Kicking the Dog
Rape Crisis Scotland, the CEO of the Edinburgh rape services and all the usual suspects are bound up in this ghoulish tale that continues to pit trans rights against women.
Okay, a cis male misogynist, a cis woman and a trans woman are sat at a table with a pile of biscuits. The cis male grabs all the biscuits, save one, and stuffs them into his mouth. He then blurts out to the cis woman, through a drizzle of crumbs, “you better watch that *T-slur*, it’s got its eye on your biscuit!”.
2014 was a long time ago now. Bowie was still alive, Trump was still a harmless punchline, Brexit was an unrealistic fever-dream and Denzel Washington was the star of The Equalizer. Halcyon days. Laverne Cox was discussing the “transgender tipping point” with Time Magazine, exploring how a once overlooked and vulnerable community suddenly was getting positive attention. Trans men and trans women were being recognised as real, valid, interesting people and were getting some media time as a result.
Only two years later, British Prime Minister and part-time haunted turnip Theresa May thought she could get an easy win by updating Britain’s trans-focussed policies. The Gender Recognition Act (2004) allowed trans people to change their gender and have this recognised by the government — and in the ten years since, there was much that could be improved. The process was slow, medicalised, de-humanising and expensive. May, who’d watched her predecessor David Cameron usher-in same-gender marriage just two years before to great praise, thought this would be another quick-win.
The UK Conservative Party have a well-deserved reputation for xenophobia, bigotry, homophobia and transphobia — as well as corruption — and same-gender marriage helped to offset that perception. Being a bit nicer to trans people could help too, right?
Oh, honey.
Now we’re in 2024, and it’s time to take a look at provision for abused women in Glasgow, Scotland. There are services specifically for women who have been raped, abused or are otherwise vulnerable and in danger and, under Scottish Law, those services cannot discriminate against the women they help.
If a trans woman is raped, she is entitled to the same help and support as a cis woman who has been raped. The person in charge of the rape crisis services in Edinburgh was even a trans woman — someone who understood vulnerable people and would be well-placed to offer comfort and succour.
Okay, good. Vulnerable women get some help. What’s the problem, then? Not enough funding? Service cutbacks? Some weirdo law that harms their operations?
At this point I must remind you that we live in a timeline where a convicted felon and rapist is set to become US President for the second time based on his promise to round-up and deport 25,000,000 people who, he claims, were eating dogs. Where “lying” is called “alternative fact”. Where we blame the needy for the greed of Big Business and where a racist manchild runs one of the biggest social websites and is set to be a special adviser to the US government. This reality is one step away from becoming Rand McNally, where people wear shoes on their heads and hamburgers eat people.
Of course the problem isn’t cutbacks or funding! It’s the transes!
What were fringe positions five years ago are now completely mainstream wisdom in British politics: in a nutshell, that transness is a fantasy that will be used by bad men to get into women-only spaces.
The prevailing wind comes from a position of biological determinism; the idea that everything about a person is attributable to their body and, being built on fundamental blocks of DNA and chromosomes, said body is unchangeable. Or, more simply put, men are men and women are women and they are different, they are always different and those two sexes represent the entirety of all humanity. That there are exactly two. And those sexes can never change. Further, that everything about a person stems from which of those two sexes they are: men are violent, aggressive and strong with at least the potential to rape; women are passive, calm and weak.
Fun interstitial — can you guess which projects have also built cases from biological determinism? If you guessed “eugenics” and “scientific racism” you’d be right!
Therefore, goes the reasoning, transness does not exist, only mentally-ill men and women exist. Mentally ill women are not a threat, because they are passive; calm; and weak. Mentally ill men are dangerous. This is pretty much where The Conservative Party is now, and Labour are only barely restraining themselves from joining them.
When you look at rape crisis provision in Scotland through those terms, the situation is untenable. A trans woman cannot run the service in Edinburgh! The service in Glasgow must not accept trans people! Women must be protected from trans people! Why did we ever let all these potential rapists into spaces set aside for women? Why did we fire an employee just because she is a massive, crock-stirring transphobe with a clearly antagonistic agenda?
Hence, the Chief Exec of Edinburgh’s rape crisis centre has left. The Glasgow branch has left the Rape Crisis Scotland group because of its trans-inclusive policies. It’s a huge scandal, and many fingers are being pointed to lay blame for this horrible situation.
Honestly, first we cost the Democrats in the USA their election by being pandered to with, like, 0 whole policies about us — and now this!
