For some survivors
The BBC has belatedly managed to find its glasses long enough to report on the ERCC ruling.
A woman who worked at a rape crisis centre was unfairly constructively dismissed for believing that those using the service should be able to know the sex of staff, a tribunal has found. It also found that Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre had unlawfully discriminated against Roz Adams, saying that management had conducted a “heresy hunt” against her.
…
Sandy Brindley, chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland, said “We believe that it is important that survivors can make informed choices about the services they can access at rape crisis centres. We know it is important for some survivors to have a choice over the sex or gender of their worker.”
Some?? Come on. It’s pretty much all. Why would a woman ever want to talk to a man she doesn’t know about her being raped?
The judgment said that the centre’s chief executive officer Mridul Wadhwa, who is a trans woman, appeared to believe that Ms Adams was transphobic. It said that Ms Wadhwa was “the invisible hand behind everything that had taken place.”
And you know…Wadhwa was known to be a horror show before all this. Inevitably, given the contempt for women it took for him to seek and accept the job. It was an insult and an act of sadism toward women all along to put him in that job.
The judge said the disciplinary process used against Ms Adams was “reminiscent of the work of Franz Kafka” – the 20th Century writer whose works are often characterised by nightmarish and confusing situations. The tribunal found that Ms Adams resigned as she “could have absolutely no confidence going forward that the respondents would comply with their obligation of trust and confidence towards her.”
Apart from that it was a lovely place to work.
A couple of things that struck me about the ruling (well, more the factual background laid out than the ruling itself):
1. How incredibly mild Adams’ “heresy” was. She wasn’t a “terf,” she wasn’t refusing to use people’s preferred names and pronouns, etc. Basically, a victim asked whether the person referred to as “AB” — who was using a male-sounding name and had recently declared themselves nonbinary — was a man. Adams merely forwarded the request to her superiors with her suggested response and requested guidance, then expressed reservations about giving her superiors’ proposed response that the center doesn’t employ men because, aside from the whole question of whether one considers the CEO to be a man, some nonbinary people claim to have at least a partial male identity.
2. The insufferable pomposity of AB. This is someone who works in a place which relies on a specific statutory exemption to sex discrimination laws, meaning that it can and does reserve certain positions for women only, and acknowledges that victims may want to work with someone of a particular gender. AB then announces to the team that they are nonbinary and will be using a male-sounding name going forward. When this predictably leads to a confused inquiry from a victim about whether AB is a man, AB responds to Adams’ quite gentle and polite discussion with a declaration that AB has been “humiliated” and cannot interact with Adams any more. There’s a strong implication in the judgment that AB was probably advised by the CEO to react this way to create a pretext for going after Adams, but even if AB’s professed reaction was genuine, it’s so pathetic. I’m nonbinary and it’s very important that you all know and acknowledge that. Oh, a rape victim is confused and thinks that I might be a man because I’m using a man’s name and presenting ambiguously? Fuck them, and fuck you for being concerned about it. I’m humiliated that you even raised the question!
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What the judge said was actually more specific:
Good report on the case by an academic lawyer: