Reframing Trauma

 I probably need to delete Twitter. For me, it is the most effective distraction tool. There is so much on it, so many arguments, questions and confusions. But if I did that then I would miss out on all the funny things and made up swear words.

Currently, there is an argument about women.

There’s always an argument about women. It’s hard to believe that just over half the population can cause so much controversy but we do. 

I’m not talking about the outrage that we should be all feeling about the poor women of Afghanistan, who were encouraged by us to get educated, break free of their chains and then abandoned to be killed by the Taliban for doing the very things we encouraged. If there is something everyone should be getting angry about, it’s that.

This current Twitter spat is about some words (again, it’s always words. Women and words!)

If you just read the tweets then you would have believed that a man said that women who are raped just need to reframe their trauma and everything will be ok. Cue, huge righteous outrage. 

Looking a bit  deeper it seemed as though some of the outrage was because this ‘man’ was pretending to be a woman. For some people, this is still seen as the ultimate crime. How dare people not want to live in the way that society thinks they should based upon the genitals they were born with?  No, there are no links to the Taliban here. It is absolutely not the same thing. It’s fine to tell someone they can’t wear a dress and make up and love a man if they were born with a penis but it is definitely not ok to tell someone they can’t study if they have a womb. 

Before I get lost down a rabbit hole of sarcasm I need to get back to how I tried to understand #ReframeYourTraumaGate.

I was also, initially, outraged by the suggestion. It smacked of ‘suck it up girl’ and there was a sense of women being told to be quiet about what had happened to them. This is something I do not approve of. Keep quiet if it helps you but shout it from the roof tops if that’s best. Society should never keep quiet. Rapists should never be allowed to continue because they know society will hush up their crime.

Because I’m a curious sort of person I decided to look up this ‘man’, who had said such a heinous thing.

Mridul Wadhwa is the CEO of the Edinburgh rape crisis centre. The pictures of this person show a thoughtful and tired-looking small (about the same height at 5’3” Nicola Sturgeon) Indian woman in a Sari. I was confused. This person certainly didn’t look like a man.

There has been a lot of anger from women about the bill to allow trans people to self identify. I am sure some of this comes from a fear of losing hard-won women’s rights. If the word women can be obliterated from the English language then all of the rights of half the population could go with it. Most people with a womb and vagina are all too aware of how fragile our position in society is. We only have to look at Afghanistan. We have a collective memory of witch trials, burning at the stake and women turning on each other to secure their own protection and safety. Not much seems to have changed.

Even with the knowledge that this might be related to Mridul’s gender status I was not happy about the idea that she had said that bigots coming to therapy would be challenged to reframe their trauma. I was confused how someone with those views could have risen so high through these therapy ranks. So, I found the original interview and listened.

It was on a podcast called The Guilty Feminist. This is not something I would have normally listened to because I hate the giggling ‘I’m a feminist but I really like pink’ trope. Do you want equal rights and pay for all people regardless of their biological sex? If the answer is yes then you are a feminist. No questions, no caveats, no trivialising the statement with flippancies about a colour. 

In this podcast Mridul came across as a person who was very good at her job. She cared passionately about rape and the trauma people suffered from it. She cared about giving people safe spaces to deal with their trauma. They talked about reframing trauma because that is what everyone does all the time. It’s how we cope with trauma. Hopefully, after some time of reframing people can get to a place where they can start to prosecute the perpetrator (it’s why it took so long for concentration camp personnel to be tried).

During the interview they talked about self identification of trans people and discussed how unsafe trans women are in this world. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, since there was an incident in a public toilet when I visited the National Gallery a few years ago. I was just coming out of the cubical when someone came in. This person was just how you might have described a cross-dresser in the Eighties; a little older than me, not dressed very attractively and with bad make up and not quite passing as a woman. The women in the toilet were quite nasty.

“You can’t come in here,” they said. “It’s not safe for us.”

I whispered (because I’m not very brave), “It’s probably not safe for him in the men’s. Why can’t we just be kind?”

Whether anyone heard me, I’ll never know but the person in the tweed skirt shuffled into a cubicle and no more was said.

So, in the interview they were talking about these issues and how some women are very concerned that men could just identify as women to gain access to women’s spaces and make them less safe. Mridul laughed (fatal) and said that men enter these spaces anyway (true) and questioned whether placing so much emphasis on this was helpful. She felt that all it was doing was adding to the trauma and making women who have been raped feel even less safe.

She probably shouldn’t  have laughed, or used the word bigot but she really didn’t say what has been reported on Twitter. 

It worries me that the anger is mis-placed. While we are busy hating a trans woman who is helping lots of rape victims we are letting the rapists off. While our attention is directed at whether people with certain sexual organs are in the right public spaces, we are failing to police all spaces adequately, so that all people feel safe. While we are worrying about words like women (meaning human with a womb) we are failing to protect over half the population.

As I said, I should probably delete Twitter, to save us all from ranting blogs but if I did I would have missed this picture of a poster, clearly made by a 50-something year old with the kind of eyesight that stops you being able to distinguish between emojis.

@TheRealPalMal tweeted this picture with the caption, ‘So it’s called “coughing” now.’