Rowling Rants About Crisis Center
In rare form as ever, JK Rowling has decided to publicly slam a crisis center for survivors of sexual violence in Edinburgh. But it turns out that the third-party review she’s using to justify freaking out about the crisis center is a bit less damning than she thought…
Opinion by Alyssa Steinsiek
On September 12th, Rowling went on a ten-post rant (plus whatever comments she made to her repliers) about the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, an organization devoted to providing specialist aid to people who have experienced sexual assault and rape. To the deep chagrin of Rowling and her various “Gender Critical” cronies, ERCC unapologetically provides services to transgender people.
That’s probably because trans people are “over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault,” according to a study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. But who cares what one of the most prestigious public universities in America has to say?
Rowling’s justification for going knives out on ERCC is a review conducted by charity Rape Crisis Scotland that she claims to be “damning.” If you look around at various reports on the review, including some from the BBC themselves, you’ll find claims that the ERCC “failed to protect women-only spaces,” that recently resigned head of ERCC Mridul Wadhwa “failed to behave professionally,” and that “the needs of survivors were not prioritized.”
Unfortunately for Wadhwa and ERCC’s detractors, there’s no clear evidence that any of that is true. In fact, the review consists mostly of glowing praise for ERCC, and only mentions Wadhwa twice, both during a timeline of events relevant to the review included in Appendix 2. But bear in mind that we must never let facts get in the way of a good witch hunt.
It is a witch hunt because, yes, Mridul Wadhwa is a transgender woman. If you consult Rowling’s tweets, the literal first thing she does is call Wadhwa a man. She spends the rest of the thread misgendering Wadhwa, which sort of puts a damper on her suggestion that ERCC has been “dominated by idealogues.”
If a trans woman quietly doing her job, helping survivors of sexual assault and rape, is an idealogue, what on earth are you Joanne?
Since her first ranty thread, Rowling has tweeted twice more about ERCC and Wadhwa, first to suggest that anybody who ever had positive contact with her should be fired and later to suggest that trans people working for a rape crisis center is exactly the same as a civilian showing up to a combat veterans’ support group and demanding to sit in and speak. Strike similes off the list of Rowling’s authorial skills.
Interestingly, a significant motivation for the review that led to Wadhwa’s resignation appears to be an incident in which a woman named Roz Adams was “constructively dismissed” for demanding that an employee’s genitals be explained to a survivor referred to ERCC. That is to say, an ERCC employee who identified as non-binary changed their name to something “masculine,” and Adams took umbrage with that.
She claims to have started out her tenure at ERCC as a trans ally, enthusiastic to support trans people, but since she also says that sex is binary and “everyone is either male or female at that level,” I’m not convinced. Further condemning Adams’ track record as an “ally” is the fact that she now works for the “female-only” crisis center funded by Rowling.
So, what are the facts of RCS’s report on ERCC? From 2022 to 2023, ERCC delivered 11,608 hours of support to 1,149 survivors of sexual violence. Thanks to a service evaluation tool used by survivors after receiving support, we know that 92% of survivors “[indicated] improved sense of safety,” that 85% of survivors “voiced that they had tools and strategies to deal with what happened to them,” and that 93% of survivors “expressed feeling hopeful about the future” at the end of support… compared to just 8% at the beginning of support.
“I walked into the last session with a confidence I could only have dreamed of when I first started,” said one survivor, referred to ERCC via STAR, a UK community wellness program. “I walked into STAR a shell of a human and walked out a whole person, who had accepted that the trauma was part of my life … I was not just surviving anymore, and I will forever be indebted to my therapist for that. My life has completely changed, I have a deep-rooted sense of strength and self-worth and I finally feel ready to step into the world without anyone holding my hand.”
Conversely, RCS’s evidence of ERCC causing “damage to some survivors” consists of a survivor who says she was traumatized by Wadhwa’s appearance on a feminist podcast, and a survivor who demanded that she be helped only by a “biological woman.” These survivors, it should be noted, never utilized ERCC’s services.
My takeaway is that Rowling is, as usual, full of it. She has no idea what she’s talking about. She’s just taking any opportunity she can to lash out at the trans community, and neither she nor any of the supposed professional reporters covering this story have even bothered to give the review of ERCC a thorough read.
Let’s soldier on and hope to see better work from other members of the profession I have foolishly chosen, but uh… nobody hold their breath.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
