by Greg Piper
Edmonton police released male charged with sexual assault in women's shelter, arrested him again after more reported assaults, looking for more victims. J.K. Rowling brings pressure on trans-friendly women's shelters.
As the federal government eradicates the primacy of gender identity over sex in education, workplaces, incarceration, youth medicine and the military via President Trump's executive orders, the battles over the rights of females versus males who identify as women, especially in the most vulnerable spaces for females, rage at levels beyond Trump's control.
In Canada, where women's shelters can lose government funding for rejecting males, police last week charged a man who appears to identify as a woman with criminal harassment and sexual assault, four months after releasing Mika Katz while the accused was facing previous sexual-assault charges, all four of which stem from the same shelter in August.
Edmonton, Alberta police said Friday they have received "multiple reports related to separate events on different days" and "investigators believe there may be additional complainants," for the first time releasing a photo of the 37-year-old defendant, also known as Michael Collins.
The press release is careful not to use pronouns or sex for Katz but distinguishes the defendant from the "females" accusing Katz, and the photo shows Katz with an unmistakable beard. CTV News, the Edmonton Journal and CityNews Edmonton all identify Katz as a man.
While it doesn't specify if the "Edmonton area" shelter is reserved for women, police noted Katz's release conditions for the first changes included a ban on coming "within 50 meters of any women’s shelter in Alberta." Five shelters have Edmonton addresses on the Alberta Council for Women's Shelters map.
Women's Shelters Canada, a nationwide association, supports housing males in women's shelters, referring to women as "both cisgender and transgender." Its 2020-2021 report says its "core values" were updated in March 2021, with the gender identity language appearing between March 6 and March 31.
The Women's Liberation Front, the U.S. gender-critical group, pointed Just the News to Women's Shelters Canada's denunciation of Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, a top contender for prime minister, a year ago when he came out against males in women's shelters.
It shared a 10-year list of incidents from Canada, the U.S., U.K. and Europe related to the fallout from letting males in women's shelters, including shelters that refuse losing funding and women getting kicked out for protesting males in them.
"To us, that looks like a concerted effort to open the door wide to men pretending to be women, and to punish women and facilities who object," the group said in an email.
Last month a California judge ordered the Madera County District Attorney's Office to use female pronouns in a criminal trial against a transgender inmate with intact male genitalia for allegedly raping female inmates while housed in a women's prison, ignoring the DA's objection that the mandate would censor Tremaine Carroll's victims and gut its "legal theory."
The Canadian government defines "women's shelters" as those providing "services to adults identifying as women," some of which "also accept girls," according to its latest shelter capacity report from 2023. The total number of women's beds includes "beds of services that include cisgender women only, and those that service both cisgender and transgender women."
Women's shelters are distinct from "general shelters" that provide "services to adults of all genders," some also accepting "youth."
Transgender activists in 2019 successfully pressured Vancouver in the neighboring province of British Columbia to stop funding Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, which the CBC called "one of the country's oldest rape crisis centres," until it agrees to house males even though the shelter said it would "see to the safety of anyone who calls its crisis line."
It has stuck to its guns in the following six years, maintaining a "women only space" tab on its website that includes updates of note, including its responses to the 2019 cutoff and the city cutting off its public education grant the next year.
"The city council utterly disregarded the compelling statements made by Vancouverites about the importance of our work and the rationale for women-only organizing and women-only space," it said after the public education cutoff.
The same year Vancouver first cut off the shelter, the city of Anchorage, Alaska, paid a faith-based women's shelter $100,000 to settle litigation over its refusal to house males after a federal court ruled it wasn't a place of public accommodation.
Katz's re-arrest blew up globally when Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling shared a Sunday report in the gender-critical Reduxx. "The thing that never happens has happened again," Rowling wrote on X, referring to the talking point by gender ideology activists that transgender women are not a physical threat to women.
Rowling last fall used her platform to call attention to a "damning report" commissioned by Scotland's Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre against its CEO, a man who identifies as a woman, for allegedly harassing staff with gender-critical views and offering no "protected women-only spaces" that weren't specifically requested. The CEO quit.
When Rape Crisis Scotland's CEO said Rowling was trying to get her fired, Rowling responded that "a man now serving time in prison for multiple sexual assaults was 'treated' at the Edinburgh centre" and that "multiple women self-excluded from the Edinburgh centre because of the male CEO you defended and praised."
Reduxx said it traced multiple social media accounts to Katz, where the accused uses "she/her/they/them" pronouns and displays the transgender pride banner. Katz identifies as a "woman trapped in a man's body," claims to have started cross-sex hormones a year ago and follows "transgender and lesbian-focused pornography accounts," Reduxx said.
Just the News found three Facebook accounts that plausibly appear to be Katz's, all claiming to live in Edmonton. Two identify Katz as "Mika Lin," created last spring and November 2023, both full of transgender colors and one that repeatedly identifies Katz as trans and in a relationship.
The oldest account, from September 2022, identifies Katz as male and a "stoner."
Greg Piper
Source: https://justthenews.com/world/canada/sexual-assault-womens-shelters-allow-males-get-global-spotlight-trans-friendly-canada
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