Until that day in her rape support group, Sarah had little interest in arguments about gender ideology. “You’d have to be living under a rock to not know discussions were happening online and in the media, but I wasn’t that involved. If pushed, I’d have described myself as an ally. I marched at Trans Pride and thought of trans women as my sisters. But I assumed there was respect for rape crisis groups and no one would try to cross that boundary. It seems quite naïve now,” she says.
When Sarah researched Survivors’ Network’s peer support group she discovered it was trans inclusive. She asked an assessor whether the group she would be attending was female-only and the assessor hesitated before saying yes, it was, so she was left unsure what to expect. “When I started at the group, it was all-female, so I then assumed that Survivors’ Network had a group for women and a group for trans women, and that’s how they were able to be inclusive but also treat women. That’s partly why I was so taken aback to see a man in the group two months later,” she says. The “man” was a self-identified trans woman, but, Sarah says, there was no indication that they were socially or medically transitioning — they looked simply like a man.
The reaction to Sarah’s case has been “enormously eye-opening”, she says: “The levels of anger and vitriol against me, all because I asked for a single-sex rape support group. I just don’t understand it.” To see so many women online empathise more with the trans person’s possible sense of exclusion than with her trauma felt, Sarah says, like when her female friends refused to believe that their male friend had raped her because they liked him. So many women care more about the feelings of men than the needs of other women.
Arguments over single-sex spaces have raged over the past decade as gender ideology —which argues that a person’s gender identity, which is how they feel inside, is at least as significant as their biological sex — has taken hold. Over the past few months, sports organisations, including World Rugby and FINA, the International Swimming Federation, have banned trans women from competing against female athletes, after years of protests from feminist campaigners and multiple women athletes. But sport takes place in public, meaning outsiders can see that women are at an obvious physical disadvantage against people who have gone through male puberty. The issue is easier to ignore when it comes to prisons (where trans women can be incarcerated with female prisoners) and rape services, as they aren’t under any kind of public spotlight, and people tend to have less interest in female prisoners and rape victims than in elite athletes.
Since Sarah launched her case, Survivors’ Network have doubled down on their stance and in April they co-wrote an open letter to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission criticising them for saying that single-sex spaces are lawful. Survivors’ Network wrote that it is “very unusual for cis service users to object to trans women joining a support group”; the EHRC, they say, “frames the needs of cis women as more important than the support needs of trans people”.
Gender activists claim that trans people are the most oppressed minority in the world, therefore women’s spaces need to include them, and any woman who objects is putting trans people at risk. It is true there are high rates of violence against trans women in Central, South America and North America, especially among trans sex workers. In the UK, it’s a very different story. The ONS says the sample size of people who identified as transgender and were victims of sexual offences is too “insufficient” to record; Channel 4 News has said that, on average, one trans person was murdered a year in the UK between 2008 and 2017. By contrast, a woman in this country is murdered by a man every two days and one in four women is sexually assaulted as an adult. The perpetrator is invariably male, because 98% of sex offenders are male. Multiple studies have shown that patterns of offending do not change just because the male person has transitioned their gender. So while certainly not all trans women are predators, just as not all men are predators, they are far more likely to commit a violent crime than women, just as men are.
Last August, Mridul Wadhwa, the head of one of Scotland’s biggest rape crisis centres who is herself transgender, said that any victims of rape who were fearful of transgender women in women’s organisations needed to “reframe your trauma”: “If you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature, we will begin to work with you on your journey of recovery from trauma, but please expect to be challenged on your prejudices,” she said.
I ask what Sarah thinks of Wadhwa’s argument. “I was abused by a man, I was raped by a man. I think it’s quite a healthy response to be wary of men, and to not assume they always have the best of intentions, because I made that mistake. I think that should be encouraged by rape crisis centres, rather than them telling us to take down our boundaries and ignore our instincts. It feels like an inconvenience to Survivors’ Network that lots of women have PTSD caused by men, so therefore don’t want to talk about it with men.”
In an article last month, a woman called Janey Starling, who says she “supports survivors of domestic abuse”, wrote a piece titled “Why Trans Women Belong in Women’s Spaces”, in which she compared abused women’s fear of males to anti-black racism. I ask Sarah about this commonly cited argument. “Black people don’t commit over 90% of sex crimes. No race does. But males do,” she says.
But gender activists would say that trans people are so marginalised that it doesn’t matter that they’re male: women should accommodate them. “I’m sure they are marginalised in some places, but where I live there are ten organisations with dedicated groups for the wellbeing of trans women, and none just for women. So I wouldn’t say they’re marginalised here,” she says.
It took a long time for Sarah to stop denying to herself that she had been raped, and even longer to understand what had happened to her as a child. “But when I understood that, I started to think, oh, maybe I can trust my instincts, maybe I do know when something isn’t right, because I’d suppressed that for so long.”
She has also started to understand how her experiences have affected her psychologically in the long term. “I didn’t know that, as a woman, I could say no, which sounds really stupid, but I didn’t know I had options. I thought sex was something that was done to you and that part of life as a woman was to make males feel included, because they’re the priority,” she says.
That day in her rape support group — her last day, it turned out — she realised none of this was true: she could say no. “This isn’t about money for me — I don’t care about the money. I just want a change of policy and for there to be female-only services, without taking away the mixed-sex services. Since I launched my case I’ve heard from so many women who say they stopped going to their groups for the same reason, but they didn’t want to say anything, and I thought about doing that — just going away and staying quiet. But I couldn’t do that anymore. It’s enough.”
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