Beira’s Place, which counsels victims of sexual violence or intimidation, is a threat to the UK rights movement, claims the charity
A women’s support centre for sexual assault victims founded by JK Rowling has been described as an “anti-rights” organisation by Amnesty International UK.
Beira’s Place, which opened in Edinburgh in 2022, was established by the Harry Potter author to provide support for women who have experienced sexual violence. The service describes itself as offering trauma-informed care to women, including any women who identify as trans.
The group appears in Amnesty International UK’s latest report, A Growing Threat – the Anti-Rights Movement in the UK, which identifies organisations the charity categorises as part of the UK’s “gender critical” movement.
Amnesty said the groups included in the report “visibly oppose the rights” of LGBT people and argued that restrictions on the rights of one group can weaken protections for others.
The report was updated this month. The document now includes 51 gender-critical organisations among a list of 117 groups and movements that Amnesty said were working against established human-rights protections.
Also included in Amnesty’s report is For Women Scotland (FWS), the campaign organisation that has successfully challenged the Scottish government in a series of legal cases over the definition of “woman” in law and the participation of transgender women in female-only spaces.
The group secured a landmark victory in the UK Supreme Court last year, which ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. The judgment has prompted governments and public bodies across the UK to review policies affecting single-sex spaces and services.
Beira’s Place was founded after controversy surrounding Rape Crisis Scotland’s Edinburgh centre, where the former chief executive Mridul Wadhwa faced criticism after suggesting survivors who objected to receiving support from a transgender woman should “reframe” their trauma. Rowling said at the time that the new service would ensure women could access support from female staff in a women-only environment.
Amnesty argued last year’s Supreme Court ruling had contributed to what it described as a deterioration in LGBT rights in the UK. The charity said that from 2015 to this year, Britain had fallen from first to 22nd place in the annual rankings compiled by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA-Europe).
According to the report, the decline is linked to several factors, including the lack of reform to gender recognition laws, the absence of legislation banning conversion practices, the treatment of LGBT asylum seekers, and the consequences of the Supreme Court judgment in the FWS case.
The report states: “Human rights are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. When the rights of one group are restricted, protections for others can also be weakened, even where the effects are not immediately visible.”
It continues: “Anti-rights actors seek a society in which women and men have fixed and distinct roles, based on what they view as ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’. These actors perceive the idea that gender is socially constructed as a threat because it suggests that gender roles can, and do, change across societies and over time.”
Another Scottish organisation, Murray Blackburn Mackenzie, is also identified in the report.
A FWS spokesperson said: “For Women Scotland is only ‘anti-rights’ if you don’t consider women to be entitled to any rights in law or public life. It’s a sad state of affairs that Amnesty has sunk so low as to defame prominent women’s organisations, including a rape crisis centre and support networks for abused wives and children.
“We won a landmark case on women’s rights at the Supreme Court where Amnesty intervened with their best legal arguments against us. That the judges were unpersuaded should have given Amnesty pause for thought. Instead, they have chosen to launch an ill-advised attack, and one that surely risks attracting the attention of the Charity Commission.”
FWS has recently succeeded in separate legal action over the placement of transgender prisoners in Scotland’s female prison estate.
After that ruling, the Scottish government confirmed it would not appeal and the Scottish Prison Service removed transgender women from the women’s prison estate while reviewing its policies.
Amnesty said its report is intended to document organisations and movements that it believes are seeking to roll back established human rights protections, particularly those affecting LGBT people and women.
NCA says offenders arrange to sexually assault and film victims via online networks with crimes often taking place in trusting relationships
Criminal investigators in the UK say they have uncovered a “truly international network” of organised drug-facilitated sexual assault in which victims are sedated before being raped and sexually assaulted.
The National Crime Agency [NCA] has said online networks, “many as yet unidentified by law enforcement”, were allowing offenders to arrange to rape and abuse victims or arrange for sexual assaults to be filmed.
In many cases, these crimes were being perpetrated by those who “utilise the existence of committed, trusting and often long-term relationships to perpetrate and facilitate offending”, the agency said, giving the example of the high-profile Gisèle Pelicot case in France.
Since it began investigating an online forum in October last year, the NCA has identified more than 270 individuals linked to that forum and its successors.
