JKR opens a new support and advocacy service for women in Edinburgh

[ArabellaScott]

Amazing.

Suzanne Moore reports on the opening of 'Beira's Place':

'Beira’s Place is not a shelter or a drop-in. Rather, women will come, their needs will be assessed and then the appropriate therapy and help will be found for them. For free.

Sex-based crime in Scotland has been rising since 1974. Jo Rowling talks of answering unmet needs “As a survivor of sexual assault myself, I know how important it is that survivors have the option of women-centred and women-delivered care at such a vulnerable time.”

There are clearly so many unmet needs – waiting lists are huge for rape crisis centres all over the UK. Lack of funding is a key issue.

What Rowling has done here is astonishing. She has not only bought the building but is funding the entire service. This is not a charity. It does not depend on the whims of whoever is in power. While Rowling is covering the core costs, if people want to support it, they possibly could do so in future by donating towards extras such as service users’ travel or childcare expenses.'

....

'These women are fighting against male violence, and they really know what they are dealing with. Kerr and Domminney have between them more than three decades’ experience of running Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis. And Rowling has handpicked her dream team of board directors to support them: Rhona Hotchkiss, a former nurse, prison governor and advisor to the Scottish Government; Johann Lamont, Labour and Cooperative MSP, and a lifelong campaigner for the rights for women; Dr Margaret McCartney, a GP, academic and broadcaster; and Susan Smith, co-director of For Women Scotland, the largest grassroots women’s organisation in the country.'

suzannemoore.substack.com/p/an-exclusive-interview-with-jk-rowling?publication_id=22356

JKR gives the women of Edinburgh a wonderful early Christmas present. Thank you, JK. 🌟

Yes, definitely

This being a service specialising in supporting women following their abuse by coercive, controlling and abusive males, I doubt they will have much difficulty with other males attempting to abuse vulnerable females by forcing their way into the service.

What kind of a male after all, with every other service available to them would see a service for the excluded females and have a response of 'tee hee hee I will try and deceive my way in there and smash their boundaries/abuse and distress those abused women further'.

A total arse of a male. That's what.

But yes, it's very clear now. This is not in any way a movement about 'kindness' or 'inclusion' or any of the other words so manipulatively applied. This is for some, openly being demonstrated on Twitter, just purely and simply about destroying and coercively controlling. On a sex based basis. Demonstrating exactly why strong gatekeeping is needed for females against such sex class behaviour.

I don't mean to make any assumptions about people on MN. The only other time I've posted on here was to ask for book recommendations about the Tudors for my 8 year old, so I don't really have a sense of what level of terminology is acceptable.

Also not making assumptions about the people running the service. I imagine that they must have thought about this. I doubt their solution is that they can just tell, or that it's looking at genitals (which I don't think would even solve the problem).

I agree completely that what matters is what a false negative (or positive) means in practice. What I want to know is what their policy to make these decisions will be, because there is trade-off in how you balance the risks of getting it wrong. I don't think that's at all easy to do in this case and I would like to see what their approach is.

Someone suggested I was intentionally derailing the thread which is not the case, but I also don't think all these extra posts are saying anything new. Also I've got some laundry to hang, so I'm going to stop labouring this point now I'm afraid.

There is a very good book called "Trans" by Helen Joyce that explains things well.

The reason that the Jewish comparison doesn't work is because anyone claiming "I can always tell that someone is Jewish" is making an idiotic statement. Meanwhile, everyone on the planet can tell the difference between a man and a woman with very close to 100% accuracy.

Particularly a TQ+ activist.

Never the slightest need for a genital check when defining who gets what they want with great care, and who gets to shut up, reframe their trauma, learn to cope with providing unwanted sex to their betters, doesn't get to have an identity or use their own language, and ought to be kerb stomped.

No trouble at all .

I don't think that's at all easy to do in this case and I would like to see what their approach is.

Is there something somehow making this harder than every other sex-segregated organisation in the last 10,000 years?

The board JKR has chosen are also women straight from the worst of the trenches, who have seen it all, dealt with it all and got the t shirts.

They'll be fully prepared for all this. And it's simple enough to explain, soz, you need this service, here's their number, have a lovely day. Probably a few thousand times, since as we all know, there will be absolutely zero conscience about trying to dominate a service's time and attention so that they can't help females in desperate need. We've seen it so often it's boring at this point.

We can tell sex with greater accuracy than religious beliefs, because one is a material fact, the other a metaphysical issue. These two things are not comparable because they do not belong in the same category.

