Rape crisis centre worker wins gender-critical tribunal (by Joan Smith)

If you’re trying to get away with a lie, it had better be a big one. It’s something populist politicians understand very well, firing up supporters with outrageous claims designed to encourage their preexisting prejudices. One of the biggest, which is shamefully popular on the Left in this country, is the idea that there’s no conflict between women’s rights and the demands of identity politics.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Women are having to dismantle the lie brick by brick, using the courts to show how individuals have been ostracised by colleagues and lost jobs. But the latest in a series of harrowing employment tribunal cases demonstrates not just the damage to a particular claimant, but the devastating impact of gender ideology on victims of sexual violence.

It shows how even women who have been raped, who are so traumatised they can barely speak about their experience, are of little account to a movement that prioritises men over women. The tribunal found that the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre constructively dismissed and harassed an employee, Roz Adams, after she realised that senior managers believed there is no such thing as biological sex, and expressed her concerns about the effect of that belief on traumatised women.

Of course this happened in Scotland, where gender ideology is so embedded that the CEO of the centre is a trans-identified man. Mridul Wadhwa wasted no time in demonstrating his unsuitability for the job, suggesting in a notorious interview in 2021 that “bigoted” rape survivors should be re-educated about trans rights. But the full extent of his influence on the culture of the centre is exposed in the tribunal’s excoriating judgment.

It found that Wadhwa and other members of the senior management team were on a “heresy hunt” when they began a disciplinary process against Adams. It concluded that Wadhwa’s intention was to “cleanse the organisation” of anyone who refused to accept views which were “at the very extreme end of gender identity theory”. Many if not most survivors of male sexual violence don’t feel able to disclose details of an attack to a man, yet employees were told to give ambiguous replies when victims asked about the sex of the counsellor they had been assigned by the centre.

Adams was not alone in challenging this approach. Joan McAlpine, a former SNP MSP, has described a meeting at the centre during which she was told that “anyone who identifies as a woman could be a rape counsellor”. Many of us would regard that as a dereliction of duty towards vulnerable women, but it gets worse.

The centre even refused to refer rape survivors who wanted a female counsellor to a women-only service set up by J.K. Rowling. This is about as far from a victim-centred approach as it is possible to imagine, turning what should have been a service for distressed women into an exercise to validate the fantasies of entitled men like Wadhwa.

No woman, not even one who has been terrorised and beaten by a violent sex offender, is safe from the demands of these misogynists. They have got away with it because too many people have swallowed the big lie that men who “identify” as women are victims who need to be cosseted. Anyone who goes on believing it, after it’s been exposed so many times, is enabling damage to women.

---

Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She has been Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board since 2013. Her book Homegrown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists was published in 2019.

Rape crisis centre worker wins gender-critical tribunal - UnHerd