The decision by a rape crisis centre to operate a woman-only environment would, you'd think, be an entirely obvious and uncontroversial move. Their aim, after all, is to protect abused women and give them a safe space to heal from violence and sexual assault. Which would mean a space free from men. Even trans activists, surely, would appreciate the thinking here, and - despite their ideological commitment to the belief that men can become women by a simple statement to that effect - realise that this wasn't a good case to get all militant about.
Apparently not. From Meghan Murphy (via):
What kind of person would threaten and harass a rape crisis center? Here in Vancouver, we have the answer: trans activists. While it might sound odd to the uninitiated that those who claim to value ‘inclusivity’ and ‘acceptance’ would also be the same people who nail a dead rat to the door of a transition house for battered women, those of us following the gender identity debate closely are all too familiar with this type of occurrence.
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. If anything, they are ‘male-exclusionary,’ though it seems a little silly to frame the women’s changing room as ‘non-inclusive’ just because men aren’t allowed to prance around in there with their dicks out. It would be akin to calling the vet ‘human-exclusionary’ or a baseball game ‘soccer-exclusionary.’...
The issue at hand and the cause of disagreement between feminists and trans activists is ideological: those who advocate gender identity ideology (trans activists) subscribe to a fringe religion that believes some people are born in the wrong body and that it is possible for males to become female by declaring it so, and feminists believe in material reality. Tough call!
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....
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.
This comes some months after trans activists successfully lobbied Vancouver politicians to deny city funding of some $30,000 to VRRWS, because of their woman-only policy.
This feels like a twisted version of a book I read titled Distress. Gender is only in the background of it but it does evoke some thoughts on the matter.
Posted by: Shir | August 31, 2019 at 05:16 AM