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Kafkaesque nightmare of trans dogma that almost defies belief: How a transwoman put in charge of a rape crisis centre started humiliating 'heresy hunt' against a volunteer who stood up for the rights of victims to know the true sex of case workers
It was a post which was expressly advertised as being for women only but, three years ago this month, a biological male was installed in it. It required a compassionate figure to lead a charity providing a 'safe space' to help rape victims get through the worst experience of their lives.
The successful candidate was bullish and strident. Mridul Wadhwa labelled rape victims bigots and transphobes if they doubted whether a man identifying as a woman should run a centre helping women recover from male violence.
As for any members of staff who harboured such notions, Ms Wadhwa is on record as saying: 'Fire them.'
All this was known within months of the 46-year-old taking up the post of CEO of Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC). What was not fully understood until much more recently was the wrathful extremes to which she would go to rid her workplace of those who did not share her views on gender politics.
A damning employment tribunal judgment this week made that crystal clear. Here was a biological male working in a women-only space who, according to the tribunal, was on a mission to 'cleanse the organisation of those who did not follow her beliefs'.
Mridul Wadhwa (pictured) labelled rape victims bigots and transphobes if they doubted whether a man identifying as a woman should run a centre helping women recover from male violence
When Roz Adams (pictured) took the ERCC to an employment court, there was no testimony at all from the individual at the head of the organisation as Ms Wadhwa refused to give evidence
This supposedly safe space was not even a safe one for employees. Its boss, the tribunal found, was instrumental in launching a 'heresy hunt' and creating 'an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment' for a staff member who dared to think differently. It was, said judge Ian McFatridge, like something from the pages of a Franz Kafka novel.
The inescapable conclusion, it seems, is that Ms Wadhwa's insistence on validation as a trans woman trumped all other considerations at her place of work – even giving support to traumatised women.
In retrospect, perhaps, her self-interested approach to charity work and vindictive attitude towards those who disagreed with her was always bound for the employment courts.
And yet, when former staff member Roz Adams took the ERCC to one, there was no testimony at all from the individual at the head of the organisation. Ms Wadhwa refused to give evidence.
There were elements of the absurd in the Edinburgh tribunal hearing which sprang from the harassment of a dedicated charity worker who happened to believe rape victims had a right to know the biological sex of their support worker.
'Do you know if I am a man or a woman?' her solicitor Naomi Cunningham asked a witness who works at the centre.
'No I don't,' came the answer.
Yet the eight-day hearing earlier this year presented a chilling reality. A government-funded charity was doling out doctrine where it once offered comfort.
Simply, people were being asked to accept that politics – Ms Wadhwa's politics – took precedence over a woman's rape ordeal.
They should not object, for example, if the crisis centre caseworker due to perform an intimate examination on them after the rape were the same biological sex as their rapist.
So long as the caseworker in question identified as a woman, where was the problem?
If they did object, then these shattered women should be 'challenged' on their 'prejudices' and told: 'Reframe your trauma'. This was the pitiless diagnosis once offered by Ms Wadwha who, to this day, holds no gender recognition certificate.
An even tougher line was taken on staff members. The tribunal found there was a concerted attempt to make life difficult for support counsellor Ms Adams, 52, because she was not on the same ideological page as Ms Wadhwa and her allies.
She was not sacked. There were no grounds for that. Instead, she was subjected to a nine-month disciplinary process for sending an email seeking guidance. She was labelled a transphobe for a communication she sent on behalf of a woman who had just been raped and who wanted to be in the company of other women.
But, as Ms Adams was to discover to her cost, the victim's ordeal was of secondary concern.
Upholding the trans inclusion ethos of its chief executive was what she concluded this supposed 'safe space' for women was really about.
Ms Adams went off sick and ultimately realised the ERCC was not even safe for her, far less rape victims. She resigned in March 2023.
The constructive dismissal case she brought is widely viewed as a prime example of the 'turmoil' now afflicting rape crisis centres across the UK.
According to a report this year by human rights group Sex Matters, women who support female-only services for victims of rape, sexual assault or domestic violence are 'routinely subjected to investigations, ostracisation, bullying and employment loss.'
