Tag: Misogyny

Where hatred of women starts:

Rapper and actor T.I. said in a podcast interview that aired Tuesday that he goes with his 18-year-old daughter to the gynecologist every year to “check her hymen” and make sure it’s “still intact.”

In an interview with Nazanin Mandi and Nadia Moham on Ladies Like Us, T.I. talked about his parenting style, among other topics. When asked about whether he’s had the “sex talk” with his daughters, he pointed to his approach with his eldest daughter, 18-year-old Deyjah Harris, who’s in her first year of college.

“Not only have we had the conversation. We have yearly trips to the gynecologist to check her hymen,” T.I. said. “Yes, I go with her.”

He then mentioned that after her 16th birthday party, he “put a sticky note on the door: ‘Gyno. Tomorrow. 9:30.’”

Gee, how festive.

“So we’ll go and sit down and the doctor comes and talk, and the doctor’s maintaining a high level of professionalism,” T.I. said. “He’s like, ‘You know, sir, I have to, in order to share information’ — I’m like, ‘Deyjah, they want you to sign this so we can share information. Is there anything you would not want me to know? See, Doc? Ain’t no problem.’”

In other words the doctor tries to tell the patriarch that his daughter has rights of her own, and he brushes all that off by intimidating her in front of the doctor and then saying that’s what he’s just done.

Also note that the gynecologist is a man, which probably makes the daughter feel that little bit less able to resist.

But above all, notice the hostility and disgust and aggression embedded in the whole thing. Notice the basic suspicion and contempt for his own daughter expressed in this police-like hauling her to a male doctor who will inspect her for (very dubious) traces of sexual activity. It sounds so Saudi Arabia-like.

T.I. also noted that he was informed the hymen can be broken in ways other than through sexual penetration. “And so then they come and say, ‘Well, I just want you to know that there are other ways besides sex that the hymen can be broken like bike riding, athletics, horseback riding, and just other forms of athletic physical activity,’” he said. “So I say, ‘Look, Doc, she don’t ride no horses, she don’t ride no bike, she don’t play no sports. Just check the hymen, please, and give me back my results expeditiously.’”

“Just inspect the slut and tell me if I have to kill her or not.”

Virginity testing, which often involves a doctor inspecting the hymen for tears or stretching, is widely considered an unnecessarily invasive practice that has no medical benefit. A report from the National Institutes of Health found that these tests can have a deeply negative psychological impact on women and girls.

The World Health Organization has vehemently denounced virginity testing, calling it “a violation of the human rights of girls and women.”

“‘Virginity testing’ has no scientific or clinical basis,” the organization said in a statement. “There is no examination that can prove a girl or woman has had sex – and the appearance of girl’s or woman’s hymen cannot prove whether they have had sexual intercourse, or are sexually active or not.”

Also please note that there is no equivalent policing procedure for males.

God what a horrible story.

Owen Jones a few days ago:

Massive kudos to @samsmith, who by coming out will help other non-binary people who have to confront the ignorance and bigotry of others.

The people who get angry at *pronouns* are exactly the same who call the left always offended/”triggered” snowflakes.

Janice Turner replied today:

Everyone is non-binary, Owen. I’m non-binary. Every feminist is non-binary, because we don’t adhere to sexist gender stereotypes. So are you going to congratulate us too?

OJ:

No you’re not, glad to help!

Now just a god damn minute. If the rule is that people are what they say they are, where does he get off replying that way?

Furthermore, how does he think he knows that? What is it that he thinks he knows?

Also – does he know anything about feminism over the past half-century?

It’s almost as if they don’t even mean it about “non-binary,” they just mean “us and our friends, who are cooler than you.”

(Also, for full disclosure, his flippant sexist dismissal of a woman older and wiser and more thoughtful than he is makes me angry.)

McKinnon does want death to “TERFs.”

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

Brian Leiter reports:

Anti-lesbian discrimination at LGBT Facebook group for philosophers

Two lesbian philosophers–Holly Lawford-Smith and Louise Moody–are removed from the group by Rebecca Kukla (Georgetown) after merely mentioning philosopher Kathleen Stock (Sussex).

The group is both closed and secret, so I haven’t seen any posts from it firsthand, only summaries of what’s going on. Someone asked how to learn more about…gender critical feminism? One of the pejorative labels for same? I don’t remember, but one of those or something like it. Holly and Louise suggested reading Kathleen Stock. Kukla kicked them out without further ado.

