Author and anti-trans activist JK Rowling has announced she is launching a crisis center for female victims of rape and sexual abuse. The catch? Beira’s Place, as the center is called, won’t allow trans women to use its services.
The exclusion of trans women from Beira’s Place isn’t a bug; it seems to be a, if not the, primary motivation behind the service. Indeed, Rowling came up with the idea for Beira’s Place; she told anti-trans feminist Suzanne Moore, in what can only be described as a fit of pique caused by remarks from Mridul Wadhwa, the trans woman in charge of Edinburgh’s Rape Crisis centre.
Wadhwa had said that transphobic clients of the centre would have their bigotry challenged. Wadhwa also said it was possible to “reframe” one’s relationship with trauma so that “it becomes a story that empowers you and allows you to go and do other more beautiful things with your life.” As a result of these comments and the fact of her being a trans woman in the first place, the Edinburgh Rape Crisis centre endured a torrent of death threats and other abuse from transphobes that led to the centre having to lock itself down.
Furious at Wadhwa’s comments, Rowling didn’t send any mean emails; she just decided to build a Rape Crisis centre that wouldn’t employ, or serve, Wadhwa’s kind. As Moore tells it, Rowling
recounts … hearing the phrase about women needing to “reframe their trauma”. It really got to her, Why, she harangued her husband, when you are extremely traumatised and go somewhere for support, should your beliefs come into it?
“I was climbing the walls. It’s not a political thing to me; this is personal. And then, after two days, I had the lightbulb moment and I thought, ‘I don’t have to pace around my kitchen ranting. I can actually do something about this.’ And that’s how it started. So here I am.”
So here she is, funding a service that avoids the “politics” of the sexual abuse of women by systematically excluding a whole class of victims.
By funding the whole thing herself, and not registering Beira’s Place as a charity, Rowling seems to want to avoid government oversight over its transphobic policies. It may be able to keep itself from getting shut down for discrimination because, as PinkNews notes,
Under the Equality Act 2010, transgender people are protected from discrimination, but services are able to exclude trans people from single-sex spaces if this exclusion is a “proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim”.
That seems like a rather large loophole.
The idea behind excluding trans victims is that cis women need a place to go where they feel safe. Never mind that there’s no evidence that trans women accessing support services would make cis women less safe. If feelings of safety are all that count, racist whites could make the same argument about a shelter needing to exclude women of color.
It’s unclear how the service staff will be able to discern whether or not a potential client is genuinely cis. Will they side-eye cis women who look insufficiently femme? Will they require a genital inspection? There’s no way to prove one’s gender identity that isn’t in some ways humiliating.
On Ovarit, the Redditesque hangout for so-called gender-critical feminists, one regular hopes that the new center will make Rowling look good to those who were critical of her for supporting Johnny Depp against the many compelling abuse allegations launched against him by ex-wife Amber Heard. No, really. She’s not bothered by the transphobia–obviously–but she doesn’t seem terribly concerned about the sexual abuse victims the centre is supposed to help either. She just hopes that it will be good PR for her beloved Jo.
“Am I the only one who hopes that JKR’s new rape crisis center might redeem her in the eyes of everyone bashing her for supporting Johnny Depp?” asks EvilTerfyTerf in a comment.
Thanks to this shelter, it just got a lot harder for the TRAs [trans-rights activists] to claim that she hates victims of DV, especially since she is one herself.
Fwiw I’m not defending Jo’s initial support of Johnny, but the sad truth is, it’s not uncommon for abuse survivors to scapegoat/turn on other victims in an attempt to uphold their own credibility.
SMH. The TERFs truly live in their own little world.
EDITED TO ADD: Here’s an interesting little tidbit. So much for “safe” spaces for women.
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@ Anna
So you’re just fucking dumb then. Good to know
@gss
People are fucking dumb. The people that tell you they can “tell” if someone is trans are fucking dumb. I have big boobs. I’ve had them since I was 12. The second I cut my hair short and wore jeans/t-shirt. Suddenly people are calling sir and looking at me weird when I go to the bathroom. I don’t look androgynous at all.
@Anna
Ah good to know I’ll get rejected if anyone decides they just don’t like me, despite having two and only two X chromosomes.
