I wrote last week about why it’s necessary to keep all men out of spaces that are supposed to be for women only. I ended, on the subject of women traumatised by male violence:
Obviously it’s not acceptable to say to such women “You can’t have any single-sex spaces”. But is it better to say “You can have single-sex spaces, mostly. Don’t worry: we’ll only let men use them if they look so much like women that you won’t be able to tell that they’re men.”
Think about that. Think about its power to undermine the certainty of an already traumatised woman that the woman she is dealing with at any given moment is truly a woman. If you’re not shocked by the sadistic, gas-lighting cruelty of that, you’re not doing the thinking bit right. Think harder. Think about it until you are shocked.
I had put a hypothetical scenario of this kind when I was cross-examining a member of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre’s board in Adams v ERCC last January. The witness agreed agreed that this was perfectly plausible:
A Muslim woman who does not have mother tongue English, who is a rape survivor, makes an appointment to see a support worker and she is assigned to Mridul. She is told all the support workers are women and she may presently find herself alone in a room talking about her sexual trauma to Mridul Wadhwa.
The witness gave clear, definite evidence that although she believed that it was Wadhwa’s practice to disclose at the first interview with a service user that he was a “trans woman”, so far as the ERCC board was concerned, he had no obligation to do so. It was perfectly legitimate for him to counsel a rape victim over a number of sessions without disclosing his true sex.
The point of my question was to demonstrate to the tribunal that the version of gender identity theory to which ERCC was signed up was so extreme that its witnesses would see nothing wrong with this situation if it should arise. The witness obliged.
At the time that I put that question, I had no reason to believe that anything like this had ever actually happened in a rape crisis centre in the UK. Shockingly, I know better now.
Since the hearing in Adams, I have had disclosed to me the testimony of a woman who sought counselling at a rape crisis centre. She was given one to one counselling with a counsellor who presented as female and referred to himself as a woman. The service-user continued to believe that her counsellor was a woman throughout all her counselling sessions until the last. In the last few minutes of the final session, the counsellor referred to himself as a “trans woman”. The service-user understood only then that she had over a series of sessions over several weeks been meeting a man, one to one in a private room, and confiding in him about her sexual trauma.
I am not a journalist, and I cannot independently verify this story. But I find it wholly credible, particularly in light of the evidence that was given in Adams, and I have no reason to doubt that it is true.