Bitchfaces, how goes it? Fantastic. Glad to hear it. However, I’m going to start tonight by saying that I’m going to piss a lot of people off, and no, I’m not even a little bit sorry.
Really.
So, Morgane Oger, a transgender activist in Canada, has been awarded the Meritorious Service Medal by Canada. This is big news, as prior to being celebrated for championing for diversity, Oger was international news for playing an instrumental role in having a rape crisis shelter defunded.
Allow me a moment to digress, if you will. Oger, who has publicly called for harassment of women who have protested the call for closing the rape crisis shelter, is coincidentally the father of two children and was heavily in arrears for their monetary support.
The reason behind the crusade to close the shelter was that trans people weren’t eligible to be sheltered at that location with rape victims. Not surprising at all, considering the women being sheltered there had just been subjected to sexual violence at the hands of men, and did not feel safe being housed with anyone bearing a male sex organ.
As a survivor of sexual violence, I wouldn’t feel safe housing with anyone with a male sex organ at that time, either. It wouldn’t matter to me if the person with the organ also had breasts, or long hair, or called themselves Madison, or if they called their organ Madison Jr. The fact would still remain that there was a male sexual organ in my safe space, and I was specifically in that space to be free from the very body part that had horrifically abused me.
Does that make sense? It does to me. It makes a lot of sense to me, because I am a woman. There has never been a time in my life that I didn’t have to be aware of the men in my direct vicinity, because if one of them chose to, they could assault me in a way that a man cannot understand unless he has been to prison. It doesn’t matter if that man now identifies as a woman, he did not spend his life knowing that type of fear, and he doesn’t know it now, either.
That’s the reason this shelter had a no-trans policy. Because, as the name suggests, they were sheltering women who had been raped. Period. Not pandering to a lifestyle, not judging anyone’s sexuality, not affixing labels. They had a ‘no male sex organ in the safe space’ policy.
As they should have.
I couldn’t care less about what is happening at the men’s shelters. They’re men, so they can do it the way men do things. However, as a woman, the rape crisis shelters are my business. I have needed one, I have lent assistance to many, and I understand exactly why they operate in the way they do.
Do I have an issue with Oger pushing for years to have the shelter defunded for specifically serving only women with 100% female organs? You bet your ass I do. That doesn’t make me a TERF, or any of the other labels so quickly slapped onto those who voice a differing opinion. It simply means that some places, like those helping women directly following a sexual assault, belong solely to women because it’s necessary to facilitate healing.
I do not care how you identify. I don’t care about your orientation, or your lifestyle, or your lack of either. I do care about the resources to assist women in crisis being dismantled by a person who has no problem calling for harassment and violence against women who oppose their beliefs. It seems that person is awfully comfortable with women being attacked, and that makes me question their whole dog and pony show.
If calling for violence and harassment of women gets you a medal in Canada, you can color me unimpressed. I don’t typically get involved in the matters of other people’s sexual identification, gender identity, or personal habits, but this is not about that. This is about a person who was a man ten years ago dismantling assistance for women who have been subjected to sexual violence, and bitch I’m not cool with that.
So, Canada, if this is your official stance on assistance for rape victims, you’ve really dropped the ball. Figures. Y’all don’t even play sports with balls. Pucks just don’t deliver the same bounce when dropped, so I’m not surprised. I’m also not sorry, and I said what I said. It’s literally common sense. The audacity to say otherwise simply floors me.
Well that's repulsive