Nigel Leary, the NCA’s deputy director, said it had disseminated more than 210 “intelligence packages” relating to suspects and potential victims to law enforcement partners in the UK and overseas, with more than 90% of those being sent abroad.
Leary said: “We believe we have uncovered a truly international network with group members identified in dozens of countries spanning every continent.” He said domestically the intelligence packages had resulted in at least 14 separate investigations, with eight victim-survivors safeguarded.
He said online platforms were “enabling and supporting direct offending”.
“We’ve seen users actively engaging with other like-minded individuals discussing in graphic detail how they want to drug their victims to commit the most heinous sexual abuse,” Leary said.
“Discussions include inviting other people to take part in the sexual assaults, seeking advice on the best drugs or sedatives to use and how to administer them, asking for specific abuse to be conducted and filmed, and also coordinating offending, arranging to rape and abuse victims, sharing methodologies and developing tactics to avoid detection.
“In many of the cases we’ve seen so far, individuals have become victims of sexual assault crimes while sedated,” he said, adding that people may not even be aware it had happened.
Leary said the scale of what investigating officers had seen so far was “deeply concerning”, and that this was “no longer isolated behaviour, but increasingly organised”.
“Intelligence indicates there have been, and are other groups, many as yet unidentified by law enforcement, still involved in this type of offending,” he said, adding that cases were “almost certainly under-detected and under-reported”.
Gisèle Pelicot’s ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, was jailed for 20 years for drugging and raping her, as well as allowing dozens of other men to rape her while she was unconscious, in abuse that lasted nearly a decade.
Fifty men were found guilty of rape or sexual offences after a three-and-a-half-month trial in Avignon, which ended in December 2024.
In a separate operation, Europol said on Thursday it had worked with law enforcement agencies from seven countries to identify 156 victims and perpetrators in “an unprecedented operation targeting drug-facilitated sexual assaults”.
Helen Millichap, the director of the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection, said “organised drug-facilitated sexual assault represents a serious and evolving threat”.
She said the offending was “rooted in domestic abuse, controlling and coercive behaviour and sexual offending”. While these crimes were “certainly not new”, she said, “the evolving profile reveals how the online and connected nature of the abuse is occurring, the dimensions are changing and therefore so must our response”.
She said that many people affected might not know they had been a victim until they were contacted by the police or saw digital evidence. “We recognise how confusing and distressing that could be, particularly where the person responsible is somebody known and trusted,” she said.
Urging anyone who suspects they may have been a victim to come forward, she said: “If something doesn’t feel right, you do not need proof or a clear memory to seek help.”
Siobhan Blake, the rape and serious sexual offences lead for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said what had been uncovered was “some of the most abhorrent offending that I’ve seen in my 25 years as a prosecutor, involving the most gross abuse of trust of victim survivors by those who should have been the very first to care and support them”.
She said the CPS was “already dealing with a small number of cases of this nature and are working closely with policing partners to understand the evidence, build cases and bring perpetrators to justice”.
“Technology has changed the scale of this abuse, creating new avenues for exploitation,” she said, but it had also made it easy for the body to track and prosecute it.
“We are using every tool at our disposal to stay ahead of the evolving nature of this type of sexual offending and build the strongest cases to take to court,” Blake said.
Here are studies that show how problematic porn and prostitution are:
Studies about Prostitution:
Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Prostitution and Trafficking in Nine Countries
Prostitution in Vancouver: violence and the colonization of First Nations women
Posttraumatic stress disorders in prostitutes: Results of a study in Hamburg in the context of an international project
Men who pay for sex in Germany and what they teach us about the failure of legal prostitution: a 6-country report on the sex trade from the perspective of the socially invisible 'freiers'
Posttraumatic stress disorder among female street-based sex workers in the greater Sydney area, Australia
Cumulative Violence and PTSD Symptom Severity Among Urban Street-Based Female Sex Workers
Are Men Who Buy Sex Different from Men Who Do Not?: Exploring Sex Life Characteristics Based on a Randomized Population Survey in Sweden
Men who buy sex: Who they buy and what they know
Sexual Exploitation as a Minor, Violence, and HIV/STI Risk among Women Trading Sex in St. Petersburg and Orenburg, Russia
Early sexual experience as a factor in prostitution
Sexual child abuse as an antecedent to prostitution
Sexual Abuse as a Precursor to Prostitution and Victimization Among Adolescent and Adult Homeless Women
Childhood victimization and subsequent risk for promiscuity, prostitution, and teenage pregnancy: a prospective study
Associations between childhood maltreatment and sex work in a cohort of drug-using youth
Dissociation and Abuse Among Multiple Personality Patients, Prostitutes and Exotic Dancers
Sex Trafficking of Women in the United States: International and Domestic Trends
Violence by clients towards female prostitutes in different work settings: questionnaire survey
Prostitute homicides: a descriptive study
Mortality in a Long-term Open Cohort of Prostitute Women
Studies about Porn:
Truth About Porn is a current, ever-growing database dedicated to the research on the harmful effects of pornography.
