“Trans rights are human rights” is the constant rally-cry of the groomer brigade. Women’s rights, on the other hand, can apparently go to hell. Women are very much second-class citizens compared to magical beings who, we are told, can change their sex at will.
And if a gaggle of male fetishists in bad makeup want to invade women’s spaces, then so be it. Sorry, ladies, your privacy, your safety and wellbeing, even your bodily integrity are nothing compared to the prurient fantasies of a bunch of predatory cross-dressers. Women may have fought long and hard for the right to the safety of single-sex spaces, but it’s time to say goodbye to all that.
The men want in and women are just going to have lie back and think of Judith Butler.
Even the most vulnerable women. Scores of women who’ve endured treatment in mental health units in Australia, public and private, are speaking out about the deprivation and abuse they suffered while in “care”. While they have many grounds for complaint, such as indifferent treatment by staff, what really stands out is the unique danger to women from being forced to share mental health spaces with men.
Australia’s mental health facilities are in too many cases exacerbating patients’ underlying trauma by placing them in mixed gender wards and taking a “medical first” approach based on using medication to treat symptoms. Health systems need to stop blaming patients for their illness, they say, and focus more on delivering trauma informed care.
Whatever the merits or otherwise of the “medical first” approach, it’s quite clear that mixed-gender facilities are an appalling risk to vulnerable women.
Dr Astha Tomar, chair of the Royal Australian New Zealand College of Psychiatrists Victorian Branch, says women are vulnerable to suffering adverse effects in these facilities because existing “psychiatric units were never designed to be gender-sensitive”.
Given the history of gendered violence that precedes admission for many women, she says, female-only wards are “one part of providing gender-sensitive care”.
“Mixed-gender units increase a woman’s risk of gender-based violence, especially when they are extremely vulnerable … due to a mental illness or psychological distress,” Dr Tomar says.
Not to mention being lumped in with mentally-ill men.
Maree* has been in and out of mental health facilities since she was 13, after experiencing sexual and domestic violence […]
During her inpatient stay last year, Maree was sexually assaulted by a male patient on the same floor. “When I made the first complaint [to staff], I was told to stay in my bed space and don’t leave,” she says. “After 24 hours in my bed space … I feel like I’m being punished.”
She says it didn’t stop the behaviour: “At one point, I’m on an exercise bike, and he puts his hands around me and says, ‘You would be very easy to strangle'” […]
Experiences like Maree’s seem to be disturbingly common. The Mental Health Complaints Commissioner in 2018 reported that the majority of complaints examined as part of its sexual safety project were related to “breaches of women’s sexual safety by male co-consumers”
It’s not, of course, a man-bashing exercise to say so. These are facilities where, by definition, mental illness and all the diminished responsibility and pathological behaviour that goes with it, are the norm. As one female patient says, “That’s not to say that men have not also had really negative experiences of the mental health system, but I think there are unique risks to women”.
All of which only goes to demonstrate the necessity of female-only spaces, whether in prisons, or mental health care.
The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System recommended “gender-based separation” in existing high dependency units in inpatient facilities and female-only spaces in any new inpatient facility built.
ABC Australia
Until the “trans-women” kick up their standard screaming fit at being denied access to vulnerable women’s spaces.
It’s almost like they’re predators fishing for easy prey, or something.
