Mridul Wadhwa, transwoman CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre

Talk about a fox in the henhouse - this guy is another grifter whose whole agenda is to validate himself at the expense of others.
I'm more angry at the people who fawned over him and allowed him so much clout.

This is interesting, suggests that Sturgeon was taking lessons from Wadhwa

If you ever wondered who was advising Nicola Sturgeon on self ID, look no further than her good friend Murdo Wadhwa

#Copying Murdo's homework

https://x.com/okaybiology/status/1748666652038766791?s=46&t=SPorwN-mokktL467rcZ57g

Men, however they identify, who choose to be where there are vulnerable women are the ones to be most vigilant about.

I was asked before one of my births would i mind a male midwife. My liberal brain told me there was no logical reason why a man couldn't be a midwife, my highly evolved female spidey senses said nope. Heard later the only male midwife had left under an unspecified cloud.

It doesn’t feel legal, does it. If I donate money to a women’s rape centre I expect that money to be used to help female victims of rape, not spent validating the egotistical delusions of a man.

The police visited Ms Murray of Brodie's Trust when she made it public that the wouldn't be referring women to ERCC.

So I'm sure the police have visited Wadhwa at home about ERCC refusing to refer to Beira's Place.

Haven't they?

is he going to be examined in the tribunal?

(typo in the link above sorry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mridul_Wadhwa )

None of this is on Mridul Wadhwa's wikipedia entry. The page is rewritten by TRAs every time anyone adds any critical information, it is truly biased and misrepresentative - as well as being the first thing people see when they google the name. If you can spare time to edit the page and keep it edited please do - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MridulWadhwa - They are very keen on reputable sources, though if you look at the talk page, that means "people who agree with us". It needs more than me rewriting it once an hour to make a difference.

And a blog by someone remembering an encounter with Wadwha at a party.

https://virginiasroom.co.uk/f/on-validation-and-tolerance

(found on this thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/4318605-I-think-Ive-figured-out-why-the-Guilty-Feminists-feel-guilty?page=12&reply=109837976 )

On Validation and Tolerance
6 November 2020

A ---- without Gender Recognition Certificate, MW, is currently running as a candidate for a Scottish constituency, as a woman. MW is someone who many years ago applied to run a rape crisis centre without disclosing trans status.... and got the job. I met MW at that time, in a friendly context and this is what happened. It might sound pedestrian to some but I am sharing this story because I believe it sheds light on the main driving force behind this person's actions and why women must resist this encroachment. I use she/her in this text because that is how I addressed MW 14 years ago and it reflects my state of mind at the time. Now, knowing what I know, I wouldn't.

. . .

About 14 y ago, at a party organised by a friend and colleague, I met MW, a friendly hijra. She was introduced to me as a woman but I could not fail to notice the Adam apple and the low voice. I instantly thought that M was trans and that knowledge occupied my thoughts for the best part of 5 seconds. She was fun, interesting and well, we were all having nice drinks and food with lots of people we liked. Everything was great and felt "familial" and relaxed.

Suddenly, my friend demanded our attention and asked us all, out of nowhere: "Is M a man or a woman?"

I looked immediately at M expecting that this question would seem impolite and intrusive to her, but I saw that she was welcoming it. I now realise that she had asked my friend, our host, to question us about how we perceived her.

This question completely ruined the good-natured, warm and carefree ambiance of the party (and really, the party itself). Everyone stopped eating, looked uncomfortable. The trust and acceptance, the openness with which we had all interacted until then were gone. I'm sure most guests knew she was trans but it did not appear to be an issue. However, the demand to categorically validate or invalidate M as female or male felt like an encroachment to all of us. Rapidly though, I brushed aside my discomfort, attributing it to some failing in the "tolerance department" on my part.

Some of the guests were older, high caste Indians. I stupidly believed at the time that their unease was caused by their rejection of trans people, by intolerance, which surprised and shocked me as I knew them and liked them dearly. So, in order to support M, I instinctively answered "woman" while others looked at the floor.

Later on that evening, the party split and we went out, M, my friend and I. They quickly both started to cast disparagingly the ones who avoided answering The Question as bigots, boring old farts, intolerant idiots...

I was not one of them, and I was glad.

But something felt "off", I felt slightly dirty. I felt I was betraying something in me, something called truth and something called self-respect. And I was betraying my other friends who refused to play the validation game.

I now understand better what happened that night. Some friends were having a good evening, men, women, trans or not, all together. There was acceptance and mutual respect. Then someone asked us to lie, or prove that we were willing to forgo truth and self-respect in order to validate someone else's identity. And people became torn between their desire to be kind and their need to be truthful. This was entirely unnecessary. There was already acceptance and validation: we all liked M, none of us were made uncomfortable by who she was.