Google Doc collection of Studies on Porn
Your Brain on Porn contains extensive research archives documenting the neuroscientific effects of porn.
We don’t call it a double mastectomy to “feminise” it. We call it a double mastectomy because that’s what it is. We don’t support using fluffy sanitised language like “top surgery” to describe serious invasive surgeries, especially when that language is used to glamourise them.
It's so obvious to me that some people learned by route The Correct Opinion on a variety of social and political issues ten years ago and haven't had a single, original, and analytical thought about anything since. Like brain just consists of viral tweets and TikToks.
#I've said this to myself while having the most careful egg-shell tangoing conversations with my queer friends#like you guys haven't had a spontaneous thought in a decade#I haven't heard a single earnest thought. you all talk like you're tweeting#this isn't even a conversation#I'm just being talked at
These tag @troyenne. Like yes. It's like so many refuse to think about anything until the updated Corrected Opinion has been decimated to them through the acceptable channels. They're literally waiting for the academics to duke it for a decade or so, write journals, record history, write books, and finally have some watered-down version of the thesis of those books fed to them via social media and Teen Vogue articles. Help.
Is it me or is this just getting worse and worse by the minute on the left idk maybe its ME thats changed but I'm increasngly seeing total crap spouted by people who just dont seem to even understand their own point.
In my opinion this originates from a) the complete demonisation of "debate" in any form b) the pressure to have an instant Correct Opinion upon first hearing about a given issue and c) the idea that all disagreements are on the same level, everything can be understood through the lens of "one thought is fascist the other is anti fascist" and therefore even entertaining a disagreement is Giving A Platform (circling back to debate being bad).
All of these things together basically just promote picking a side as fast as possible - usually this means adopting the first perspective you hear, mulling it over is effectively wrong. From that point on, anyone who disagrees with you is either a bigot or a pick-me depending on whether they belong to the group this issue is about, if applicable. You do NOT want to talk about this issue with anyone who thinks even slightly differently, because thats a debate and thats bad.
Most of this is reactionary to the right wing saying these things in bad faith - you of course do encounter fascists and/or bigots demanding a "debate" at every twist and turn, feeling entitled to the friendship of the very people they insult on the basis of "Aren't we allowed to disagree?", and themselves acting like all disagreements are the same level; this time to minimise pure hatred and discrimination.
But that doesn't mean we should just give in to it. The left has essentially just let the likes of Ben Shapiro decide that "facts and logic" is exclusively an attribute of the right wing. This is just making the left more and more ridiculous as people have somehow become convinced that they actually shouldn't care much for facts, or be able to explain their point in any way, or have any logically sound arguments.
I’m sure it is getting worse. It’s no longer enough to hold an opinion, or lack an opinion, in private. Not boosting content with the “correct” views or accidentally engaging with content from someone with the “incorrect” views can get someone challenged, labeled a bigot, or harassed until they give their endorsement to the “correct“ view and change which accounts they interact with. It’s not just “correct” views either; there’s intense language-policing and slogans/mantras to memorize and know when to parrot. Engaging beyond surface-level with someone who dissents is seen as providing a platform or as basically “entertaining the enemy” and is heavily discouraged. Other than parroting the “correct” views and language, the only acceptable action is to link to influencers or groups that support the “correct” views and language.
