Abused or abuser?
When Roz Adams won her employment tribunal case against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre this May, many commentators were shocked by the evidence revealed in court about the “Kafkesque” “heresy hunt” she was subjected to at the “invisible hand” of the CEO, Mridul Wadhwa. This feeling intensified with the publication of Vicky Ling’s damning report into the centre with a list of failures which included: “a strategy which did not put survivors first; a failure to protect women only spaces;… [and] a CEO who did not understand the limits on her [sic] role’s authority.” Many were horrified that, after nearly half a century, an organisation set up by redoutable women to serve their sisters in the darkest moments of their lives had fallen so far. How did it happen and how could self-proclaimed feminists have let it get into such a mess?
Back in 2010, the year of the Equality Act, there was no question what vulnerable women and survivors wanted and needed from a support service. The now disbanded Women’s National Commission surveyed 650 UK women’s sector organisations that year (with 297 responding) and reported that 99% of the respondents “believe that it is important for a woman who has been sexually assaulted or has experienced any other form of violence to have the choice to access a women-only support service.” The report emphasised the need for safe spaces to “rebuild trust” and female only staff to “ensure empathy and respect”. They were also clear that “The presence of men and male staff in violence against women and girls support services would deter many women from seeking support and from accessing longer-term after-care services.” The report also stressed that if services were mixed-sex they should offer women-only services at point of delivery. Storm clouds were, however, gathering. Respondents to the survey warned of pressures from funders to “include men so that they are ‘more representative of society’, ‘more relevant’ and serve the ‘wider community’.”
Two years later, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) conducted a report on The impact of changes in commissioning and funding on women-only services, surveying 25 women’s organisations. The findings were very similar, with 95% of users saying the women-only nature of the service was important. They cited “safety and security” and an “ability to talk more freely”. The report noted that this was “particularly the case for ethnic minority women”. In an awful foreshadowing, many of the women said that they would not have accessed the service if it had been mixed-sex.
The assault on women’s services since these reports has been swift and brutal. Politics, manipulation, funding, and an exploitation of the “be kind” narratives which have gripped contemporary thinking have all played a part. And women have suffered.
A key document in the push to deprioritise the needs and safety of women was also published in 2010: Out of sight, out of mind – Transgender People’s Experiences of Domestic Abuse, was based on research carried out by Scottish Transgender Alliance (STA) and the LGBT Domestic Abuse Project. The latter group was a LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS) project and was funded by the Equally Safe Fund. The previous year, the CEO of LGBTYS, James Rennie, was convicted of horrific counts of child sex abuse. Despite this, no investigation of the charity took place and it later emerged that a further 2010 LGBTYS report on “coming out” was co-authored by paedophile Andrew Easton. Such revelations might indicate that this was not an organisation with robust standards around safeguarding.
Nor did the researchers seem to have much of a clue about data collection and methodology. The survey was self-selecting with recipients recruited through flyers and email in transgender networks and badged, explicitly, as a domestic abuse project. The obvious problem with such methodology is that the possibility of bias in the sample is extremely high. Even the authors admitted that this, coupled with the small sample size (sixty usable responses), meant it was unlikely to be representative. The report’s conclusion that 80% of trans people suffered domestic violence should have been incredible (in the sense of unbelievable) yet it has been bandied around ever since.
Dig deeper and there are more egregious problems in this report. Domestic violence is acknowledged to be a gendered crime, the majority of victims are women and the majority of perpetrators are male. Yet, no distinction was made between the abuse reported by the 19 transmen and the 28 transwomen and no attempt was made to differentiate the 13 respondents in the third group: “other types of gender variant people”. Worse, the assumption in Out of Sight is that the adoption of a trans identity shifts the normal axis of power in a relationship and wipes out the structural inequalities conditional on sex. The respondents were also allowed to self-declare sexuality, which, naturally, led to a majority in the “MTF” group identifying as “lesbian”. This presents obvious issues: just as it would have been useful to know if the abuse reported was different for male and female respondents, the sex of the partner is also absent from the analysis. With such hopelessly tangled definitions and such a varied group, meaningful conclusions become impossible. This was further exacerbated as the report used a very loose interpretation of “domestic abuse” as will be seen.
The report claimed “the type of domestic abuse most frequently experienced by the transgender respondents was transphobic emotional abuse”. The authors say, “Seventy-three percent of the respondents experienced abusive behaviours from partners or ex-partners which specifically aimed to oppress or invalidate the transgender person’s gender identity, undermine their ability to transition, or to influence their decision about coming out to others.” It becomes clear that, to the authors, the hurt and upset felt by female partners of transitioning men was “emotional abuse”. Refusing to call their partner by a new name and pronouns scored highly in the survey as did “stopping” the partner changing their clothing, hair or make-up. In fact, anything other than enthusiastically embracing the new identity of the partner is branded “abuse”. There is very little partners can do to avoid the charge: if they refuse to publicly accept new names or pronouns, or refuse to let friends know, it’s abuse, but if they do let slip and tell other people, they are equally guilty.
