Sir, "the left" has been purged from The Left. The folks in charge these days are really, IMO, lasered in on end stage capitalism, via wars and divisiveness. Hilarious, sadly, that some accuse the Dems ("The Left") of being Marxists when the Dems AND the GOP openly despise the workers.
For sure. The point is the left needs to regain it’s material class based roots and eject the woke. Too many actual leftists seem to think they need numbers of whatever warm bodies are at hand, and fail to realize the woke are destroying the left as a working people’s movement.
I would disagree slightly with one point, and that is the GOP is at least pretending to care about ordinary people, where as the Dimocraps are all in on woke as a cloud of rainbow smoke they blow over over imperialism and crony capitalist rule. It's now the party of Dick Cheney, nuff' said.
Oh, I agree with you. I usually just toss in the GOP because it is tiresome when someone squeals that I must be a Republican if I only criticize Dems. The Binary Bigot squad.
I have not looked around about the Cheney thing, but I told my grandson that every true Dem cult member will experience no cognitive dissonance whatsoever about a Cheney endorsement - instead of seeing that the Dems are now the predominant warpigs (although the GOP is a close second, slowed a bit by the money part) - they will cheerily assume Cheney has changed his predatory spots. Harris is merely more bloodthirsty than Trump, that's all.
We haven't gone anywhere. The Democrats became neocon Democults and purged US. People like @djean111 and me remember that very well indeed.
As for Marx, he and especially Engels WERE feminists in the sense they had no objection to women having equal legal rights. After all, women were workers as well and should be among the ones making the decisions according to classical Marxism.
It's all the other cultural bullshit used by the ruling class to divide the workers against each other to which they would vehemently object. That would include raising prices to force women to work in order to support a household.
OB, I do have quite the opinion on this story, but am sifting through words to try and express myself in a non-get off my lawn manner. For starters, it looks to me that transgenderism has overridden the rights of everyone else. And if someone's self-image is so damn fragile that the entire rest of the world has to cater to them, then maybe those snowflakes need some counseling or just a bit of self-reflection about how everybody else has rights, too.
I told my grandson that even if he truly considered himself to be a woman (oh, he does not, this is just an illustration or example) - I would never allow him to be in the bathroom with me or in my bedroom while I was getting dressed. I have feelings too. And rights.
I would have thought firing someone because of their private opinions would be illegal. The militancy of this stuff has gotten weird and ridiculous. And hurtful.
You know I respect you, but heck - we are facing nuclear annihilation. Do you know any transwomen?
I got to tell you, in a situation like rape, I’d be totally fine with a trans woman doing my intake… because I actually do know transwomen - and they know what gender based violence looks like.
Innomen - if you don’t know what someone’s genitalia looks like under their panties, are they required to disclose what their genitalia looks like in advance? Because essentially, that’s what you are demanding: the private medical history of someone who is otherwise perfectly qualified to offer assistance.
It is patients who determine qualification. I'm perfectly in my rights to demand ANY criteria for a councillor. I can choose them by ice cream preference if I wish and if they lie to avoid answering me in the manner I intend they've sabotaged the relationship from the start and thus don't deserve to be in the profession at all, which makes your hypothetical a nonsense contradiction. A qualified councillor would not force themselves where they are unwanted.
And for the record, this is a debate that might happen in 50 years. For now the technical competence is not remotely there. A huge portion of the entire problem is that claiming you can change someone's gender is fraud because we lack the ability to even approximate it.
Burn victims and amputees and cancer patients with massive excisions prove humanity lacks the technical skill to actually change someone's gender. We can't even rebuild fingers and toes. These crude fumbling approximations backed by shaming, force, and delusion are not true metamorphosis. A caterpillar liquefies before becoming a butterfly, did you know that?
This is an epidemic of bad plastic surgery backed by a cult made of equal parts emperor's new clothes, and surgical gay conversion therapy. It's hideous, vicious, and fascist. There's a reason this is accepted in the same corners of the world that flog rape victims for adultery.
This is genital mutilation and sterilization trying to "pass" as medical care.
I swear to you that there are Transmen and Transwomen in your midst, and you would NEVER know unless they decided that you were a safe person to confide in. Many of them are some of the finest people I know, living quiet lives of dignity, raising families, going to work just like the rest of the people you know.
I wish I had the opportunity to introduce you to some of these people, and to have you hear their stories first hand.