Under UK law, it is acceptable to discriminate against trans women where doing so achieves a legitimate end. For example, one could run a rape crisis centre and, if circumstances required it, provide a service such that a traumatised person need not come into contact with a trans person. Neither are denied service, the service is just applied differently.
Similarly, UK prisons hold broad (in fact, far too broad) powers to put violent or sexual offenders into isolation: they mix with other prisoners only at supervised times (such as meals) and are not allowed to roam free in “general population”.
Those sound like two policies that should allow a prison to handle a trans inmate — such as Karen White. However, the prison screwed it up and then blamed it on her being trans. The debate then became about whether she was allowed to call herself a woman, not how she was dealt with. Roll on a couple of years, and now, no trans woman can go into a women’s prison in the UK — even if it is for a non-violent crime, such as credit fraud — unless they have had genital reconstruction surgery because we are not seen as women, all of us are now seen as men who are potential rapists.
Fun interstitial: did you know, even if all trans women did want genital reconstruction surgery, we can’t all get it? The waiting lists are long, the operation costs a fortune privately, many of us have health issues that preclude elective surgery and some (like me) are just too heavy for the fatphobic NHS. Uh-huh! It’s true!
You would think that these same policies should allow a rape crisis centre to operate in a manner that responds to the needs of the distraught and traumatised. However, the narrative that’s taken root can’t accept that. Any trans member of staff must be outed to other staff and patients, to avoid them being in a room with a man who is a potential rapist. Any trans woman patient must be outed, to avoid women being in a room with a man who is a potential rapist. Trans women must be (at least) completely segregated, to avoid women being in a room with a man who is a potential rapist.
You’ll notice that sounds very discriminatory, because it is. It is a massive breach of privacy, a huge personal invasion and, for want of a better word, demented. It calls for broad, prejudicial action against people based on their trans status.
Because the CEO of the Edinburgh crisis centre wouldn’t sanction revealing staff/patient gender identities, she had to be sacked. A “gender critical” (transphobe) who worked at the Glasgow centre got £70,000 for being sacked when she caused a massive stink, demanding to know who was trans… and her opinion is now a protected characteristic thanks to Maya Forstater.
Trans people, in this case women, are no longer even viewed with suspicion. We are now just out-and-out threats. First stop, getting us out of services where we can get help for abuse or rape — second stop, getting us out of hospital wings and public toilets!
How we landed at such an extreme position so lacking in nuance is complicated. A large portion is because we have an uncritical media landscape — now, by that, best beloved, I don’t mean that they don’t give politicians a hard time. They do. They love asking questions to make politicians squirm or look foolish. That’s part of the game, and politicians play along. What they don’t do is hold stories to account based on fact and evidence. What do I mean by that?
“Reports” from “constituents” to a back-bench MP have led to headlines about children being shown pornography and taught about gender-reassignment. News anchors, editors and reporters are seemingly devoid of any ability to interrogate this. Just as they did during Brexit, they essentially just handed a platform over without requiring any level of due-diligence. The fact there’s not a shred of evidence to back it up is neither here-nor-there.
And, anyway, stuff to do with queer people is juicy. It’s about sex, always and forever. The news and media reinforce this association because they benefit from it. Sex sells, and weird sex even more so! Who doesn’t want a tasty front-page where we talk about how the T-slurs and F-slurs are invading our schools with their indoctrination tactics and ideology!
Language is important, and it has been used consistently for many years now to paint queer and trans people as generically bad.
An equally large influence is social media. It allows otherwise small-fry a soapbox to build up large audiences. There are no requirements to fact-check or verify anything that’s said: I’ve peppered this article with links to back up the basics of my argument, but I didn’t need to do that. Indeed, the more one is appealing to base prejudices the less one needs evidence. If an audience holds that prejudice, you need only fan it. It needs no further explanation.
Most of the “gender critical” movement fall into the social influencer bracket. Only one or two have any sort of large-scale audience offline, and even then they have to write columns; or books; or schedule speaking events. What gender critical positions need is access to an audience that they can shock, surprise and then recruit.
Watch Caelan Conrad’s undercover deep-dive into this movement to see, first hand, how they operate and what they really think. Straight from the horse’s mouth.
Social media actively encourages and rewards this shock-jock behaviour, because it drives engagement. Stun people with something, and they’re likely to be drawn further in. They’ll reshare it, comment or react in another way. That tells the platform’s algorithm that this content is resonating and so it’ll be surfaced more broadly. It’s as though someone built a machine to identify the troublemaker in every class and school and automatically give them their own TV show.
