Podcast #246: How Gender Activists Took Over a Scottish Rape-Crisis Centre
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay talks to writer Joan Smith about the scandals that unfolded at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre under the leadership of its male trans-identified CEO, Mridul Wadhwa.
Jonathan Kay: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Kay.
Today’s guest is Joan Smith, whom our Quillette readers will know from her detailed and scathing articles about the state of gender politics in Scotland, including her most recent offering, which appeared on 4 August under the title, Gaslighting Scottish Rape Victims in the Name of Trans Inclusion.
Joan Smith
In that article, Joan brought readers up to speed on the bizarre situation at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, which has been overseen in recent years by a trans-identified biologically male CEO named Mridul Wadhwa.
As Joan will discuss, Wadhwa was recently suspended from his job—or possibly fired, it’s not clear which—following a number of scandals. These included the bullying of a rape-crisis counsellor named Roz Adams, who’d asked questions about why clients at the rape-crisis centre weren’t being given honest information about the fact that the centre was being run by a man.
BBC News
Thanks to the centre’s fixation on transgender inclusion, moreover, a subsequently convicted male sex offender named Cameron Downing was allowed to access the centre’s services, on the claim that he wasn’t really a man, but actually “non-binary.”
As we will discuss, these scandals at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre reflect a larger pattern in Scotland.
Daniel Sanderson,
Under former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who resigned in 2023, Scotland enacted a number of highly controversial policies in the name of trans inclusion, including putting violent male rapists in female prisons.
Once again, Joan Smith’s article appeared in Quillette on 4 August under the title, Gaslighting Scottish Rape Victims in the Name of Trans Inclusion. She spoke to me earlier this week from London, England.
Jonathan Kay: Joan Smith, thanks for being on the Quillette podcast. My first question is very basic: How do you pronounce the name Mridul Wadhwa?
Joan Smith: Well, that’s more or less it.
Jonathan Kay: Ah, okay… I’d assumed I was hideously butchering it, as I often do with names from all around the world.
So, how did this person become the head of, at the time… am I correct?… that it was Edinburgh’s only rape crisis centre?
Joan Smith: I think it was the only one. It was certainly the best known by far since it was set up by women for women. And the job of running the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, the CEO job, had been advertised as open to women only.
And he applied, and he always wears women’s clothes, and he presents himself as a woman. And he did actually, in a podcast, say that [when] he applied for the job, he didn’t reveal his biological sex, and was offered the job, and it was only at that point that the people who interviewed him discovered that he was actually a biological male.
And at that point, they were legally entitled to withdraw the job offer because, you know, they’d been clear that it was only open to women. And there is an exemption under [Britain’s] Equality Act 2010, which allows certain jobs to be [reserved] for a person of a particular biological sex. But he was quite well known in those circles by then, because I think, I think he’d been around in Scotland, in Edinburgh, and, you know, the area since about 2005, working in the violence-against-women-and-girls-[counselling] sector, and presenting as a woman.
And I think they were impressed, and they decided to go ahead and give him the job.
Jonathan Kay: This may sound like an extremely naive question, but I’m going to ask it. Is there any precedent for a man taking on a job like this—because I can see a situation in which a man with experience in this field presents himself in good faith, and with full transparency after serving for years or decades in the [field], and getting the job with the support of staff and board members. To your knowledge, has that happened in Scotland?
Joan Smith: I don’t know if that’s happened, but it’s worth saying that there are very few men working in this field. You know, the rape-crisis-[counselling] movement in this country, rather like domestic-violence refuges, was really set up outside the state by women, because there wasn’t provision for women who suffer from domestic and sexual violence.
So it’s very much a kind of offshoot of 1970s feminism, that women got together, found the money to acquire rent or buy accommodation. And of course the service is generally on a single-sex [basis], because if you ask a woman who’s been raped and maybe viciously beaten or assaulted over a period of years, on the whole she finds it quite difficult to talk about that experience, and most women find it easier to talk to other women. So, I wouldn’t expect many men working in this field at all.
Jonathan Kay: Typically at a rape-crisis counselling centre, someone would come in and, as I understand it, the intake procedure and also the counselling procedure, they might find themselves alone in a room with a counsellor in a vulnerable context. Is that the case?
Joan Smith: Yes, I mean there’s basically two different kinds of counselling. So sometimes women find it easier to talk in a room with other women who’ve gone through similar experiences… they don’t feel personally quite as exposed. But even in that context, I think rape victims would usually expect the other victims to be female, and the discussion to be led by a female counsellor.
The other model is a one-to-one situation, where the woman actually sits in a room on her own with the counsellor who is female. So she feels in a position where she feels she can trust [the other] woman.
