Season 2 Episode 6

Stassja Frei: In March 1974, at the height of the Women’s Liberation movement, three Sydney feminists broke into two adjacent terrace houses in the inner city suburb of Glebe. There, they set up Elsie Women’s Refuge – Australia’s first ever refuge for women and children escaping domestic violence. At the time, domestic violence wasn’t recognised as a crime in Australian law and it was rarely taken seriously by police. 

The bold move gained extensive media coverage and donations of food and other goods for the houses came rolling in. Within a year, eleven such refuges were established across the country and the Whitlam government was forced to finally take action on domestic violence. The following year, in 1975 the Australian government began funding women’s refuges.

Now, just fifty years later, to be eligible for that government funding, women’s crisis services must show that they’re inclusive of men who say they’re women.

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Welcome back to Desexing Society. I’m your host Stassja Frei. Episode 6: Escaping Male Violence

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Jacklynn Draper, who goes by Jack, has worked in the domestic violence sector for decades. She’s a lesbian and a second wave feminist who had her own experiences with family dysfunction and male violence. But it was her time working at Australia’s first feminist run abortion clinic, the Bessie Smyth Foundation, that opened her eyes to just how pernicious male violence is, on the lives of women.

Jack Draper: I started out working in the abortion clinic and that’s when I heard stories, you know like you have the 13 year old whose father brings her in, throws her in the door basically and says “I’ll come back at 4 o’clock” and you realise the tragedy that is incest and what that is for that person, and rapes and so that led me to then go and work in women’s refuges, and I did that for a really long time in Canberra, and I did a lot of lobbying. I sat on women’s advisory committees for the beginning of the funding of women’s refuges. They used to be called supported accommodation assistance programs and they had a whole series of them so I would feed policy into them because even though we’ve had women’s refuges for like 40 years, it’s been a really slow haul to get them anywhere near a reasonable service, and now they’re so defunded they’ve sort of gone backwards again. But working in Canberra, because it’s quite a middle class place full of public servants, you could really up the ante about what standard was accepted. When I first went to work in women’s refuges, women were expected to share a bedroom with another woman and her three kids. I’m like, hang on a minute, you can’t expect someone to heal from trauma in such a crazy situation. And so, I know it sounds little, but just getting a room for one woman and her kids was a big issue. Then getting the government to count the kids because you know they used to only count the women and it’s like well actually all the kids get a service, they’re all traumatised.

Stassja Frei: Jack is also an artist and each year for International Women’s Day she creates a piece called Counting Dead Women.

Jack Draper:’Cause our Commonwealth government doesn’t even count the number of women murdered each year by their partners so a group of volunteers do it and they’re called Destroy the Joint. They just put up an annual count. So each year I make a book that sort of opens out with a cut out for each woman who’s been murdered and I make a statement about that. 

Stassja Frei: In 2014 the New South Wales Liberal Party was in power, led by Premier Mike Baird. They implemented a major homelessness reform program called Going Home, Staying Home. The reforms completely gutted the New South Wales Women’s Refuge Movement. Specialist domestic violence services established solely for women and children were repurposed to serve homeless people and those with addiction and mental health problems. That meant formerly women only services became open to men. Operation of the few women’s refuges that remained was put out to tender, and it was well funded, faith based charities like St Vincent de Paul and the Salvation Army that won the contracts. That year, Jack devoted her Counting Dead Women art piece to the death of women’s refuges.

Jack Draper: I think it was 79 dedicated women’s domestic violence refuges and then over a period of 3 years we ended up with 7 in the whole state.

Stassja Frei: It was hard to confirm these figures online. However, the Women’s Electoral Lobby estimated that women’s refuges had been reduced by 80%.