That's fair. My problem with the ERCC is that management policy was to conceal the gender identity of counselors. Why the secrecy? It's not to protect the victims. It's to protect something about the center's employees.
Perhaps I shouldn't be so shocked. The American health care system is the most predatory in the world because it is truly global neoliberalism as applied to medicine. Everything--doctors, patients, staff, treatments, drugs--is commodified for profit.
The scale eclipses what happened in Scotland. This one just caught me by surprise, probably because I don't live in the UK.
Does a worker deserve basic privacy protection regarding whether or not to disclose medical information to a stranger? I think it kind of comes down to that. There are entire groups of people whose ideologies I really detest. Should workers be required to disclose who they voted for before they are allowed to serve me? If a worker or counselor passes to the degree that they would need to inform me that they had been born with a penis (though they had perhaps been living as a woman their entire adult life) - what would, exactly, be the purpose?
Say my rapist had been a person of color. Should I be able to reject medical care because the doctor was a person of color? What if I hate Jewish people? Do I have the right to demand my intake counselor disclose their religious beliefs? How about if the worker was a lesbian? Should it be required that this be disclosed to me? That was rather the point of the CEO; and I cannot help but think bigotry against trans people played a huge role in this shitstorm.
When I looked up this entire sordid event, it looked more like an ideological battle between transactivists and terfs, and had absolutely 0 to do with patient care. Roz Adams was fired, apparently for ‘just asking questions’ - but found a job in JK Rowlings clinic, so - it seems that this might have been more than ‘just asking questions.’ The clinic’s CEO had an excellent reputation in women’s health work, but started getting harassed and doxxed when she tried to run for MP, and the harassment was actually pretty vile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mridul_Wadhwa
Listen, you know that I am not comfortable with how trans care is being addressed right now; there is something completely faddish in the number of kids suddenly self-identifying and I am distressed by the low bar to transitioning) which should start with psychological assessments rather than immediate medical treatment.) You have brought me along on this a bit (as well as a youngster in my life who probably should not transition.)
At the same time, I have known scores of trans folk in my lifetime - men and women who are just living their lives like all the rest of us, who CLEARLY did not conform to their birth gender, and who do not deserve the sort of hatred and bigotry and fear and anger they are being subjected to by the anti-trans activists.
The answer to your first question, as applied to a rape crisis center, is a resounding NO! The workers are there to provide a service to the victims. The victims are not there to provide a steady job for those workers. If you don't like those terms, then you shouldn't work for a rape crisis center.
I can see transwomen working in all sorts of different fields. There is one in the call center where I work, and she's a natural for it as well as one of the nicest people I've ever met, but I wouldn't put her in a rape crisis center and then not tell its patients what she is.
I don't think she would, either. I can ask her if you'd like.
Ohio, I expect that this story, as reported, is not quite so simple. 1.) The CEO in question is a fundraiser and a long time women's rights advocate who had served on the board of several non-profits and was a political organizer with an excellent reputation. She was not a direct counselor. 2.) An employee at the clinic - a self-proclaimed 'sex realist' started raising hell publicly and privately. 3.) The CEO started receiving online threats that involved having to get security. 4.) The CEO mouthed off and her comments were taken out of context. 5.) Transwomen get raped all the time, so having counselors who can serve that community is imperative. 6.) Like most other culture war bullshit stories, (for example, boxers who look like 'boys') - the entire thing has been most likely blown out of all proportion and was meant to garner clicks and ad revenue. 6.) There's a genocide going on with babies being returned to their parents in trash bags. , and the Biden administration has come very close to getting us all killed this weekend. 7.) You and I will likely never agree on this issue, and I will never stop defending people I view as being unfairly maligned and oppressed because they don't fit societal norms. 8. ) I still like and very much respect you.
Well, good, you would be totally fine! So you feel that empowers you to take away that choice for everybody else? FFS, I even get to choose the gender of my primary and specialist doctors. Is that wrong, too? Like I said in another post, looks to me like some folks' rights are being taken away due to militant factors. Just to make a damn point, and to validate some people. That is not going to end well. It should not end well.
First, this is such a ginned issue, designed specifically to inspire hatred against trans women, who get plenty of hate as it is. No one was denied anything in real life.
The “crime” this woman committed is to compare trans women to other minorities. Like, you sure can choose your doctor (sometimes, sort of), but you can’t reject them because they are black, because that would be wrong.
This was a shitstorm in a teapot, turned into a bitch fight between woke trans activists and woke terf activists.