@Elaine
I’ve been misgendered with double D to F cups (depending on weight fluctuations), for as long I can remember. It’s to “correct” you for having short hair and wearing comfortable clothes, I think: at least in my case it is very deliberate and considered. Mostly the hair, to be honest, I can’t think of I time it happened to me in long hair.
It’s all about hair length. Before I had even started socially transitioning, I got called female when I had long hair, and male when I had short hair. Hair length is what determines whether people “pass” as their gender.
@bcb: “Hair length is what determines whether people “pass” as their gender.”
Not always. I’m a cis woman who’s always worn my hair long and always dressed either in conventionally “feminine” or unisex clothing styles, never deliberately presenting as masculine. But I have nonetheless occasionally been mistaken for a man, probably due to a stocky build and strong facial features. Once a little girl laughingly commented as I passed by “A boy with long hair!”
People fleetingly misread other people’s genders All. The. Time, based on all sorts of arbitrary criteria. Mostly nobody ever finds out about it, because it’s usually just a silent momentary impression based on a passing glance.
But when somebody explicitly articulates their misperception, it really sticks in our minds, because for most of us our gender is a significant part of our identity and it’s disturbing to realize that somebody got it wrong.
@ Anna Kiddna: “The primary motivation is surely to assist female rape victims, but you throw in this absurd slander. ‘It’s all about the trans!’”
It’s not slander. The way we can tell that yes, the activism of Rowling and her ilk really IS “all about the trans” is because of its constant unnecessary emphasis on deliberately exclusive language.
You know, if Rowling or any other self-identified feminist came along and said something along the lines of “Because of typical physiological differences between transgender women and cisgender women, some cisgender women who have been harmed and traumatized by men experience anxiety about transgender women’s bodies. That’s not the fault of transgender women, but we think it’s important for cisgender women to have access to some cisgender-female-only spaces to be able to work through that trauma”…
…that would be a reasonable position. Not all of us would agree with it, but it would not necessarily be intrinsically transphobic. What is intrinsically transphobic is the categorical insistence that the words “woman”, “female”, etc., have to be reserved only for cisgender women.
You can tell that the bigotry is the point when you notice that Rowling’s project isn’t advertising as a “cisgender-women-only space” or something like that, but as a “women-only space”. The fundamental pupose is just to make more opportunities to publicly repeat their claim that transgender women aren’t women.
@Elaine, BTD, bcb: Same with me. I always have been mistaken for a man when I have short hair, and called ma’am when it’s long.
I guess women with short hair are going to have to drop trou or flash boobs to get into this TERF shelter. @Kimstu, they probably wouldn’t let you in either.
Lots of trans women look girlier than I do.
And Anna is indeed fucking stupid, which is why I am once again begging David to ban this stupid drive-by troll who isn’t even near the quality of some of our other trolls. He/she/they’s a bug flying around our nice BBQ, and the countermeasures need to be deployed.
sprays citronella oil
@AnnaKiddna:
When did single-sex toilets them? Never, because they aren’t and have never been considered necessary. Yes, this means some males will possibly slip in if they pass as female quite well, exactly as has been the case for amenities.
What it means is that some males, not bothering with disguise, will barge right in notwithstanding, having decided that rules are for people who aren’t them (cf. Donald Trump), because magical barriers only work in the British Wizard Series.
(This is the response I like to imagine from those poor beauty pageant contestants):
http://i.imgur.com/Jwkck0C.jpg
Anna K is banned for terfism and generally being annoying.
What they want is to be as cruel and damaging as possible to trans women. The fact that they will achieve more instances of harm and cruelty to gnc cis women – who in terms of sheer numbers are a larger proportion of the population – is a bonus.
Does Anna seriously not realise that there are more cis women who don’t “pass” to the terf eye than there are trans women? And has Anna perhaps never noticed that photos of quite well-known people – such as JKR, in one memorable instance – routinely get jeered at as examples of “you can always tell”?
Anyone desperately seeking help from this place of JKR’s who happens to turn up in ‘unfeminine’ clothing and with short hair, say, and without makeup, is going to get nothing but aggression because the people running it are primed and champing at the bit for exactly that.
@David Futrelle:
Anna K is banned for terfism and generally being annoying.
Thank you.
@David: Thanks. Now he/she/they can go boo-hoo among the other TERFs (or their online group of sad sacks) about being banned.
Like I said, not even a good troll.
And this just in:
http://i.redd.it/s1oi0iif8k6a1.jpg
@David
Thanks for doing that.