Beira's Place, an Edinburgh rape crisis centre which insists on female-only support for rape victims, was set up after the controversy at ERCC. Pictured: Beira's Place board of directors (left to right) Susan Smith, JK Rowling, Johann Lamont, Margaret McCartney and Rhona Hotchkiss
Ms Wadhwa (pictured) is on record as saying the ERCC should fire staff who doubted whether a man identifying as a woman should run a centre helping women recover from male violence
It says women are increasingly reluctant to seek help because they fear the service will not be genuinely female-only.
Report author Matilda Gosling claims trans-inclusive services are being forced on these charities by their funders and they now face a choice between failing to offer the services traumatised women need or losing out on the finance to keep operating.
Says Ms Gosling: 'These are brave, principled leaders who've been put in an impossible situation – and either way, vulnerable women lose.'
The difference with the Edinburgh facility is its leader is herself trans. The trans inclusion ideology starts at the top and is expected to be upheld at every level below her.
Who, then, is the transgender charity worker appointed to lead the ERCC amid a storm of controversy in 2021? By her own account Ms Wadhwa is a women's rights activist and former SNP member who quit the party after objections to her being included on an all-women candidate list in Stirling for the 2021 Scottish parliament election. She is now a member of the Scottish Greens.
She has had rather more to say on her own victimhood than that suffered by rape victims.
The abuse and harassment began in 2019, she said, while she was director of the Forth Valley rape crisis centre in Stirling.
She claimed it intensified when she tried to launch her political career and grew worse still when she moved to the ERCC. In 2022, she said: 'It just kicked off that very first day.
'Emails, complaint letters to the board. I think one of them… was signed by quite a few hundred people. So, pretty much from the first day, we began to deal with this onslaught.
'It was mostly on social media. And it was relentless and endless. And all kinds of people were then retweeting.'
The issue, of course, was that the new boss was, legally, a man who had applied for a role which required a woman.
A more diplomatic leader might have acknowledged the extreme sensitivities in an area of charity work dedicated to helping women who had been raped.
Instead, it seems, she fanned the flames. Women victims who had a problem with her were 'bigots' with 'unacceptable beliefs,' she said. 'Therapy is political.'
Opponents argued that is the very last thing it should be.
The tribunal heard evidence Ms Wadhwa regarded anyone who inquired whether she had a gender recognition certificate as transphobic. It heard she told an Edinburgh University public meeting last year that staff unsure about trans-inclusive policies should be fired.
A woman victim in her 60s who asked for female-only group therapy received a curt email to say she was unsuitable to use ERCC's service, the tribunal heard.
And complaints about the charity's operation were filed in a folder labelled 'hate emails'.
Roz Adams, 52, who was a member of staff at Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, was harassed and discriminated against according to a tribunal judge
Ms Wadhwa, who is transgender, was directly identified by judge Ian McFatridge as being a key figure in the investigation, which he said 'should not have been launched in the first place'
All told, the regime which emerged was one dedicated not to the needs of vulnerable women but to reinforcing the gender identities of its staff.
And yet, for all her stridency on trans issues, it turns out Ms Wadhwa did not even tell her employers she was transgender when she first started working in the sector.
'No one asked me, so I didn't tell, because that is not what women's organisations are obsessed with,' she explained later.
It was largely in reaction to the controversy at ERCC that author JK Rowling funded the December 2022 launch of Beira's Place, an Edinburgh rape crisis centre which insists on female-only support for rape victims.
Ms Wadhwa was incandescent. In a message to staff, she said: 'This new organisation has been founded on a platform of exclusion, misinformation and what I would describe as white feminist imperialism, that interesting combination of the flaws of white feminism and the white saviourism of colonialists and, of course, capitalism of which the founder is a beneficiary…'
Ms Adams now works at Beira's Place. Her difficulty with ERCC arose when a rape victim emailed asking whether her assigned support worker was a man or a woman. In turn Ms Adams emailed superiors seeking guidance as to what she should say.
She suggested telling the woman the worker was a 'woman at birth, but now identifies as non-binary', but this solution was shot down.