For youth, there’s also less and less of a boundary between online and offline life, so being challenged online can be a lot more impactful than how it might land for someone who already has a firm offline social support network and who is careful to remain anonymous online. If someone has their real name or face on their profile or in videos and their account is followed by all of their friends who are doing the same, I’m sure they feel intense pressure not to rock the boat. This is especially true for those who have conflated having “wrong” opinions with being a “bad person.” They don’t want to be labeled bad people, but they also don’t want to believe their friends are bad people, so they heavily police each other to ensure everyone is in line. To an extent, this seems to have broadened such that many want to believe having certain identities automatically makes someone more likely to be a good person with “good” views, leading to intense in-group pressure for conformity. I think this is also reflected in bizarre claims about Gen Z, including the several posts I’ve seen recently in which people seemed to believe no one in Gen Z identifies as or votes conservative (which is blatantly and demonstrably false!).
There’s also an ever-increasing number of issues to be “aware of” and have opinions on, with a 24/7 news cycle and many major sociopolitical events happening simultaneously. The internet allows people to also come across discussions that would otherwise be strictly local. All of these issues are nuanced and would be hard for anyone to fully understand, let alone have informed views of, but that’s no longer the expectation. No one has the time or energy to engage with everything, and “correct views” are easy cognitive shortcuts.
All of that is without even touching on mis/disinformation or political campaigns to encourage infighting at a time of rising anti-intellectualism. For all that the left likes to pretend to be immune from anti-intellectualism, it’s only worse on the right, not absent on the left, and studies suggest it’s increasing across the board. Any time anyone insists “lived experience” leads to greater knowledge in all ways than actual research, any time they deride any knowledge generated by individuals not known to be from specific minority groups, or any time they act like any given individual with a marginalized identity automatically knows everything about that group and what’s best for it, they’re contributing to anti-intellectualism! I would also consider people trusting Tiktoks or Tweets over reputable sources (e.g., the World Health Organization) to be a serious red flag even if the videos or Tweets are allegedly also from professionals. Even professionals can be wrong, and individual social media accounts aren’t held to nearly the same rigor as professional and organizational sources.
In short, none of this is really surprising, but it’s a symptom and contributor to really serious political problems. Populations that can’t access or evaluate information are easy to manipulate, which is very convenient for bad-faith political actors. Just because positions seem counter-culture and politically correct doesn’t mean their implications or actual implementation is, and the general push against nuanced and careful thought is extremely dangerous regardless.
Visibly not shaving as a woman is lowkey so wierd sometimes. I'm literally just being a natural human but I feel like the odd one out.
Wearing shorts at work because there's a heatwave and I can see my co-workers going 👀👁👁👀👁👁 all confused. Its a bit funny but also a bit sad. Like ladies please its OK! You are safe I'm just a bit annoying!
Anyway, resist the shave ladies 💪 its wierd but its also chill and funny.
The woman who eschews femininity, who is content with her natural shape and size and smell, who is impatient with the lengthy rituals of femininity, is condemned by both sexes. To women, she is an uncomfortable reminder of the extent to which they have abandoned themselves to the demands of men. To men, she is a threatening warning that their domination is not total and that women still have the power to regain themselves.
found this revolutionary paper that analyzes every single case of transgender violence across 25 years in Britain, using data from Trans Day of Remembrance. it is the first study that has ever counted trans perpetrators, and the researchers found that trans people were more often perpetrators of violence than victims of it in Britain.
this paper is very comprehensive and has a ton of sources if you wanna do further research on this topic. i recommend reading it and forming your own conclusion.
13 men are accused of helping a man abuse his wife over a period of years.
The co-accused of a rapist who allegedly conspired with other men to drug and sexually abuse his wife can be named for the first time after reporting restrictions were lifted.
The husband, who still cannot be named to maintain his wife's anonymity, initially denied any wrongdoing but has since pleaded guilty to a number of the charges he faces - including rape - although he is set to stand trial on others.
The case involves 13 other men who are alleged to have sexually abused the victim or helped supply substances to render her unconscious, including at her Stockport home.
The husband and 12 of the 13 other men are set to stand trial at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court in September.
One of the men, Keith Fotheringham, 59, from Dundee, Scotland, has pleaded guilty to all charges he faced.
The 59-year-old admitted offences including conspiracy to rape and conspiracy to administer a substance with intent.
The other defendants are aged between 28 and 73, and include Jonathan Kirk, a paramedic who in 2013 was pictured shaking hands with Prince Harry, and Karl Lindsay, the former chief executive of Taunton Town Football Club.
Lindsay stepped down as chief executive in November 2025.
