@jj1968
Barrel and bottom of.
It's true I'm afraid. A lot of women in the sector are really pissed off with you. They think you're distracting from the true problems facing the sector which is the funding crisis, putting survivors at risk by creating unnecessary fears and are deeply insulted that you think they would put women at risk when few of you know anything about how the sector actually operates
Time for my comment once again
jj1968 as to who founded, co-founded and contributed to many of the new grassroots women's rights group across the UK:
Frontline workers, management and even a board member or two of organisations in the Violence against Women and Girls sector. Women in the sector who have found themselves unable to freely raise their concerns against the inclusion of males in the female-only spaces and therapeutic environments they work in.
They cannot speak up publicly not only for the already much discussed serious repercussions for themselves but also because this could mean no longer being able to mitigate against the negative impact of self-id policies on the female victims of male violence they care for. But they come to our meetings. They found, run or support their own local or national groups. Many attended a closed session at the Scottish Parliament to report on the issues with and concerns about self-id within services set up to help female victims of male violence recover.
As for your assertion that the sector itself has said there are no problems with including males in female-only spaces and therapeutic environments and we should therefore stop saying there are, I shall tell you once again that I am part of a group of survivors and mothers of survivors who have met with the management of such an organisation to inform them of the problems caused by their self-id policies, of the actual - not theoretical - harm they have already done to women and girls and to make suggestions as to how they could safely and easily (because it is actually surprisingly easy) accommodate males without including them in the female-only therapeutic environment. They did not care. They forbade us from speaking about the meeting and then went online to proclaim loudly, once again, that there had never been the slightest problem with their self-id policies.
And then we found out we were neither the only survivors experiencing problems nor the first to raise it with the service.
And the same thing is happening across the UK. Survivors informing services of the problems, frontline workers experiencing problems and management denying them. I know because I've met these women, because they come here on Mumsnet to talk about it, because they publish their experiences on blogs, websites and social media, because they write to the papers and some even go on TV or radio to do so.
I do not doubt you know women working within the sector who hate women like me speaking out about the damage they're doing. I have spoken to management of a different sector organisation who told me they feel beleaguered and unfairly attacked, but who understood in the end that our aims are the same: to allow all the victims of male violence who they cater to to receive the help they need. Who then said they wished they could publicly defend the right of female victims to female-only services, but even if they weren't worried about the backlash from self-id proponents, their funding conditions make that impossible.
So jj1968 you may know women in the sector who are angry at us. I know women in the sector who are campaigning with us and are angry at those denying female victims the right to female-only provisions.