What kind of person would threaten and harass a rape crisis center? Here in Vancouver, we have the answer: trans activists. While it might sound odd to the uninitiated that those who claim to value ‘inclusivity’ and ‘acceptance’ would also be the same people who nail a dead rat to the door of a transition house for battered women, those of us following the gender identity debate closely are all too familiar with this type of occurrence.

A follow up to the dead rat that was nailed to our door recently… this morning we found this writing scrawled across the windows of our storefront space that we use for support and training groups #Misogyny pic.twitter.com/vm6Gv8jWcj — VancouverRapeRelief (@VanRapeRelief) August 27, 2019

On Tuesday, Vancouver Rape Relief & Woman’s Shelter (VRRWS) tweeted images of vandalism left on their storefront — a space used for meetings, events, and support groups. ‘Kill TERFs,’ ‘Fuck TERFs,’ ‘TERFs go home, you are not welcome,’ ‘Transwomen are women,’ and ‘Trans Power’ had been scrawled across the windows and door in black marker. ‘TERF,’ for the blissfully ignorant, is an acronym that stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist.’ This is, of course, a misnomer. Radical feminists are not interested in ‘excluding’ trans-identified people from anything. What they are interested in is protecting certain spaces designated for women and girls. If anything, they are ‘male-exclusionary,’ though it seems a little silly to frame the women’s changing room as ‘non-inclusive’ just because men aren’t allowed to prance around in there with their dicks out. It would be akin to calling the vet ‘human-exclusionary’ or a baseball game ‘soccer-exclusionary.’ The women’s changing room is for women, the men’s is for men, and a baseball game is for hitting balls with bats and/or drinking beer and feeling confused because you don’t really understand this sport and are only there for the drunken yelling and hot dogs.

The issue at hand and the cause of disagreement between feminists and trans activists is ideological: those who advocate gender identity ideology (trans activists) subscribe to a fringe religion that believes some people are born in the wrong body and that it is possible for males to become female by declaring it so, and feminists believe in material reality. Tough call!

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VRRWS has been targeted not only with vandalism, but with dead animals nailed to their door and stuffed through their mail slot, on account of their women-only policy. They operate a transition house for women and their children, which aims to protect abused women and help them to heal from horrific violence and sexual assault. To most, it makes sense that a space for extremely vulnerable women escaping male violence would exclude men. For trans activists, it makes sense to disembowel a skunk and string it up by its neck — noose-like — to hang it on the door where victims of rape and domestic abuse will find it and read it as (yet another) violent threat.

It’s hard to take sides on this one, but local would-be politician, Morgane Oger, managed to, tweeting:

‘Regrettably but predictably, VRR choosing to ignore Canada’s civil rights laws causes blow-back. I empathize VRR feel threatened by the predictable response to their conduct. As I have previously offered, I am ready to help VRR get out of their mess if they wish to.’

In other words, those bitches deserved it.

Many progressives like Oger have accused the women involved in Vancouver Rape Relief and their supporters of being ‘hateful’. Oger also led a (successful) campaign to end a $30,000 City grant the organization had been receiving for education purposes, claiming their practice of serving women alone and hiring only female counselors discriminated against men. Well, to be specific, men who announce they are women. During a City hearing to determine the continuation of this grant, Oger accused VRRWS of ‘having a history of discrimination against transgender women on the basis of their gender identity or gender expression.’ This is untrue, as services and spaces that are women-only don’t care about a person’s gender identity or gender expression. Indeed, feminists in particular are mostly thrilled when individuals choose to reject sexist gender roles. Many of them prefer pants to skirts and grow their armpit hair as long as they please. The point is that rejecting gender roles does not actually change one’s sex.

During and after a Vancouver event which took place in May aimed to discuss the issue of gender identity and kids, hundreds of protesters accused panelists (myself, in particular) of having ‘blood on [my] hands’ and held signs reading, ‘Transphobes Kill’ and ‘Support our Trans Sisters or Fuck Off.’ Odd, considering I have never threatened anyone, never mind a trans-identified person, and was simply wanting to discuss the actual or potential harms of attempting to transition children to the opposite sex: preventing them from going through puberty, rendering them sterile, subjecting them to numerous unnecessary surgeries, altering the course of their lives in ways a child could not possibly understand. Also odd, considering that it is trans activists who issue direct death threats to those they disagree with.

Feminists don’t hate trans-identified people and they don’t want them dead. Despite the fact that trans activists are actively working to destroy women’s hard-earned rights and spaces. Despite the fact trans activists routinely slander and threaten them, and work to shut down and silence their attempts to speak about their concerns.

Anybody should be able to say anything at all and not be threatened with death. But certainly, of all the people who should be protected from such terrorizing, it should be women who dedicate their lives to helping some of the most downtrodden among us — those with few to no resources, who are running for their lives, who have suffered immensely, and are simply trying to protect themselves and their families.

Any person who would go so far as to intimidate and threaten women who stand up for other women in this particularly disturbing way is on the wrong side of politics, never mind history. It is beyond unacceptable that the left is not only remaining silent on these kinds of attacks, but is continuing to fuel them, by claiming it is feminists who are guilty of ‘hate’ and ‘violence,’ not their comrades-in-arms.

Meghan Murphy is a writer in Vancouver, BC. Her website is Feminist Current.