In a statement released today, the club said it has no ongoing association with Lindsay, and said it expects the highest levels of conduct from all those associated with it.
The husband, in his 60s and from Stockport, will face a jury on other charges which he denies including administering a substance with intent to engage in sexual activity between 2004 and 2025, and conspiring with others to drug and rape his wife between 2018 and 2025.
He has also pleaded not guilty to conspiring with others to drug and rape his wife between 2018 and 2025.
The other defendants are:
Philip Wild, 58, from Stockport
Sean Peers, 37, from Stockport
Jordan Wallace, 31, from Manchester
Alan Keelan, 42, from Manchester
Jonathan Kirk, 43, from Stockport
Robert Stewart, 70, from Stockport
Mohammed Sabir, 28, of no fixed abode
Graham Brougham, 73, from Northwich, Cheshire
Richard Townsend, 37, from Rochdale
The following men are not accused of contact offences against the victim, but are alleged to have conspired to abuse her in other ways:
Karl Lindsay, 55, Taunton, Somerset
Daniel Rayner, 42, from, Whitstable, Kent
David Graves, 59, from, Ilkeston, Derbyshire
On Monday the husband, who cannot be identified, changed some of his pleas after he previously denied all 48 counts he faced on the indictment involving his wife.
He pleaded guilty to five counts of rape, six counts of assault by penetration and three counts of sexual assault on various dates between 2022 and 2025.
The husband also admitted sharing intimate photographs or film of his wife, without her consent, for sexual gratification.
He denies 11 counts of rape, two counts of attempted rape, seven counts of assault by penetration, four counts of sexual assault, four counts of conspiracy to rape, three counts of conspiracy to assault by penetration, one count of conspiracy to administer a substance with intent and one count of administering a substance with intent.
A further preliminary hearing will be held on 24 August, a week ahead of the scheduled 12-week trial.
what it all comes down to is the belief that pregnancy is god's will, that babies are gods creations, and women's bodies are just the vessels he uses to make life. it's the belief that pregnancy is passive. anything the woman does to actively interfere with god's plan is her playing god and acting above her station.
but we know this is bullshit, that women's bodies make unconscious decisions regarding pregnancy, from conception to miscarriage, prioritizing her welfare above all else. if binge drinking during pregnancy is an active choice that creates a disabled child, materially so is continuing a pregnancy that you know will create a disabled child. there is no difference in outcome for the child who has to deal with the lifelong disability. and there's no material difference between miscarriage and abortion, either, except that one is a conscious choice. fundamentally, what people are uncomfortable with is women defying what they see as divine authority by exerting her own will over creation. but she's the only god in this scenario, because nobody's getting created without her.
sex work fans love to ask you to compare prostitution to other jobs but refuse to compare it to other types of sex. if you take away someone’s food and say you’ll only give it back after a blowjob it doesn’t sound very consensual does it?
do you have other people’s bodily fluids inside of you while standing at target?? do the people yelling at you at target get to penetrate you?? do you have to suck off the people yelling at you at target??
being spit on and slapped by customers is pretty bad.
Im just saying, your analogy is bad and your stance is bad. Actually promote enforcing the rape and trafficking laws we have. If all porn and sex work is done illegally and women never willfully go into porn and sex work, then enforcing rape and sex traficking laws will end porn and sex work.
You're mad at a symptom, and like yeah be mad women are raped and traficked, but get mad and try to change the system. Adding more laws to outlaw sex work, which in most countries is already illegal, doesn't solve the systematic issue. Adding more laws that men aren't going to enforce solves nothing.
Enforcing the already existing laws, holding men accountable for their actions, and changing the justice system to actually punish these criminals is the way to go. If that completely eliminates sex work and porn, i'd be happy. If it doesn't and women freely go into sex work and porn, i'll be happy.
Hi, I notice a lot of people have a lot of assumptions about what I believe. I believe in the nordic model (where the prostituted women are not prosecuted but the johns and pimps are) combined with programs and protections for prostituted women to help them get out of the sex trade. In many countries, prostitution is fully legal, such as Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand. In many cases this has increased human trafficking due to traffickers presenting their victims as legal prostitutes.
I agree with you that capitalism is the root of many evil, and would consider myself a marxist feminist. However, I can acknowledge that prostitution is unique among types of exploitation because it is rape. Coerced work is a problem, but coerced sex is rape.