That's why we cannot just sometimes accurately tell the sex of someone we meet but almost always, with at least 99% accuracy. (Even AI programs can replicate this accuracy.)

Additionally, women are better at recognising men than men are at recognising men to a statistically significant degree. That's because this is a survival skill for women.

It is far more dangerous for us to incorrectly identify a male as female than the other way round. That may result in us assessing someone who may pose a risk as harmless, which can put us into danger. Incorrectly assessing a female as male and so assessing someone who is harmless as dangerous may well be unpleasant for the person wrongly assessed but will not put us into danger.

And as for the latter, I have just spent a whole weekend with dozens of very butch lesbians and where the issue of being misidentified is concerned they said they would rather be challenged than not, especially because this gives them the opportunity to put worried women at ease while supporting the right of all women to challenge men in their spaces.

So your four-way classification is irrelevant in this respect because it doesn't account for the different consequences of and ways of dealing with misidentifying males and misidentifying females.

Furthermore, you are looking at the issue of recognising sex in a very limited way, a way that doesn't apply in this case.

Access to Beira's Place is not based on perception of appearance, but on interaction of staff with the person seeking support. As previous posters have pointed out, given extensive efforts to do so, some men with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment may well pass at first sight. However, once they interact with women, their voice, movement, mannerisms, behaviours will make their sex far more obvious, especially to women working in the VAWAG sector.

This is a very difficult type of classification problem.

It's really not, though. Male people tend to look male even when wearing make-up, dresses etc. Perhaps if someone had gone to the extreme of having facial feminisation surgery and surgery to raise the pitch of their voice it might be a bit harder, but I think that is quite rare.

The thing is, whenever you offer a service to a single demographic, there is always the possibility that someone outside the demographic might try to access it. The obvious comparison would be age - under-18s trying to get served at a bar, for example. The government could throw its hands up in despair and say "there's no point in having age-limited services because they're so hard to enforce." Strangely, it doesn't do that.

Quite. There are signs everywhere saying if we think you look under age, that's it. They often even use the age of 25, rather than the legal age of 18, just in case.

And it has to be said again, it won't be women who are trying to use a service they're not entitled to.

Also, refusing men access to a service they are not entitled to, but want to exploit, is really not going to be that much of a drama for most women.

I'm sure Beiras place is prepared for people not eligible for their services to present themselves, either by accident or design. I would imagine they will be treated with kindness and dignity and signposted to an appropriate service.
Presumably Beiras will take up some of the pressure on other service providers thus shortening waiting times, thus indirectly benefitting them as well?
Surely criticism is churlish...

When did 'it's very difficult to tell someone's sex' become a thing? We had gender benders, butch dykes back it the 70's and 80's and never had the slightest problem. I think it suits the gender ideologues agenda to push this nonsense. Are they hoping that if you repeat a lie long enough it becomes truth.
The last idiot who tried this line about having to do genital inspections to identify sex, I bet him £1000 I could stand in the street and identify the sex of every single person who went by. They didn't take me up. Offer still stands.

I don't know why 'being able to tell' is even an issue.

Firstly, it supposes trans woman are deliberately abusive and manipulative to want to access a space they know is for traumaised women. I'm not sure why TRAs keep asking it as a 'gotcha' because we are told time and time again that trans people aren't like that and that no male person would ever go to the effort to gain access to women's spaces, so it shouldn't matter. Hypothetical that will NEVER happen aren't worth worrying about... right?

Assuming that there are a few cases of 'bad apples', if they aren't clocked in the first appearance, they absolutely will be when having the initial consultation. Lets be frank here, we are talking about a male person who is actively abusing a service (and the women included in the service). If they don't give themselves away with their looks, they most certainly will with their attitudes.

And I may be being cynical here, but in every instance of a trans woman attacking, abusing or otherwise degenerating women, they have never 'passed'. I can't think of one example where it's not been obvious (and that's just by pictures - we know real life without filters and mood lighting it's even harder to 'pass). It will be one of those that attempts to access the service.

I'm astounded at the amount of people who have suddenly become worried about men and boys being abused, they didn't care about them one week ago, but suddenly care about them when they can be used to attack JKR.

I have known men who have been in abusive relationships, it is serious (but not on the same scale as the numbers of abused women). So why don't all these campaigners campaign for male support centres that can also allow in trans women? But we know that's not what they want. If anything these abused men are being used as cannon fodder by TRAs.

The stories I've heard about "trans women" in crisis centres it was very clear that they were men who deliberately self identified as trans to be able to access these spaces. The did nothing to appear feminine, they were there to intimidate.

