Rape crisis centre stripped of funding for refusing to accept trans women
VANCOUVER — Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre, has been stripped of city funding after refusing to rescind its policy of only serving female-born women.
In a statement, the organization said it is a victim of “discrimination against women in the name of inclusion” and accused Vancouver city council of trying to “coerce us to change our position.”
Meanwhile, the measure was cheered by activists who have long singled out Vancouver Rape Relief as a bastion of“trans exclusionary” behaviour.
After the vote, Vancouver Coun. Christine Boyle posted a message to her Twitter account accusing the organization of “supporting transphobia.”
“Trans women are women and sex work is work. … I can’t support [organizations] who exclude them,” Boyle wrote in an accompanying note. “I can open any organization I want and discriminate against the people I don’t like … but when I start to bring taxpayer funding into this, it makes this entire room responsible for my actions,” she said.
The group’s city funding will dry up starting in 2020. Under the measure adopted by the city, Vancouver Rape Relief cannot receive City of Vancouver grants “until such time as the organization makes changes to become aligned with … city policies.”
Money from the city represents $33,972 of Vancouver Rape Relief’s annual budget of more than $1 million, most of which is provided by the B.C. government. The city grant was used for educational outreach programs, which Vancouver Rape Relief said were “free and accessible and available to everyone,” including transgender people.
Founded in 1974, Vancouver Rape Relief has attracted fierce criticism for refusing to admit trans women into its core services such as peer counselling sessions, shelters or transition homes.
In 2017, the official opening of the Vancouver Women’s Library, a space with links to Vancouver Rape Relief, was hijacked by protesters who handed out pamphlets stating: “This library is run by women who hate other women.”
When the Licorice Parlour, an East Vancouver candy store, put up a poster in support of a Vancouver Rape Relief fundraiser in May, the shop was hit with online harassment and negative reviews for being “oppressive” and “transphobic.”
Vancouver Rape Relief has said that while it believes transgender women need support and protection from violence, their “lived experience” is fundamentally different from that of a woman whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with her birth sex.
“We do not have the experience to offer services to people without the same life experience … this is not our work,” Vancouver Rape Relief representative Hilla Kerner told a City of Vancouver committee last week.
In denying service to trans women, Kerner said their group was no different from other city-supported organizations who reserve their services toward a particular demographic group, be it immigrants, Chinese speakers or native youth.