(Photo credit - me)

Jane’s story reveals how a large umbrella body within the men’s violence against women sector interfered directly with a small member organisation to enforce the policies of gender identity ideology. The threat of funding loss was one of the major themes that came out in my doctoral research, and it is an incredibly effective tool to silence women’s sector charities.

However, most of the women I spoke to for my thesis talked about local authority commissioners and grant funders threatening loss of contracts if they didn’t allow trans identified men into women’s spaces. But in Janes case the organisation was Scottish Women’s Aid

As a charity Chief Exec myself, I can assure you women like Jane are gold dust and you really want them on your board of trustees. Jane explained to me why she applied:

It all just seemed right, if I wanted to do something for my community that is what I would like to do. So, I went through the usual interviews and became a member of the board and then after a year I became a secretary to the board. Then I was approached by the chair, and she was wanting to step back, and the vice chair didn’t have the time to do the job, so I said I would, and I was elected as chair. At the same time, I was asked to join the local Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) partnership [board].

Jane didn’t have to wait long before she got targeted, the tactics are reminiscent of the witch finding days. Once they’d found Jane her organisation was being circled by both politicians and Scottish Women’s Aid – pitch forks in hand ready to drown the witch:

My vice chair contacted me and said Scottish Women’s Aid (SWA) had contacted them as there had been comments directed at them [SWA] on twitter – saying ‘There is a TERF as chair [in a member organisation]. This means we don’t feel safe, women won’t feel safe, and nobody will use this organisation.’ So Scottish Women’s Aid had contacted my vice chair asking what was going on. At the same time some Scottish National Party members had done the same. It was a “mock polite” inquiry – e.g., we are very concerned that transwomen will not be welcome and that women as a whole will be put off because of this one person who is a bigot - which was apparently me.

Naturally Jane asked for evidence of her ‘crimes’:

There was a dossier of evidence against me. The dossier was bizarre, I had said good luck to Maya Forstater on twitter – so that was one of my tweets. Another one was Mandy Rhodes had done a piece in the Holyrood magazine with Johann Lamont the Labour MSP, they were both outspoken on the issue. It was a very good interview about being a woman involved in politics. I had retweeted it so that went in the dossier. There were claims that there were some young people who were on the violence against women partnership board who were too frightened to be in a room with me, which was slightly bizarre as we had only ever met online, but nonetheless it was suggested that people felt unsafe.

There was also the suggestion that things had been cancelled, which I knew about, I had been invited to an event on International Women’s Day and I had been cancelled...It was all in the dossier, which was quite alarming to see altogether. It was these bizarre tweets and then the more serious stuff like ‘they [the event planners] refused to let her speak’. Funnily enough they [event planners] had replaced me with someone else who I know is gender critical and probably more out than I am, but there we go.

At this point it is important to remember that a lot of women’s aid member organisations are really very small, they are made up of volunteers and a few paid members of staff. Jane explained how baffling this situation was for the rest of her board of trustees:

They were massively caught off guard. Most of them didn’t even know what this thing was that I was being accused of. I remember one saying to me, ‘that [Jane’s Gender Critical beliefs] all sounds eminently sensible if you are a feminist’. It was embarrassing, you know I was supposed to be this professional woman, and they had asked me to help them so I could write funding bids, that is what I spent a lot of my time doing, writing funding bids for them. At the time they were putting through the big funding bid for Scottish Government funding.

Scottish Women’s Aid have long supported the adoption of men into women’s spaces, and their private “advice” to member organisations remained consistent with their public support of gender identity ideology:

The vice chair said she would go back to Scottish Women’s Aid and ask their advice on what we should do. She came back a couple of days later saying that they had advised we might not get Scottish Government funding if you are associated with this woman…which was me…Of course Scottish Government funding, apart from a few little piddly pots of money, is what the whole organisation runs on.

Obviously, Jane was left with little choice but to step down as chair of her local women’s aid charity:

The Vice Chair asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I think I have to step back – I cannot be chair of the committee - that means when the money doesn’t come in it is because of me - and we had been told that is a real possibility.

Jane remained on the local violence against women partnership board, but she was always curious who her accusers were and what they might do next:

I still am a member of the partnership board, although I still spend a lot of time looking around the room wondering who is apparently terrified of me. I spent a lot of time talking to women in Edinburgh who were really supportive of me, because I was in total shock. You know I thought oh god there is this bloody dossier floating around and if they knew that it had worked one time then what would they do next?

Subsequently Jane did a bit of her own detective work and looked for the tweets aimed at Scottish Women’s Aid. These tweets were the reason why Scottish Women’s Aid challenged her position as chair in the first place:

The funny thing was that I went and looked at the tweets that were aimed at Scottish Women’s Aid about me, it was someone with very few followers and the tweets had not been picked up, there was no huge pile on. It was just one tweet with two likes.

It’s astounding that after one tweet an umbrella body would make such an effort to contact a small member organisation. You would hope they would either completely ignore the tweets, or better still offer solidarity to a female volunteer like Jane who is helping the women’s movement, supporting victim/survivors and being unfairly targeted simply for thinking that sex is real. Instead Scottish Women’s Aid insinuated to the other women in the organisation that a continued association with the witch could bring them all down:

I think it was definitely an excuse. You get minor tweets all the time, but this was bizarre that they had immediately contacted my board. This was before the dossier; it was one tweet with two or three likes. It was ridiculous. So, they had issues right from the start and maybe looking for an excuse.

My organisation was told right from the top they wouldn’t get funding, and you don’t mess with that.

*Not her real name

Dr Shonagh Dillon

Thank you for reading Jane’s story. You can follow/subscribe to my Substack or follow me on X to get notifications of each interview.

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