But wait, there’s more. Of course there is; there always is; there is the festering hatred of various men who have to share their festering hatred with the world. Trans ideology has been such a gift to those men.

UPDATE:  Two different readers sent along the unhinged reaction of Keyvan Shefiei, another charming PhD student self-destructing on social media:

A “bigoted piece of shit” and a “vile fucking human.” Why? Because she doesn’t subscribe to the doctrine that men can magically become women simply by saying the words “I identify as.”

ADDENDUM:  An amazing response to being called out for their unhinged behavior.  Among the philosophers sympathizing with Shalfiei, who apparently think it’s fine to call another philosopher a “piece of shit” and a “vile fucking human,” are Daniel Silvermint (Connecticut), Fiona Schick (CUNY), Amy Marvin (Oregon), Audrey Yap (Victoria), Joshua Habgood-Coote (Bristol), and Nathaneal Smith (Rochester), among others.

I don’t know anything about the last five, but I saw Daniel Silvermint’s sympathizing before Brian’s update, and it’s a gem of its kind – its kind being a combination of ostentatiously professorial wording with intensely stupid content.

(2/4) the vulnerable person was right to get "as angry" as they did in response. Suddenly the attack no longer matters – only whether the reply was 'civil', or in this case of our field, 'reasoned' and ‘professional'. And because these are loaded terms, and because the people

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) April 8, 2019

The “on the record” is laughable for a start, because what record? What godly recorder is seeking David Silvermint’s official opinion?

But the rest of it is infuriating, because what “attack”? There was no “attack.” Not agreeing to bizarre metaphysical claims is not an “attack.” And because what “wider conditions of vulnerability”? Are we supposed to assume that trans women are in a condition of vulnerability while women are not? If so, why? I asked him that, then after some hours I asked him again; all I got was a block. He pretends to be making a reasoned argument but he declines to argue.

(4/4) In my opinion, philosophers should spend more time worrying that the core values of our field align so closely with respectability politics, and less time worrying that a graduate student said a swear.

— Daniel Silvermint (@DSilvermint) April 8, 2019

“A swear.” Calling someone a “bigoted piece of shit” and a “vile fucking human” is not a mere swear. A man calling a woman those things is doubly not a mere swear. Daniel Silvermint is helping another dude bully a woman on Twitter, and pretending he’s doing serious philosophy in the process.

Guess what he teaches. Go on, guess.

I joined the University of Connecticut in 2013 as an Assistant Professor, jointly appointed in Philosophy & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Yeah. Women’s Studies, that guy.

https://twitter.com/KieranBennett/status/1103970038577414144

Big strong determined? Clearly not nearly enough so or that stupid “TRANSPHOBIA KILLS” banner wouldn’t be hogging the limelight on International WOMEN’S Day.

https://twitter.com/KieranBennett/status/1103928452283944960

“TERF graves are gender neutral bathrooms! [i.e.toilets]”

Not big, not strong, not determined, and sure as hell not feminist.

There’s this winsome image:

I haven’t been able to find it on that group’s Facebook, so maybe Facebook has now removed it. But it’s interesting that people who seem to consider themselves to be on the left think that is a fine woke lefty image – a lynched woman with the inscription DEAD TERFs. The word “TERF” is a free pass for men to express loathing and contempt for women and be seen as awesomely progressive for doing so.

The San Francisco Public Library posted on Facebook a couple of hours ago:

SFPL exhibits are intended to address social issues of the time. We do not endorse nor advocate the viewpoints of the exhibits. Due to concerns raised by library patrons, we are altering the degenderettes antifa art exhibit at the Main Library to remove an offensive shirt, a piece of artwork that could be interpreted as promoting violence, which is incompatible with our exhibitions policy. See the attached poster for more info about the exhibit.

“…pride bat in hand” – ready to club a woman. If it were a member of the KKK with a burning cross would the SFPL be celebrating the “defiance” with an exhibition? Museums and libraries do have exhibitions of racist violence, of course, but not in celebration.

Strange times.

Strange times.

https://youtu.be/zNGTtqGG1Lk

The lyrics are helpfully provided.