To address the bodily autonomy comment, I strongly believe in bodily autonomy, which is why I am against all forms of rape, paid or otherwise. If you are not free to say no, due to fear of hunger or homelessness, your yes means nothing. Therefore, prostitution is a violation of bodily autonomy rather than an expression of it.
Also, what’s with the terf name calling? Trans people are also often victims of the sex trade. I support programs to help them get out and lead better lives too
Me on hearing about exploitation in the clothing industry: ok I have the money to buy ethically made clothing so I’ll do that
Me on hearing about Barry Callebaut’s use of child labour: well damn, I really liked this local chocolate company but they make their chocolate out of the child labour cocoa so I gotta say goodbye
Left wing men on hearing that the industry where they get to pay to stick their dick in a woman or girl who otherwise would not want to have sex with them is rape: well ackshually a customer yelled at me one time so I should be allowed to rape women and children
I guarantee most of the people in discussions about "sex work" claiming to have been spit on and slapped by customers in retail have never once actually had that happen to them. Reminds me of the MRAs who claimed women slapped them for holding the door for them.
Anyway, even for people who have experienced getting spit on and slapped at work, that's not the job. If those things weren't happening, you'd still be cashing people out, serving coffee, etc.. Having to suck off some piece of shit, get fucked in the ass or vagina by them, etc. to afford rent/food/other need is the job of prostitution.
And, as always, people need clothes and food. While you try to buy ethically when you can, that's not always possible. No one needs to get laid.
Melissa Woodward speaks out about being sold as a child into the sex trade industry in America and her life as a child prostitute and stripper. Melissa is now the executive director of a non-profit organization who’s mission it is to Prevent, Rescue and Heal children victimized by sex trafficking in America. www.FortheSakeofOne.org
Sex Trafficking in America: A Former Sex Slave’s Story of Hope
For everyone who says that western women don’t need feminism, this is America, this is what men in America do to children. Do you think that when they go home to their families they are respectful to the women they live with? Do you think that when they go to work or the grocery store or ride the bus they are respectful to the women they meet? These are the men the rest of us are stuck with, too. These men did not come out of nowhere. Our culture made that possible. Our culture makes this torture possible. Read this woman’s story and tell me again about how misogyny isn’t a problem in America and women aren’t oppressed because of our sex.
I remember seeing another gifset of this woman’s interview. The last customer she saw wanted to watch a little girl set on fire. Her burned body was dumped in the trash. I don’t know how she survived.
“The abusive man learns early in life, from his surrounding society and beyond, that when he becomes an adult he has the right to swallow a female whole, and that in this way he will fill the vast emptiness inside of him and feel empty no more. He learns that the female of his choosing owes him her life entire in this fashion, that it would be wrong of her to fail to sacrifice her life and herself in this way. Not only that, but he learns that this self-erasure will be her greatest joy.
He gets these messages all over the place, from his own unhealthy relatives all the way up to police responses, courts, and Disney movies.
All of what he learns is a lie. It is a moral lie, meaning it’s a lie about what’s right and what’s wrong; no woman’s life should ever by martyred to fill a man’s (or anyone’s) emptiness. But not only should this not be done, it also cannot be done. Thus it is not only a moral lie but also a lie about the nature of reality. A human being cannot be vacuumed into the inside of another person and become part of that person, in some kind of twisted reversal of the birth process. It’s absurd that it’s even necessary for me to state this.
The abusive man hates the woman for continuing to exist outside of him. No matter how hard she may try, in her terror and in her trauma, to disappear inside of him, she simply cannot do it. (And if she gets some support in her life, she may even attempt to refuse to continue trying.) He hates her for this, for still being there, because he was taught that to disappear inside of him is her unlimited obligation and will make him whole.
When you find yourself wondering why the abuser hates you – as most abused women do at one point or another – this is why: because you continue to breathe, because you have skin, because you eat food and then move with the energy of that food, because by getting out of bed and standing up in the morning you have once again demonstrated your failure to become him.”
Ever Wonder Why Your Abusive Partner Hates You? blog post from Lundy Bancroft, on his website lundybancroft.com
The recent death of Sylvia Rivera, an activist drag queen who threw quarters at the police during the Stonewall riot, has prompted much guilt-laden commentary about how the gay civil rights movement has pushed aside "the people who started it all." The commentary is wrong as a matter of history and unsupported as a matter of policy.
