Why a number of women are quite angry
Sister Outrider on the Rape Crisis Scotland issue:
Very troubling indeed.
And we know why RCS is doing it, of course – we know it is Forbidden to acknowledge that trans women are men, and Mandatory to say that being “inclusive” of trans women is identical to providing women-only services. We know that, but we think RCS has to do better than that, because they’re there for rape victims, not for men who identify as women. Some rape victims are male, for sure, but rape victims who are female need genuine women-only services and RCS should put that need first and men’s need to be “validated” as women not second but nowhere at all. That purported need is irrelevant to female rape victims.
Indeed.
Particularly when one “side” of the balance thinks its “needs and interests” far outweigh the needs and safety of the women for these services were ostensibly established in the first place.
Rape crisis centres are in danger of becoming magnets for predatory TiMs the way that thepriesthood and Scouting have been magnets for paedophiles.
Once again, I’m sure we’re all familiar with the “Schrödinger’s Rapist”* analogy, but to recapitulate: Women afraid of being raped are constantly engaged in a quasi-Bayesian analysis and assessing men’s behavior for cues to update their priors (which are never zero). E.g. if a woman on the subway is signaling that she just wants to be left alone (reading, texting, having earphones on, avoiding eye-contact, showing no interest, answering in monosyllabic words etc.), and in spite of this you still insist on starting up a conversation, you are revealing something very important about yourself: That her boundaries don’t matter to you; That what she may or may not want is not going to stop you from going after what you want. In the Bayesian analysis you just became a bigger threat.
By that same logic, if TIMs insist on entering into the toilets, changing rooms etc. of women who don’t want them there, that is a major red flag in itself and an extra reason for concern. But it takes a special kind of entitlement and psychopathic disregard for other people’s boundaries to force yourself on women who have already been raped and are seeking help for their trauma. To use a metaphor from my workplace (I work at the operation center of a power company) this is the equivalent of the alarm sounding, the red and the yellow lamp lighting up at the same time, and error messages pouring in faster than you’re able to acknowledge them.
* A terrible metaphor, I know.
Nicely put. And particularly particularly when services like these are always under constant threat from whataboutmenary anyway even without factoring in the gender identity extremist nonsense. I like to think of the comments in our local paper as a triple-distilation of everything that’s wrong with the world. Every single time rape or domestic violence or violence against women and girls is mentioned in the paper, they fly into overdrive mansplaining that men suffer from domestic abuse too, citing long-debunked studies, demanding that there be shelters for men too (without being prepared to help start or fund one) and so on. And I think I – and the long-suffering mrs latsot – are the only people for forty miles who have even heard the word “trans.”
Bjarte, you are exactly right about boundaries. The right of women to set their own boundaries is precisely what’s at stake here, and what an uninformed majority are happily frittering away. When I say things like that on Twitter (which is just my local paper’s comments section but with more people and a Dark Mode) people hit the roof. The problem really is that men don’t want women to be able to set their own boundaries.
Reading through this post again, I’m again amazed by the lack of adulthood in the room. I’m amazed by it every single day, but I never seem to run out of amazement.
Same here. It’s like a magical well in a fairy story.