Oger drops a dime on Yaniv
Just a month ago, when the Vancouver City Council voted to withdraw future funding from Vancouver Rape Relief, Morgane Oger was one of those leading the charge.
The defunding is the latest flashpoint in an ongoing struggle between transgender activists and feminist organizations who maintain that female-born and male-born women should remain distinct groups.
One of the figures leading the defunding charge against Vancouver Rape Relief was Morgane Oger, a longstanding transgender advocate and vice president of the B.C. NDP.
In comments before a March 13 city committee meeting, Oger called Vancouver Rape Relief “noncompliant with Canadian law” and guilty of “systematic, consistent misbehaviour.” She also said that it is the last B.C. women’s shelter to continue denying services to the trans community.
Biting hands that feed it:
Tax-funded @VanRapeRelief pushes prejudice in an indignant online rant about discrimination despite a one-year grace period to catch up to Canada's discrimination laws by @CityofVancouver.#vanpoli #inclusion #bcpoli https://t.co/btX2RQo7ZQ— Morgane Oger M.S.M. (@MorganeOgerBC) March 17, 2019
That’s Morgane Oger accusing VRR of “pushing prejudice” because they think men who identify as women are not women in the same sense that women are.
“I can open any organization I want and discriminate against the people I don’t like … but when I start to bring taxpayer funding into this it makes this entire room responsible for my actions,” she said.
That was Oger a month ago, rejoicing at getting educational funding taken away from a women’s anti-rape organization.
Today Oger is talking about something else.
People in marginalized communities are extremely sensitive to the misbehaviour of their own, especially when it reinforces prejudice. The instinct to band together and be unyielding is strong, and I reject the prejudice that surrounds this story. Sometimes we resist exposing difficult conversations to the outside. Jessica Yaniv is forcing such an awful conversation.
None of the allegations I write about today have been proven or ruled on by a court. This article is based entirely on eyewitness accounts, which are always highly subjective.
I wish it wasn’t a transgender person or someone saying they are part of the LGBTQ+ community who has been doing what Jessica Yaniv has reportedly been doing for years – as far back as 2013.
We then get a couple of paragraphs explaining, or insisting, that what one person does must not be seen as saying anything about an identity that one person shares with others. Once we’ve underlined that a few times…
But the things that people have told me Jessica Yaniv has done to them are awful and can’t be swept out of our consciousness. Awful things have been reported and need to be taken seriously.
What things? Oger never says. Maybe that’s for legal reasons; maybe it’s fair enough to issue a warning without going into specifics. On the other hand there are public sources for some of what Yaniv has done, so surely Oger could cite those? There’s not a word about “wax” in the whole piece, when one of Yaniv’s conspicuous little games was calling up women who ran small businesses yanking women’s hairs out so that he could sue them when they politely declined to wax him. Maybe Oger thinks that’s a perfectly fine thing to do.
Some time after that first conversation I learned more about the specifics of Yaniv’s actions and her history and actions. In the only other conversation with her when she called me at my Trans Alliance Society number in early 2019 I advised her that she did not seem to me to be the appropriatd person to fight for trans women’s rights to services for women – on the basis of her documented past history.
With the help of other women who pointed the way in recent months, I tracked down and heard witnesses with first-person accounts of Jessica’s online behaviour spanning 2013 to 2018.
Their stories included reports and evidence of outrageously inappropriate acts, some towards children who are tweens and teens. Some of the material has survived as screenshots, and what I saw shows what strikes me as a pattern of predatory behaviour. I am not in law enforcement or a lawyer but as the mom of kids under 14 I was horrified by what the women told me happened and I believe them.
That’s it. That’s all the information we get. What predatory behavior?
We know what predatory behavior, that is we know some of it. Wanting to show young girls how to insert tampons was one item. No doubt Oger, with inside sources, knows more, but Oger isn’t telling.
I spoke to four women. Three of whom had awful experiences with Jessica Yaniv. All were young women and girls at the time.
They are all adults now. I urged each woman to make a complaint with police on the basis of the things they said happened. I hope this has an effect and with enough police reports there may be a case.
There’s always Vancouver Rape Relief…
That’s about halfway through; almost all of the rest is about saying don’t you dare think of Yaniv as saying anything about other men who identify as women. The concern is all for the trans “community” rather than women and girls.
It was impossible for me to speak about allegations so steeped in transphobia because every transgender person is familiar with the transgender-woman-as-predator model used by hate groups advocating to marginalize us. Without real evidence, this horrible story is simply indistinguishable from the copious hate propaganda that clogs my social media.