Here is the standard story: "On the night of June 28, 1969, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar that included a mix of drag queens and lesbians. Led by the drag queens, the patrons fought back, igniting the gay civil rights movement. Yet the new movement soon became overly image-conscious and pushed these brave heroes to the back of the bus. It's high time we repay our debt by fully including transgender issues in gay causes, including proposed legislation."
This fictionalized account of Stonewall and its aftermath has been repeated so many times by gay and transgender activists it now goes almost unquestioned.
Typical ol the genre is a recent Village Voice column by Riki Wilchins, executive director of GenderPAC. Wilchins describes the Stonewall Inn in 1969 as a "sanctuary" for "gender queers," who were "unwelcome at the city's tonier gay bars."
Wilchins asserts Rivera "helped [give] birth" to the gay movement at Stonewall. Similarly, in his book The Gay Metropolis, Charles Kaiser says Stonewall was "sparked by drag queens." Despite these contributions, transgender causes are now excluded from the movement because, as Wilchins puts it, gay organizations are "determined to project an image of normalcy."
This is politics-by-guilt-trip, and it has been undeniably effective in redirecting many gay groups' priorities. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has even withdrawn its support of the only federal legislation that would prohibit anti-gay employment discrimination because the bill does not include "gender identity" within its protections.
The standard tale is error piled on error. First, it exaggerates the undeniable importance of Stonewall as a catalytic event. As the careful work of numerous historians has demonstrated, there was an active gay civil rights effort under way long before Stonewall. Gay activists had organized the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950, and in other cities later; had supported openly gay candidates for public office; had fought the closing of gay bars; had founded a national magazine, the Advocate; had marched in front of the White House for equal rights; and had picketed businesses that discriminated against gays.
Outside of New York, according to Stephen Murray in his book American Gay, gay activists initially paid little attention to Stonewall. Even in New York, a police raid on a bar called the Snake Pit later in the summer of 1969 generated more organizing than Stonewall did. The founding of the Gay Liberation Front followed the Snake Pit raid, not Stonewall.
Only through the annual Pride parade commemorations that began to spread significant-ly in the mid-1970s did Stonewall take on the singular importance in gay history it now enjoys. At the time it happened, however, the event simply did not carry the incredible motivating force we now attach to it.
Second, the centrality of transgenders to Stonewall is exaggerated. It is wrong to characterize the Stonewall Inn as having been a sanctuary fo genderqueers, as Wilchins and others do. Murray writes a "men familiar with the milieu then insist that the Stonewall clientele was middle-class white men and that very few drag queens or dykes or nonwhite were ever allowed admittance"
But don't take Murray's word for it, consider what Sylvia Rivera herself told the historian Eric Marcus for his book, Making History. "The Stonewall wasn't a bar for drag queens. Everybody keeps saying it was. … If you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you. And only a certain number of drag queens were al-lowed into the Stonewall at that time."
If Rivera is right, it seems likely the Stonewall patrons who rebelled that June night in 1969 included many (perhaps mostly) middle-class white males. A description of the riot as an uprising of drag queens may be more politically correct, but as history it seems partial. This criticism does not deny that drag queens participated in the riot. It only makes the point that their centrality to the event likely has been exaggerated, probably for ideological reasons.
Finally, these historical disputes have no bearing — either way— on whether "gender identity" ought to be included in gay civil rights legislation. Even if Stonewall was the single casus belli of the gay struggle, and even if transgenders were the only people there kicking shins and uprooting parking meters, so what?
If we learned the Stonewall police had busted up a meeting of gay white racists, instead of drag queens, we wouldn't say that should make us more attentive to the concerns of racists. These matters rise or fall on their own merits, not on the relative role groups played in distant and disputed events.
And speaking of the merits, drafting legislation is an immensely complicated task that involves putting together a coalition of supporters. Gay civil rights legislation would be stalled or effectively killed in many places if transgenders were included. The ones between a more inclusive bill that goes nowhere and a less inclusive bill that actually becomes law.
These are hard realities. We should not feel guilty because we want to make progress, least of all because someone is telling us fairy tales about our past. •
Dale Carpenter is a law professor. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Trans-revisionism and gender loonery has been going on longer than you think. Gay men and lesbians fought for their own rights.
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