Jonathan Kay: So we had a situation here in Canada, in Vancouver, and this is a situation that goes back to the 1990s—well before the current mania for intersectional feminism and gender identity. You had a biological man [Kimberly Nixon] who pretty much dedicated his life to seeking access to… I think it was a volunteer job… at a rape crisis centre. I think he was rejected. And then after being rejected, [he] went on this vengeance streak against the rape-crisis centre. It became clear from the sheer viciousness of the campaign against the centre that this was a guy who saw his entrée into the ranks of rape-crisis counsellors as an essential hallmark of his desire to be treated as a woman.
Hilla Kerner
And there was something pathological about it. I don’t get the sense Mridul has that kind of personality—[he] doesn’t seem sociopathic or anything like that. Is it possible that Mridul is in good faith seeking to help women?
Joan Smith: You know, the purpose of a rape crisis centre is not to make people who have a tenuous grasp of their gender, what they would call their gender identity—it’s not to make them feel better. It’s to help women who suffer from male violence. I don’t know what Mridul’s motivation was. Certainly I can see that one of the things he got was a lot of validation. He was treated as a woman, his self-presentation was accepted, and he was allowed a position of great influence and some power… And that’s not, from my point of view, what a rape crisis centre exists for.
Jonathan Kay: During the editing process on your article—and, spoiler alert, I was your editor—we had a side discussion about intersectionality.
My understanding is that your views on intersectionality and intersectional feminism are somewhat nuanced, and we didn’t want to turn your piece into a culture-war polemic about that. However, I will glancingly say that, as most listeners will know, intersectional feminism does assign pride of place in the marketplace of ideas to people who have multiple markers of… the common word used here is “oppression.”
So in the case of Mridul, somebody who is trans-identified, somebody who is an immigrant, born and raised in India… It seems that in Scotland, as in other English-speaking countries, stacking up those badges of intersectional identity is a ticket to hyperspace yourself into at least the mid-echelons of left-of-centre politics. Has that been the case with Mridul?
Joan Smith: Yes. He certainly did want to have a political career, and he tried to be selected to stand for the Scottish National Party, the SNP, as a candidate for the Holyrood Parliament.
Jonathan Kay: You mentioned the SNP, which I think most of the world knows as a sort of nationalist movement. And it’s odd because nationalist movements… we tend to associate [them] sometimes with right-wing reactionary [impulses]—like in Hungary or Russia, which are anti LGBT. Could you give us a thumbnail description of how the SNP, again, a nationalist party, went all in on this gender movement? How did this happen?
Joan Smith: The SNP is slightly unusual in terms of nationalist parties because it’s always tended to be left of centre. And after 2015, it became the largest party in the Scottish Parliament, and so the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, was an SNP minister. I think they were very open to all kinds of wacky ideas.
From 2015, they were in a position of power, but they didn’t quite have a majority, and they formed a coalition with a bunch of Green politicians in Scotland who really are very wacky indeed. The Green-SNP coalition really embraced the whole transgender movement. And you have to understand that both there and in England and Wales, there’s been a concerted push by activists to take over certain parts of the state and also the charity sector.
So we know, for example, that a trans group more or less wrote prison policy in Scotland, and they explicitly tried to change prison policy so that men who went to prison for serious offences, including rape, who identified as women, would be moved into the women’s [section] and they would be put in women’s prisons.
And their rationale for that was that that was probably one of the hardest tricks to win. And if you could do that, you could do the same elsewhere. And I think the rape crisis movement was another target. You know, these are organisations that deal with very vulnerable women, women who are in prison, women who are separated from their children, women who’ve been raped.
If you can embed gender identity into organisations like that, the rest will probably fall into line. And that’s what the SNP-Green coalition allowed.
Jonathan Kay: Even before the current scandal [at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre], there was a completely separate scandal involving [Mridul] and their tenure at the centre. I believe it was on a podcast… [Mridul’s] language was somewhat veiled, but as I understand it, Mridul said that when women come to the rape crisis centre, they may have all these preconceptions about the male body and being with male bodies and their traumatic experiences… we might have to reframe that trauma in an ideologically correct way…
And once you waded through all the jargon, which is something of a chore, I must say, you realise that what this person is saying is: We have to alter this traumatised person’s view so that they take a more positive view of trans women who have penises and look exactly physically and biologically like the person who raped these people. Is that correct?
Joan Smith: What he actually said—it was something along the lines of: We know that bigoted people get raped as well. And women are not going to a rape crisis centre saying, “You know, I was attacked. It was terrible. And I have bad feelings about male-bodied people as a result.” That’s not a priority.
What they’re trying to do is actually get their lives back on course after suffering horrendous male violence. And so what he was doing was turning a personal ordeal into an ideological battlefield. So he was saying that our job is not just to counsel these women and help them come to terms with what’s happened, it’s also to change their ideas about transgender people, about men, and so on.
And that is an absolutely extraordinary change from the reason that rape crisis centres were set up in the first place. I mean, you have to remember that women who come to a rape crisis centre, they may have been raped several times, they may have been raped by several men, they may have suffered horrendous violence, they may have been raped by a partner or an ex partner.
They are dealing with some of the most traumatic experiences that a woman can go through. And to say that you’ve actually got to think about this in a different way, which is to stop being so afraid of men… The reason women are afraid of men is a very good one, because most violence against women is committed by men.
Jonathan Kay: What’s shocking to me is how this person kept their job. Like, I’m trying to imagine you ran an anti-racism centre. Somehow, you’re a white person and you became the head of an anti-racism centre. And you gave an interview and said, “A lot of people who come to our centre who are victimised by neo-Nazis, they have all these preconceptions about the Nazi regime. And part of my job is to educate them about German history and stuff like that.” That person would be fired immediately.
Joan Smith: They could have said [to Mridul], “We’re disturbed by your approach to your job, we’re not very happy about this…” But you have to understand just how… I mean, we use the word “captured,” how captured the rape-crisis sector is by trans ideology. It really has penetrated all levels of civic society in Scotland, and so you’d actually not find, I think, many people, many women at a senior level in the rape-crisis movement in Scotland who actually found anything wrong with what he was saying.
Jonathan Kay: That’s insane.
Joan Smith: Yes.
Jonathan Kay: Okay. So we’re on the same page. And I think the interesting subplot here is the name of the podcast [that Mridul appeared on] was actually called The Guilty Feminist. Is that correct? That’s too perfect. Why would anyone listen to that podcast?
A rape-crisis centre is there to provide services for rape victims. It’s not there to validate the identity of somebody who decides they’re non-binary or whatever.
But let’s get into the current scandal, [which caused Mridul] to be suspended—possibly fired. This story, to some extent, has a hero. This is someone who came to the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, was hired as, I understand, a rank and file counsellor, and how did they prevail [legally]?
Joan Smith: She’s called Roz Adams, and she came to work for the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre around the time that Mridul Wadhwa was appointed. It was very clear that [Adams] wasn’t in any way anti-trans. She’d worked in Glasgow previously, had worked quite happily with trans-identified people. But when she began to work at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, what happened was a [female] member of staff decided to identify as non-binary. And this member of staff changed her first name to a name that sounded male.
This raised questions with service users because they were being told that “your counsellor is this person.” And looking at the name, they thought the person was male. So they started asking, “Can you assure me that my counsellor will be female?” So, Roz Adams was asking her seniors, including Mridul Wadhwa, “What do I tell this woman?”
And in the end, [Adams] was told, “You have to say that there are no men working at the centre.” Now that wasn’t true, because the CEO was a man.
There was an [internal] disciplinary process against Adams, accusing her of transphobia, which went on for ages and ages and ages, and eventually she resigned and went to an employment tribunal, where she won very comprehensively.
Ncole Jones
The decision of the tribunal was that she had been given no choice but to leave her job because of the discrimination that she’d suffered—discrimination [against] her gender-critical views.
And then later on in the saga, a woman in her sixties approached the centre and said she had been raped 40 years ago. And she wanted to join a group to talk about her experience for the first time. And she raised the question: Could she be sure that she’d be in a room full of women? And what she was told was that the centre wasn’t the place for her. And so Adams was getting more and more worried by the way in which the service [operated], because the centre is there to provide services for rape victims.
It’s not there to validate somebody who decides they’re non-binary or whatever. And Adams was getting more and more worried about this. Oh, and she discovered that people who had queried whether there were men working at the centre, people who’d sent emails asking why Mridul, who is a man, was in charge of the centre—their emails were being filed in a folder called “hate mail.” So there was a very clear bias against anybody who was asking questions, whether they were working at the centre or whether they were people who wanted to use services—they were being smeared as [motivated by] hatred. And women were actually being misled about who was working at the centre.
The internal disciplinary process decided that Adams had been transphobic, but they decided they would take no action because it had dragged on for so long. I mean, even they were embarrassed by how many months this had taken. But Adams decided at this point that she couldn’t go on working there, so she resigned. And she then went to an employment tribunal. And we know all of this because the employment tribunal [forced] the centre to produce a huge quantity of documentation.
And what’s astonishing about it is that we learn the amount of time they all spent emailing each other about protecting the non-binary identity of staff members and things like that.
And there’s an additional bit to it, which is that J.K. Rowling, the author, comes into the story. So J.K. Rowling decided that, given the appalling things that were happening at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, she decided to set up and provide most of the funding for an alternative rape crisis centre in Edinburgh, which she called Beira’s Place, and that this would actually be women treating women.
Severin Carrell
The internal [Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre] documents that were released to the employment tribunal show that this caused incredible consternation and rage [among Mridul’s staff]. And the non-binary member of staff suggested that they all get together so that they could “rage” about the founding of this alternative rape crisis centre.
Now, you and I might think that given that Mridul and the people who supported her didn’t want to actually counsel the bigoted rape victims who had the wrong ideas… you might think that they were very happy there was a place to send them. But not at all. They were furious. And, in fact, Mridul was so angry that she decided not to refer people on to this other centre.
Jonathan Kay: Was Mridul surrounded by fellow [like-minded people]?
Joan Smith: The tribunal was clear in its judgment, that most of the staff at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre agreed with Mridul, and that they were absolutely adamant that biological sex is not important, and that what matters is gender identity. They were very hostile to anybody who thought biological sex was important, which is of course the position that Roz Adams took.
Jonathan Kay: There is also a completely separate scandal, I guess this is the third scandal if we’re counting. And this one, it’s not clear to me how this figured into the decision to finally suspend Mridul. There was a fellow by the name of Cameron Downing—I can’t even guess what pronouns he’s using now—a non-binary former drama student who somehow ingratiated himself into the apparatus of the Scottish National Party.
Joan Smith: He was an “equalities officer.”
Jonathan Kay: All the while, he was sexually abusing people of both sexes, apparently, and he gushed about the great treatment he got at Mridul’s centre. Can you tell us this person’s story?
Joan Smith: So, as you say, he’s a former drama student, something like 24 or 25, and he ingratiated himself with the Scottish National Party.
He was photographed with people like Sturgeon. He’s a man, but he used “they/them” pronouns, which is manna from heaven as far as the SNP is concerned. And he presented himself at the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre as a victim of sexual violence and was accepted as a client.
And he had several months of counselling, to help him deal with trauma. He started abusing both men and women. He blackmailed a young man into having sex with him by threatening to tell his friends and employers that this man had raped him unless he agreed to sex.
Jenness Mitchell
He appeared in court [in June]. He was convicted of a number of charges, including physical and sexual assault. He was given six years in prison with a further three years on licence. And some of the gender critical people in the Scottish National Party, like the former MP Joanna Cherry, are very angry about this because they say that for ages they were trying to warn the SNP that this young man was a predator and that their warnings weren’t heeded.
David Walker
The SNP say that as soon as they realised that there were these accusations against him that they dropped him as an equalities officer and so on. But the fact remains, the central fact in this is that a rape crisis centre set up to counsel female victims of sexual violence became so trans-inclusive that it accepted a young man who turned out to be a sexual predator as one of its service users. It’s a story you couldn’t make up.
A rape crisis centre set up to counsel female victims of sexual violence became so trans-inclusive that it accepted a young man who turned out to be a sexual predator as one of its service users. It’s the kind of story you couldn’t make up.
Jonathan Kay: This person, Downing, he tweeted that he wanted to, “beat the fuck out of some TERFs and transphobes.” And, as most listeners will know, TERF is a term of abuse used by activists to attack anybody who believes in the reality of biological sex.
And then in another tweet, he wrote, “I fucking hate turfs and transphobes with such a passion.”
One minor character here is Joanna Cherry. It sounds like she was a “conscientious objector” within the SNP.
Joan Smith: Before she became a Westminster MP, [Cherry] spent her career prosecuting rape cases and domestic violence cases, so she knows this subject inside out and she was absolutely horrified by the direction that the SNP were going in.
There have been a number of cases of SNP members threatening [Cherry] with rape and murder. I think a couple of people have actually been prosecuted and gone to prison. She was the subject of a huge campaign by pro-transgender SNP members who complained about her all the time. I think the only reason the party didn’t actually do anything about her was the fact that she had an equal number of complaints about the way that she’d been treated and the violence that she’d been threatened with.
I know Joanna quite well. She’s a friend of mine. Her view is that she’s always been on the left, she’s always been a nationalist and she doesn’t recognise this iteration of the SNP, particularly under Sturgeon. She’s much more aligned with the former leader, Alex Salmond.
And her view, I think, is that the SNP took a terrible wrong turn in terms of aligning itself with all this gender-identity nonsense. And I think she felt, why should she be forced out of a party she’s supported all her life? But it certainly wasn’t comfortable for her. And she is very angry about the fact that Cameron Downing wasn’t actually thrown out of the party much earlier.
Jonathan Kay: Nicola Sturgeon’s been out of power. And her ouster, if that’s the right word, was reported, maybe in the back pages of North American newspapers. It wasn’t clear to me how central the issue of her gender extremism was.
This was around the time when I think there was this infamous case of a man who presented as a woman named…
Joan Smith: Isla Bryson.
BBC News
Jonathan Kay: Yeah, so a notorious, horrible, violent rapist… and Nicola Sturgeon could not give a straight answer to the media about it. It was a circus that went on for weeks, where she was asked point blank by interviewers who were admirably forthright: Should this person belong in a woman’s prison, yes or no.
How central was this issue to Nicholas Sturgeon stepping down as leader? At least in the New York Times, some of the articles barely mentioned [the gender issue].
Joan Smith: Oh no, it was absolutely central. In December, 2022, she steered this ridiculous bill through the Scottish parliament, which would have allowed “self-ID,” so that any man could simply pop up and say, “I know I’m a woman,” and get what’s called a gender recognition certificate, saying that his gender was female. And that would allow him to get a new birth certificate saying he’d been born female.
And he didn’t have to have any gender reassignment surgery, nothing like that. At the moment, you can’t get that certificate until you’ve lived in your new identity for two years, and you’ve had two diagnoses of gender dysphoria. What the Scottish National Party and the Greens were trying to do was sweep away all of those safeguards, and say that anybody above the age of 16 could simply declare himself a woman, and would have to be legally treated as a woman.
And they were warned repeatedly, there were attempts to change the bill. There were attempts to put in safeguards to say that a man who’d been accused of rape could not change his gender. The SNP and the Greens were so set upon this that they actually voted down even those safeguards; and with, I’m afraid, support from some of the Scottish Labour Party.
[And then shortly after], this test case came up. So this man who’s called Adam [Graham] something, he was accused of raping two women. And when he was in prison, he announced that he was a woman and he was changing his name to Isla Bryson.
So he appeared in court, and the courts in this country have been largely captured. He was referred to as “she.” We’ve had any number of court cases in this country where the prosecutor will say, “And did she then put her penis in you?” So this man was treated in court as if he were a woman. And when he was convicted of the rapes, he was remanded to a women’s prison in Stirling, Scotland.
And there was an absolute outcry. And he was only there for one night before he was moved back into the male estate, put in a male prison where he should have been. But it actually showed the folly of Nicola Sturgeon supporting self-ID because here you have a man accused of raping two women and he’s still allowed to be treated in court as though his self-ID matters more.
The fact that he presents himself as a woman matters more than the dignity of his victims. And in English and Scottish law, by the way, a woman can’t commit rape. She can be an accessory to rape, but you actually have to have a penis to commit rape. So here is a man who’s convicted of a crime that only a man, a biological man, can commit; and the court is treating him as though he’s a woman and he’s sent to a woman’s prison.
So that really exploded in Nicola Surgeon’s face and she faced, as you say, all these questions from people saying, “Well, is Isla Bryson actually a woman?” And she and other SNP and Green politicians got themselves into a terrible mess. And some of them then said, “oh no, you know, he was just pretending…”
And then we all said, “Yes, but we said that men would do this.” How do we know the difference between a man who’s genuinely, if there is such a thing, transgender, and a male convict who wants to go into a women’s prison because the conditions are easier? And so it played a huge amount into the fact that Nicola Sturgeon had to resign.
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Jonathan Kay: In April, you had the Cass Review, which is this five-star blue chip meta study, effectively analysing all the best science from not just Britain, but all around the world, regarding paediatric gender transition, and sounded a very powerful note of caution against the transitioning of minors. It seems to have had a huge effect on British politics and policymaking.
Did that play a role in Mridul finally being suspended from CEO of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre? Are things turning around?
Joan Smith: I think [Mridul’s] suspension was much more to do with the outcome of the employment tribunal because Roz Adams, the employee who complained, she will be awarded her costs and also damages. So it’s going to be very expensive for the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre.
And it isn’t just Roz Adams. There have been, I should think, getting on for a dozen court cases now, where employers have been found to have discriminated against employees who hold a very simple common sense view that biological sex is immutable.
So what’s happening is that employers are beginning to realise that there is a cost to allowing this ideology to run riot through their organisations. There’s a cost in terms of reputation and a cost in terms of actually having to pay compensation to individuals. So I think things are turning round.
Jonathan Kay: Joan Smith, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
