Rape victims have been violated by the very services set up to support them

I’ve never felt comfortable with the almost enforced use of preferred pronouns because while I have always wanted to be kind, that small courtesy should not then compel me to accept a falsehood. 

And the reality is that as soon as you call a man a ‘she’, you are on a slippery slope downwards that takes you to a place where we are now where ultimately, female victims of sexual assault were further damaged by the very services designed to protect them. And there are no kind words to excuse that. 

Yet why am I still uneasy, after all that has now been exposed to be true, to describe the man who identifies as a woman who was, inexplicably, hired to lead Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre when the job should have been ringfenced for a woman as a ‘he’?

You can explain it away as social programming, cowardice, or just the polite etiquette of everyday life but it’s indicative of how we have all become so caught up in this madness where ‘he’ is ‘she’ and fiction is fact. Where a very deliberate assault on linguistics has put up for debate what it even means to be a woman. 

And in the social clamour to bend over backwards to be kind to men and their feelings about who they think they are, we disregard the needs and rights of women. And as is ever the case, they get pushed to one side. 

Women represent more than half the population. And now even the very definition of what we are has become skewed towards men.

Last week’s big announcement by Police Scotland that rapists would not be recorded as women, no matter what their gender preference might be, should never have got to the stage of forming a sentence, never mind being reported as a policy U-turn. 

When you think about it, how bonkers is that? 

But it is emblematic of where we are. Having previously talked of being driven by their ‘values’, of recognising the feelings of an assailant, and stating that preferred gender could take precedence over biological fact – disregarding the fact that you actually need a penis to be a rapist – Police Scotland found itself in an invidious position of being rightly exposed for the potential consequences of this nonsense.

But putting the capture of our public bodies by a disputed ideology to one side, I can’t help but believe that if the debacle that has engulfed Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre and its trans woman former chief executive had happened anywhere other than Scotland, with its cosy cliques, cult-like tendencies, compliant public servants, and spineless politicians – bar too few notable exceptions – who have facilitated and encouraged a climate of no debate, then heads would surely have rolled and a national scandal declared.

Instead, a divisive, discredited and completely inappropriate chief executive was able to walk out of a job by mutual agreement with a supine board and presumably on a handsomely-paid notice period. This, after a damning employment tribunal found he had led what amounted to a heresy hunt against an employee who had gender-critical views, and which was followed by an independent review detailing how rape survivors were further damaged by a chief executive who put their own needs before those of vulnerable women. Despicable.

Many of us have felt uneasy, angry and dumbfounded in the years leading to the shocking place we are now. We quietly questioned why a man who self-identified as a woman should be so lauded among the so-called feminist professionals; was pictured with the then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon; put on all-women political shortlists; celebrated as a pioneering woman in making services set up by women, for women become ‘inclusive’ all at the expense of women.
Those concerns were dismissed as not valid – those who held them were transphobes.

But when we heard Wadhwa talk about the need for rape victims to ‘reframe their trauma’ and accused them of being bigots for specifically wanting single-sex spaces, it was obvious we were now engaged in a zero-sum game that would inevitably end in harm being inflicted on women.
Inexplicably, that’s when the chief executive of the umbrella body, Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS), Sandy Brindley, stepped in to describe Wadhwa as “an amazing sister, mother and warrior for women’s rights”.

And now, five years on with an independent review, albeit commissioned by RCS and with Brindley, among others, attempting to rewrite history, the damage done to rape survivors by Wadhwa in failing to do the job that a rape crisis centre was set up to do has been spelled out in no uncertain terms.

Under Wadhwa’s leadership, the centre lacked focus on its core requirements and “there were no protected women-only spaces available through ERCC unless they were specifically requested”. Consequently, rape victims self-excluded from the service.

There is no place for a narcissist in a service set up to help women heal from the violation they have endured by men. But Wadhwa not only pushed his own feelings to the fore, he was facilitated by the head of Rape Crisis Scotland and endorsed and cosseted by a political environment that became so enthralled by the notion of gender self-identification that those involved were too spineless to question what is a woman.

And that’s not the ‘gotcha’ question that politicians like John Swinney like to dismiss it as. Because when Police Scotland, of all organisations, a body that operates on evidence and fact, has had to reverse ferret in declaring that contrary to what appeared to come before, a rapist will not be recorded as a woman, no matter how they identify, then surely you start to understand the need for clarity on language?

And it might appear a stretch to go from lamenting the use of preferred pronouns to decrying the fact that rape victims were violated by the very services set up to support them, but when even a rape crisis centre has to go away and work on its definition of a woman [clue: she doesn’t have a penis] then surely we have reached an inflection point that says enough is enough?