Jack Draper: And of course, you know say Elsie, which was the first feminist refuge opened back in the 70s, that’s run by the Catholic church now. And so now I train Catholic workers who work for say for example, Elsie women’s refuges, and you have to actually say to them, don’t turn up to work with that cross of Jesus around your neck, it’s really inappropriate to be putting that on women. And to be honest I despair because in the training – it’s quite a detailed training, it goes for four days, and at the end of each day we go round the circle and see how everyone’s travelling and ask a question about the impact of working with traumatised people and, all those people who work for religious organisations say they pray for the women who come in the refuge. So at the end of the day they go home and pray and they think it’s solved. You know, when we had women’s run refuges, activism and changing the law and raising awareness about male violence was a really big part of it whereas they are really just a band aid measure.

Stassja Frei: The Liberal Party had taken the hard work of feminists and handed it over to the adherents of a male centric religion – a religion that many feminists view as a tool of women’s oppression.

All this is to paint a picture of the precarious existence of women’s refuges. On top of this is yet another threat that these vital services have been facing for roughly the last 20 years.

Jack Draper: So there’s been such a push to accept trans women into women’s refuges and I really believe it’s not about those men who identify as women needing a safe space as much as it is about winning the right to be in a women’s space. The sorts of situations I’ve seen come up- and quite often workers contact me as to how to handle that because I’ve done a lot of professional supervision and people respect, you know, the boundaries and the ethics that I have around these things, but it does really annoy me. For example, one of the refuges down here had three townhouses. 

Stassja Frei: Just quickly, when Jack says ‘down here’ she’s referring to the city of Wollongong, which is about 1.5 hours south of Sydney. The townhouses that she’s talking about have 3 or 4 bedrooms each.

Jack Draper: So when they had a trans person come, that trans person got given a whole town house to themselves because it wasn’t seen as safe to let the kids be near, essentially a man. And yet he got to stay there for 9 months with workers really falling over themselves to meet his needs, when the women were really cramped up into a space because of him taking up one of those houses. Some of the workers were saying to me, this trans person used to catch the train up to Sydney and do sex work there and come back but then ring from the station and say “I’m not safe cos I’m all in drag and a worker needs to come and pick me up.” Now I know that those same workers would not pick up a heterosexual woman resident if they came back impacted by drugs and alcohol saying I need a lift. They’d say well catch a taxi or work it out yourself, you know. So I do think that they get a different level of service because they’re seen as unique and different and I think that in the end that just takes away from women again in terms of the service. Plus I really don’t- I know that a lot of adult men who identify as women are autogynephiles and I don’t trust them around women and I don’t trust them around children in particular. And the women who come into refuges are really traumatised and they don’t necessarily have an eye on the kids, and the kids who come into refuges are often really highly sexualised, like they’ve already been sexually abused or been shown pornography or a whole range of things, so I just think it’s really dangerous to be putting those kids at risk and you know, maybe they’ll be suing refuges in the future for things that go down and happen.

Stassja Frei: Based on this anecdote from Jack, it’s clear that domestic violence workers are well aware that housing men alongside women and children is a safeguarding risk. If it wasn’t a risk, that particular man could’ve shared a house with other women. Instead, his inclusion meant that women in need were deprived of vital housing.

But this isn’t the only impact of forced male inclusion. Ironically, it’s also impacting the quality of services available to gays and lesbians.

Jack Draper: So there’s a whole other area for me around the transing stuff which is that lesbian domestic violence is a really big issue because we all have our own dysfunctions and ways of behaving until we’ve reconstructed ourselves. And so I used to train a course called Responding to Violence in Lesbian and Gay Relationships, and once the trans stuff took over in about 2007, that course was pulled because it was seen as to be not inclusive. So it disturbs me that because the trans stuff has come up and because it’s so contentious, what’s happening is no workers are being trained in how to respond to lesbian and gay relationships and in fact I think the important part of those trainings was that- not to make assumptions about who was the perpetrator. Workers used to get really caught up in, but who’s the perpetrator if there’s two women? And you’d go well you actually have to listen and observe and you know, do a proper risk assessment, see who’s behaving in which ways.

Stassja Frei: Jack is also finding that workers are coming into the training having fully bought into the narrative around transgender vulnerability. 

