Dead animals nailed to the door
Meghan Murphy has more on the activism vandalism against VRR:
On Tuesday, Vancouver Rape Relief & Woman’s Shelter (VRRWS) tweeted images of vandalism left on their storefront — a space used for meetings, events, and support groups. ‘Kill TERFs,’ ‘Fuck TERFs,’ ‘TERFs go home, you are not welcome,’ ‘Transwomen are women,’ and ‘Trans Power’ had been scrawled across the windows and door in black marker. ‘TERF,’ for the blissfully ignorant, is an acronym that stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist.’ This is, of course, a misnomer. Radical feminists are not interested in ‘excluding’ trans-identified people from anything. What they are interested in is protecting certain spaces designated for women and girls.
Not because trans people are trans, but because male people are not female.
VRRWS has been targeted not only with vandalism, but with dead animals nailed to their door and stuffed through their mail slot, on account of their women-only policy. They operate a transition house for women and their children, which aims to protect abused women and help them to heal from horrific violence and sexual assault. To most, it makes sense that a space for extremely vulnerable women escaping male violence would exclude men. For trans activists, it makes sense to disembowel a skunk and string it up by its neck — noose-like — to hang it on the door where victims of rape and domestic abuse will find it and read it as (yet another) violent threat.
I didn’t know about that one.
It’s hard to take sides on this one, but local would-be politician, Morgane Oger, managed to, tweeting:
‘Regrettably but predictably, VRR choosing to ignore Canada’s civil rights laws causes blow-back. I empathize VRR feel threatened by the predictable response to their conduct. As I have previously offered, I am ready to help VRR get out of their mess if they wish to.’
In other words, those bitches deserved it.
Many progressives like Oger have accused the women involved in Vancouver Rape Relief and their supporters of being ‘hateful’. Oger also led a (successful) campaign to end a $30,000 City grant the organization had been receiving for education purposes, claiming their practice of serving women alone and hiring only female counselors discriminated against men. Well, to be specific, men who announce they are women. During a City hearing to determine the continuation of this grant, Oger accused VRRWS of ‘having a history of discrimination against transgender women on the basis of their gender identity or gender expression.’ This is untrue, as services and spaces that are women-only don’t care about a person’s gender identity or gender expression.
Many women don’t do a particularly orthodox gender expression ourselves, after all.
Any person who would go so far as to intimidate and threaten women who stand up for other women in this particularly disturbing way is on the wrong side of politics, never mind history. It is beyond unacceptable that the left is not only remaining silent on these kinds of attacks, but is continuing to fuel them, by claiming it is feminists who are guilty of ‘hate’ and ‘violence,’ not their comrades-in-arms.
Looking at you Peter Tatchell.
Tatchell. Pfft.
But remember what we have all been told – by philosophers! – “TERF” is not a slur. No, it is a neutral descriptor, – neutral, neutral, neutral.
Implausible deniability.
Yes, good thing the vandals didn’t use an actual slur, right?
Yeah. Just like cunt (for the English). Amirite?
I’ll admit that, a few days after the fact, I was a bit choked when the bill arrived for the amount I decided to donate to the VRR the other day,
Not anymore.
Sick of being bullied (in so many arenas these days…), but nevertheless yes am admittedly afraid of the potential actual, physical and professional retaliatory actions of those bullies, so trying to fight back however I can in the safest way I know how :-/
Am I the only one seeing the clear parallels with Charlie Hebdo and the Danish Muhammad cartoons?
Sonderval, I think what we’re seeing is plain and simple fundamentalism – commitment to a dogma you are prepared to defend at all costs (usually the costs accrue to other people, at least in trans dogma. These are not suicide bombers).
Isn’t it weird that male support services have yet to come under such attack from TRAs…
Ouch! That’s gotta sting.
The link in that phrase of the OP goes to an open letter to an NDP MP Niki Ashton, who had supported Oger in his recent bid for the nomination of a Vancouver riding a month or so ago. It has a long list of Oger’s actions against VRRWS, amongst others.
It quotes federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh:
It then links to Ashton’s, noting her own stance on women’s inequality and saying (which includes this bullet point: Applying gender-based analysis to public policy, especially addressing the needs of marginalized women.
The problem is that while both the statements talk about women and their rights, they also talk about gender which only confuses things and gives TIM opportunists like Oger the opening they need to push their agenda.
Dead rats – really? It’s sad how often people that should know better don’t. Are people so self-absorbed that they can’t fathom the harm they’re inflicting? Or is it that they just don’t care (narcissism does have one great advantage in that the number of viewpoints you have to consider is very manageable). Or is it the danger that admitting that there are other valid points of view the real issue.
So I’ll say it again what should be intuitively obvious – Human rights and trauma care are very different beasts. Polar opposites in many respects. Overcoming prejudice works best when a person ventures out from their safe spaces. Overcoming trauma works best when a person is nestled in the safest possible of spaces.
We understand that sometimes people may need a push to leave those safe havens but not while they’re vulnerable. I think all here sympathize with fact that human rights is about allowing lots of different kinds of people to find and live openly in the safe spaces that work best for them. It’s not (or shouldn’t be) about displacing everyone else’s needs. In a just society these conflicting needs may be hard to balance sometimes. In this as in most things empathy comes in handy. Imaging for even a moment that others may not be in the same place as you can be a big help. Doing that for even a second should alert the activists among us to consider that people in pain may not be up for geopolitical debates or particularly interested in your problems. Activists above all others should understand that the traumatized, like themselves, have no safe spaces. Pushing yours probably won’t work for them. Many victims of trauma have had someone else’s will forced upon them, so insisting on doing it yet again on behalf of your cause isn’t helpful. That’s not advocacy it’s further abuse. The activist, should know better.
Trauma counseling is the opposite of human rights activism – it isn’t about living in a just and balanced society. It’s about starting from the safest of places and hopefully working your way back to a point where you can. Some never do. Stop responding with a knee jerk of, ‘yes but’. Your pain is not their pain. Stop trying to shoehorn your quest into everyone else’s torment. You won’t be accepted as having a valid personal perspective when you’re busy trying to bully others for theirs.
Of course there’s enormous danger in this. If you acknowledge that women who are raped and abused might have different perspectives and needs than yours, where does it stop? It’s a slippery slope. If there are two valid perspectives might there be more? Who knows – you might just have to consider that people born as women might indeed have different safe spaces than yours after all and that calling people TERFs is, well…
Sorry for the rant, but my god, this pisses me off.
Keep ranting, Pliny.
This selfishness of inserting your personal quest into other people’s recovery – and to the detriment of that recovery – is incredible. There’s a mind blindness to it. A trauma center is all about working to aid someone in their time of vulnerability, and the Morganes of the world can think only of the trauma they supposedly experience when people do not universally ratify their self image.