so if you want to hear Wadhwa complaining about mostly cis women seeking rape services that starts at almost an hour in. Yes he really does say that.
The part where he talks about women who show up at the Rape Crisis centre with “prejudices” i.e. who see men as men starts at 1:12:30. At 1:13:56 he says “sexual violence happens to bigoted people as well.” He goes on to tell such women to expect to be challenged.
Great situation here. Women who’ve been raped go to the Edinburgh Rape Crisis centre where the male CEO has made it policy to “challenge” them if they stray from male-centered trans orthodoxy.
How do they know? Is there a political questionnaire that must be filled out to receive services after being raped (by a man)?
What form does this “challenge” take. What “reframing” of trauma are they talking about?
Completely unsurprising, however. An “I told you so” moment when you appoint a man as CEO of For Women Scotland.
Presumably by demanding that a rape victim answer a whole set of unnecessary and totally unrelated questions such “Are you a fucking TERF?” or “Are trans women women, period?” before they get any help. Or maybe by demanding that they bare their souls and trauma about being raped with councillors who are very obviously male, and then calling them TERF bigot scum when they ask for a female councillor?
Getting them to accept that being raped isn’t nearly as bad as being dead named or refused access to a toilet space where you can discuss tampon use with tween girls.
Quite how the funders and woman running a rape crisis organisation so completely decided to make themselves an unsafe space for 99% of their clients I really don’t understand.
And here we have a member of Bob’s “harmless minority” saying out loud that rape victims should be further victimised if they refuse to say the magic words, thereby threatening material harm to people over a point of ideology. I would not call that harmless, myself.
It’s also horribly short-sighted and counterproductive to both the mitigation of sexual assault and the broader acceptance of trans people. What do these people *think* will happen when large numbers of rape victims are shamed and bullied into saying things they don’t believe, or are turfed out of rape crisis shelters when they refuse to do so? Because eliciting sympathy for trans people is going to be quite low on the list of probable outcomes, as a sheer matter of practicality.
But it earns woke points on Twitter for a few hours, so it is worth it in the social game these people are playing.