CBC News reports that one of Canada’s oldest women’s shelters will lose city funding over their stance on not allowing transgender women access to their facilities:
The City of Vancouver has voted to gradually end a yearly grant to one of the country’s oldest rape crisis centres on the basis it discriminates against transgender women.
At a March 14 meeting, the city approved this year’s funding — $34,312 — for the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter but described it as termination funding. The city says no further funding will be awarded to the organization until it makes accommodations for transgender individuals.
The National Post reports that transgender activists were thrilled with the move:
Meanwhile, the measure was cheered by activists who have long singled out Vancouver Rape Relief as a bastion of “trans-exclusionary” behaviour.
[…]
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.
Vancouver city councilwoman Christine Boyle tweeted this out after the vote, in response to a tweet by Vancouver transgender activist Adrienne Smith:
Trans women are women and sex work is work. Trans women & sex workers deserve care & protection. I can’t support orgs who exclude them, so I won’t be supporting city funding for #Vancouver Rape Relief. I hope we can redirect funds to an inclusive provider. https://t.co/2UlZyZmSN8
— Christine Boyle (@christineeboyle) March 13, 2019
In other words, female rape victims can look forward to being victimized all over again by the system because idiotic female politicians like Boyle are betraying their own gender in the name of “inclusion.”
And Smith saying that transgender issues are “not debatable” is just yet another in a long list of examples of transgender “women” (read: men) attempting to silence women because “equality” or whatever.
Lee Lakeman, a founder of the women’s shelter, wrote this in 2006 about how female victims of sexual assault could be triggered by males in their safe spaces (again, via the NP):
Men are strictly banned from spaces operated by Vancouver Rape Relief, and the organization has previously argued that their clients, all of whom are recovering from male violence, do not feel comfortable while in the presence of someone who used to live as a man. “Even deep voices, male insignia like baseball caps and boots can make women nervous,” wrote Lee Lakeman, a founder of the centre, in 2006.
More recently, in a January talk at Vancouver Public Library, Lakeman said “to me, this discussion of ‘inclusion’ is really the conduct of the backlash against feminism.”
This has been said over and over and over again in response to aggressive attempts by the activist left in Canada, the United States, and other countries where the push is on by transgender activists and their militant supporters to give men dressed as women access to women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, etc. And every time the issue gets brought up, opponents of allowing this type of intrusive access get labeled “transphobes”, “bigots”, etc.
The same side that has claimed for decades that it is a champion of women’s rights and safety has willingly and enthusiastically thrown their support behind transgender activists at the expense of rights that were fought for with blood, sweat, and tears by pioneering women long before them. Women’s rights are slowly eroding before our eyes at the dictation of men who identify as women.
Contrary to what transgender activist Smith said earlier, what really isn’t debatable in all of this is that our worst enemies in the transgender rights battle are… other women.
The Vancouver Rape Relief Center is set to lose about $35,000 a year once their city funding is cut. Hopefully donations will pour in to offset the loss.
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—Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 15+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here. Connect with her on Twitter.–
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