We are on the brink of nuclear annihilation. By the end of this year, the death toll in Gaza will be around a half million dead, mostly women and children. The US is floating plans for nuclear war against three different nations and yet, here we are, focused on the infinitesimal possibility that an intake worker at a rape crisis center MIGHT secretly be trans and insisting that that health care workers “disclose” in advance their private medical information.
No one hates trans women. That's just divisive bullshit. Well, I do not. BUT - I do not have to accept trans women as actually being women. I believe trans women have an absolute right to consider themselves as women. I also believe everybody else has the right to consider that trans women are biological males. Or women. Or whatever.
Bringing up nuclear war again and again is just an attempt to take attention away from an issue.
Oh, and I would still take the bear, my dear. There are WOMEN I am afraid of - I would hate to meet, say, Hillary or Madelyn Albright in the woods. Being a trans woman, like being a woman, does not guarantee or confer kindness or whatever. I know that, as a woman. There are women I do not trust in the least.
It never occurred to me that I would reject a doctor because they are black. My last doctor was Indian - great guy, subservient to insurance company rules. In the space of a week, I went to hey, we give knee replacements to 90 year old people, and your knee is pretty bad. One week later- oh, hospitals are scary places for people your age, exercise. Bone on Bone.
The doctor before that - mean as a snake. Woman. The doctor before that - your knee hurts? take an Advil, you are 75.
I completely reject the bullshit of trusting a gender when it comes to anything at all. I have worked with and for lovely supportive women. And nasty manipulative women. Stop inferring that being a woman or trans woman is any sort of guarantee of fair or empathetic treatment. But if I was raped, then woman would be my first choice of someone to trust and confide in.
And what makes anyone's private medical information more deserving of secretiveness than mine.
I realize my replies are all over the place. The subject is triggering.
However - this seems, as is all to common these days, to be more about the "rights" a trans woman than the rights of an actual raped woman. Just another soapbox, eh?
Yes, the push to war with Russia and the Gaza genocide are far grander and dangerous issues than this one, and to your credit you are not attacking people's character for daring to challenge transgender ideology.
That doesn't make the concerns expressed here any less genuine. You seem to assume that all trans people are people of good character, and that just ain't so.
Like every other group of human beings, there are kind, generous, intelligent, stupid, predatory and criminals in the trans community just as there is in every other one.
Some wrongs were done here by the management of a crisis center. Fortunately, it appears they are finally being addressed. It is only expected that I would side with the employee.
I would have been just as horrified if the manager and counselors of the crisis center were merely straight men, and I'm a straight man who seen rape victims up close and personal. All of them needed women at the time.
I freely admit those personal experiences cannot be universal, and they do influence my thinking, but everything I know says they are the most common.
The assumption among anti-trans activists is that ‘born’ women are naturally of good character, and are in all cases superior to other women who were not born with the correct genitals. As a ‘born’ woman, I gotta tell you that this has not been my experience.
There is something horrifically puritanical about the anti-trans movement - an assumption in the moral virtue of women, an idea that ‘natural’ women are spiritually, ethically, morally superior to men and trans people - and as such, we women need not only open access to ‘men’s spaces’ (a right we demanded!) but also that we must be protected in ‘women’s only’ spaces due to our delicate special natures.
The worst violence I have ever encountered in my life was at the hands of girls and women. Womanly violence tends to be less physical than male violence, but is no less devastating.
I was a psychotherapist for 25 years. Before grad school I did volunteer work with the local rape crisis center. A staffer I knew said they needed crisis advocate volunteers to be on call for survivor support in hospital ERs . I asked if they could use a male advocate and they said absolutely. They had a great training program and I did ER victim support for about a year.
Whenever I went on an ER call I always asked if the survivor were comfortable with having me be their advocate. It was NOT a therapy situation but was about making sure services were adequate and providing information so the survivor could be making decisions about their own care. I did liaison work between staffers and the survivor and staffers.
And -- BTW -- about a third of my clients were male survivors of sexual assault and often the boys were assaulted by females.
As in all aspects of behavioral health, things are complicated.
The Rape Crisis Center then asked me to be a community educator, speaking to school and parent groups etc. All of that provided me with the references for grad school. When I was doing my internship my supervisor was a gay male psychologist who provided counseling support for a number of trans clients before they could have surgery at the famous clinic in Trinidad , Colorado. I did not do work with the trans clients but I regularly sat in on clinical staffings and it is significant that my supervisor stopped doing the trans work because of the many emotional problems clients had due to the ongoing hormone therapy before and after transition.