Stassja Frei: Nearly every training I do when you get to the slide about the alphabet soup – which is not my slide and I always have to talk lots about how I don’t agree with what’s written in it – everyone always goes, you know, ‘oh those trans women, they’re the most discriminated against’ and it’s just pure propaganda and it’s not borne out by any of the research or the evidence which we keep showing them, whereas it’s really heterosexual women who are the biggest victims of male violence. Trans women are also the victims of male violence but there’s often other things alongside of that- about other risky behaviour that they might be doing, which isn’t to blame them for the violence that’s happening, but it’s just not the same issue. 

Stassja Frei: According to the Trans Murder Monitoring project, since 2008 there have been four transgender people murdered in Australia. That’s four people in 17 years. In comparison, one Australian woman is murdered every nine days by a current or former partner. 

For the 2023 to 2024 period, the Trans Murder Monitoring project found that of the transgender people murdered globally, 46% worked in prostitution. And this is the risky behaviour that Jack alluded to. 

The violence faced by trans identified males is different to the violence faced by women. Women are most likely to be murdered by a male partner. Whereas trans identified males are most likely to be murdered in the course of prostitution. 

None of this is to say that trans identifying people aren’t in need of domestic violence services.

Jack Draper: I think that if there are people who want to identify as something that they aren’t, then there could be some sort of mixed refuge, I think that’s perfectly possible to fund those things but I don’t think they should be allowed in a space that’s made for traumatised women and kids to you know, gather themselves together and set about on a new life, which is massive, you know and takes a minimum of 5 years for women to reestablish their life. $40,000 they reckon is the minimum cost it is for a woman to leave a violent relationship, and some women spend hundreds of thousands. This is absolute craziness and what a disservice to humanity that all this women’s and children’s positive energy is diverted just into surviving.

Stassja Frei: Instead of doing the hard work of establishing new services specific to the needs of trans or LGBT+ people, the trans lobby has instead taken the much easier route of colonising women’s services. And they’ve been pretty successful. 

Jack Draper: So I was part of the push right back in the 80s to push for the exemption so we didn’t have to employ men, cos there’s always been men who’ve been trying to push into women’s spaces and turn up at women’s refuges and be really inappropriate. But in Sydney those exemptions stood I think at probably 97% of the women’s refuges actually had that exemption. But then they have a peak body called NSW Women’s Refuge Movement, that’s what it was called then, and they got a new CEO who had previously worked at ACON as a lesbian health worker and within, it was just a couple of months they ran a workshop for all the NSW women’s refuges about how to get rid of your exemption. So it became very popular to be seen as inclusive of men who identified as women and it seemed to me that a lot of those refuge workers really lost their focus about women and children’s safety.

Stassja Frei: By now we shouldn’t be too surprised that there’s a link to ACON. In 2014, a self-described queer woman by the name of Moo Baulch was appointed as CEO of Domestic Violence NSW. That’s the state’s peak body for domestic violence services. And yes, you heard that correctly. Her name is Moo, as in the sound a cow makes. In previous decades she probably called herself a lesbian, but now she goes by queer. In one of her bios that I found online, she uses she/they pronouns suggesting a possible drift towards a non-binary identity.

Before joining Domestic Violence NSW, Moo had worked for ACON as their Same-Sex Domestic Violence Officer. As an aside, the term ‘same sex’ is now considered transphobic. Because according to the transgender belief system, people are attracted to gender identities, not sexed bodies. Accordingly, it would seem that Moo has had to retroactively change her job title. For example, on her LinkedIn profile, she erases the term same sex and instead describes her role at ACON as LGBTI Domestic Violence Project Manager.

I couldn’t find anything online to confirm that under Moo’s leadership, Domestic Violence NSW ran workshops on how to reverse the single sex exemptions for women’s refuges. But I don’t doubt Jack’s account of this happening. What I did find was evidence that in her role at ACON, Moo had worked toward male inclusion in women’s services.