Instead, following advice from Ms Wadhwa, a manager wrote to the victim to say the centre had no male staff on its volunteer team.
As for the support worker the rape victim had asked about, they took grave offence at Ms Adams' characterisation of their gender status, describing it as 'humiliating' and even 'violent'.
Ms Adams, who felt the service should be unambiguous and clear to its users on the sex of its staff, soon learned she was being accused of transphobia and investigated for 'gross misconduct'. She was later told she would receive a warning.
Ultimately she resigned. There had been no mediation to help reconcile with the non-binary member of staff – referred to in the proceedings only as AB – and she felt the original problem had not been addressed.
'It wasn't a safe space for me to return to,' said Ms Adams.
Why, many may wonder, was such a divisive figure installed as chief executive of the ERCC in the first place? The question was explored in detail at the tribunal by lawyer Ms Cunningham, representing Ms Adams.
Was it because the organisation needed a 'strong leader' as suggested by senior manager Katy McTernan, who spent hours at the tribunal answering for her absent boss?
Or, as Ms Cunningham put it to her, wasn't this about fulfilling a 'strategic aim' for transgender activists by putting a talismanic trans figure into a position of power in a women-only space?
Not at all, said Ms McTernan. Ms Wadhwa, she insisted, was the 'best candidate'.
And what about Beira's Place? Wasn't it true, Ms McTernan was asked, that ERCC refused to refer rape victims who wished to be supported by a 'literal' woman to the JK Rowling-funded service?
This was nothing to do with the 'profound hostility' with which Ms Wadhwa was said to view Beira's Place, insisted Ms McTernan.
It was, in fact, because they didn't refer to organisations that were not a charity.
The blithe, nothing-to-see-here responses in defence of Ms Wadhwa continued when ERCC board member Miren Sagues, 33, took the stand. She described her boss as 'an amazing woman' who 'respected people's boundaries'.
An alternative view held by increasing numbers of vulnerable woman who no longer see ERCC as an option in their time of crisis is that she is utterly contemptuous of boundaries.
The conclusion drawn by Ms Cunningham was that the organisation was in the gaslighting business. It gaslit rape victims by telling them its volunteers were all women when it knew that, biologically, that was not true.
It then exacerbated the offence by labelling them as 'transphobic' or 'bigots' if they sought more accurate information.
Indeed, said Ms Cunningham, if a victim who sits down 'expecting to pour her heart out' to another woman discovers that she is actually talking to a biological man, isn't she being 'violated all over again'?
The verdict of the tribunal panel was unequivocal.
Ms Adams had behaved entirely reasonably and the investigation into her – motivated by bias and prejudice – should never have been launched.
'Normal concepts of natural justice' were 'ignored', it said and staff explanations for the 'completely spurious' disciplinary process were 'a nonsense'.
And yet, thus far, no hint of an apology from ERCC. It said it was 'saddened' by the verdict.
In a statement, Ms Adams said the ruling 'validates and makes worthwhile three years of struggle'. She hoped the judgment emboldened bodies including the Scottish Government and Rape Crisis Scotland to safeguard the ability of traumatised women to choose a support worker on the basis of sex.
For its part, Rape Crisis Scotland said an independent review into the practices and procedures at the autonomous ERCC had been commissioned.
For now, Ms Wadhwa remains in post despite growing calls for her to quit.
Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at the charity Sex Matters, said the ruling made the CEO's position 'clearly untenable'.
Ash Regan, the former SNP community safety minister who later joined Alba, said it was 'unconscionable' that Ms Wadhwa stayed in her job.
As for Ms Rowling, her message was for the Scottish Government – now widely viewed as enablers for dogmatists such as Ms Wadhwa.
The author said: 'It would be nice, for once, to see the Scottish Government speaking up for the women who've been subject to unlawful discrimination for defending their sex-based rights, and to hear the government condemn, rather than side with, those conducting the witch hunts.'
For ministers, the lengthy judgment, and the hostile, Kafkaesque environment described in it will make for uneasy reading.
It holds a mirror to the gender war in which their allegiance is already pledged to the unreasonable and intolerant.