I find what is currently happening to be completely unethical and I predict there will be huge lawsuits coming along and we will look back on this like the lobotomy craze of the 1940s and 50s. Many clinics in Europe have been shutting down because of the many problems and violations of patient and parent rights and ethical problems. I am guessing that will eventually -- and should -- happen here.
What is described in the article and the Jimmy Dore video is absolutely unethical and a betrayal to women. Any client has the right to know the clinical background and qualifications and relevant personal background of any counseling provider and also has the right to turn down treatment by a counselor for ANY reason at any time. It is their decision, not the clinic's and they don't have to present some kind of legal argument to do so. If a client didn't want to work with me because they didn't like my hair color that is their right.
Counseling is about the needs of the client, not the clinician or clinic management. The needs and interests of the client comes first. Period. End of discussion.
Thank you. If the needs, and comfort, of the patient don't come first, then whatever is being practiced isn't medicine in any form that Hippocrates would recognize. As I said above, I would have been just as horrified if the crisis center counselors had been straight men.
The BIG problem for me was the secrecy. Why NOT inform the victims? Why not ask their preference? Whatever the reasons for management's actions, they had nothing to do with the safety or feelings of the patients.
Having male staff included in a well-run rape crisis center is appropriate because, truly, a lot of men and teenage boy and younger do get raped. It's a completely unreported story. There is a way to have male and female counseling staff and crisis service/support staff in an ethical and supportive way for clients, and -- again -- clients should get to make the final choice of who they work with.
Unfortunately, in a nation with so much sexual violence, most rape crisis centers run on a shoestring and staff are very underpaid. But, heh, we have bombs going to Israel that need to be paid for, right?
One of the first things they ask you when you sign up for normal therapy is gender preference of therapist. I can imagine how i'd feel if i had this horror story bait and switch happen. I CANNOT imagine it as a rape survivor and i hope i never can. This is Unconscionable.
They are effectively destroying access to everything. No one wants to deal with this drama. Odds of encounter for me equals percentage chance I will abstain. It's like high pressure sales or religious harassment. And I don't even have a problem with the people themselves, it's the ideology and banker backed exploitation I can't stand. And i don't wanna have to choose between keeping my silence and drama. Exactly the same choice religious people force on me.
These people are so desperately in need of validation they literally seek out forced proximity. That makes me feel pity, but it's also profoundly unfair in any kind of service context. It's basically a new kind of lockdown. People prefer to choose who they encounter, so people avoid anywhere they think they'll be denied that choice. (Calling that bigotry is insidious.) I can't imagine the mentality of in-turn trying to force my way into places where i'm unwanted. There is a deeply disturbing assault-like aspect to that. At minimum it's invasive.
I don't want to engage with nonsense cultural issues, but this one is becoming unavoidable, and something more. We have millions of new people with aggressive hormonal imbalance and a fanatical religion equivalent, on top of sterility and lifetime medical need to deal with. These people have been maimed in every sense of the word. When you ask how they got that way, who would sign up, the answer is obvious, and then you start to realize how fascist this is.
Someone in power has found a way to sell a new kind of eugenics direct to the undesirable "customer". Humanity lost ww2 it seems. In attempting to stomp out that fire we apparently just spread embers globally for a slow burn. Between the IDF and the banks, is there a single aspect of the reich that isn't alive an well and being state backed in the modern english speaking world?
Theoretically it raises some interesting points. I feel like some of it is blown out of proportion these days, which is why cultural issues have a tendency to distract after a while.
Can I have a god given biologically essentialist right to no-stupid-people spaces? It’s basically the same logic. In order to exist in society, we have to tolerate people we may not enjoy as much as others in society.
When is the left going to purge these pretenders? Marx did not put up with feminists and other interlopers in the International.
Sir, "the left" has been purged from The Left. The folks in charge these days are really, IMO, lasered in on end stage capitalism, via wars and divisiveness. Hilarious, sadly, that some accuse the Dems ("The Left") of being Marxists when the Dems AND the GOP openly despise the workers.
For sure. The point is the left needs to regain it’s material class based roots and eject the woke. Too many actual leftists seem to think they need numbers of whatever warm bodies are at hand, and fail to realize the woke are destroying the left as a working people’s movement.
I would disagree slightly with one point, and that is the GOP is at least pretending to care about ordinary people, where as the Dimocraps are all in on woke as a cloud of rainbow smoke they blow over over imperialism and crony capitalist rule. It's now the party of Dick Cheney, nuff' said.
