Her “beliefs”
Behold – a piece of good news on this day of horror. Roz Adams wins £70,000 and a public apology from Edinburgh Bully Rape Victims Centre.
A trauma specialist has been awarded almost £70,000 and won a public apology from the rape crisis charity who forced her out of her job in a row over women-only spaces.
The payment to Roz Adams was twice the anticipated figure and came after a tribunal found she was the victim of a “heresy hunt” at Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC), where her “sex realist” beliefs were at odds with those of Mridul Wadhwa, the trans activist who was the centre’s chief executive.
The trans activist and man.
Adams suffered harassment after she stood up for a female victim who wanted assurances she would receive counselling from a woman, with Wadhwa identified as the “invisible hand” behind the counsellor’s persecution.
For 16 months under Wadhwa, who identifies as a trans woman but has no gender recognition certificate, the ERCC had no women-only spaces. Referrals to the centre have been paused while its safeguarding procedures are revamped.
Honestly the fact that Wadhwa has no gender recognition certificate is really beside the point. I know it’s not beside the point legally, but in terms of reality, it is. You can’t change sexes with a certificate. You can’t do it at all, and claiming to be able to do it with a certificate is like claiming you can do it with a paper clip or a bottle-opener or a tablespoon of baking soda.
At an earlier redress hearing, Adams argued that Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS), the umbrella organisation for 17 centres across Scotland, was at fault for failing to have a clear definition of “woman”. She urged the tribunal to make a ruling that would affect centres nationally.
McFatridge declined to make a ruling with wider implications. He said: “It is clear … that this is an area where people hold strong beliefs and individuals on both sides of the argument hold strong views that the other side are wrong or misguided or indeed that these opposing beliefs are dangerous.”
Well, yes, but that seems beside the point. Legally speaking maybe it’s not, but ontologically speaking it is. People can hold strong views about anything, and they can simply be wrong, including obviously blatantly undeniably wrong. People who think what sex a person is is a matter of self-declaration as opposed to a brute fact are just wrong. It doesn’t matter how strong their belief is, it matters how well it maps onto the reality.
Strength of belief surely just can’t be a criterion in law, can it? When humans are notoriously able to believe any damn thing they feel like believing?
Same thing was said about the election. Someone showing a clip that claimed, not wrongly, that both sides of the presidential ticket had supporters that said it would be the end of democracy if their candidate lost.
Problem is, in most of these false equivalencies, one side actually has a good case to make. Both sides now is a bad argument; you need to do hard work to show that both sides are equally deluded.
[Strength of belief surely just can’t be a criterion in law, can it? When humans are notoriously able to believe any damn thing they feel like believing?]
Not only that, how would you actually know the strength of a belief? How do you tell whether someone actually believes in something, and how strongly so?
That said, we do have regulations based on strength of belief. For instance, even if you assiduously wear a hijab whenever you’re in public, you can’t have it on your passport photo if you’re an atheist.
Mosnae, there have been cases decided in the courts based on ‘sincerity of belief’, which I suspect they are using the same way as ‘strength of belief’. It’s always in religious cases, which puts the court in the position of having to determine if a person’s belief is truly sincere. They often are also called on to decide whether a religion is ‘legitimate’. None of these should have any bearing on the law. There might be some role in cases where, say, a person sincerely believes the person he/she murdered was possessed by Satan; if the belief is sincere, they might need to be sent for mental health treatment instead of prison. Even there, it’s a difficult problem for one person to assess the strength (sincerity) of another person’s beliefs.