Identifying as abused

Amid the five-day debate over whether men have a cervix or not, also known as the 2021 Labour Party Conference, a councillor revealed they’d suffered transphobic abuse in the conference toilets.

That man was ‘Patricia Josephine Hannah-Wood’, a councillor in Lancashire, but before we get to his claim, it is worth noting that he had already made an extraordinary misogynistic mark on the conference before submitting this allegation.

On day one, he took to the floor to speak during a debate about women’s rights against the backdrop of a woman who’d just been murdered by a man, and argued that … women are violent against him and he is comparable to the murdered woman.

He said: “As you can tell, I’m a trans woman. Since becoming a woman I have experienced undue harassment and violence against my person, not only by misogynistic men - but by women as well. It is not just men that cause violence. But we must support this motion [for equality for women] because without it more women like the young schoolteacher who was murdered this week - more of us - will suffer that fate.”

(If the audience were able to ‘tell’ he’s trans, how did he know that the people who supposedly attacked him were doing so out of misogyny?)

The next day Patricia was back (this footage is available here from 2 hours and 38 minutes). This time he claimed that just after his speech he was attacked by a woman again, this time in the women’s toilets: “Straight after that motion was debated I was in the loo downstairs with a few of my colleagues from the north west when I was transphobically abused in this conference centre by one of our sisters.”

This led to loud cries of ‘shame’ from the audience but, sadly, no further details emerged. Just: “Alongside our black and BAME colleagues we are under constant attack every single day” . This resulted in a standing ovation.

Another Labour councillor, Lindsay Broadwell, who identifies as a ‘cis lesbian’ but is in fact male, claimed this week that he had been aggressively challenged in the women’s toilets simply for being a butch woman.

While both these men may have been subject to sideways glances by actual women in the intimate space of the toilets, the likelihood of an aggressive challenge is low since women know the dire consequences of questioning entitled men. For men such as Patricia and Lindsay, who is muscular and 6’2”, the idea that they have experienced a level of physical and sexual vulnerability akin to, or more severe, than that of women, is likely to be fantasy. Lindsay has form. He once claimed a male, armed with a knife, had asked him to expose his genitals in order to escape harm, a crime he had coincidentally predicted three days before this attack, which was never reported to the police. He also argued for mixed-sex hospital wards by detailing a humiliating ‘genital inspection’ by a nurse, which again reads like fantasy.

Fantasies of hostile women in toilets play an obvious role in painting ‘TERFs’ as irrational aggressors and augmenting the picture of the innocent trans woman who ‘just wants to pee’, but a handful of trans-identified males appropriate women’s experiences of sex attacks and abuse in order to stave off accusations of abuse from others. Another (former) Labour official, Lily Madigan, seeded stories of sexual harassment and assaults on Twitter for a few weeks in 2019. Shortly afterwards several young women came forward to accuse him of inappropriate sexual behaviour, including one who alleged he had tried to force her to kiss him, a story he had claimed as his own.

The Canadian predator ‘Jessica’ Yaniv, now known as Jessica Simpson, well known for his failed attempt to sue beauticians who refused to wax his testicles and his fantasies about women’s toilets and menstruation, claimed a female journalist reporting on his depravity sexually assaulted him in the toilets of a court house where he was appearing on weapons charges. No charges were ever brought and Yaniv / Simpson may face defamation charges of his own.

At the time of writing, one of the trending topics in the Reddit ‘asktransgender’ sub is someone saying they know they’re trans because they have an “extreme envy of both the social and physical characteristics of women”. Of the 53 replies, not one says that that is a problem.

As women and girls once again share stories of their vulnerability at the hands of men and boys after the brutal murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa, they are frequently talked over by extremists who insist these women were murdered because of their identification with the female gender rather than their biological sex.

These same extremists, among them the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, also routinely claim that transgender people (they usually mean trans-identified males) are ‘amongst the most marginalised and abused communities,’ (insinuating without evidence that ‘trans women’ are more vulnerable to attack than biological women). Trans identified males in fact are 18 times more likely to commit violent crimes than women. This is not to dismiss the idea that trans-identified males experience abuse because they are conspicuous as gender non-conforming men, but it is not on the same scale as what women experience in public and in the home. The lower-than-average murder rate of trans people in the UK is something that should be celebrated.

For years, we’ve seen that women’s experiences of vulnerability and violence at the hands of men is not only being appropriated but also used against them. It’s impressive, however, that the Labour Party Conference provided not one, but two examples of the trend.