Oh, I agree with you. I usually just toss in the GOP because it is tiresome when someone squeals that I must be a Republican if I only criticize Dems. The Binary Bigot squad.
I have not looked around about the Cheney thing, but I told my grandson that every true Dem cult member will experience no cognitive dissonance whatsoever about a Cheney endorsement - instead of seeing that the Dems are now the predominant warpigs (although the GOP is a close second, slowed a bit by the money part) - they will cheerily assume Cheney has changed his predatory spots. Harris is merely more bloodthirsty than Trump, that's all.
We haven't gone anywhere. The Democrats became neocon Democults and purged US. People like @djean111 and me remember that very well indeed.
As for Marx, he and especially Engels WERE feminists in the sense they had no objection to women having equal legal rights. After all, women were workers as well and should be among the ones making the decisions according to classical Marxism.
It's all the other cultural bullshit used by the ruling class to divide the workers against each other to which they would vehemently object. That would include raising prices to force women to work in order to support a household.
Awwwww......that "@djean111" brought back some good memories!
OB, I do have quite the opinion on this story, but am sifting through words to try and express myself in a non-get off my lawn manner. For starters, it looks to me that transgenderism has overridden the rights of everyone else. And if someone's self-image is so damn fragile that the entire rest of the world has to cater to them, then maybe those snowflakes need some counseling or just a bit of self-reflection about how everybody else has rights, too.
I told my grandson that even if he truly considered himself to be a woman (oh, he does not, this is just an illustration or example) - I would never allow him to be in the bathroom with me or in my bedroom while I was getting dressed. I have feelings too. And rights.
I would have thought firing someone because of their private opinions would be illegal. The militancy of this stuff has gotten weird and ridiculous. And hurtful.
You know I respect you, but heck - we are facing nuclear annihilation. Do you know any transwomen?
I got to tell you, in a situation like rape, I’d be totally fine with a trans woman doing my intake… because I actually do know transwomen - and they know what gender based violence looks like.
Thank you! 👏🏼
As a matter of fact, I do. I also know women who have been raped, and they do not share your opinion.
I’m a survivor as well, and was more or less trafficked by my mother.
Gotta say, my rapists were cis gendered men, not transgendered women.
Listen - if I am in the woods and there’s a bear, a man, and a trans-woman, I ‘m picking the transwoman.
Your right to make that choice doesn't give you the right to take it away from others. End of story. Full stop.
Innomen - if you don’t know what someone’s genitalia looks like under their panties, are they required to disclose what their genitalia looks like in advance? Because essentially, that’s what you are demanding: the private medical history of someone who is otherwise perfectly qualified to offer assistance.
It is patients who determine qualification. I'm perfectly in my rights to demand ANY criteria for a councillor. I can choose them by ice cream preference if I wish and if they lie to avoid answering me in the manner I intend they've sabotaged the relationship from the start and thus don't deserve to be in the profession at all, which makes your hypothetical a nonsense contradiction. A qualified councillor would not force themselves where they are unwanted.
And for the record, this is a debate that might happen in 50 years. For now the technical competence is not remotely there. A huge portion of the entire problem is that claiming you can change someone's gender is fraud because we lack the ability to even approximate it.
Burn victims and amputees and cancer patients with massive excisions prove humanity lacks the technical skill to actually change someone's gender. We can't even rebuild fingers and toes. These crude fumbling approximations backed by shaming, force, and delusion are not true metamorphosis. A caterpillar liquefies before becoming a butterfly, did you know that?
This is an epidemic of bad plastic surgery backed by a cult made of equal parts emperor's new clothes, and surgical gay conversion therapy. It's hideous, vicious, and fascist. There's a reason this is accepted in the same corners of the world that flog rape victims for adultery.
This is genital mutilation and sterilization trying to "pass" as medical care.
Ok, and now we have it.
I swear to you that there are Transmen and Transwomen in your midst, and you would NEVER know unless they decided that you were a safe person to confide in. Many of them are some of the finest people I know, living quiet lives of dignity, raising families, going to work just like the rest of the people you know.
I wish I had the opportunity to introduce you to some of these people, and to have you hear their stories first hand.
That's fair. My problem with the ERCC is that management policy was to conceal the gender identity of counselors. Why the secrecy? It's not to protect the victims. It's to protect something about the center's employees.