Newspapers report breathlessly on every Twitter fight twisted billionaire authors get into with actors. Or with TV personalities. Or other authors. The very drama itself is the story. How many gendercritters would either never have been drawn to this movement, without this dopamine delivery mechanism of outrage-binging? How many of its ostensible leaders would never have bothered getting this worked up, if it didn’t lead to such attention and influence?
Lastly, since the 1980’s, the promises of Capitalism have evaporated. I’m not going to go full Socialist on you, but look at what we’ve had. Austerity. Cuts. Tax rises. Recessions. The Great Recession. Mortgage defaults. Home repossessions. Food banks. Rent increases. Inflation. Doubling energy bills.
Capitalism was meant to make us all rich, if we just worked hard. Well, we’re working hard and only a handful of people have gotten rich. And now those guys don’t pay their taxes, channel revenue through Ireland or the Cayman Islands and spend their spare time building rocketships. Oh, and influencing government.
Productivity has increased, but is no longer associated with better pay. Inflation has pushed prices up. Companies gouge us for products assembled by slave labour that are designed to fail within a couple of years.
Even if we put our biggest set of blinkers on, stuff cotton in our ears and sing as loudly and as off-key as we can… there is no way we’re not all, in our bones, unaware of where we are. We might deny it, ignore it or argue-the-toss about it… but in our souls we know it’s true. We live in a world where tomorrow will probably be harder than today. That 1950’s idyll of one person’s salary paying for a house, two cars, two holidays a year, college for the kids and a chicken roasting in the oven is a joke. Homer Simpson’s lifestyle, originally conceived as average or normal, is beyond the reach of most people now.
Our economies, business laws and regulations are complicated. They’re beyond me, at least. I can see the system is rotten, but I don’t know where to begin replacing it short of throwing it all away before we destroy the Earth. If someone is not of a mind to throw it away, they’re going to be equally lost as to when and how improvements should be made. All they know is that they’re hurting.
And when people are hurting, they get mad.
It’s the old “kick the dog” trope: the man has a bad day at work, but his boss is too big and too mean for him to say what he feels. What does the man do? He comes home and kicks the dog. The dog didn’t make his working life a misery, but it’s the entity closest in proximity and least-likely to retaliate or tell-tales. If anyone complains, he’ll say it growled at him and got what it had coming.
This, then, is our world.
In the UK, 2023–2024, around 70,000 rapes were reported. Of these, 1,967 were referred to the Crown Prosecution Service for trial. Of those, 597 resulted in convictions. 0.85%. Rapes are reported by newspapers with quote-marks around “rape”. We care more about the potential, what if, maybe the person is innocent and the victim is making it up for attention?
The number of reports thought to be or found to be false is about 4%.
If you go out to a bar, you’re supposed to guard your drink so it isn’t spiked. You need a network of friends, all looking out for each other. You mustn’t walk home alone, or even get a taxi alone.
If a cis woman is in an abusive relationship with another cis woman, you can’t legally term violations as rape. If convicted, the abuser will be allowed into a women’s prison, because she doesn’t have a wing-wang. If not, she’ll be allowed into changing rooms, toilets, schoolyards and (if needed) rape crisis centres.
What, then, are trans women in this tapestry? We’re a dog to kick. It’s been made clear that it’s okay to kick us, and it’ll make you feel better. Maybe even make you feel clever. You don’t even really need to believe anything: the only requirement is that you don’t engage your brain sufficiently to realise human beings do not just do what their ‘genes’ tell them, they have free will, trans women need rape crisis help too (17 were seen by the crisis centre in Scotland last year — hardly a tsunami but not zero either) and trans women don’t want predators in their spaces either. Because we’re women. Because we’re not predators or freaks.
We aren’t the threat. We’ve never been the threat. There is no torrent of predators trying to get into toilets: you know why? Because a “bad man” can get into a women’s toilet by just putting on overalls and carrying a mop. Or even just sticking his head in and saying “sorry, my daughter came in 15 minutes ago and I’m worried, mind if I check on her”? The little stick-figure on the door wearing a dress isn’t a magic charm that repels evil!
Some trans people are bad, some women are bad, that doesn’t mean you prejudge everyone based on that.
The network of outrage, horse-hockey purveyors is the threat. A justice system that presumes women lie is the threat. A legal system that prioritises the feelings of men is the threat. An institutionally sexist police force is the threat.
Collectively, they have stuffed every biscuit, bar one, into their maw and then told cis women “look out for that *T-slur*: it’s after your biscuit”.
