Should a woman have to reveal a past history of trauma in order to have her boundaries respected in the here and now? Karen Danson, one of the nurses suing Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust after being forced to share a changing room with a male colleague, recently gave an interview in which she described how her experience had brought back memories of abuse she’d experienced as a child.
Like many women reading it, I felt a mixture of admiration for Danson’s bravery and anger that she had been put in this situation. The behaviour of “Rose Henderson”, the male colleague insisting on being given access to female-only spaces, was atrocious. A simple “no” from the women whose boundaries he was transgressing should have been enough to stop it. That any woman should have to spell out why it was so unpleasant, drawing links with previous experiences, should never have been necessary.
Yet spell it out Danson did. She described how Henderson allegedly watching her, smirking, and asking “are you not getting changed yet?” triggered memories of her father watching her when she was six, asking when she would get changed for bed. If Henderson was not initially aware that many of his female colleagues wanted spaces of their own, he has long since lost that excuse. He wants to be there despite knowing how these women feel, and the sense of violation it provokes.
How, one might think, could anyone read Danson’s interview and not be on her side? Quite easily, as it turns out. I expected it — but was no less dismayed — when, having seen multiple expressions of support for her, I began to see gender wars fence-sitters constructing their latest “yes, but …” response. It ran along the lines of “Henderson isn’t Danson’s father, and while it’s very sad that she’s making these connections, maybe that proves she’s the problem?” It’s something I’ve come to think of as the traumatised woman double bind.
Despite the progressive championing of “lived experience”, a history of sexual abuse is rarely seen to make a woman an authority on the boundaries that matter. On the contrary, her traumatised status is frequently used to justify her exclusion from political debate. When explaining why we respond to certain men as we do, it seems we are stuck with two equally impossible options.
Either our fears of male violence and sexual exploitation are imaginary — the fantasies of bored housewives on Mumsnet, desperate for radicalisation to spice up our pampered lives — or they are a response to things that have really happened to us, in which case, we lack objectivity. We are oversensitive, seeing the same patterns everywhere, lashing out at hapless males who remind us of our abusers for the silliest of reasons. Even if we are no longer deemed “fallen” or “ruined”, our abuse has apparently made us stupid.
As Judith Butler pompously puts it in an effort to explain why abuse victims who want female-only spaces are wrong, “the traumatic aftermath [of sexual violence] is real, but living in the repetitive temporality of trauma goes not always give us an adequate account of social reality”:
In fact, the reality of the trauma we suffer makes it difficult to distinguish between what we most fear and what is actually happening, what happened in the past and what is happening now. It takes some careful work for those distinctions to emerge in a stable form for clear judgement. The obliteration of those distinctions is part of trauma’s damage.
There is a degree to which this might be true, some of the time. Some victims of severe trauma might become scared of all males, all the time, which — regardless of its origins — would not provide a solid basis for navigating the world in the long term. However, there is a difference between “all men” and “men who are specifically demanding access to female-only spaces” (if anyone is obliterating distinctions here, it is Butler). If the latter remind women of men who have denied them privacy and boundaries in the past, it is because that is what these men are doing now. Yet Butler and others would like to suggest that the trauma-addled minds of female abuse victims are leading them to see things which are not there.
“One might,” Butler comments, “see someone who is reminiscent of the person who has done the violence, but is it not up to us to ask whether that new person should be bearing the burden of our memory, our trauma?” Many of those seeking to dismiss Danson’s interview tried to position “Rose” as one such “new person” being forced to “bear the burden” of Danson’s trauma. It is as if only a crazy, “damaged” woman would think a man standing in the female changing rooms in boxer shorts, waiting for you to get undressed, might be a bit of a problem. What’s especially cruel about this is that when women are vulnerable, it is possible to make them believe it is true.
I have had some experience of this (and of course, I fear that in mentioning it, it only reinforces the double bind). When I was nineteen, I voluntarily checked into a psychiatric ward for treatment for anorexia. When I arrived there, I found the ward was mixed-sex, with several highly disturbed men, and I freaked out. At the time, I told staff I was unhappy and frightened because this reminded me both of growing up with someone with paranoid schizophrenia and of past experiences of forced treatment in a mixed-sex adolescent psychiatric unit. The staff persuaded me — and I persuaded myself — that my fear was actually part of my own illness (or at least, this was the charitable interpretation; the other was that I was just being a bitch, repulsed by these poor men simply because they were “different”).
Women are put in situations where the only way to prove we are “rational” and “undamaged” is to give in to male demands
It has taken me three decades to reach the conclusion that I wasn’t being unreasonable (and that I hadn’t personally invented the entire concept of “single-sex psychiatric wards” due to being mad). What I was being was inconvenient; unlike, perhaps, someone without the same past experience, I was aware that physical differences mattered. Nevertheless, for years I felt guilty about “causing such a fuss” then later discharging myself from the hospital, having been fortunate enough to get a bed in the first place. I talked myself down, pretended not to know what I knew, conflated thoughts that were a symptom of illness with things that people didn’t want me to think — as so many women do, with or without any formal psychiatric diagnosis.
Ultimately, the double bind is both victim-blaming and coercive. Women are put in situations where the only way to prove we are “rational” and “undamaged” is to give in to male demands. Sometimes when I see women denigrating other women for wanting boundaries, even after disclosing their own trauma, I feel they’re attempting to position themselves as “less ruined” than the crazy women “causing trouble”. People are kinder to you if you’re the cool girl saying “yes” than the mad girl saying “no”. Show that whatever was done to you left no marks by letting others do it again.
With regard to the Darlington case and others involving the preservation of single-sex spaces, there has long been a temptation to argue that not all male people who want access to women’s spaces are a problem — we just can’t tell which ones are. I don’t think this is true. There is no harmless version of overriding a woman’s “no” when you have already heard it, loud and clear.
Karen Danson may have been quicker to see this because of her past, more capable of recognising the underlying dynamics. So-called “damaged” women can be the experts on the damage men do. They shouldn’t have to tell their stories but, when they do, we should listen.