Perhaps I shouldn't be so shocked. The American health care system is the most predatory in the world because it is truly global neoliberalism as applied to medicine. Everything--doctors, patients, staff, treatments, drugs--is commodified for profit.
The scale eclipses what happened in Scotland. This one just caught me by surprise, probably because I don't live in the UK.
Does a worker deserve basic privacy protection regarding whether or not to disclose medical information to a stranger? I think it kind of comes down to that. There are entire groups of people whose ideologies I really detest. Should workers be required to disclose who they voted for before they are allowed to serve me? If a worker or counselor passes to the degree that they would need to inform me that they had been born with a penis (though they had perhaps been living as a woman their entire adult life) - what would, exactly, be the purpose?
Say my rapist had been a person of color. Should I be able to reject medical care because the doctor was a person of color? What if I hate Jewish people? Do I have the right to demand my intake counselor disclose their religious beliefs? How about if the worker was a lesbian? Should it be required that this be disclosed to me? That was rather the point of the CEO; and I cannot help but think bigotry against trans people played a huge role in this shitstorm.
When I looked up this entire sordid event, it looked more like an ideological battle between transactivists and terfs, and had absolutely 0 to do with patient care. Roz Adams was fired, apparently for ‘just asking questions’ - but found a job in JK Rowlings clinic, so - it seems that this might have been more than ‘just asking questions.’ The clinic’s CEO had an excellent reputation in women’s health work, but started getting harassed and doxxed when she tried to run for MP, and the harassment was actually pretty vile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mridul_Wadhwa
Listen, you know that I am not comfortable with how trans care is being addressed right now; there is something completely faddish in the number of kids suddenly self-identifying and I am distressed by the low bar to transitioning) which should start with psychological assessments rather than immediate medical treatment.) You have brought me along on this a bit (as well as a youngster in my life who probably should not transition.)
At the same time, I have known scores of trans folk in my lifetime - men and women who are just living their lives like all the rest of us, who CLEARLY did not conform to their birth gender, and who do not deserve the sort of hatred and bigotry and fear and anger they are being subjected to by the anti-trans activists.
The answer to your first question, as applied to a rape crisis center, is a resounding NO! The workers are there to provide a service to the victims. The victims are not there to provide a steady job for those workers. If you don't like those terms, then you shouldn't work for a rape crisis center.
I can see transwomen working in all sorts of different fields. There is one in the call center where I work, and she's a natural for it as well as one of the nicest people I've ever met, but I wouldn't put her in a rape crisis center and then not tell its patients what she is.
I don't think she would, either. I can ask her if you'd like.
Ohio, I expect that this story, as reported, is not quite so simple. 1.) The CEO in question is a fundraiser and a long time women's rights advocate who had served on the board of several non-profits and was a political organizer with an excellent reputation. She was not a direct counselor. 2.) An employee at the clinic - a self-proclaimed 'sex realist' started raising hell publicly and privately. 3.) The CEO started receiving online threats that involved having to get security. 4.) The CEO mouthed off and her comments were taken out of context. 5.) Transwomen get raped all the time, so having counselors who can serve that community is imperative. 6.) Like most other culture war bullshit stories, (for example, boxers who look like 'boys') - the entire thing has been most likely blown out of all proportion and was meant to garner clicks and ad revenue. 6.) There's a genocide going on with babies being returned to their parents in trash bags. , and the Biden administration has come very close to getting us all killed this weekend. 7.) You and I will likely never agree on this issue, and I will never stop defending people I view as being unfairly maligned and oppressed because they don't fit societal norms. 8. ) I still like and very much respect you.
Well, good, you would be totally fine! So you feel that empowers you to take away that choice for everybody else? FFS, I even get to choose the gender of my primary and specialist doctors. Is that wrong, too? Like I said in another post, looks to me like some folks' rights are being taken away due to militant factors. Just to make a damn point, and to validate some people. That is not going to end well. It should not end well.
1. How many trans women are running rape crisis centers? Exactly ONE. -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mridul_Wadhwa
2. What percentage of trans women are subject to sexual assault? Around 50%.
https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.html#
https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications/2019-02/Transgender_infographic_508_0.pdf
That has absolutely nothing to do with giving women who have been raped a choice. Nothing at all.
First, this is such a ginned issue, designed specifically to inspire hatred against trans women, who get plenty of hate as it is. No one was denied anything in real life.
The “crime” this woman committed is to compare trans women to other minorities. Like, you sure can choose your doctor (sometimes, sort of), but you can’t reject them because they are black, because that would be wrong.
