28/10/2022
Open Democracy website reports on the activities of extremist groups in Scotland to try and discredit and disrupt the work of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, which has always worked with trans women without incident and which has a transgender director. In a revealing analysis, the brave weblog notes the connections between far right Christian extremists, the political macho right wing and a small number of misguided feminists, who believe that they can forge a meaningful alliance with the far right against transgender women. In fact, all evidence suggests that the right wing turns on feminist women as soon as the alliance has outgrown its usefulness to them. Open Democracy’s Adam Ramsay writes: “Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre has shown Open Democracy 55 pages of emails it received , with senders’ details redacted. Almost all misgender the trans director and many accuse her baselessly of predatory behaviour. Some are racist. The letters include numerous threats of vigilante violence. One seems to call for a genocide of trans women. Another chillingly presents the board with a choice of sacking the director, or seeing transphobes “take matters into their own hands”.”. He continues “Yet analysis by the Trans Safety Network showed the anti transgender tweets came from fewer than 250 accounts, and just 30 accounts tweeted almost half of them”. The article concludes that the fringe nature of anti-trans extremism does not stop it from being dangerous, noting that all manner of transphobic as well as homophobic people have felt emboldened to attack LGBTQIA people as a consequence. But it noted that the hateful minority remained politically isolated, given that “the expected passage of Scotland’s long-awaited Gender Recognition Act through the country’s parliament later this month. The 2021 SNP/Scottish Green Party co-operation agreement, which defines the agenda of the Scottish government, included a commitment to make it easier for trans people to gain legal recognition for their gender through the legislation, and in early October the committee that scrutinised the proposed bill overwhelmingly endorsed it.” For the full analysis at Open Democracy, visit our website for a link.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/trans-scotland-mridul-wadhwa-for-w...
