It'll presumably pay for their covid vaccines too, so they can travel internationally.
Let's hope she doesn't bring over these American women while she's at it.
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I have worked part-time at a shelter for homeless women in Maine since 2016. The shelter was originally conceived as an alternative to the city’s larger, mixed-sex shelter, where many women were too afraid to stay. Afraid of the rapes and assaults that took place at that shelter, and of the ease with which the abusive husbands/boyfriends/pimps they had become homeless fleeing could track them down there, women were opting to sleep on the streets instead. And so a separate women-only shelter was established, to offer vulnerable women a safer refuge from men’s violence.
In the time that I have worked at the shelter, men have always been welcome to stay alongside the women, on one condition: the men must tell us they are women. They may refer to themselves by “feminine” names or dress in “feminine” attire, but we do not require they do these things — who are we, after all, to police anyone’s gender expression? As long as a man claims that he is a woman, our doors are open to him.
(Continues)
When women report harassment by men in the shelter space, or approach staff to voice their discomfort, my coworkers’ customary response is to ignore the women’s reports completely. They do not record the reports in our daily logs, nor do they mention the incident to a supervisor. They do not confront the man to speak to him about his behaviour. If, while describing the harassment she is experiencing, a woman calls the man a man, or “he” rather than “she,” my coworkers take the time to correct her by pointing out that she is mistaken: this man is a woman. My coworkers are less apt to take the time to investigate the woman’s claims. A woman is more likely to be scolded for “transphobia,” should she commit the savagery that is “misgendering,” by forgetting to be blind to a man’s maleness, than a man is to be held accountable for predatory behaviour towards women. My coworkers, eager to show off their impeccable gender politics, rush to validate men’s declarations of womanhood. A dense smother of self-congratulatory smarm hovers around their attention to pronouns and the related linguistic gymnastics of queerness. Within this fog, it is apparently impossible to see the women in front of them, seeking their support.
When women objected to the man masturbating in a nearby bed at night, a coworker mocked the women’s prudery to me, expecting I would find it equally absurd. How puritanical and square to be upset by some guy jerking off to pornography three feet away! My coworker did not write a report about the complaint. I did, but nothing came of it. Several weeks later, the man was restricted from the shelter, after threatening to shoot everyone, but his public masturbation and the distress it caused women trying to sleep in neighbouring beds was never addressed.
More recently, a woman told me she knew that staff would never do anything about the man who follows her around the shelter, watching her; who stands by her bed, watching her. Sometimes this man wears a wig. He asks that we call him by a feminine name. The woman he is harassing is an incest victim with severe PTSD from years of abuse. This woman told me that because of our prioritization of what she termed “the gender thing,” staff refuse to intervene in the situation. The man could therefore torment her with impunity.
This woman told me it was unfair, and I agreed. It is unfair. I told her that if the man began bothering her on a day I was working, she could come find me, and I would confront him. I made a note of her allegations in the daily log. With the scant authority afforded to me as part-time support staff, there was little else I could do. But nothing has happened, in terms of repercussions for this man, and nothing will happen. He will remain in the shelter, and a woman victimized by men since her childhood will continue to endure male harassment in a space expressly created to provide women with some modicum of sanctuary from men’s violence. My coworkers will continue to remind her to use the man’s preferred pronouns when she tells them yet again what he is doing to her, in hopes that this time, someone might take her seriously, might make it stop.
The men also complain about how they are treated by the women, by staff, and by the world. The men tell us that they do not feel accepted or understood by the women at the shelter, or by anyone at all, anywhere. The fact that not every single living human takes these men at their word that they are women is an injustice cruel beyond bearing, and the men suffer. The men are hurt. They feel sad. Invariably, my coworkers console the men, reassuring them that they have every right to be at the shelter, that they are no different than any other woman there. My coworkers stick up for the men — the real victims, subject to the brutality of bad, mean women so backwards as to confuse the erection in the bed next to them for anything other than a female penis. My coworkers ask the men what staff can do to help them feel safe, comfortable, accepted, and supported. Staff meetings are held to discuss how we ought to update the shelter to make it a friendlier place for men.
Continues: www.feministcurrent.com/2020/09/13/protecting-men-at-the-womens-shelter/