Other forms of abuse surveyed were undoubtedly more serious including physical and sexual violence but without knowing the sex of the victims or the sex of the partner, it is hard to draw a conclusion that this was a result peculiar to the trans community or whether other power dynamics were at play and how these results compared to other surveys of domestic violence suffered by women or gay men.
The examples given throughout the report back up the supposition that male and female respondents were recording different types of “abuse”. “Coming out” to partners is identified as a time of “high risk”. The report grudgingly accepts that this can be stressful for partners, but this is secondary to that allegedly felt by the trans partner who may feel “guilt about their trans status disrupting their partner’s life and worry about being seen as selfish if they express their gender identity openly”. One such example is very revealing about the type of “abuse” trans-identified men complained about from their wives:
“I told [my wife] that I was wanting to go for the operation… And she said ‘yeah okay I can sort of understand that, I can go with you’… [Then a friend] said something to her which really hit home: that once the operation is finished and all the rest of it and I’ve went through it all, she’s going to have a lesbian relationship. That struck home and she started to turn… And I also said to her, ‘well to go for the gender recognition certificate, I do have to have a divorce, although if you want, you know, we’ll have a civil partnership’… And it turned really, really nasty then… every time we were talking to each other it was anger that was coming out… ’You and your cronies are freaks, you’re just all f-in freaks’… Well you’ve 30 years of marriage behind you, and for your wife who knew all about you… But suddenly I’m a freak… You know, and it permanently got to me.”
Clearly, the wife of 30 years who has just been told her life and relationship is collapsing, did not know “all about” her husband, but her trauma is not worthy of examination or sympathy. The report characterises a trans partner as the blameless victim in a marriage breakdown triggered by their actions: “Many people hope that their partner will come to understand their need to transition, so they put themselves at risk for longer, in the hope of saving their relationships”. According to the report 45% of the respondents said that “a partner or ex-partner had repeatedly put them down so that they felt worthless.” One man complained:
“She knew about my transgender status. At first she was okay about it, but then she started using it against me. She was happy when she thought I was more like a transvestite, you know, cross-dressing, but as it carried on, she wasn’t happy about it. She started threatening to tell my friends about it if I didn’t do what she wanted… I trusted her, but she abused that… After we broke up, she went around my friends and told them I was transgender.”
This behaviour is categorised as “coercive”, with the authors writing, “Respondents reported high levels of control and coercion from partners relating to the process of transitioning, either by preventing them from expressing their true gender identity or, in a smaller number of cases, forcing them to ‘out’ themselves through threatening to tell others of their trans background or identity.”
Another thread that runs through the accounts is the inability of partners to perceive the trans identified individual as anything other than their true sex. From the examples given, it seems female respondents were especially prone to find this upsetting. One woman says “[I] dated a girl who knew a lot about my transgenderism, being a close friend of mine beforehand, and claimed to be very accepting [of my male gender identity] but throughout the relationship she stressed importance on me being female, and became emotionally and physically abusive.” There is no concern that the partner may feel equally defensive of her sexuality or her identity as a lesbian. Similarly, a woman in a hetrosexual relationship complains that “I had just left a very short relationship with a man who saw me as nothing but female regardless of what I told him… I certainly tried to make him aware [of my identity as a transman], as I did most of my past partners, but it fell on deaf ears.”
Nowhere is it acknowledged that these women are, themselves, attempting to coerce and gaslight partners, not least when forcing them to accept “non binary” identities. Rather, they argue that “Transgender people with non binary gender identities are particularly at risk of invalidation of their identities because wider society generally insists that there are only two legitimate genders, making it very easy for partners and services to be dismissive and disrespectful.” These “abusive partners” are said to “deliberately trigger major emotional distress with what may seem, to other people outside the relationship, like minor words or actions”, perhaps because, for the most part, these are very minor infractions. However, the expectation is that the partner is obliged to act as a constant source of validation and support: “For transgender people who have not transitioned and may only have access to validation of their gender identity through their partner, such behaviours can make them even less confident to tell others about their transgender status and seek support outside the relationship.”
Naturally, there also appears to be a great deal of play-acting the victim from trans-identified men with one respondent saying, “I suppose I’m more aware that as a woman I’m more at risk of certain things than previously”. Instead of treating such statements with the contempt they deserve, the report notes, “As a result of coping with new gender roles, transgender people (particularly trans women in the early stages of transition) may be uncertain about what strategies and behaviours to utilise to cope with gender inequalities”. This confusion is also, inevitably, cited as all the more reason to expect these men will be “abused” as they “may also find it more challenging to recognise and remove themselves from abusive situations, both within their relationships and outside the home from strangers.”
