Previously in the group, she and the other women had talked freely about men’s feelings of entitlement to women’s bodies and spaces and found comfort in their shared experiences. No longer. Afterwards, she asked Survivors’ Network, the Brighton-based government-funded charity for victims of sexual violence that ran the group, if there could be a female-only group.
“It seemed like a reasonable thing to ask, because they had a group for trans women, and a trans-inclusive group for women, so two groups for people born male, but none just for females,” she says.
According to the Equality Act, sex is a protected characteristic, meaning that the provision of single-sex spaces is lawful where it is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. But in correspondence seen by UnHerd, Survivors’ Network told Sarah that a single-sex group would be “problematic as we do not police gender”. Sarah had to leave the group where she had found, for the first time in her life, support, help and understanding. Survivors’ Network suggested that she get individual therapy, and was advised there was a two-year waiting list, then heard nothing further about that. They also suggested she seek help from “other services in the city”, but Survivors’ Network is the only service of its kind in the whole of Sussex, and she couldn’t find any group just for women. Sarah is now taking them to court for sex discrimination.
Of course I’m not saying trans women shouldn’t be helped by rape services, and it’s great there are mixed-sex groups for people who feel comfortable with that. I don’t want to stop that at all. But there should also be single-sex ones. This is a government-funded service. We deserve to have the support we need.”
Survivors’ Network declined to give a comment for this article but instead directed me to a statement affirming their commitment to trans-inclusive feminism: “Trans women are women and as such they are welcome in women-only spaces.”
Until that day in her rape support group, Sarah had little interest in arguments about gender ideology. “You’d have to be living under a rock to not know discussions were happening online and in the media, but I wasn’t that involved. If pushed, I’d have described myself as an ally. I marched at Trans Pride and thought of trans women as my sisters. But I assumed there was respect for rape crisis groups and no one would try to cross that boundary. It seems quite naïve now,” she says.
When Sarah researched Survivors’ Network’s peer support group she discovered it was trans inclusive. She asked an assessor whether the group she would be attending was female-only and the assessor hesitated before saying yes, it was, so she was left unsure what to expect. “When I started at the group, it was all-female, so I then assumed that Survivors’ Network had a group for women and a group for trans women, and that’s how they were able to be inclusive but also treat women. That’s partly why I was so taken aback to see a man in the group two months later,” she says. The “man” was a self-identified trans woman, but, Sarah says, there was no indication that they were socially or medically transitioning — they looked simply like a man.
Multiple studies have shown that patterns of offending do not change just because the male person has transitioned their gender. So while certainly not all trans women are predators, just as not all men are predators, they are far more likely to commit a violent crime than women, just as men are.
To see so many women online empathise more with the trans person’s possible sense of exclusion than with her trauma felt, Sarah says, like when her female friends refused to believe that their male friend had raped her because they liked him. So many women care more about the feelings of men than the needs of other women.
“I was abused by a man, I was raped by a man. I think it’s quite a healthy response to be wary of men, and to not assume they always have the best of intentions, because I made that mistake. I think that should be encouraged by rape crisis centres, rather than them telling us to take down our boundaries and ignore our instincts.
In an article last month, a woman called Janey Starling, who says she “supports survivors of domestic abuse”, wrote a piece titled “Why Trans Women Belong in Women’s Spaces”, in which she compared abused women’s fear of males to anti-black racism. I ask Sarah about this commonly cited argument. “Black people don’t commit over 90% of sex crimes. No race does. But males do,” she says.
But gender activists would say that trans people are so marginalised that it doesn’t matter that they’re male: women should accommodate them. “I’m sure they are marginalised in some places, but where I live there are ten organisations with dedicated groups for the wellbeing of trans women, and none just for women. So I wouldn’t say they’re marginalised here,” she says.