People who claim that allegations against Yaniv were public knowledge for years before this post must be deeply frustrated that people who could have helped act were unaware or not listening. I have a simple message for them:
There are ways to bring valid concerns to the attention of the affected community leaders and xenophobic hatred is not the appropriate way to get results. Nobody reached out to anyone I know to express concerns about this person beyond throwing insults and accusations over social media. Next time, instead of passively demonizing people please pick up the phone and call somebody with power or influence.
It’s unlikely public figures are the monsters your social media silo tells you they are. There is no cover under the trans umbrella for predators.
In the future, please consider what these allegations sound like from my community’s side of the fence in the context of our experiences. Perhaps center your fury on the people who prey on transgender women with their alarmist fairy tales that made this incident undetectable from dominantly hateful narrative.
When there is a predator among us, we can’t hear you if you bury your words in hatred and if you don’t reach out.
DARVO much?
Updating to add: now Oger is just plain saying it’s Feminist Current’s fault.
Amy hamm incites hatred against trans women because of who we are. Maybe she didn't get the memo, so I'll say it more explicitly: She and @FeministCurrent enabled Yaniv, creating social cover by inciting repulsive hatred instead of researching the facts and reporting. #DoYourJob https://t.co/orpUBQrLve
— Morgane Oger M.S.M. (@MorganeOgerBC) April 20, 2019
Center your movement on my movement. Center me. Ignore the millions – billions – of women that need help to center those who would erase women.
So people reporting behaviors that had been warned about were ignored because those reports (and the warnings preceding them) were simply brushed aside and ignored, classified as “transphobic hate speech?” Maybe Oger didn’t want to publicize the details of Yaniv’s* actions because they sounded too much like what people had been afraid would happen (predatory men pretending to be women, entering women’s spaces) and didn’t want to hear a confirmatory chorus of “We told you so!”
Turns out that fears of “bathroom stalkers” were not baseless and overblown, and that transwomen predators were not the laughable, imaginary, TERF-ish fever-dream, mythical creatures we were told they were. From the perspective of Yaniv’s victims, the unheeded warnings come too late, as “one” is a much larger number than “zero” and one is one too many. Donning a dress and “identifying” as female does not magically disqualify men from being in the running to be Schrodinger’s rapist. This continued sacrifice of the safety of women and girls on the altar trans identity validation is too steep a price to pay for the mollification of a small group of disproportionately loud extremists.
*I notice Oger is still willing to call Yaniv “she”, so the “no true transwoman” card has yet to be played.
I hate that we live in a world where this obvious fucking psychopath gets away with this shit and still has a halo. This is horror-movie stuff.
WTF do you mean, “When there is a predator among us, we can’t hear you if you bury your words in hatred and if you don’t reach out”? The women DID “reach out” to tell you about this predator. They said, “here is a ‘transgender woman’ predator, right here!” That’s not “burying words in hatred” that’s telling the truth plainly in very simple, clear, understandable words.
You just wanted to pretend it wasn’t real or true, like all the rest of the false, “pretend” narrative. Pretend you’re not male. Pretend real violence is nonexistent. Pretend that mere (and true) words are “actual violence.” Pretend that actual problems are made-up bigotry. Pretend, pretend, pretend. It’s all make-believe, while real, actual women suffer.
Gosh, Oger, Yaniv’s own screenshots have been floating around forever. They paint a pretty clear and consistent portrait of a pedophilic predator.
And we’re supposed to believe you never saw them? And that Meghan Murphy “enabled” Yaniv?
Well put, maddog.
“bury your words in hatred” = referred to a man as a man, criticized his lawsuits against people who could not and would not wax his scrotum, did not refer to his genitals as female, in short committed the horrible crime of “misgendering”. Nothing else matters.
Any criticism of a transwoman, no matter how valid, is an act of transphobia….apparently. Just a couple of days ago it was Giliellsplained to me that McKinnon’s ‘grease fire’ comment was not problematic because…..and here I recommend you suspend all critical thinking……people rarely die in fires these days and besides, as a transwoman and therefore a minority, McKinnon gets to say things that cis people cannot. Oh, and a transwoman wanting people to die in a fire is totes not as bad as a cis man saying that he wouldn’t rape a particular woman*, and anyway it was only a joke and not meant literally.
That last bit was particularly amusing as it was said in the comments on a post of PZ’s about how ‘It was just a joke’ is no excuse for saying shitty things. Obviously only if the person saying shitty things has cis privilege, though.
