Should Trauma Victims Decide Who’s Allowed in Public Spaces?

A New York Post article about former college swimmer Paula Scanlan bizarrely suggests that a traumatic experience gives a person the right to exclude anyone who triggers fear from public proximity.

by Evan Urquhart

Should Asian men be allowed to enter a CVS pharmacy when there are women present? Some women presumable exist who have been raped by Asian men they first met in a CVS, making the experience of encountering an Asian man inside a CVS pharmacy a potentially triggering event. According to the logic advanced by many on the anti-trans right, therefore Asian men should be banned from any CVS where they might potentially trigger a woman’s trauma response.

This is, of course, absurd. Trauma is unfortunately quite common, incredibly varied, and people recovering from a traumatic experience can be triggered by all sorts of things. We don’t ban all potential triggers because we couldn’t, and because any attempt to do so would massively inconvenience innocent people going about their lives. However, if you combine the idea that we can ban triggers with transphobic prejudices it can start to sound superficially plausible that trauma victims deserve to be protected from triggers in this way. Hence the premise of a New York Post story which suggested that a college woman who claims to have experience trauma deserved to dictate whether a trans woman on her swim team could use the locker room along with the other women there.

The swimmer in question is Paula Scanlan, a devout Catholic who appeared in Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman” video. Scanlan is associated with International Women’s Forum, and involved in activism against transgender rights broadly and trans women’s participation in sports specifically. In the Post story she refers to a terrible experience of having been sexually assaulted in a bathroom when she was 16. She says that sharing a locker room with Lia Thomas while both women were on the swim team at UPenn made her uncomfortable because it triggered memories of the trauma, even causing her to have nightmares.

Scanlan particularly highlights the fact that Thomas had a low voice.

screenshot from the New York Post

The Post article doesn’t examine the question of whether that a trauma victim would have a right to be free of triggers, despite that being a bizarre and totally unworkable in most other contexts. Even in the context of women’s locker rooms it doesn’t really make sense: After all, there’s some overlap between cis men and women’s natural voices, meaning that cis women athletes with low voices might trigger Scanlan just as much as Thomas did. Scanlan isn’t arguing that people with low voices should be banned from changing with her, or very tall women, or muscular women, or women with angular faces. She’s also not arguing for the inclusion of trans women with cis-passing voices or frames.

Scanlan and the NY Post aren’t really arguing that women should be safe from encountering triggers at all. They’re putting a veneer of sympathy for victims of sexual assault on to a base of prejudice against trans women to make their pre-determined outcome more palatable: That trans women should be excluded from women’s spaces just because.

What makes this so much more frustrating is that the right scoffs at the idea of safe spaces in every other context (and are abysmal in their support for victims of sexual violence as well). Just last week Fox News released a scathing article making fun of the idea that Black people might want to form their own camping and hiking groups to be free of discrimination in outdoors space. The NY Post itself has run highly critical stories against the concept of spaces where LGBTQ+ youth can be themselves. The double standard is that when the concept of a safe space can be used to oppress and enforce discriminatory ideas, the right is suddenly all for it. All victims of trauma, even ones involved in discriminatory activist campaigns, deserve sympathy and respect for their experiences. But those experiences aren’t, can’t, and shouldn’t be used to target groups of people for exclusion from a public space.