‘A women-only rape-relief centre in Vancouver has had its funding pulled for ‘excluding’ trans people.
The Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter (VRRWS) cares for, on average, 1,200 women each year. It offers immediate response and services, including transition housing and a 24-hour crisis line, for women fleeing male violence. Established in 1973, it is the oldest women’s rape-crisis centre in Canada.
But a year ago Vancouver city council plunged the centre’s future into doubt. It approved VRRWS’s annual grant for 2019/20, but also stated that it would cease funding the following year. And so, last month, it came to pass. The city council voted finally to end the centre’s funding. And it did so on the grounds that, by exclusively serving women, the centre was discriminating against men who identify as women.
Driving this defunding campaign was local trans activist Morgane Oger. Oger, a politically active trans woman, spent the better half of the year taunting and shaming the shelter for being ‘transphobic’, simply because it did not serve trans women or gender-variant people – in other words, men.
When the city council pulled the plug on the VRRWS, Oger took to Twitter to gloat, likening the centre to a white-supremacist organisation. Oger also wrote a scathing blog post implying a connection between the rape-crisis centre and various right-wing fringe groups, from the Soldiers of Odin (a far-right, anti-immigrant group) to the Peoples Party of Canada (a populist, far-right political party). This type of behaviour ought to be of no surprise to anyone familiar with trans activists’ bullying tactics.’
Read more: Canada’s war on women
