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I’ve had yet another battle this week with the NA Gods about a women’s meeting I run being female only, & trans exclusive.
I’ve been “asked” to unaffiliated our Women’s Recovery Meeting from NA after another complaint that my rule of female only attendees is “transphobic”. Here’s the issue:
Many women in recovery have experienced severe sexual abuse. They have traumas I couldn’t repeat as to do so would be to describe horrific acts of child exploitation & sexual abuse. When the women who come in to recovery do so, they must be able to talk about what happened to them. We have a triage team who know how to help. We’ve been running for almost 4 years now & are one of the only guaranteed female only meetings that exists.
We need to be trans exclusive because of men – the male kind – who take advantage of the meetings online format to put on a wig & some lipstick & sneak in to specifically listen to the descriptions of sexual trauma that women have endured. Some men (not all men, not even most men, but some) sexually enjoy watching devastated women recount the details of what has been done to them at the hands of men. I’ve been in other meetings where men are clearly recording the testimonies of women & seen men clearly openly masturbating on camera. It’s vile, it’s well known to happen & no one on the front lines would ever doubt that this is a recurring issue.
What shocks me is that it is not men who are making complaints about our meeting. If a man is so perverted that he seeks out ways to watch women talk about what they call “trauma porn”, he may try subtly to come in but will not risk exposing himself by drawing attention to what he is trying to do. Instead, he will tell women in other groups that a trans friend of his has recently overdosed & died & name my Women’s Only meeting as the culprit, then the women will become outraged & team up to make complaints or even infiltrate the meeting themselves & cause trouble.
Women who have found recovery have already beaten so many odds against them. The vulnerable young women who find us have found a supportive, strong group of sisters who will be able to protect their safe space & help them through recovery. Without the meeting, which is once a week, many wouldn’t have made it.
People say this never happens. It does. Men are posing as trans women online to go on to Zoom meetings set up for women in recovery & preying on us. That needs to stop, or at the very least women who are further in to recovery need to be able to firmly set boundaries & keep our meetings running without endless pressure for trans inclusion. The trans women I know could never & would never object to a female only recovery meeting.
We must be allowed to retain female only spaces & services for the most vulnerable women in our communities & cannot afford to have any loophole which nullifies our already strained resources.
I’ve been threatened by a woman this week who will be “outing me on Twitter” as a “transphobe” for retaining the female only boundary for our women’s only meeting. So there – I’ve outed myself. I do not believe it is “transphobic” to keep perverted men away from traumatised, vulnerable women in early recovery.
I will not bow to the handmaidens of predatory men over protecting vulnerable women. It is not trans women I wish to keep away from our meeting – they are a casualty of the perverted actions of pornsick men. Please kindly stop enabling them to abuse women.
Women deserve single sex services. There is no time to be politically correct when it comes to the recovery of abuse survivors: they are likely to talk about what has happened to them for the first time in a meeting like ours, surrounded by only women. Men did that damage & women are trying to undo what we can & help the healing begin.
I cannot believe it is women who object & can’t see that to include *males in women’s only services is to nullify them.
I will not compromise or be bullied in to putting women at risk. No.
Cutting to the heart of the matter as usual, J.K. Rowling on single sex spaces.
Unfortunately male socialization and the violence that is inherent with it remains the problem. This isn’t a plea to ‘sensitize’ men. Nothing of the sort, males, in the process of their socialization need to be taught to respect the boundaries and rights of others. They need to be taught to be cognizant that other people experience and act in the world differently than they do.
I am all for a rough and tumble socialization experience for both sexes, we need to seek environments for our children that encourage the adoption of anti-fragile attitudes and strategies. Our lives are filled with challenges and hard tasks that require the habits physical and mental resiliency to be in place before reaching maturation. We need to steer away from male and female socialization and more toward “good people” socialization – in which people are raised to be assertive, creative, and respectful of themselves and others.
“Good people” socialization is an end goal though, first we must deal with the sex stereotypes that harm both women and men – that is the first step.
Male violence (and the threat of male violence) still shapes women’s lives here in 21st century. We have not advanced past the stage of needing female only spaces and strong rules regarding the safeguarding of women and children from predatory men. The transgender idea of self – identification inserts a gigantic loophole into conventional safeguarding techniques thus rending safeguarding untenable and unsafe for women. Human beings cannot change sex and we should not as a society entertain legislation and legal fictions that promote this dangerous idea.
