Roz Adams is not a public figure. She is not on social media. Yet this hardworking rape crisis support worker has found herself at the centre of the Scottish gender wars over the last few months, due to her employment tribunal against the beleaguered Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). It all makes for a rather harrowing tale.
Adams was constructively dismissed from her former position at ERCC in 2023, after a lengthy period of discrimination and harassment from colleagues. She takes the view that when a woman approaches a rape crisis service requesting a female counsellor, she should be assured that this is what she will receive. This was not a controversial stance to take in rape crisis services until relatively recently – until under Mridul Wadhwa, ERCC became a place where such views became verboten.
Wadhwa, who identifies as a trans woman, was controversially hired as ERCC’s CEO in 2021 and has repeatedly come under fire from feminists for pushing gender identity beliefs into the Scottish rape crisis sector. On the Guilty Feminist podcast in 2021, for example, Wadhwa said that ‘sexual violence happens to bigoted people too’, adding that where such bigots brought their views to ERCC they should be helped to ‘reframe their trauma’. To translate: a female survivor of male violence who requests no male, no matter how they identify, is involved in her care, must be ‘challenged’ for centring her needs. Given the views of the director, it was arguably predictable that this would lead to someone like Adams being treated to a ‘heresy hunt’ and a ‘completely spurious and mishandled disciplinary process’ for expressing the alternative view. That is precisely what happened to her, according to the tribunal’s conclusions in May.
This week Adams was also awarded £70,000 due to her unfair dismissal and the emotional suffering she has experienced. The ruling from Judge Ian McFatridge demanded a public apology to Adams from ERCC, and that the service cease its refusal to direct survivors seeking single-sex rape crisis services to Beira’s Place. This is the organisation set up and financed by author JK Rowling in 2022, in direct response to the lack of female only rape crisis provision in Edinburgh. It was ‘extraordinary,’ McFatridge said, that ERCC did not already refer women to its services. There is much that is extraordinary in the Scottish gender wars.
Over the last ten years, a perfect storm has been brewing, where zealotry has met policy has met power has met culture. Much of the discourse has centred around the lengthy and often intensely frustrating passing of Nicola Sturgeon’s gender bill in 2022. Others sneerily dismiss all this chatter about sex and gender as ‘a culture war’. But at root is a rather ordinary question that used to beget a simple answer: what is a woman? Depending on how you answer determines whether you will become one of the heretics such as Adams, push the views of Wadhwa, or become one of the countless people sitting on the sidelines wondering what on earth is happening.
ERCC has now issued their public apology to Adams. In it they say:
We recognise that during the employment tribunal with Roz Adams we did not act in the right way. We want to publicly apologise, and we understand that Roz’s actions were not motivated by transphobia, but by a genuine wish to act in the best interests of service users.
Yet this only came after a private apology in September, which Judge McFatridge ruled ‘defective’. Without a public apology, Adams reportedly worried that she would continue to be viewed as ‘transphobic’ in the sector she continues to work in – and her concern is valid. It is an accusation that sticks. The ERCC apology states clearly that they now accept Adams was not motivated by ‘transphobia’ but by a desire to support women. This is progress, as for having much the same desire, Scottish women have been subjected to by MSPs dismissing their concerns. Echoing Wadhwa, such women were called ‘bigoted’ by many. Former first minister Nicola Sturgeon herself said women with concerns about the push to prioritise gender identity over biological sex had views that were ‘not valid’.
There are words other than ‘extraordinary’ for what the last few years in Scotland have felt like – and many of them are unprintable. Women have been monstrously attacked, across many sectors, as I recount in my recent book, Hounded. Like Adams, a huge number of the women in my book wish merely to get clarity about the law as it stands, and to insist that women (of the traditional definition) have their needs, rights and concerns listened to by those in power. Such women, contrary to popular opinion, are often conflict-averse. Gender identity beliefs (that ‘trans women ARE women’ for example) are ridden with conflict if taken to the literal extremes that they have been allowed to over the last decade. They must be challenged, women reason, to stop that harm, to halt the conflict.
Amongst other harms, gender identity beliefs have seen male rapists housed in women’s prisons and male athletes trouncing women in women’s sports. They have seen a caring rape crisis counsellor subjected to a high-profile employment tribunal – with all the associated costs, stress, and emotional suffering such accusations of ‘transphobia’ bring with them. Like Roz Adams, I know that a public acknowledgment of the harm done to her for opposing gender identity beliefs only goes part of the way to righting things.
Some women, similarly to Adams, eventually receive some sort of justice via employment tribunals and court cases. Others, such as dancer Rosie Kay, children’s poet Rachel Rooney, or, indeed, myself, had no such way to argue for justice, given our freelancer status. Either way, though, no woman who has been put through a hounding in the gender wars can ever be un-hounded. Hopefully Roz Adams will be permitted to move on and to heal from the excesses of the now-former ERCC chief executive. Wadhwa finally stood down in September. Adams now works at Beira’s Place.
In Adams’s statement responding to the ruling from Judge McFatridge, she says what she desires, first and foremost, is ‘to take a rest’. Secondly, though, Adams reiterates what she always wanted: women-centred rape crisis services for any victim-survivor of male violence who requires them. It is indeed ‘extraordinary’ that such a stance led to what Adams, and so many other women, have experienced in Scotland the last few years.
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