Reconsidering Violence Against Women through the History of a Refuge for Trans Women

Both right-wing forces and gender-critical feminists currently frame cis and trans women’s needs as fundamentally different and conflicting. Violence against women is a particular flashpoint: trans women are construed as a threat to women’s spaces, including refuges. In this article I use the history of Tiresias House, a refuge established in Sydney, Australia in 1983, to demonstrate women’s shared experiences of violence across the spectrum of cis and trans, to highlight shared histories of solidarity against male violence by feminists and trans women, and to explore what is at stake when we use history to answer contemporary political questions.