This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

In Trauma and Recovery, the psychiatrist Judith Herman distinguishes between traumatic events that are “natural disasters or ‘acts of God’” and those “of human design”. In the case of the former, she writes, “those who bear witness readily sympathise with the victim”. 

When it comes to the latter, the situation is more complex. Here, taking the part of the victim is not a natural response. After all, Herman points out, “all the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil.” By contrast, the victim “asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”

Victims are difficult people. They disrupt the untroubled narratives we tell ourselves about the world we live in and the people we know. They tug at those threads that are supposed to remain untouched. 

Nowhere is this more true than in the case of victims of male sexual violence. Rape, sexual exploitation and child sexual abuse are not rare; their occurrence is not limited to discrete communities with known ideological flaws. 

It cuts across all social strata, often thriving in settings which self-identify as virtuous and safe: the church, the charitable organisation, the family. To exist in such a setting and demand that others bear witness to your trauma — that they respond, socially and politically, to the harm done to you — is an incredibly challenging thing to do. You are not just asking for care and consideration; you are asking people to revise their most fundamental group narratives, the truths they tell themselves in order to believe they are good and that they belong. 

It is for this reason, I think, that many people sympathise with victims of rape and child abuse in the abstract, but do not want to witness their trauma in the wild. In the minds of others, those who make visible the aftermath of male sexual violence can quickly cross over from victims to perpetrators. Their crime is not one against the integrity of the body, but against the bystander’s own sense of self. 

The story of the Princess Grace Hospital offers one such example. 

In October this year, a victim of sexual assault had a potentially life-saving operation cancelled by London’s Princess Grace Hospital. This was in response to her request that due consideration be given to her trauma. The woman, who had arranged to have complex colorectal surgery, had asked for single-sex facilities, and to be exempted from any requirement to feign a belief that gender identity trumps biological sex while receiving treatment. 

Fear of male people while in a highly vulnerable physical state is not illogical

These are not extreme demands. Fear of male people while in a highly vulnerable physical state is not illogical; asserting boundaries can form an important part of recovery. For rape victims in particular, the right to stress the primacy of one’s own perceptions of sex and power — rather than cede to someone else’s insistence that their sex, and their power in relation to you, is whatever they say it is — can be vitally important. 

A private hospital, the Princess Grace boasts of “specialists in care for women’s health”. One would assume such specialists know what female bodies are and, while some may lack expertise regarding the relationship between biological sex, male violence and trauma, most would possess a basic degree of empathy and compassion. 

While issues of human resourcing and the organisation of physical space may yet have made the patient’s requests difficult to accommodate, this is something for which the hospital could have expressed contrition. It is not the fault of the Princess Grace Hospital that we live in a country where 98 per cent of sexual violence is committed by male people and an estimated one in 20 female people have been raped. Nentheless, that is surely something every medical institution ought to take into account when considering how best to meet the needs of female patients.

But representatives of the Princess Grace Hospital were not contrite. On the contrary, on 7 October the patient received an email from Maxine Estop Green, the hospital’s CEO, stating not just that the operation was off, but explaining why:

We do not share your beliefs and are not able to adhere to your requests and we have therefore decided we will not proceed with your surgery […] I appreciate this is not the communication you were expecting to receive, however HCA is committed to protecting our staff from unacceptable distress and we believe the cornerstone of good patient care is based on mutual respect and trust.

And there it is. As if by magic, rape victim becomes potential perpetrator, threatening to cause “unacceptable distress” due to her trauma, a trauma now recast as “values” that others — the untraumatised, those untainted by anything so inconvenient as fear — do not share. 

I am not entirely unsympathetic to the problem faced by the Princess Grace Hospital. It is the same problem faced by any institution or political grouping that has been frogmarched into accepting that a woman is anyone who says they are a woman, always and without exception. The trauma of female victims of sex crimes — who cannot switch off their awareness of who is and is not male — does not fit this narrative. 

The visceral, physical response, the unwilled terror at the sound of a male voice or the sight of a male body — all of that contradicts the line that trans women are a special, extra-vulnerable type of female person, as opposed to a just another type of male, with the same physical capabilities and emotional unpredictabilities as any other. 

The argument against trans women in sex-segregated spaces is not based on their transness, but their maleness. People pretend that’s not true, however. In keeping with the “do nothing” preferences of the bystander, many people would rather impute bigotry and bad faith to rape victims than deviate from the “trans women are women” thought-terminating cliché in which they have become invested. 

This investment may have complex roots; perhaps at the start it seemed a low-cost concession (“why not just call people what they want to be called?”), one which didn’t require actual belief (“of course, no one is actually saying …”). Then various other factors — peer pressure, threats of violence, the risk of ostracism, financial incentives — came into play. In the end, no one remembers why they ever expressed doubt. Doubt is for bigots. 

We should not be surprised how tenaciously people hold onto their myths

We should not be surprised how tenaciously people hold onto their myths, even when faced with the pain of others. A mother will disbelieve an abused child rather than accept the man she married is a bad person; a congregation will send a girl to a Magdalene laundry rather than admit that the head of their flock might be a rapist. Similarly, even women who call themselves feminists would rather denounce women terrorised into fearing all male people than admit that there is a problem with pretending that maleness is in the eye of the penis-owner. 

This is why “reasonable compromises” are impossible in the trans debate as it stands today. Any admission whatsoever that maleness matters — that it is real and politically salient — is heresy. The faithful will sacrifice the vulnerable rather than lose their religion. 

The degree of shaming to which survivors of rape and child sexual abuse have been subjected in order to preserve the “trans women are women” line is utterly obscene. Women who ask for female-only spaces are told they must reframe their boundaries; that they are obsessed with genitals; that they are weaponising trauma; that they have the wrong values and the wrong perception of reality. It is vital that they are vilified. Stop to consider their pain and you, too, might start pulling at the thread of the dogma. 

Because this is the sad truth of modern trans activism: it is completely incompatible with the recognition of female trauma as anything other than a fetish. Genuine female fear of male people is an affront to “I am whoever I say I am”. It is viewed as an attack, therefore all shame must be projected back onto women themselves. Like Medusa with her snake hair, once again the female victim of male sexual violence is made into a monster. 

The patient at the heart of the Princess Grace Hospital story has since had her operation rescheduled, with the original surgeons in attendance. It is a positive ending, as far as it goes. She is not condemned to die for her beliefs. 

But some actions cannot be retracted. The email sent on 7 October was not just an operation cancellation. It was an act of shaming, the same shaming to which victims of sexual trauma have been subjected throughout history for daring to suggest their truths matter more than particular party lines. 

This is the context in which we need to understand the Princess Grace story: as not just related to “the trans debate”, but clarifying the way in which said debate not only replicates but amplifies the traditional, millennia-old shaming of female victims of sex crimes. It is this shaming that enables someone such as Maxine Estop Green to potentially put a woman’s life at risk for expressing her fears. 

This shaming is familiar and commonplace. It is no less grotesque for it. None of us should choose to “see, hear, and speak no evil” when faced with it.