Rape Crisis Scotland still can’t define ‘woman’

Pity Sandy Brindley, chief executive of Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS). Since October last year, she has been wrestling with the problem of defining “woman” within the context of providing support for survivors of sexual violence. That is despite a tribunal judge ordered Scotland’s national rape crisis service to enforce a clear definition of “woman” across all its centres.

This might not seem very difficult. I’m certain, for instance, that the stranger who assaulted me wasn’t a woman, despite never having had the chance to ask him his gender identity. Then again, I’m probably not as much of an “intersectional feminist” as Brindley — that’s “intersectional” not in the helpful sense of recognising that women experience intersecting oppressions, but in the off-the-wall one of deciding that “being a woman” can intersect with “not being one”.