It is the lie people objected to, not the person, not the person's choice or expression. It was the demand that our moral purity and values (kindness vs. truth) must be put on display, weighed and judged, that people objected to.

. . .

Today, in response to criticisms of his encroachment and disrespect for women's boundaries and consent, MW asked us to be kind, said that kindness will win, all the while telling us that his critics should be destroyed as evil. It is as evident now as it was when I first met him that, for MW, kindness must flow only one way.

Dear MW, it wasn't kind 14 years ago to ask us to lie, and I am truly sorry that I did, in the name of kindness.

Wadwha getting performatively upset at women attending Parliament in 2019:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/3592927-Meghan-Murphy-in-the-Scottish-Parliament

Blog by Wings Over Scotland from when Wadwha was standing as an SNP candidate in 2020, doing a review of the situation:

https://wingsoverscotland.com/waiting-for-the-men/

Found a couple more from the archive.

The police being sent around to check the thinking of someone disapproving of Wadwha in 2022:

Ms Murray runs Brodie’s Trust, a charity that provides help to women who have experienced the loss of a pregnancy through domestic violence or a forced termination. In September, in the wake of Wadhwa’s comments, she said Brodie’s Trust ‘cannot in all conscience send vulnerable women to [the ERCC]’. She made the perfectly reasonable point that it is not for sexual-violence charities to police vulnerable women’s thoughts. ‘We have no interest in our clients’ religion, sexuality [or] political views’, she said. And so she said she would no longer ‘signpost’ vulnerable women to a centre whose CEO was openly threatening to police and correct vulnerable women’s beliefs.

The police didn’t see it as reasonable, though. In November, detectives from Edinburgh knocked on Ms Murray’s door. They had in their possession screenshots of her tweets and a printout of the statement made by Brodie’s Trust. Get your head around that – actual police officers printed out a statement made by a charity and went around to the charity founder’s home to talk to her about it. This is banana republic stuff. The officers confirmed to Ms Murray that she hadn’t said anything ‘hateful’ – ‘there isn’t a crime here’. So why were they in her home waving around printouts of her comments, she asked? ‘Because we need to speak to you to ascertain what your thinking was behind your statement’, they said.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/01/the-thought-police-are-here/

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4471645-mridul-wadwha-and-the-thought-police

I think this thread needs to be up on this from overnight. Surely it’s a fireable offence and the charity should be sanctioned for allowing it?? https://x.com/suzanne_moore/status/1749143776830845117?s=46&t=-14LOzq-_bsjEdbZ5Y7CuQ

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/mridrul-wadha-sacro-and-the-14-million

This may help to make some issues clearer. It is a transcript from a Fox and Owl film, supplied by @JackyHolyoake in another thread: Page 2 | Forth Valley Rape Crisis Centre | Mumsnet

Transcript:

Fox Fisher: I'm here in Stirling to meet Mridal Wadwha, who is a trans woman who also runs a rape crisis centre. Let's go say hello.

Mridul Wadwha: I am Mridul Wadwha. I am trans and a Piscean. A mother. A wife. Half zoroastrian, half Hindu. I'm an immigrant. I run a rape crisis centre. I'm a feminist. I'm a boss. And I speak my mind even when I shouldn't.

FF: Mridul, tell me a bit about where we are and how you came about to work here.

MW: This is the Forth Valley Rape Crisis Centre and I am the Manager. So the centre works with anyone over the age of thirteen who has experienced sexual violence. And anyone who is affected by it. The centre is part of the rape crisis movement. We are a woman only space in the sense that only women work in the centre. Although we work with anyone who's been affected respective of gender identity. I think one of the key things that I'm proud of that has happened in this movement is the increased awareness about forced marriage in Scotland. And how we worked pretty hard to make sure that the law was implemented effectively. Most of our services, violence against women services, largely cater to white, cis women. But there are others that do naturally come to our spaces. You can't expect people to know that you are inclusive if you're not explicit of your inclusion. So, I think our journey around inclusion as a violence against women movement is ... we are getting there, but I think there are some key things that we have to do. And consistently, because equality is too fragile. I spend most of my life thinking about the status of minority ethnic women and migrant women in particular. Any minority who experiences oppression, you expect to be treated badly wherever you go. So you steel yourself up for that. So when you say: "We are inclusive" .. well. you have to show what you are doing not to treat people badly. Can you connect with people's humanity? For me it is an investment in attitude. We need to expose ourselves to difference so that difference is normal. We just dare not to think of ourselves as different.

FF: Is there a personal reason for getting into this line of work?

