@SolasAnla
Remember - my intentions with this post was to sort out my ideas and find a way through a morass of issues and responses so I can talk to people in a way they can HEAR why this is an issue.
So, my response was to this:
Exactly. It is already traumatic to be a victim of rape. Having to refer to your male attacker as a woman is awful.
The moment I saw those words, I remembered Mridhal Whadi's comment about people needing to be re-educated.
However ... when I heard Whadi's comments the first time, I instantly remembered this experience I had, and the post (in bold above) brought it all back again.
(@CheeseMmmm - I wasn't the facilitator; and it happened over thirty years ago; and in a different country).
The woman making this statement WAS racist. No question about it. She shared this in a group which included black women who had been raped, who reacted very very badly to it.
The reaction went something along the lines of 'Are you saying your rape was worse because you're white?' Her response was, 'Yes. Black woman are used to these sort of experiences from black men, therefore it's more shocking for white women.' Also comments about how more rapists are black etc.
It caused incredible distress. The facilitator, who was black, did not feel able to continue working with her. Other black members of the charity threatened to walk out if black women who had been raped were expected to confront this in group situations.
Now - Transpose Whadi's view, which presumably be that this woman needed to be re-educated in racism. (At least, that's what I thought when I heard whadi say that).
That's not what we did though. And trust me, the context we were working in regards race was far more explosive than the current TWAW context. It was tough. Massive talks in-house, where we all agreed that our primary job was to provide a service to women in a moment of CRISIS irrespective of their views. And that crisis was rape. So we focussed on that. _
_
We agreed, even if it made us uncomfortable, that, to this woman, the fact that she had been raped by a black man WAS an additional trauma to her. But her expression if that was an additional trauma to black women. Group work wasn't working for her or other women in the group, so she had face to face support from another white charity worker.
I don't know if we got it right. I feel though, to take her to one side and say 'Listen, you can't share things like that' - if that was her truth - would not have helped her get over a point of immediate raw crisis. There's a time and a place, and that was neither the time nor the place.
So, back to this thread ...
Knowing that some people I might speak to would hear these words
Exactly. It is already traumatic to be a victim of rape. Having to refer to your male attacker as a woman is awful.
as transphobic would mean they might instantly stop listening. I have resolved to not address the question of whether it is or isn't transphobic when talking to friends, but focus on the issues of crisis and need, and share this experience as an example.
My view is that 're-educating' women who have been raped, almost as a condition of whether they get support or not, is not right. In fact, if I remember my own experience of trauma, if someone had instead tried to 'fix' something else, I think I'd have felt that was barbaric and even more isolating and made things a whole lot worse.