Beira's Place

What happens when women say 'No'

I’m going to tell y’all a little story, and it won’t be a fun one.

The vitriolic online pushback this past week following JK Rowling’s announcement of her creation of Beira’s Place, a rape crisis center for female victims in Edinburgh, has been painful to witness.

It has become glaringly obvious that proponents of trans-ideology haven’t been angling all these years to merely include trans-and-nonbinary-identified males under the umbrella of those who have access to traditionally female-only spaces and services. They are opposed to any and all female-only provisions, regardless of the harm or distress this could cause us.

Which sounds like an attempt to legalize rape culture to me.

It doesn’t seem to matter that there are currently 17 rape crisis centers in Scotland which are already fully inclusive of trans and nonbinary identified male victims. Nor does it seem to matter that countless Scottish women have expressed a need (and desire) for a female-only services, or that a strictly female-only rape crisis facility, as defined by Section 212 of the Equality Act, is supported in law.

No, all that seems to matter is that women are refusing to cede a boundary—which, under patriarchy, is not allowed … ever—and you can’t claim you are respecting someone’s personhood if you don’t respect their right to say “No” to you.

Twenty years ago, something unthinkable happened to me. For nearly nine months, my right of refusal to one man’s will was repeatedly and egregiously bulldozed over. I may tell the full story one day, but for now, what’s relevant is that when I finally escaped this man, I was so obscenely mind-broken that the only thing I could think to do was “get to Michigan.” I spent all my savings on a ticket to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, the one place in the world where the husk I that I’d become would be temporarily safe from the reach of men.

The first days of Fest that year are still a blur, but I remember the women. The women who knew within seconds of meeting me that I’d just escaped something monstrous. Women who praised me for my small contributions, who carefully held my shaking hands, who made space for me.

The alarm in the eyes of a woman at the Triangle fire pit upon witnessing my numb surprise over her concern when I was badly burned tending the fire one night. I simply hadn’t felt the immense heat when my thumb sank through the surface of a molten log. I was perplexed by her quest to find a woman who might donate ice. I’d forgotten I was still worthy of care.

The woman—also, miraculously, a trauma therapist—who sat with me for hours under a tree overlooking the Night Stage meadow as I tried—mostly unsuccessfully— to speak around the frozen weight of the glacier of shame that had settled in my throat.

And there was a fierce butch woman—who I’m still in touch with to this day—who chanted and drummed over me as I shook and wept, calling out to the Earth Mother herself to draw this poison out of me at the healing circle at the week’s end.

I owe these women my life. Several times over.

Female-only spaces are life-saving spaces, and they are needed. This is my hard line.

MichFest was meant to be one week a year where women celebrated women, but that year—for me—it was a sanctuary, a safe container for all my fragments, and a reminder there may still be a chance to come home to myself. And now even that community has been dismantled, that healing space lost, that haven stripped from women by patriarchal ideologues.

Women shouldn’t have to spill our trauma out in order to convince the world that we are warranted to say No, I need to be around female people—held and supported by females only—for a while to feel safe and heal. Women-only space is different than mixed-sex space. Fundamentally different, and at times, crucial. And I no longer care who I offend by saying so.

I applaud JK Rowling’s creation of this one space for women who are victims of male-violence, though I cannot call it a ‘triumph’ as others have referred to it. A triumph would be the Genderati’s meek acceptance that female personhood and trauma matters and these pocket-sized spaces in the world for women who need them will be tolerated without a crusade labeling us as hateful witches.

Yet that would require the barest acknowledgment that males and females are differing material classes, and thus have different needs. Or even considering that the ‘trans rights’ movement is actually a series of unjustifiable demands for legal privileges which only further the structural oppression of female people.

It’s much easier for those who cannot bear sincere self-reflection to double down exponentially to the point of absurdity or implosion no matter who they might harm.

I have painstakingly clawed (thawed?) my way into my own understanding of personhood through the kindling and spark of sisterhood, and what I’ve learned is that difference is not hatred. Boundaries are not abuse. Women are not a resource to be siphoned for the use of other people—namely, male people—no matter how they identify, or what their needs might be.

No. Fuck off.