Ibid. transcript extract:
^"So I just want to say, as the owner of this podcast,
I feel I need to say that in this space. I also know that there are many people who are concerned that if transwomen can self identify, and come into a refuge, that that may trigger all sorts of things in cis women. Have you come up against this?^
Mridul Wadhwa : Yes, I have. If you just Google my name, you will see evidence of what I've been going through for the last two or three years up in Scotland around this issue. I know you described a situation of a night bus, but actually for transwomen, even the day is dangerous. And I think it's important to acknowledge that because there is such a social licence to be awful to us. And there absolutely is. It really doesn't feel like there is any punishment or any reputement or anything, any consequences in most societies of this world, if not all if you harm a trans person. And that was my experience growing up in India, I transitioned in India before I came here. And for the record I had, for those who are very interested in my, in what happens between my legs. Because that is what the mycology around me has been created. You know, as a wo.. transwoman who works in the women sector is that I don't have a gender recognition certificate, I have never transitioned and usually they want to know if I have a penis or not. All of that happened in India. And if you understood migration, you would know that I don't need a gender recognition certificate. Because I was a woman when I came here, I might be
very successful. [word unclear]
But yes, there are these concerns, misguided, and downright dangerous. So between misguided and downright dangerous, there are a whole lot of opinions and feelings about self identification. I think it's really important for people to hear that trans people self-identified before it was a word in the cis lexicon. Like, I am a transwoman, and that is self-identification. But the state has decided to legislate, or, hopefully in Scotland, that doesn't look like it's happening in England anytime soon, to change the way we can change our birth certificate. That's all that's happening.
But every other experience that we have as transwomen, how we are trans people, and more broadly, how we engage with services, how we go about our life, everything works on a self-id basis, and it's already been working. It is fine. Are there trans people that are dangerous? Yes, there are just as men can be dangerous, and some women can be dangerous. Laws are made and they are broken. But we all know that that will happen. So just to suggest that a few individuals who happen to be trans might abuse legislation or spaces, women's spaces, doesn't mean that you excluded a whole community and secondly, men already harm women, because that's what they're really talking about. Men already harm women without going into women's spaces, or even if they, like they can go into women’s spaces that they like.
And my argument is that men are already in these women's spaces, like, for example, a Rape Crisis Centre or a Women's Aid, because who is making the decisions about how much money we get. About who you know, who gives us planning permission, it is not women alone. So the argument that women's spaces will be somehow compromised, from my perspective as a strategic thinker, that's already happening, because we are functioning in a man's world. But to go into the very specifics about who gets access to these spaces, I
think it should be reassuring that women's services are very private services, we often organise our services, and I can speak to Rape Crisis Centres in particular, that we organise them in such a way that actually when you use our service, you might never ever see another survivor, when you're in our building, or in our space, except maybe in our group. So I don't know, really, what the argument is, anymore. I think the argument essentially is from people is like, we refuse to see the humanity of transwomen in particular, as people, and we would rather that they're not here at all." (continues without reference to the impact on female rape/DA survivors when men are present)