Apparently female rape survivors 'need' mixed sex groups

[IamSarah]

Honestly. This is what my local rape crisis centre wrote in a letter to the EHRC.

Apparently women who have been raped need to welcome trans women into the rape crisis groups as they provide amazing value and are 'needed'.

Of course they haven't actually asked female survivors. None of it is trauma informed. I've no idea what the motivation is but its dodgy as hell.

survivorsnetwork.org.uk/our-letter-to-the-equalities-and-human-rights-commission/

Ooh.
Hehdehog is a real life Whatabout in the wild!

Single sex provisions for women who have suffered rape is important, necessary and needed.
TW in mixed groups or groups for transpeople.
Single sex means single sex, and if a TW then insists on invading such a group I would find that as a sure-fire sign the individual should be booted off the premises, and invited back to a mixed sex group on another day when they
had calmed the fuck down.

I would not have gone to a mixed sex refugee or to a mixed sex DV group. Because I had just been violently attacked by a man. Yes, I dealt with male police officers and male solicitors, but for the times I needed to talk it was very important that there was a single sex option.

Cheering you on, Sarah! Thank you for fighting.

Hedgehogs thinks women with facial hair from PCOS look like men. There is no arguing with that level of stupidity.

Obviously in the vast majority you can tell by sight, but if someone claims otherwise, what are you gonna do

So you think that all male people who identify as women have no regard for anybody else and would knowingly go to a group where their maleness could traumatise women rape victims. You don't have much respect for these people's moral character.

Obviously in the vast majority you can tell by sight, but if someone claims otherwise, what are you gonna do about it?

Vast majority is a good start! If we can exclude the vast majority of men from women's SS spaces, then that is vastly better than not being able to exclude any of them! As a pp said, don't let perfect br the enemy of good.

I also think you're underestimating how powerful social pressure is to obey the rules. I trust that most Transwomen are attending the groups because they genuinely think that's ok. If there's one group which is clearly defined as single sex and another group which is sign-posted as transwoman-inclusive, I don't see any reason to believe transwomen will lie.

And it's Overton window stuff for sexual predators. If Transwomen are permitted into a group according to the rules, then any man who gets off on women's trauma might think 'well, I could be trans. How would they know?'. Whereas if the rule is clear he's less likely to think he can get away with it.

I'm so sorry for what you had to go through and glad you got to a better place 

And it is terrible that we have gone backwards in our provision for the most vulnerable in our society.

But we will overcome this reversal, because we, women, know and appreciate what's been taken away from us, in spite of insistence that we should be polite and never assume ALL survivors need these spaces and services.

We should apparently always make sure we say 'Not all survivors are like that' and some, supposedly 'need' males in their recovery spaces, otherwise we don't deserve these spaces due to our extremism. Or at least, this appears to be what @Discovereads is arguing on this thread.

Obviously in the vast majority you can tell by sight, but if someone claims otherwise, what are you gonna do

I mean, I think that either you can argue that trans women don't pose any threat to women whatsoever and are totally respectful, or you can argue that those who believe they "pass" will use women's single sex spaces anyway, even when they know they aren't supposed to, but you can't argue both those things at the same time.

They know they are male.

Are you saying we can't trust them not to do the right thing and stay out of female only spaces?

You realise that one cannot carry certain knives in the street? That various types and sizes of knives are illegal to carry out in public without good reason, that police regularly run campaigns to remind people of this, and hold knife amnestys? There is specific legislation to try and make murder with knives less likely. Nobody says 'oh, anyone who wants to go out stabbing is going to anyway, let's not bother with knife laws'.

To quote Mick Lynch, Richard, you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle.

To repeat.
Males have male only survivor groups.
TW have TW only survivor groups.
Some women would like female only survivor groups.

Why and who would argue?

There seem to be some misunderstandings about the necessary qualities, experience, and skillset of anybody who'd aspire to be a bridge between perspectives and communities.

There has been some helpful research in this area. This article is an overview of it in one contentious area and wider lessons might be drawn from that experience. Interestingly, the research is grounded in why cons/fraud are so successful.

Having some degree of status within the group that you seek to influence and being seen to be trustworthy seem to be very important for anyone who aspires to influence perspectives. To this end, it would plausibly help to have a realistic view of yourself and how others perceive you.

Goffman observed that all “marks” eventually come to understand that they have been defrauded. But strangely, they almost never complain or report the crime to the authorities. Why? Because, Goffman argues, admitting that you have been conned is so deeply shameful that “marks” experience it as a kind of social death – the painful end of one of the many social roles we all play.
…
Within those groups, we can pinpoint influential members who may be turning their backs on Covid denialism, and encourage them in their journey. We can message them offering support, particularly if our reference groups overlap – whether that means sharing the same home town, or practising the same faith. The more shared social space, the better. We might offer to back them up if they get trolled for expressing misgivings about Covid denialism. Or we could let them know that we would admire them for telling the truth.

Those people may not have a television audience of millions, but they nonetheless have the potential to act as “coolers” for those in their reference groups – both online and off. The higher their status within the groups, the more influence they will have in reconciling their fellow travellers to the reality of the pandemic, perhaps enabling them to rejoin society, or at least preventing them from endangering the rest of us.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/09/convince-anti-vaxxers

I'm surprised there are no reliable statistics (apart from reported rapes by women which are somewhat misleading since we do know large numbers of women do not report). Do we have the same for men, TM and TW?

I am surprised there aren't two trans groups in the mix. Presumably TM may have different experiences from TW?

Worth repeating. Sickening attitude.

It’s all been said here already, and would convince any decent human being that women need a single-sex space. But I will just add my voice to so many others, and say that I would have been traumatised by finding a male person in a rape survivors’ group.