Its not hard to use the right words
When your talking to people
And you know the ones the prefer
Its not that complicated
To use respectful language
Its the least you can do
if you don’t it shows the truth
About you and your loyalty
To the patriarchy
Your false feminism
Hides your misogyny

Terfs are trash
We won’t stand for trans exclusionary feminism
Theres nothing radical about traditional gender binaries

If you intentionally
misgender anybody
Your a sexist piece of trash
That deserves a brick to the teeth
Equality is for everybody
You gotta lot of nerve
coming round with that
Swerf talk terf talk
Gonna get that sidewalk
curb stomp

The Scottish National Party MP Mhairi Black read out some of the misogynistic abuse she gets, including liberal use of “cunt.”

For instance starting at about 1:00

She needs a kick in the cunt, guttural cunt, ugly cunt, wee animal cunt – there is no softening just how sexualized and misogynistic the abuse is.

Please tell us again how “cunt” is not at all misogynistic in the UK. Please; we’re listening.

This is painful to read:

Theodore Johnson first killed a woman in 1981. He tipped his wife Yvonne over the balcony of their ninth-floor flat in Blakenhall Gardens, Wolverhampton, having already hit her with a vase. Well, they had been arguing – a factor that enabled him to plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of provocation. The second woman Johnson killed was Yvonne Bennett, in 1992. He strangled her with a belt while their baby slept. Her “provocation” was that she refused the box of chocolates he had bought to win her back; he was able to plead diminished responsibility and, after a two-year stay in a secure psychiatric unit, was released and again free to form new relationships. Then, in December 2016, Angela Best became the third victim of Johnson, 64, and on Friday he will be sentenced for her murder. Best’s spur to his violence had simply been to end their relationship and start a new one with someone else.

Couldn’t someone have warned Yvonne Bennett and Angela Best? Shouldn’t Johnson have had some sort of large conspicuous non-removable warning label attached to him?

Paula Cocozza, the author, says there are more such cases, as well as the background violence.

According to the Office for National Statistics, one woman in four experiences domestic violence in her lifetime, and two women are killed each week in England and Wales by a current or former partner.

Prof David Wilson is a criminologist with a special interest in serial killers. “When I looked at Theodore Johnson,” he says, “I saw a man who has killed three or more people in a period greater than 30 days. Technically, he’s a serial killer. What is the context in which he has been able to kill, especially after being incarcerated on two separate occasions? That context is misogyny. Women being killed by men who are in a relationship with them is seen as a thing that happens, something that just occurs. Last year, two women a week died at the hands of their partners or ex-partners. That is an extraordinary figure that begins to reveal something not about serial murder but about the phenomenon of everyday murder. There is this unreflective acceptance that violence towards women is normalised.”

Just one of those things, like fires and floods.

This year the government will introduce a domestic violence and abuse act, the specific proposals of which have yet to be announced, but which should help to clarify and unify the police response to domestic violence. The biggest change Jacob would like to see is better sharing of information. She reads a lot of domestic homicide reviews and many disclose that communication could have been better. Agencies such as police, probation, health services, housing, adult social care, child social care and substance abuse services “are holding back information from each other which, if shared, could save lives”.

At some point in the future, she will read the domestic homicide review for the case of Best’s murder by Johnson. What it won’t say is that the context of domestic violence still somehow persuades too many of us that such murders should be valued differently from a random killing by a homicidal stranger.

“It’s somehow seen as not as large a breach of the social contract we all have with each other,” says Liz Kelly, the director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University. Nor is the review likely to mention misogyny, a word that is also absent from risk assessment forms. As Kelly says, “Misogyny is not seen as a form of extreme dangerousness … We need to identify these men who hate women and [understand] that they are a danger to all women.”

That’s the thing. We’re often told it’s “just talk” (or just trolling or just the internet or just a reaction to the “control left”), but it’s not safe to assume that.

Oh gee, mark your calendars. “Sargon of Akkad” aka Carl Benjamin is doing a star appearance at Conway Hall (of all places) next month.

Sargon of Akkad presents:

“This Week in Stupid Live” – An Evening with Sargon of Akkad

Friday 15th December @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

A snip at £10.

Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin is a popular independent Vlogger with over 700,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Carl critiques ideological arguments and his channel is dedicated to rational arguments backed by evidence.  Sometimes a polemicist, at other times soft spoken, Sargon of Akkad has created a considerable amount of content regarding skeptical thought. The evening will be spent discussing politics, philosophy and the endless idiocy of the extremes of each political wing.

