“By a trans activist”
The Times also (along with the BBC) reports on the Rape Crisis Scotland outrage in a cautious timid obfuscating way.
Rape Crisis Scotland boss apologises for Edinburgh centre failings
What failings were those then?
Subhead:
A review had heavily criticised the support service run by a trans activist, which failed to provide women-only spaces for 16 months
The issue was and is not the “trans activist” part; the issue was and is that he’s a man.
Why do they refuse to say this up front? If even the Times and the Telegraph won’t say it how can we expect the Guardian and the Beeb to say it?
The lede:
Sandy Brindley, the chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, has apologised “unreservedly” to abuse survivors damaged by a support service in Edinburgh run by a trans woman accused of harassing staff with gender-critical views.
Still not good enough. We know what that means but not everyone pays close attention to the issue, so saying “run by a trans woman” is not clear enough. It’s their job to make it clear enough.
Brindley also insisted that services offered around the country must provide “women-only” spaces.
She was speaking after Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre was heavily criticised in a review and Mridul Wadhwa, its former chief executive, was found to have “failed to set professional standards of behaviour” and not understood “the limits on her role’s authority”.
Under Wadhwa, the Edinburgh centre failed to provide women-only spaces for 16 months.
Now there the Times befuddles the low-information reader all over again. The Times fails to spell out that Wadhwa is a man, and calls him “her” inside unattributed quotation marks. If you don’t already know Wadhwa is a man, you won’t learn it from this reporting.
She told the BBC that while there was no reason why transgender people should not work in rape crisis centres, the services must provide women-only spaces.
She reiterated that Rape Crisis Scotland, the umbrella organisation for 17 local centres, had no active hand in Wadhwa’s appointment but said there had been “no reason” not to agree to it, because Wadhwa had significant experience of working in the sector.
She should be booted out and never allowed to work in a rape crisis anything ever again.
Brindley said she “absolutely recognised” that women-only spaces were a priority for many women using rape support services. Critics, however, highlighted that Brindley had failed to define what constitutes a woman.
As does the Times in much of this very story. The obfuscation creeps in everywhere.
If he were a man who acknowledged that he is a man, and who understood the importance of providing female counselors and having women-only spaces and providing a women-only service, and who had the good sense to work as an administrator and not be directly involved in the services, I think he would be at least adequate. Were he instead a woman, a “she”, but she was fully captured by transgender ideology, and she fought to include trans-identified males as counselors, and she rejected clients who complained, and she fired staff who made any mention of the actual sex of counselors – in short, if “she” did most of the things “he” actually did – I think she would be awful.
So I do think it is of major importance that the (former) director is a trans activist. He shouldn’t have been hired for a job that was expressly female-only, but what he did in that job was terrible. I think the subhead was reasonable, in this case.
But “male” should have been included, at least.
I don’t think I agree about the man as administrator. He might be able to do an adequate job, but the messaging would still be off-putting if not outright insulting. It seems to me one doesn’t want a gentile as director of a Holocaust museum or a whitey as director of a museum of enslavement or a gaijin as director of a museum of Japanese internment. Museums aren’t the same thing as rape clinics, but…
I’m not sold on that, either. It is helpful to have someone from the right demographic group, but one really wants someone who is an expert in the appropriate area, and has the requisite skills. Ideally that can be found in someone with the right demographic characteristics, and usually that’s the case, but a terrible candidate with the right demographic characteristics does not work out better than an excellent candidate of the wrong demographic group. If a candidate is terrible, the fact that the candidate is terrible should be important.
If Wadhwa had done an excellent job, and was being pushed out for being male, or for lying about his sex, that would be reasonable. That’s the kind of thing that happened to Rachel Dolezal. But Wadhwa was pushed out for promoting trans ideology and punishing women, thus doing a terrible job, and also for being male in a job that was supposed to be open only to women.
I agree, that makes sense. They could easily have noted both things.
Yes, one wants someone who is an expert in the appropriate area, and has the requisite skills, but one also wants someone who is part of the group affected. Expertise for this particular kind of museum is necessary but not sufficient.
I don’t think that’s a terribly loony or touchy-feely claim. I think it’s just…what to call it…acknowledgement of human feeling. People who haven’t had it done to them don’t feel it the way people who have had it done to them do.