“I learned that predators don’t have ‘PREDATOR’ tattooed on their foreheads. They tend, at least to begin with, to resemble your next door neighbour or friendly uncle. They don’t announce themselves as perverted.They seem friendly, helpful and ever so keen to please, the kind of people who go out of their way to befriend, perhaps proffer little gifts, some pocket money, tell a few jokes, until there’s an uneasy reliance upon them, by which time it’s too late to back out because the hooks are in so far that they can’t be released without more damage, destruction, public shame and deep personal regret. Those men supplant themselves into the empty spaces previously occupied by ex partners or fathers or brothers, bringing salvation, which soon turns to coercion and pain, gaslighting and deflection. Some such men are upright citizens, not just famous disc jockeys and musicians, but teachers, foster carers, priests, Scout leaders, lawyers, judges, doctors, each and every walk of life in fact has predators with disordered minds. They encourage the keeping of secrets, for that secrecy, darkness and shade are essential to achieving their ends. They are not to be questioned in their motives, required to justify or explain what they do.
Some men frighten women; some men bully women; some men kill women; some men belittle and humiliate women and some men harm little girls. Some men get to little girls via their vulnerable mothers; some men get kicks prowling where they can and ambush women or their daughters. That is why women and girls have single-sex spaces, for safety, respect and dignity.
Men who batter or molest or terrorise their stepdaughters into silence don’t grass themselves off – they refer to the falls, the accidents, the self-inflicted injuries occurring strangely in odd circumstances as they babysat. And, offended, do the ‘who, me?’routine, indignant.
Women who are vulnerable and see their children abused by new partners don’t always manage to recognise or speak of what is right under their noses, they’re weakened, isolated, and scared – for some in such circumstances, escape, refuge or justice are for the birds – and were they to pluck up the courage to seek such aid, what they need are soothing understanding female voices who know the terror which comes from having the lighter, weaker, more vulnerable body, unable to fend off attack. Women fleeing violence, abuse, domestic terror inflicted upon them by men don’t deserve to be greeted at the door of a refuge by an intact male telling them to leave their ‘trans bigotry’ outside on the doorstep.
And women who have been brutalised might try to find a quiet cool breathing space in a public toilet in a supermarket where they can take a deep breath and stare into space for a few precious moments whilst fearing what lies ahead, moments to check a noticeboard for a helpline or just to sit in peace away from a boorish leering unwelcome advance.
Mothers in emergency treatment rooms getting shards of glass tweezered from the backs of their heads, or their cheeks, or having their lips or eyebrows decorated with butterfly strips don’t want those administrations provided by fat male fingers – those resemble the hard hands which punched and slapped hell into them.
Grannies in their twilight, scared and alone in hospital wards with varicose veins, hip replacements or hysterectomies don’t desire to wobble onto a bedpan in a nightgown in full view of a male bodied patient.
Teenage girls shouldn’t hide at home for embarrassment of having to use school toilets as boys listen to them rustling next door – we’re sending money to charities building toilets in Africa, for girls, so that girls can get educated, yet here in Scotland we are tearing those girls’ toilets down. Feminist to our fingertips we Scots are. Indeed, but perhaps only upon the international stage, not at the domestic hearth.
We know that the majority of female prisoners in Scotland are not locked up because of their violence, most having suffered trauma in childhood, usually at the hands of abusive men – yet these days women are required to share with transwomen – intact male bodies – with scant if any risk assessment and no regard to the views of the women – retraumatisation comprising cruel and degrading treatment – condoned by a female First Minister in a country whose justice system was once allegedly the envy of the civilised world.
So today in 2021 I am no longer a safeguarder – I left that job a few years ago. In the meantime though, there has been a new training regime instigated when safeguarders learn how to interview children and have to compete the ‘Enhanced Disclosure’ check – you fill in a form which I learned last week no longer asks for the applicant’s sex, but for the applicant’s gender – I don’t know why that is but I do know this – one day in Scotland we will see, as self-identification erodes the safe spaces and safe places women and girls need, that predators will access those places and lives of women and girls will be harmed and their safety jeopardised. Dignity, respect, choice, sex, not gender -‘these will all be tossed into the abyss by the SNP/Green government as they take ‘a leap of faith’ , in the name of progress. Back to the future and the loss of the gains our great grannies won 100 years ago. It is to Scotland’s shame, and my conscience won’t allow it. Will yours?”
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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