That’s not his real claim to fame though, is it. His real claim to fame is bullying women on social media, especially Twitter.

In May 2016, in response to Labour Party politician Jess Phillips‘ statement that rape threats are commonplace for her, Benjamin said “I wouldn’t even rape you” in a YouTube video and repeated this on Twitter.^{[2][5][8][13]} Benjamin declined to apologise for the comments.^[13]

Twitter suspended him.

Conway Hall isn’t just a building, it isn’t just a generic hall that hosts anything and everything.

The Conway Hall Ethical Society, formerly the South Place Ethical Society, based in London at Conway Hall, is thought to be the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, and is the only remaining ethical society in the United Kingdom. It now advocates secular humanism and is a member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

Secular humanism. Ethical society. Not a good fit for aggressively rude men who bully women.

Conway Hall must not have been paying attention.

Julian Assange tweets:

Capitalism+atheism+feminism = sterility = migration. EU birthrate = 1.6. Replacement = 2.1. Merkel, May, Macron, Gentiloni all childless. pic.twitter.com/mkqowTABWx

— Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) September 2, 2017

Helen Lewis responds:

https://twitter.com/helenlewis/status/904290514597498880

Explorers find yet another cache of hostility to women.

A pathbreaking new study of online conversations among economists describes and quantifies a workplace culture that appears to amount to outright hostility toward women in parts of the economics profession.

Alice H. Wu, who will start her doctoral studies at Harvard next year, completed the research in an award-winning senior thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. Her paper has been making the rounds among leading economists this summer, and prompting urgent conversations.

…

The underrepresentation of women in top university economics departments is already well documented, but it has been difficult to evaluate claims about workplace culture because objectionable conversations rarely occur in the open. Whispered asides at the water cooler are hard to observe, much less measure.

But now water cooler conversations have moved to the internet, and new ways of finding patterns have been worked out.

This is what Ms. Wu did in her paper, “Gender Stereotyping in Academia: Evidence From Economics Job Market Rumors Forum.”

Ms. Wu mined more than a million posts from an anonymous online message board frequented by many economists. The site, commonly known as econjobrumors.com (its full name is Economics Job Market Rumors), began as a place for economists to exchange gossip about who is hiring and being hired in the profession. Over time, it evolved into a virtual water cooler frequented by economics faculty members, graduate students and others.

It now constitutes a useful, if imperfect, archive for studying what economists talk about when they talk among themselves. Because all posts are anonymous, it is impossible to know whether the authors are men or women, or how representative they are of the broader profession. Indeed, some may not even be economists. But it is clearly an active and closely followed forum, particularly among younger members of the field.

Ms. Wu set up her computer to identify whether the subject of each post is a man or a woman. The simplest version involves looking for references to “she,” “her,” “herself” or “he,” “him,” “his” or “himself.”

She then adapted machine-learning techniques to ferret out the terms most uniquely associated with posts about men and about women.

The 30 words most uniquely associated with discussions of women make for uncomfortable reading.

In order, that list is: hotter, lesbian, bb (internet speak for “baby”), sexism, tits, anal, marrying, feminazi, slut, hot, vagina, boobs, pregnant, pregnancy, cute, marry, levy, gorgeous, horny, crush, beautiful, secretary, dump, shopping, date, nonprofit, intentions, sexy, dated and prostitute.

I count three out of the thirty that are neither demeaning nor sexual: levy, nonprofit, intentions.

The words that deal with men betray no such pattern.

It includes words that are relevant to economics, such as adviser, Austrian (a school of thought in economics) mathematician, pricing, textbook and Wharton (the University of Pennsylvania business school that is President Trump’s alma mater). More of the words associated with discussions about men have a positive tone, including terms like goals, greatest and Nobel. And to the extent that there is a clearly gendered theme, it is a schoolyard battle for status: The list includes words like bully, burning and fought.

Wu points out that the anonymity of the posts removes social pressure to be something other than a shit. That of course is what I’ve been saying for years (so many years, way too many years): that the anonymity of Twitter and discussion boards and so on makes this kind of dreck possible.

Wu looked at themes as well as vocabulary.

This part of her analysis reveals that discussions about men are more likely to be confined to topics like economics itself and professional advice (with terms including career, interview or placement).