Age limit is a good comparator.

It can be hard to tell what age someone is; there are many signs and plenty of info to say what the legal age for buying alcohol is. Yes, some who are younger will sneak through. Yes, some who are much older will be asked for proof unnecessarily.

We don't just say 'oh, you can't tell, may as well not bother even trying'.

We assume most people will comply with the law and we take reasonable steps to try and uphold it.

Someone upthread half-questioned that surely ineligible people wouldn't try to access the service.

I used to volunteer in a Samaritans-type (not them) phone line. 10+ ears ago. We got men calling up pretending to be in crisis. They were repeat callers. Some were what was then called "cross-dressers" or "transvestites" and were getting off on describing what they were wearing. They had been told we had one phone line and they were blocking anybody actually in crisis from calling. They still called. There were other men, outside the "trans umbrella" who called just to jerk off to their fantasy crisis story.

I remember hearing about a woman who was former rape crisis phone line volunteer. She too was getting calls from men jerking off, when they knew what the line was and who they were preventing from getting through.

All these calls were cut off when they were identified as time wasters (/abusers - there were never these callers when males were answering, but a higher incidence of callers hanging up after hearing Hello.)

The chances of men not being dicks with Biera's Place are absolutely zero. But I'm going to guess the team already have multiple strategies for dealing with all of them.

You can't save the whales because you haven't yet saved the tigers!

How many times have we heard this one dragged out - women, you may do nothing at all for yourselves until you've fixed everyone else's issues. Mummy eats last, and nobly survives on everyone else's scraps.

No, mummy fucking doesn't, because mummy is a MNetter, has boundaries, knows what codependency is, has read her Lundy Bancroft, and is in the process of LTB.

I've also today seen JKR criticised because she could/should have set this up years ago, but didn't.

This is a very difficult type of classification problem. It's a little like criminal justice - both an innocent person being incorrectly locked up, or a guilty person going free, are disastrous. For that reason there is a process with evidentiary standards etc
And yet both outcomes still happen, despite tinkering with standards.

It seems to me that it's a reasonable to ask what the process is here, and how they are going to consider the trade-offs between the consequences of false positives and false negatives
Go right ahead and ask, it's free for you to do just that, I'm sure that if not yet, then soon there will be an email for you to use. Remember though that this is not a charity and as such doesnt have to answer you. And then remember we can always tell. Its really not difficult, even if at first glance you are unsure, you just have to see them walk, hear their voice or better still smell them. Men smell distinctly different to women. Always.

Women can tell men by many different things that give them away as being Male.
So many things it's pointless listing them. I've never tried to tell Jews from non Jews, I dont even know where I would start. But men, I have no problem identifying men.

And you last sentence, this will go one of two ways.

Every trans woman who is ever in the area will try to access beira, or none will. Depends how convinced they are that they "pass" I know a few think they are very dainty , pretty girls.

Sigh. Imagine the optics.

"Yay I'm male and I successfully lied and deceived my way into receiving services for abused women! Cos I wanted to!"

Do please, any arse who feels so inclined, crack on. Do you. You cannot buy that kind of publicity. In the name of bringing the GRA down, every little helps.

Yes, and she could have achieved world peace too, if she'd just put her mind to it and stopped working at her main job and devoting a large chunk of her spare time to the charity she set up many years ago to help women and girls! Talk about selfish!

I suspect as the poster upthread who recounted the experience of call handlers at the Samaritons and a rape crisis centre are an example of how someone who is offering a service to women only will be able to work out who is who. And if as I understand it this new centre will not be a charity and its business model is women only, then they can just have an statement about anyone trying to fraudulently use the service will be sued.

The much bigger issue is that, particularly in Scotland, the so called professionals are allowing trans women to be part of women's services at the expense of women.

That is the issue, not just that Nicola Sturgeon thinks she is on to a vote winner, but apparently an enourmous number of women dont believe in women only services, even though the EA allows them to do that.

So unless and until those of us on FWR and other GC forums put ourselves forward to be the decision makers, support workers or a groups backers, this will continue.

The state whether local or national isn't going to care. They give the money they have to who they want because for each one of us saying they shouldn't another woman will say they should.

And they can now point to the fact that rich people who have this outlier beliefs can fund this discriminatory type of service.

That's the issue we have got to address. That each time we think we are making headway with women's sex based rights, other women undermine it.

And guess which group the patriarchy chooses to support.

Absolutely fantastic.
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