For example, in 2013 when she was still at ACON, Moo was the main point of contact for the Second National LGBTIQ Domestic Violence Conference. One of the focuses of the conference was to showcase examples of, quote, “a range of capacity-building initiatives to help services to make their practice accessible to LGBTIQ people.” End quote. This sounds good in theory. Until you realise that it means making women’s crisis services accessible to men.

It’s clear that Moo brought ACON’s agenda to Domestic Violence NSW. The clues are in their 2015 Annual Report. they describe working closely with the LGBTIQ Domestic and Family Violence Interagency. From what I can tell, ACON were one of the so called agencies that made up the interagency. And Moo had collaborated with them during her time at ACON. The annual report also describes how Domestic Violence NSW contributed to a forum ran by the organisation Sydney Women’s Homelessness Alliance. This forum was devoted to trans women’s access to domestic violence services. Domestic Violence NSW proudly stated in their 2015 annual report that, quote “We have a strong commitment to improving access for trans* women.” End quote.

Moo has now set her sights on influencing national domestic violence policy. Since 2022 she’s been the Chair of Our Watch. That’s Australia’s national peak body for the prevention of violence against women.

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The consequences of opening women’s crisis services to men are predictable. Feminist news outlet, Reduxx reported that in Spain, three men who had been convicted of domestic violence offences went on to change their legal sex. And then they tried to access domestic violence shelters where they knew their wives and children were living.

In another example, this one from Vancouver Canada, a trans identified male by the name of Tyler Porter boasted online about harassing women in a women’s crisis accommodation centre. The website WomenAreHuman.com reported on this case back in 2019. Tyler had tweeted the following, quote: “Bitch please. I’ma walk around first thing in the morning topless, titties out and a bulge in my pants. In the woman’s shelter. With a piece of toast in my hand and my hair tied up.” End quote. In other posts he bragged about throwing oestrogen pills at women who objected to his presence.

Meanwhile in Australia, gender critical commentator Angela Jones shared with me her own experience of encountering a man in a support group meant for women recovering from sexual violence. You might recognise Angela’s name. She was publicly smeared as an associate of neo nazis by former Victorian Liberal Party leader, John Pesutto. But that’s a story for another day.

Angela Jones: I had the horrific experience of being at a support group for female survivors and, with about 30 women, and unbeknownst to myself and one of the women there, one of the people in the group at the back of the group where I couldn’t see was actually a biological male. I only saw a ponytail, I didn’t see that person and observe them and I assumed being a female only group that there wouldn’t be a man there. Anyway I was asked to go to that meeting because this one specific woman had experienced a recent sexual assault in the city in broad daylight and she was there and she wanted support and I was asked to attend and offer her support and I got there and we all talked, as happens in these groups, we all shared a little bit about ourselves and how we overcame some of these things. And this woman shared her story and it was absolutely horrific and she was incredibly traumatised. And then a couple of other women shared and then this- someone else shared because it all went round the room- and then a male voice spoke and I saw her spin around in her seat and look and there was the biological man behind her, with a pony tail, with a pair of fake breasts but otherwise had the appearance of a male, of a man. And I watched the look of horror in her face when she realised that a man had heard her share in intimate detail, the story of her rape. And I didn’t do anything in that moment because there was 20 something other women there and I did not do anything and I have regretted that ever since. And this was years ago now, this was before Covid, so 4, 5 years ago. And I remember just thinking ‘oh no’ and then after the meeting trying to go and find this woman and she’d gone. She’d just gone off by herself and gone and then I went to the women who ran the group and I said ‘what’s the- why was there a man there?’ and they said ‘oh you know well we’re inclusive and you know blah blah blah’. So I rang the organisation that runs the group who, you know, advertise the group as female only and they said ‘oh look, you know, we’re an inclusive organisation’ and I saw red, I saw red cos I can only imagine what it felt like to be that woman and to be red raw and emotional and tentative about making connections with anybody but needing to talk to people about what happened to her and for that man to have invaded that. And even now from what I know about autogynephiles, the fact he may only have been there because he gets off on hearing women’s trauma because it’s a form of validation for him, like just makes me feel sick. Makes me feel absolutely sick. 