It would not only have brought back the fear and shock of the original attack. It would also have created a whole new nightmare of going to a supposedly safe place and finding it wasn’t safe. Of being offered help, and then discovering I was there to provide an audience for some organiser’s demonstration of wokeness.

saying all female survivors are triggered by males in womens groups represents an extremist opinion that is not fact based. And making such extremist arguments doesn’t help you get what you want, which is female only womens groups…it just further polarises the debate and gets you called transphobic by equally extremist TRAs. We all need to move towards the middle, not further away from each other.

I disagree. Women have kept ‘moving towards the middle’ and constantly find the line is redrawn so that they have to give more.
I don’t owe anything to males who want to intrude into women’s spaces.

@silvershirt 💐

Because some TRAs are extremists.

Stonewall
Lottery Funding
Other large national funding organisations
Local Authorities
Local charities
Individuals

These are the organisations and individuals we, a small, local rape crisis centre, have been defunded by because we do not accept men in our services. As I have said before, in direct reply to you, here and other threads, @Discovereads we lost 40% of our funding about 5 years ago specifically and only because we are a single sex, female organisation. There is no maybe about this, it is the specific reason given us.

Why would the Lottery Fund not support single sex spaces? It isn't because "some TRAs are extremist" it is because many many organisations have been captured by Stonewall and have been working "ahead of the law", as Stonewall counsels, for years.

It is NOT an extremist position, It is, according to all of those who believe the crap being put out by Stonewall, etc, fair, inclusive and right and (according to Stonewall at least) written into law. Transwomen are women and cannot be refused entry to single sex female anything. And no, nothing is ever proportional to a legitimate aim, by their standards - which is why we have been defunded and whay Sarah couldn't enter a single sex session.

And as for @Hedgehog12 and the "rapists gonna rape" shite - could someone pass me the KoolAid, I need a long lie down!

saying all female survivors are triggered by males in womens groups represents an extremist opinion that is not fact based

Who has said this?

Who has said this?

Don't spoil her fun, she's role-playing being all centristy and bridge-buildy.

Did @Discovereads LOL at Shakira upthread?

How very dare you?

Crossover in build between men and women? Of course there is. But you will have to believe me when I tell you - as a sports biomechanist and physiologist by education and trade - that there are certain things that do not overlap, are resolutely sexed. The number of women with a Q angle in the male range is so slimas to be vanishingly rare, and they STILL walk differently.

Hips do not lie!

Absolutely this. This exposes the lie in the position of Stonewall et al. Who try to pretend that they have nothing against single sex spaces, they just want there to be TW inclusive too, and there is room for everyone. WHilst all the while working against single sex spaces. They are destroying single sex spaces. Their position, their ideology, their 'consultancy' is destroying it. They might 'allow' it now to stay on the statute books., like Keir Starmer, but in reality they are destroying it. There would have to be active position to map and monitor and commission single sex spaces top keep and this is what they are not doing.

They will have no excuse when they look around for a female only space ;and god for in they or their loved ones ever need one) and can’t find one. They can’t say ‘we didn’t know’.

I was wondering about trans men, too. It's hard to get statistical evidence of reported rape rates for all the groups we are discussing here, as most of the trans-related statistics come from studies done my alphabet-organisations and don't necessarily use the same definitions and questions as the wider studies which, until very recently, didn't ask for information on trans-status.

But I do remember seeing some American (I believe) survey which found that trans men have higher victimisation rates from sexual and partner violence than trans women. Sadly, I didn't bookmark the reference and only looked at the summary somewhere online, so it may all be rubbish.

But it IS worth asking about trans men: Which group would they go to, and are there any limitations on their choice of a support group?

To be fair, they talk about 'adding value' and don't say for whom it adds value. Clearly it is for men.

Does anyone else think it's bonkers to say that: "To suggest that the value in women-only spaces lies solely or primarily in the exclusion of men significantly undervalues the inception, the purpose and the continuation of women-only spaces". Obviously definitionally women-only spaces exclude men. Or they're not women-only spaces. This is an argument for mixed sex only surely?

It also says this: Trans people are amongst the most marginalised in society. They are the subject of significant levels of hate crime, including nearly 1 in 5 having been subjected to or threatened with sexual assault". Thing is, they're not even in the top 50% of marginalised people in society by this reckoning given than 1 in 5 women have been raped or sexually assaulted (rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/statistics-sexual-violence/) not just threatened and 97% of women have been sexually harassed (www.openaccessgovernment.org/97-of-women-in-the-uk/105940/).

Why is there no reference for the 'research' which shows that 'cis' women (I assume they actually just mean women and not the tiny percentage of women who define themselves as cis) are happy for biological males to be in purportedly single-sex support groups. They have references for other things. I expect is it because this research is far too flawed or small scale to over-ride the vast swathe of information which suggests that a whole heap of women actually seriously and absolutely DO mind.

I see this letter as a hate crime in and of itself.

Solidarity Sarah and I am so sorry that you are being abused again by a system which refuses to consider that your rights and needs might be important. There are women on this thread who get it and I hope you can take some comfort knowing that we can see what is really going on here.

Why is there no reference for the 'research' which shows that 'cis' women (I assume they actually just mean women and not the tiny percentage of women who define themselves as cis) are happy for biological males to be in purportedly single-sex support groups.

There was a reference - Discovereads gave it above.

The obvious flaw is that they were surveying people using mixed-sex "women's" groups.

So obviously any women who had left, like Sarah, or who had chosen not to take part in the first place, weren't able to say they objected.

And of those still using the service, I wonder how much they feel able to complain. We see what happens to those who do, like Sarah.

Anyone else having difficulty with the gardening site? Get to submit and then nothing happens.