MW: Staying on has been personal because it is pretty clear to me that I was the only transwoman in the women's aid movement. And I wasn't even sure that if I had been hired, if they had known that I was trans. When I came out individually to various colleagues, there was this disbelief: "Oh, you can't be trans". You know, what does a trans person look like? What does a cis woman look like? How do we know? Over a period of time it became more and more important within my work in this movement to be a transwoman. My activism wasn't around trans activism because really what mattered to me more was my status as an immigrant woman and the women I worked with who came from immigrant backgrounds. It means I've had the opportunity to deliver training across this country and so invariably I would come out in all of my training, not just for people to change their perception of what an immigrant woman looks like or who she is, but also what a transperson looks like. So I think staying in it has become a personal thing.

FF: So tell me what it was like growing up for you and who was the first transperson you met?

MW: So I grew up in India. To me now I would say it was like living in a war zone. And it really came home to me, I really understood when people started speaking about the civil war in Syria and the use of snipers. That's the analogy I use. A sniper would hit me every day, multiple times. From name calling to sexual violence, all of that happened, all the time. When I became an adult, when I began to think a lot more practically and seriously about my transition it was empowering to have grown up in a country where there is a recognition of the third gender or the non-binary in a sense. A transperson I identified with? I don't think I ever met one. I didn't have any resources, I didn't know where to go. And then I remember that I chanced upon this article. A journalist had written an article about how they had set up a helpline for transpeople. So I went to meet this journalist and they put me in touch with the local hospital's psychiatric unit. It was a complete nightmare, where this guy essentially told me "I don't believe you're trans because you would have insisted on going to a girls' school. Why did you go to a boys' school?" And all that sort of shit. It was like 'I am trans I'm not stupid'. But eventually I found some doctors elsewhere in a different city, but it was so expensive and trying to find a job and keep a job was a challenge. So when I was 17-18 and I made a decision after a failed suicide attempt. I wanted to thrive. I just didn't want to ... manage. So I think coming to that decision was very transformative. I just said to people: "This is who I am, take it or leave it." I got two gifts. One was that I grew up in a household where my parents, not in any every day way ever told me not to be who I was, this effeminate child. But I also grew up to a spiritual outlook that doesn't have a concept of guilt in the same way. I think that has been the biggest gift. I don't know what it feels like to be guilty or ashamed of who you are. I have been lucky somehow to find myself in places where I was able to influence. And I think it is therefore important if you have been given this opportunity by fate to use that effectively. It's a responsibility to be your honest and true self at all times. I have the gift of being the eternal minority. From growing up in a mixed faith background to being a transwoman; to being a person of colour here, and a migrant. What is important for me therefore in doing this work is to try and do something to make sure that others who come after me can come on their own merit. But I think what is most important right now is for more diverse voices to be heard. Whether it is the survivors of sexual violence, or my colleagues who do a lot better work than I do. I need to make sure that my colleagues who I manage here, that their ideas really come to fruition. That is the most important reason why I do this work. What I am really interested in is to make sure everyone that goes through here feels that they have a opportunity to express what is really going on for them. That's why it is important, because this movement, particularly the feminist women's movement that is built on the history of so many women who have transformed. One of the dangers of being in this movement sometimes is that we don't know when to let more people sit around the table. And I think I do know the importance of it. Because I just don't want to be the token trans BAME woman in Scotland for many things in many spaces. Hopefully that will not be forever, and hopefully people won't call me to speak at events anymore. Because I think that is important too. We have to become redundant. That's why it's important.

[A film by Fox Fisher and Owl]

This is so much more insidious than that male period dignity officer, who everyone was rightly up in arms about. At least that guy tried to argue that a man could legitimately do the job.

The Student asked Wadhwa if she believes a man could be a successful rape crisis centre manager. She does not: “I don’t think men are ready to go out and set up services of this nature. Women’s aid organisations and rape crisis centres have been set up with the blood, sweat, and tears of women. It’s about the women’s experience of sexual violence. Our workforce is reserved for women only.”

I'm totally bewildered. Does he actually believe himself or is he having everyone on and laughing into his sleeve?

Agreed.

For those who missed that episode in this sorry saga, this is FWS's summary and reaction to MW's comments on the Guilty Feminist podcast.

The Real Crisis at Rape Crisis Scotland - For Women Scotland

Women who want an all female support group are being turned away because "trans inclusive values" are more important than delivery of the service the organisation was set up to provide.

I despair.

Thank you for starting this thread.
You are spot on about many women in Scotland knowing about this sick shit show , but not enough people were listening. Hopefully they will now.

I am even more cross that Deborah Frances White championed him on the guilty feminist. He’s even worse than I thought and I didn’t have a good opinion of him in the first place.

One of my previous links doesn't work. Here is a replacement.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4321939-2nd-thread-AIBU-to-OBJECT-to-being-asked-to-reframe-my-trauma-by-Edinburgh-Rape-Crisis-CEO