A sadly common phenomenon in cases of domestic abuse is the counter-allegation, where the perpetrator turns allegations back on the victim. As further evidence has emerged in recent years of the impact of partner transition on wives and families, it has become clear that, all too frequently, this is a selfish, destructive act which is often accompanied by mental or physical cruelty and coercion. Accounts on the Trans Widows Voices website detail boundary transgression, pornography habits, and jealous rage. These stories were often untold or unheard: while transitioning men have been celebrated as “stunning and brave”, a reluctant or confused spouse has been monstered as unkind and unaccepting of her husband’s “true” self. The damage such narratives do was laid bare in the recent documentary Behind the Looking Glass. The report gives zero consideration to the situation of spouses and presumes instead that the trans identified individual is uniquely vulnerable in the relationship.
The report also wanted to have its cake and eat it. They reported that 25% of respondents claimed their partners had threatened or attempted suicide which they identified as emotional abuse and said it could “generate intense feelings of guilt and concern”. Yet, a few pages later, the report uncritically cites debunked statistics for suicide ideation in the trans population and warns “It is therefore a highly abusive and dangerous from of control for a partner or ex-partner to target a person’s transgender identity in a negative way and to prevent them being able to express themselves as who they are.” In other words, miserable partners, pitched into a situation they cannot control and who went on to self-harm, are controlling monsters, while the trans individual who is, possibly, destroying the marriage, is to be indulged and protected.
One of the authors of this shameful Domestic Abuse report was Amy Roch, then Domestic Abuse Development Officer at LGBT Youth Scotland. This was not the only report co-authored by Roch. A year later she was one of the two authors of Stronger Together, a guidance document for including transwomen in women’s services – one of the overt aims of the earlier project. Stronger Together was covered in more detail in a blog post by Murray Blackburn Mackenzie: it materially misrepresented the law, claiming women’s services were “legally obliged to offer services to all trans women in possession of a GRC” and that “services which refuse to provide a service to that woman are breaking the law.” The guidance went further and claimed that “any woman [sic] who ‘intends to undergo, is undergoing or has undergone gender reassignment’ is entitled to service provision”. The document also said that if female service users were uncomfortable with a man in their spaces “we would work to educate other service users – much in the same way that we would if we received comments regarding other service user’s ethnicity, religious affiliation or sexual orientation.” This travesty of a document drew explicitly on Roch’s previous paper and advertised that she was “commencing research to identify gaps in provision for gay, bisexual and transgender men experiencing domestic abuse”. There is also a record of a proposed project on transgender people’s experiences of prostitution in Roch’s name at Edinburgh University, but no evidence that either of these projects came to fruition.
In any case, the damage was done. Both these flawed, badly researched (and dishonest) pieces of work were accepted without question by the women’s sector in Scotland. Scottish Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis Scotland hosted Stronger Together on their websites and the Domestic Violence document was routinely and uncritically cited as evidence that trans people were at elevated risk of violence and abuse. Roch, who describes herself as an “expert in Gender Based Violence and LGBT+ rights” went on to enjoy a career in the women’s sector, working for Women’s Aid and in Rape Crisis. Latterly, she was deputy (and briefly acting) CEO of LGBT charity Galop, in which capacity she gave evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic Violence and Abuse at Westminster at which she claimed “LGBTQ+ people experience domestic abuse at similar rates to heterosexual cis gender women”.
Frighteningly, it’s been revealed that the College of Policing is also using Out of Sight. Cathy Larkman, a retired Superintendent in the South Wales Police reported that they were signposting to it, and “appear to be advising the nation’s police officers that wives who withhold access to make up and nail varnish, or who object to their husband’s new ‘identity’ are committing domestic abuse.” She further said that “The College didn’t consult or reference groups like Trans Widows or Children Of Trans before producing this. Both groups could have given them an entirely different perspective on the subject of domestic abuse and ‘gender identity’.”
Roch’s appalling papers have cast a long shadow on the women’s sector in Scotland, materially affecting the delivery of services. Allowing men to infiltrate women’s services and be included in their remit was one of the recommendations of the report which argued for “Advertising by agencies that they will work with trans people (or trans women for women only organisations).” They also concluded that “Police services need to work to reduce the barriers to reporting for transgender people experiencing domestic abuse by:
– Specific training for all police officers on the needs of transgender people.
– Public promotion of trans inclusion by police forces.”
In forcing this ideology on women’s services and the Police, the activists have been wildly successful, persuading them to jettison experience and critical faculties in the name of “inclusion”. Vulnerable women who are suffering at the hands of a egotistical, narcissistic trans-identified partner have long been disbelieved, many have self-excluded from services originally designed to help them, because these spaces, following Roch, prioritised the man. Now they may find they are criminalised simply for refusing to accept a partner’s transition. It is time, once and for all, to stop allowing powerful interest groups like LGBTYS to subvert the law and put women’s safety on the line. It is well past time such shoddy, biassed, dishonest “research” is treated with the disdain it deserves. Women deserve, and need, better.