Bros before rape victims
Oh good, another man reports on a man in charge of a rape crisis center and the evil women who don’t want men running rape crisis centers. The man reporting is Adam Ramsay at Open Democracy, and the man in charge of the rape crisis center is Mridul Wadhwa. Adam Ramsay just can’t say enough about how evil these women are for objecting to men forcing their way into women’s spaces.
Warning: this piece discusses transphobia.
Warning: this piece is hostile to women.
“It’s only recently that I’ve really stopped looking over my shoulder or not thinking actively that I could be harmed,” Mridul Wadhwa, the [Edinburgh] centre’s director, told us. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think I will be harmed. Even now, I do believe that I will be harmed. I believe it is almost inevitable.”
It’s all about him, you see. It’s not about the women who need the center’s services, it’s about him.
Wadhwa has dedicated the last 14 years of her professional life to supporting women who are victims of sexual violence. But for the last three years, she’s faced torrential abuse including unfounded smears that she’s a sexual predator and numerous threats of violence – all because she is trans.
No. That’s just a straight-up lie. It’s because he’s a man and because he took a job running a rape crisis center. Trans shmans; the point is that he’s a man.
The abuse began in 2019, when Wadhwa was director of the Forth Valley rape crisis centre in Stirling. It intensified in October 2020, when she launched a bid to be an SNP candidate in the 2021 Holyrood elections, and again when she was appointed director of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) in April last year.
Because women think men should not be in charge of rape crisis centers, for reasons that should be obvious.
We get many more paragraphs of bleating about “abuse” of Wadhwa.
One of the main groups leading these attacks is For Women Scotland, whose Twitter account has repeatedly promoted the hashtag #AskRapeCrisisScotland, and stories about Mridul Wadhwa.
…
“I find this misinformation painful to read,” said Mridul Wadhwa. “I see it as the erasure of my womanhood, denying my existence, my privacy and my ability to contribute to society. I say my, but really I mean all trans women. Their dangerous messaging makes all women who provide services in these settings suspect; their messages seek to reinforce stereotypes of what women must look and behave like, and also suggest that employers must share the personal histories of their female staff.”
It’s all about him, you see, and his “womanhood”; the women who need the service are just there to “validate” his “womanhood.”
Adam Ramsay is getting some skeptical responses to his “read my story” tweet.
To put a person with male genitalia in charge of a rape crisis centre (possibly with the occasional bloke in drag as a client) is to head towards putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank.
Wadhwa also accused Graham Linehan of publishing part of his (Wadhwa’s) address online and that it caused all sorts of trouble and distress.
The first part of this is true: Graham did post part of Wadhwa’s address online, I’ve seen it.
That part of the address is:
It’s honesty like this and applying for jobs that are open only to women without informing the organisation that you’re a man which truly qualify Wadhwa to run rape crisis centres.
Innnteresting. Open Democracy just published even more of Wadhwa’s address then, by openly saying he’s ED of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. Edinburgh narrows it down considerably. I’m shocked, shocked.
Oh, this is so cute:
A male is a “woman” if he feels quite certain that he thinks, feels, and acts like no man could think, feel, and act — but women being female is a “stereotype.” That’s not even the pot calling the kettle black. That’s the pot calling the kettle racist.
And, of course, none of those ‘abusive’ comments are published, only the statement that they are abusive and make him fear for his life. JK Rowling has published screenshots of threats. I’m pretty sure For Women Scotland has published actual evidence. “TERFs” publish evidence of death threats, rape threats, and many other kinds of abuse. TAs and trans* only say they were abusive without showing us what they were.
And, yeah, it isn’t stereotyping what a woman must look like to say a woman is an adult human female. I don’t look like Princess Di; Ophelia doesn’t look like me; none of us look like Roseanne. Yet we would accept all of us – different body shapes, different body sizes, etc, as women. And lest I be accused of “white” feminism, yes, Oprah is a woman. Whoopi is a woman. Alfre Woodard is a woman. Serena Williams is a woman. Stacy Abrams is a woman.
It isn’t about what you look like, what you wear, or what you “feel”. Being a woman is a passive thing that you are born with…and for which you are actively targeted a large part of your life, whether you are targeted for being too sexy or not sexy enough, for being too feminine or not feminine enough.
Again, I feel the need to point out that Mridul Wadhwa probably has been accused of being a sexual predator, and threatened with violence, because the human race really has no limit when it comes to finding new ways to be horrible. But I doubt those comments came from For Women Scotland; instead, the article is almost certainly doing the usual hatchet-job where they conflate all the opposing actors into one amorphous blob because they can’t count to three (sides of a debate).
If Mridul Wadhwa went walking around town in dresses and make-up, but wasn’t trying to invade women’s spaces specifically, then the actual bigots would still be incentivized to violence, while FWS wouldn’t give two shits about it all. That’s the difference, and it needs to be shoved into the media’s face until they get it.
Oh, that’s exceedingly rich, coming from a man who insists that raped women are not allowed to look over their shoulders, or to think “actively” that they could be harmed by males, i.e., the people who overwhelmingly commit rapes. No, even in the refuges created precisely for their safety from men, they are now told that they will be hostilely challenged and reeducated for feeling as they do, and to look over their shoulders in fear of male violence.
If he genuinely is fearful of bodily harm coming from an as yet unknown and unidentifiable person, then he should understand that that’s exactly how women feel. The only difference is that women victims of male violence can eliminate half the population as potential perpetrators. He has to be suspicious of everyone; he thinks the harm is “inevitable.” Women only have to fear men. Their harm already was inevitable; it’s not just potential, it already happened.
What a selfish individual. It’s enraging.
And, I hadn’t heard that the ERCC was closed? So women now have nothing? Because a narcissistic man forced his way in? Geez, the whole rape center got raped by a man.
No, it’s not closed; Adam Ramsay used misleading language. The front door is no longer unlocked, and instead people have to push a buzzer to get in. This was done to protect the man running the shelter for raped women.
Quite possibly, yes. But this could also be the usual, willful misconstruction of Schrodinger’s Rapist. “Women have no way of knowing whether any given man is a rapist, so it’s safest to assume that any and all may be potential rapists” is frequently translated as “All trans identified males are rapists” using the Trans Activist Decoder Ring. The same translation is also churned out when the input sentence is “Predatory men will take advantage of Self-ID to gain access to women’s single-sex spaces,” or, “There’s no way to distinguish men who are actually trans from those who are only pretending.” Without an actual quote, I would not trust any claims he makes about communications which might simply be critical, but not actually defamatory or threatening. Trans activism seems to impair the ability to distinguish between these categories of speech.
#5 iknklast:
More proof that they are lying when they claim to be women; because women know how to take screenshots of abuse they’ve received.