Some luxury “cis privilege” benefits package
Victoria Smith nails everything, as she always does.
ERCC’s former chief executive officer, Mridul Wadhwa, has now resigned after being accused of “not understand[ing] the limits of her role” and “fail[ing] to set professional standards of behaviour”.
That is putting it mildly. The problem here is not one of disorganisation or managerial overreach. As anyone who followed the tribunal of former ERCC caseworker Roz Adams will know, it is one of deliberate sabotage. It is not that the need for women-only spaces somehow fell off Wadhwa’s radar. It’s more that Wadhwa — a trans-identified male who does not have a Gender Recognition Certificate — did not approve of the kind of survivor who requests them.
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There is nothing about the damage Wadhwa has done to ERCC that could not have been predicted several years ago. The tragedy is that plenty of those who enabled the sabotage still claim to be feminists. For women such as Nicola Sturgeon, Mhairi Black and Shona Robison, trans activism’s infiltration of the women’s movement provided the ideal way to prove how forward-thinking and progressive they were. There is, after all, more status in claiming to be a trans ally than in aligning yourself with the women of the past, those drudges who built up the very things that you are now free to trash.
Feminism – the real kind – is so last year, last decade, last century. It’s boring. It’s respectable. It’s old. Where’s the fun in that? And if feminism isn’t fun, well, it can go fuck itself. It becomes just another tedious whiny clueless mommy-figure telling you to clean up your room.
For this is a story of letting a thing be wrecked because you think so little of those who created it. Reading the past few years’ discourse on female-only spaces and inclusion, one could be forgiven for thinking women were handed rape crisis centres as part of some luxury “cis privilege” benefits package. The truth is that they fought for them. It is shameful that such a small thing — not the end of rape, nor even a meaningful reduction in rape, merely the resources to support women in its aftermath — should have had to be fought for at all.
Well when you put it that way, yes, so…erm…let’s not put it that way. Let’s just keep saying women are boring.
I think that this is a really good summary of all the crazies on the left today. And, for that matter, the crazies on the right (though they use different rhetoric, don’t tend to talk about “rights” much). The important thing for them is not the human rights of any group or individual, but simply burning everything down.
Calling them childish is pretty spot on. They haven’t come to terms with one of the fundamental lessons of adulthood: you can’t have everything. Sometimes one thing precludes another. If you want women’s rights, you can’t have the TQ+. If you want the TQ+, you can’t have women’s rights. Once you commit to one, you forever cut yourself off from the other, and this won’t change no matter how much you cry and stamp your feet. You can’t resolve the contradiction with more liberty, because it’s not Mommy stopping you from having both; it’s reality.
Victoria Smith is always spot on. I have vague memories of the women’s movement in the 70s setting up rape crisis centres and domestic violence shelters with very little money, and a lot of energy and good will. There is some kind of law that something set up by the passionate and committed at great effort will then be taken for granted and used/misused by the next generation. Cf Amnesty International.
It’s like the self-made man who created a business that brought in wealth, and his inheritors then don’t want to hear about the rags for riches struggle, while they become trustafarians like the children in Succession.
They also don’t realize that applies to democracy, too. Too many people think democracy means ‘I get what I want’. It never occurs to them that if more people want something else, they may have to concede gracefully, unless they can persuade the majority to want what they want. There are better ways to do that than barbed wire baseball bats, IMHO.
That has been the task of every successful movement – anti-racism, gay rights, women’s rights – find a way to persuade the majority you are right, or at least that your position is desirable. Then you might get some of what you want. It’s hard work, and for some reason, transwomen act like entitled males who think they shouldn’t have to do hard work, someone else should do it for them. Why is that, I wonder? ;-)
Spot on, iknklast. I’ve been banging on about the corrupting effect of the “you can have/be everything you want” lie but it never occurred to me that it would extend to people’s ideas of how democracy works, but of course it does. Sadly, it seems every few generations need to have basic concepts like democracy explained to them in language they understand since the old lessons may as well be written in Linear A .