This was a shitstorm in a teapot, turned into a bitch fight between woke trans activists and woke terf activists.
We are on the brink of nuclear annihilation. By the end of this year, the death toll in Gaza will be around a half million dead, mostly women and children. The US is floating plans for nuclear war against three different nations and yet, here we are, focused on the infinitesimal possibility that an intake worker at a rape crisis center MIGHT secretly be trans and insisting that that health care workers “disclose” in advance their private medical information.
Well, here YOU are.
No one hates trans women. That's just divisive bullshit. Well, I do not. BUT - I do not have to accept trans women as actually being women. I believe trans women have an absolute right to consider themselves as women. I also believe everybody else has the right to consider that trans women are biological males. Or women. Or whatever.
Bringing up nuclear war again and again is just an attempt to take attention away from an issue.
Oh, and I would still take the bear, my dear. There are WOMEN I am afraid of - I would hate to meet, say, Hillary or Madelyn Albright in the woods. Being a trans woman, like being a woman, does not guarantee or confer kindness or whatever. I know that, as a woman. There are women I do not trust in the least.
Addendum
It never occurred to me that I would reject a doctor because they are black. My last doctor was Indian - great guy, subservient to insurance company rules. In the space of a week, I went to hey, we give knee replacements to 90 year old people, and your knee is pretty bad. One week later- oh, hospitals are scary places for people your age, exercise. Bone on Bone.
The doctor before that - mean as a snake. Woman. The doctor before that - your knee hurts? take an Advil, you are 75.
I completely reject the bullshit of trusting a gender when it comes to anything at all. I have worked with and for lovely supportive women. And nasty manipulative women. Stop inferring that being a woman or trans woman is any sort of guarantee of fair or empathetic treatment. But if I was raped, then woman would be my first choice of someone to trust and confide in.
And what makes anyone's private medical information more deserving of secretiveness than mine.
I realize my replies are all over the place. The subject is triggering.
However - this seems, as is all to common these days, to be more about the "rights" a trans woman than the rights of an actual raped woman. Just another soapbox, eh?
Yes, the push to war with Russia and the Gaza genocide are far grander and dangerous issues than this one, and to your credit you are not attacking people's character for daring to challenge transgender ideology.
That doesn't make the concerns expressed here any less genuine. You seem to assume that all trans people are people of good character, and that just ain't so.
Like every other group of human beings, there are kind, generous, intelligent, stupid, predatory and criminals in the trans community just as there is in every other one.
Some wrongs were done here by the management of a crisis center. Fortunately, it appears they are finally being addressed. It is only expected that I would side with the employee.
I would have been just as horrified if the manager and counselors of the crisis center were merely straight men, and I'm a straight man who seen rape victims up close and personal. All of them needed women at the time.
I freely admit those personal experiences cannot be universal, and they do influence my thinking, but everything I know says they are the most common.
The assumption among anti-trans activists is that ‘born’ women are naturally of good character, and are in all cases superior to other women who were not born with the correct genitals. As a ‘born’ woman, I gotta tell you that this has not been my experience.
There is something horrifically puritanical about the anti-trans movement - an assumption in the moral virtue of women, an idea that ‘natural’ women are spiritually, ethically, morally superior to men and trans people - and as such, we women need not only open access to ‘men’s spaces’ (a right we demanded!) but also that we must be protected in ‘women’s only’ spaces due to our delicate special natures.
The worst violence I have ever encountered in my life was at the hands of girls and women. Womanly violence tends to be less physical than male violence, but is no less devastating.
I was a psychotherapist for 25 years. Before grad school I did volunteer work with the local rape crisis center. A staffer I knew said they needed crisis advocate volunteers to be on call for survivor support in hospital ERs . I asked if they could use a male advocate and they said absolutely. They had a great training program and I did ER victim support for about a year.
Whenever I went on an ER call I always asked if the survivor were comfortable with having me be their advocate. It was NOT a therapy situation but was about making sure services were adequate and providing information so the survivor could be making decisions about their own care. I did liaison work between staffers and the survivor and staffers.
And -- BTW -- about a third of my clients were male survivors of sexual assault and often the boys were assaulted by females.
As in all aspects of behavioral health, things are complicated.