Stassja Frei: For some women, support groups like this are the only form of help at their disposal. Whilst wealthy women can afford to pay private psychologists to help in their recovery, poor and working class women simply can’t. And yet it’s generally wealthy women in positions of power, like Moo Baulch, who’ve opened these services to men. Services that they themselves will never need. 

Angela is right to be concerned about the motives of autogynephilic men who want access to sexual assault support groups. In his book Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies, transsexual Dr Anne Lawrence identified rape fantasies as one of the themes in the narratives of autogynephilic men. He wrote, quote: “arousal to the fantasy of being mistreated or raped by a man seems to mediate some cases of autogynephilic transsexuals’ attraction to men: It is simply one more way to be a woman in relation to a man.” End quote. In short, fantasising about being raped makes the autogynephile feel like a woman. Bearing this in mind, I can think of a few disturbing reasons that an autogynephile would want to attend a sexual assault support group. For one, he might be accessing new material to incorporate into his rape fantasies. But also, he gets the sexually exciting experience of being one of the girls, so to speak.

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Women’s domestic violences services in Australia have quietly and without much resistance, been steadily colonised by the transgender industry. Overseas, there’s been far greater resistance. In Canada, for example, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter has steadfastly held to their position that the service is for women only. And for this crime against men who say they’re women, the service was sued for discrimination, lost $30,000 in annual funding from the city of Vancouver and had dead rats nailed to the front of their building along with messages telling them to die. Surprisingly, this didn’t persuade them to start catering to men.

Over in Scotland, in 2021 the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre made the shocking decision to hire a man who says he’s a woman as their CEO. In response, Harry Potter author and women’s rights advocate, JK Rowling funded an entirely new rape crisis service for the women of Edinburgh. 

And in England, a woman is suing a charity called the Survivors’ Network for indirect discrimination after she encountered a man in a women’s sexual violence support group. This story made waves all the way down here in Australia when Melbourne woman, Leena van Deventer tweeted that the woman suing should, quote “be spat on at every opportunity.” End quote. This probably would’ve gone unnoticed except that Leena van Deventer is a rather wealthy, privileged woman who sits on the board of the Victorian Women’s Trust. This not for profit describes itself as a “proudly independent feminist organisation.” I can’t think of many feminists who would call for a rape victim to be spat on. Can you?

Despite public outrage and my petition calling for her to be sacked, CEO Mary Crooks stood by van Deventer telling the Daily Mail that, quote “She has learnt a lesson and frankly I’m proud of the approach we have taken and proud of her response.” End quote. Had van Deventer suggested that a transwoman be spat on, I think we all know that she would’ve been sacked immediately.

For now, it’s hard to see a way forward for women’s crisis services that doesn’t include men. Even if such services wanted to exclude men, they would quickly find themselves ineligible for government funding. Plus, with the degraded state of the Sex Discrimination Act, there would be nothing protecting them from vexatious litigation by angry men who say they’re women. Just like in the 1970s, it may well, once again fall to actual feminists to create new, women only refuges from the ground up.

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Coming up in the next episode of Desexing Society, we’ll be exposing how transgender activists seek to control women’s language.

Karleen Gribble: So replacements for women would be things like ‘pregnant people’ potentially or ‘birthing people’, ‘vagina havers’, ‘cervix owners’. The one that I think I dislike the most is ‘menstruator.’

Alexis: An Indigenous woman was told off for using the term ‘mother’s milk’ and she explained that that was the term that her family and her community used and that’s why she used it and she was told off for that and asked to say something else. It doesn’t feel like liberation to not be able to describe my body or my experience.

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Stassja Frei: Thanks for listening to Desexing Society. Written and produced by me, Stassja Frei. Thank you to my script editor, Ms Edie Wyatt, my sound technician Matthew Friend, and to Jack Draper and Angela Jones for appearing in this episode. For more information, or to donate towards this project – which I paid for myself – please visit desexingsociety.com