Just a month ago, when the Vancouver City Council voted to withdraw future funding from Vancouver Rape Relief, Morgane Oger was one of those leading the charge.

The defunding is the latest flashpoint in an ongoing struggle between transgender activists and feminist organizations who maintain that female-born and male-born women should remain distinct groups. One of the figures leading the defunding charge against Vancouver Rape Relief was Morgane Oger, a longstanding transgender advocate and vice president of the B.C. NDP. In comments before a March 13 city committee meeting, Oger called Vancouver Rape Relief “noncompliant with Canadian law” and guilty of “systematic, consistent misbehaviour.” She also said that it is the last B.C. women’s shelter to continue denying services to the trans community.

Biting hands that feed it:

Tax-funded @VanRapeRelief pushes prejudice in an indignant online rant about discrimination despite a one-year grace period to catch up to Canada's discrimination laws by @CityofVancouver.#vanpoli #inclusion #bcpoli https://t.co/btX2RQo7ZQ — Morgane Oger M.S.M. (@MorganeOgerBC) March 17, 2019

That’s Morgane Oger accusing VRR of “pushing prejudice” because they think men who identify as women are not women in the same sense that women are.

“I can open any organization I want and discriminate against the people I don’t like … but when I start to bring taxpayer funding into this it makes this entire room responsible for my actions,” she said.

That was Oger a month ago, rejoicing at getting educational funding taken away from a women’s anti-rape organization.

Today Oger is talking about something else.

People in marginalized communities are extremely sensitive to the misbehaviour of their own, especially when it reinforces prejudice. The instinct to band together and be unyielding is strong, and I reject the prejudice that surrounds this story. Sometimes we resist exposing difficult conversations to the outside. Jessica Yaniv is forcing such an awful conversation. None of the allegations I write about today have been proven or ruled on by a court. This article is based entirely on eyewitness accounts, which are always highly subjective. I wish it wasn’t a transgender person or someone saying they are part of the LGBTQ+ community who has been doing what Jessica Yaniv has reportedly been doing for years – as far back as 2013.

We then get a couple of paragraphs explaining, or insisting, that what one person does must not be seen as saying anything about an identity that one person shares with others. Once we’ve underlined that a few times…

But the things that people have told me Jessica Yaniv has done to them are awful and can’t be swept out of our consciousness. Awful things have been reported and need to be taken seriously.

What things? Oger never says. Maybe that’s for legal reasons; maybe it’s fair enough to issue a warning without going into specifics. On the other hand there are public sources for some of what Yaniv has done, so surely Oger could cite those? There’s not a word about “wax” in the whole piece, when one of Yaniv’s conspicuous little games was calling up women who ran small businesses yanking women’s hairs out so that he could sue them when they politely declined to wax him. Maybe Oger thinks that’s a perfectly fine thing to do.

Some time after that first conversation I learned more about the specifics of Yaniv’s actions and her history and actions. In the only other conversation with her when she called me at my Trans Alliance Society number in early 2019 I advised her that she did not seem to me to be the appropriatd person to fight for trans women’s rights to services for women – on the basis of her documented past history. With the help of other women who pointed the way in recent months, I tracked down and heard witnesses with first-person accounts of Jessica’s online behaviour spanning 2013 to 2018. Their stories included reports and evidence of outrageously inappropriate acts, some towards children who are tweens and teens. Some of the material has survived as screenshots, and what I saw shows what strikes me as a pattern of predatory behaviour. I am not in law enforcement or a lawyer but as the mom of kids under 14 I was horrified by what the women told me happened and I believe them.

That’s it. That’s all the information we get. What predatory behavior?

We know what predatory behavior, that is we know some of it. Wanting to show young girls how to insert tampons was one item. No doubt Oger, with inside sources, knows more, but Oger isn’t telling.

I spoke to four women. Three of whom had awful experiences with Jessica Yaniv. All were young women and girls at the time. They are all adults now. I urged each woman to make a complaint with police on the basis of the things they said happened. I hope this has an effect and with enough police reports there may be a case.

There’s always Vancouver Rape Relief…

That’s about halfway through; almost all of the rest is about saying don’t you dare think of Yaniv as saying anything about other men who identify as women. The concern is all for the trans “community” rather than women and girls.

It was impossible for me to speak about allegations so steeped in transphobia because every transgender person is familiar with the transgender-woman-as-predator model used by hate groups advocating to marginalize us. Without real evidence, this horrible story is simply indistinguishable from the copious hate propaganda that clogs my social media. People who claim that allegations against Yaniv were public knowledge for years before this post must be deeply frustrated that people who could have helped act were unaware or not listening. I have a simple message for them: There are ways to bring valid concerns to the attention of the affected community leaders and xenophobic hatred is not the appropriate way to get results. Nobody reached out to anyone I know to express concerns about this person beyond throwing insults and accusations over social media. Next time, instead of passively demonizing people please pick up the phone and call somebody with power or influence. It’s unlikely public figures are the monsters your social media silo tells you they are. There is no cover under the trans umbrella for predators. In the future, please consider what these allegations sound like from my community’s side of the fence in the context of our experiences. Perhaps center your fury on the people who prey on transgender women with their alarmist fairy tales that made this incident undetectable from dominantly hateful narrative. When there is a predator among us, we can’t hear you if you bury your words in hatred and if you don’t reach out.

DARVO much?

Updating to add: now Oger is just plain saying it’s Feminist Current’s fault.