The Rape Crisis Center then asked me to be a community educator, speaking to school and parent groups etc. All of that provided me with the references for grad school. When I was doing my internship my supervisor was a gay male psychologist who provided counseling support for a number of trans clients before they could have surgery at the famous clinic in Trinidad , Colorado. I did not do work with the trans clients but I regularly sat in on clinical staffings and it is significant that my supervisor stopped doing the trans work because of the many emotional problems clients had due to the ongoing hormone therapy before and after transition.
I find what is currently happening to be completely unethical and I predict there will be huge lawsuits coming along and we will look back on this like the lobotomy craze of the 1940s and 50s. Many clinics in Europe have been shutting down because of the many problems and violations of patient and parent rights and ethical problems. I am guessing that will eventually -- and should -- happen here.
What is described in the article and the Jimmy Dore video is absolutely unethical and a betrayal to women. Any client has the right to know the clinical background and qualifications and relevant personal background of any counseling provider and also has the right to turn down treatment by a counselor for ANY reason at any time. It is their decision, not the clinic's and they don't have to present some kind of legal argument to do so. If a client didn't want to work with me because they didn't like my hair color that is their right.
Counseling is about the needs of the client, not the clinician or clinic management. The needs and interests of the client comes first. Period. End of discussion.
For those interested in learning more on the current trans crisis I urge you to check out the book "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" by Abigail Shrier ( https://www.amazon.com/Irreversible-Damage-Transgender-Seducing-Daughters/dp/168451228X )
You've nailed it. Lobotomy 2.0, that's almost exactly what this is.
Thank you. If the needs, and comfort, of the patient don't come first, then whatever is being practiced isn't medicine in any form that Hippocrates would recognize. As I said above, I would have been just as horrified if the crisis center counselors had been straight men.
The BIG problem for me was the secrecy. Why NOT inform the victims? Why not ask their preference? Whatever the reasons for management's actions, they had nothing to do with the safety or feelings of the patients.
Having male staff included in a well-run rape crisis center is appropriate because, truly, a lot of men and teenage boy and younger do get raped. It's a completely unreported story. There is a way to have male and female counseling staff and crisis service/support staff in an ethical and supportive way for clients, and -- again -- clients should get to make the final choice of who they work with.
Unfortunately, in a nation with so much sexual violence, most rape crisis centers run on a shoestring and staff are very underpaid. But, heh, we have bombs going to Israel that need to be paid for, right?
Touche’.
One of the first things they ask you when you sign up for normal therapy is gender preference of therapist. I can imagine how i'd feel if i had this horror story bait and switch happen. I CANNOT imagine it as a rape survivor and i hope i never can. This is Unconscionable.
They are effectively destroying access to everything. No one wants to deal with this drama. Odds of encounter for me equals percentage chance I will abstain. It's like high pressure sales or religious harassment. And I don't even have a problem with the people themselves, it's the ideology and banker backed exploitation I can't stand. And i don't wanna have to choose between keeping my silence and drama. Exactly the same choice religious people force on me.
These people are so desperately in need of validation they literally seek out forced proximity. That makes me feel pity, but it's also profoundly unfair in any kind of service context. It's basically a new kind of lockdown. People prefer to choose who they encounter, so people avoid anywhere they think they'll be denied that choice. (Calling that bigotry is insidious.) I can't imagine the mentality of in-turn trying to force my way into places where i'm unwanted. There is a deeply disturbing assault-like aspect to that. At minimum it's invasive.
I don't want to engage with nonsense cultural issues, but this one is becoming unavoidable, and something more. We have millions of new people with aggressive hormonal imbalance and a fanatical religion equivalent, on top of sterility and lifetime medical need to deal with. These people have been maimed in every sense of the word. When you ask how they got that way, who would sign up, the answer is obvious, and then you start to realize how fascist this is.
Someone in power has found a way to sell a new kind of eugenics direct to the undesirable "customer". Humanity lost ww2 it seems. In attempting to stomp out that fire we apparently just spread embers globally for a slow burn. Between the IDF and the banks, is there a single aspect of the reich that isn't alive an well and being state backed in the modern english speaking world?
I wouldn't mind being counseled by a transgender woman. They know quite a bit about getting the shit beaten out of them.
Your assumption is that all transgendered women are the same. I sincerely doubt that.
Theoretically it raises some interesting points. I feel like some of it is blown out of proportion these days, which is why cultural issues have a tendency to distract after a while.
Can I have a god given biologically essentialist right to no-stupid-people spaces? It’s basically the same logic. In order to exist in society, we have to tolerate people we may not enjoy as much as others in society.