So, yes, when the thinking is so screwed up that transwomen get a pass for saying the most obnoxious things simply by dint of being trans, and when people are casually labelled as transphobes for objecting to those obnoxious things being said, then of course the very valid criticisms and accusations against Yaniv were bound to be dismissed as mere transphobia.
*Yes, that ‘I wouldn’t even rape you’ was a particularly vile thing to say, but worse than wanting women to die in a grease fire?
Eeesh.
One sentence in particular jumped out at me from Oger’s piece:
That seems to me to be telling. One one level, the claim is true and perfectly anodyne. But there’s a big difference between being a member of a community and claiming to be a member. There’s a big difference between being a woman, or a Jew, or schizophrenic, or trans, or… or… or… and claiming to be any of those things. The claim might be mistaken, or deceitful; and one might be a member of that community (at least in some sense) without claiming it, or without even knowing it.
Oger strikes me as doing something either very silly, or very sly, and that speaks to YNNB’s comment #2 here. Either she’s drawing a meaningful distinction between membership and claims to membership – in which case the door is wide open to a no-true-Scotsman move (because JY was only *claiming* membership); or she’s eliding them, such that members and claimed-members can and should be mentioned in exactly the same breath. Or she might be making both moves at once. Who knows?
Meaning, the trans activists are primed to dismiss all claims of predatory trans people out of hand. I wonder if other groups get to do this… do black people get to dismiss out of hand any accusation of criminality just because the right continually paint them as criminals? No, they are they frank and open that of course there criminals who are black.
Just another special exemption carved out for themselves on a point the left would ordinarily reject.
Re “real trans”, Lily Maynard has an absolutely brilliant two-part essay on this topic at her blog. Here is a link to part two, about kids:
http://lilymaynard.com/what-makes-somebody-real-trans-part-2-kids/
Part one, about adults:
http://lilymaynard.com/what-is-real-trans-part-1-adults/
Well that’s the thing, isn’t it. Being trans is all about claiming to be – there is nothing else. There are no facts or boxes of evidence to consult, it’s just claims all the way down. Two claims, which are in tension with each other – the claim to be trans and the claim to be the sex opposite to one’s body. The mantra “trans women are women” underlines that tension. The two claims can’t both be true, yet we’re ordered to accept that they can on pain of ostracism and violence.
Holms @ 11 – actually there can be fraught disagreements about criminal accusations and the history of racism. See, for a very famous and much discussed example, the OJ Simpson trial. It could be part of why Bill Cosby got away with it so long.
Well that was clarifying. I knew there was something underneath all of this that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. When you put it that way, it’s pretty stark. Oger can’t really criticize Yaniv because they’re in the same boat.
Of course we have to blame her. Haven’t you read the Cluster B Handbook of Gaslighting©?
If you ask a Bee for something you have stepped over a line. We mere props in the Bee’s play don’t get to ask for anything; we get given things if we keep to the script, but actually asking means we don’t deserve it. And, what’s more, we are to blame for not getting it because we had the temerity to ask. Had we not asked, the Bee would – of course – have given it to us because they are magnanimous like that. But by asking about it, we stepped outside the script. It doesn’t matter whether you need more money to spend on food because the prices have gone up, or if you want to ask them to deal with an abuser. The mindset is the same.
So, all Meghan had to do was keep quiet about the abuse, the Ogre would have dealt with the situation, and no-one would have been hurt.
Somehow they never admit that unless someone tells them, they cannot know everything. Because they know everything that there is to know, right? And anyone who says different is lying. They have always known what they needed to do, but they know the Bigger Picture and your meddling has made a mess of things. And now they can’t let you have whatever you needed, because by making a mess of things you are responsible.
TL;DR:
Narcissists cannot abide anyone else saying anything which exposes a weakness, and will shoot the messenger.
The thing is, I have screenshot of MorganeOger supporting JY in filing up to 16 Human Rights complaints against women who would not was his “ladyballs.” MO and JY also share the same business address. I have screenshots of them both defending his right to pursue women who would not touch him. What we have here is MO (and likely the Oger foundation as well), supporting the sexual harassment of women. JY found people who were willing to provide the waxing services he wanted. He continued to seek out people who would refuse him, so he could file complaints. MO defended this online because it furthers MOs efforts to minimize women’s sex based rights in favor of gender identity rights, which conflict. MOs recent disavowal of Yanicv is for optics and damage control. We need to continue to call for MO and The NDP to explain this publicly, and affirm that women’s sex based rights matter as much as gender rights.