Discussions of women are much more likely to involve topics related to personal information (with words like family, married or relationship), physical attributes (words like beautiful, body or fat) or gender-related terms (like gender, sexist or sexual).

Men are complicated people who think and work; women are blobs who get poked and have babies.

To be sure, the online forum Ms. Wu studied is unlikely to be representative of the entire economics profession, although even a vocal minority can be sufficient to create a hostile workplace for female economists.

Janet Currie, a leading empirical economist at Princeton (where Ms. Wu works as her research assistant), told me the findings resonated because they’re “systematically quantifying something most female economists already know.” The analysis “speaks volumes about attitudes that persist in dark corners of the profession,” Professor Currie said.

And other professions, and intellectual interests, and fandoms, and and and…

Some economists say they find the discourse on econjobrumors.com to be a breath of fresh air. George Borjas, an economics professor at Harvard, wrote on his blog last summer that he found the forum “refreshing.”

Professor Borjas said: “There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, gossip, sex. …” In an email sent on Wednesday, after he received a copy of Ms. Wu’s paper, Professor Borjas said his views had not changed.

Ah yes. It’s always so refreshing to throw off those shackles of political correctness and go back to calling women sluts and bitches. Thank you, Professor Borjas.

There’s a piece by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha about emotional labor. The title is

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR A FAIR TRADE EMOTIONAL LABOR ECONOMY
(CENTERED BY DISABLED, FEMME OF COLOR, WORKING CLASS/POOR GENIUS)

I have no idea what the second line, the one in parentheses, is supposed to mean.

Whatever it’s supposed to mean, I’m staggered before the piece even begins, by a throat-clearing that prefaces it:

Editor’s note: In this piece you may notice some departures from Bitch’s house style. This piece was edited according to the author’s specifications.

Femme: A person who has one of a million kinds of queer femme or feminine genders. Part of a multiverse of femme gendered people who have histories and communities in every culture since the dawn of time. A queer gender that often breaks away from white, able bodied, upper middle class, cis ideas of femininity, remixing it to harken to fat or working class or Black or brown or trans or non-binary or disabled or sex worker or other genders of femme to grant strength, vulnerability and power to the person embodying them. A revolutionary gender universe.

In other words…a person who for some reason thinks the word “woman” is some kind of obscenity or blasphemy or admission of guilt, and is therefore to be shunned…in favor of the word “woman” in another language. That’ll fix it.

But French – my dear, isn’t that terribly elitist? It’s only snobby people who sip their lattes in coastal bubbles who know French. Surely it should be mujer.

But more to the point – fuck that.

I’m so sick of this constant drip-drip-drip insistence that actually women have to be kicked out of feminism now because women are not oppressed at all but rather the source of oppression, because they’re such white cis able-bodied upper middle class bitches. There’s no such thing as “femme gendered people” who are a category apart from women, and being fat or working class or black or brown does not make you not a woman. I’m so sick of this stupid malevolent woman-hating bullshit. There is no “revolutionary gender universe” that excludes women – that right there is just plain old vanilla patriarchy, and I say the hell with it.

But she goes with it. Everything is femme.

The thing about being a working class or poor and/or disabled and/or parenting and/or Black, Indigenous or brown femme is that people are going to ask you to do stuff for them. Oh, are they ever…And because: your life as a working class or poor and/or sex working and/or disabled and/or Black or brown femme person has taught you that the only damn way you or anybody survives is by helping each other…It’s maybe what hippies mean when they talk about the gift economy, it’s just a million times more working class, femme, Black and brown, and sick in bed.

Do not say women; never say women; women are the enemy.

We live in a white capitalist colonialist cissexist ableist patriarchy that oppresses in many ways, including by reviling all that is femme. In the queer communities I’ve been part of since the ’90s, I’ve witnessed how femmephobia, sexism, and transmisogyny act together to view femininity and femmeness as weak, less than, not as smart or competent, “hysterical,” “too much,” not worthy of praise or respect, enforcing rape culture and political, economic and social disenfranchisement of femmes. Forget femme invisibility; the thing most femmes I know are impacted by is lack of femme respect. Femmephobia and transmisogyny infuse queer and mainstream cultures in a million ways, from the ways in which femme genders are seen as inherently less radical (i.e., assuming money spent on makeup or femme clothing is somehow more capitalist than that spent on bowties and butch wax) to the ways in which, as writer Morgan M. Page notes, “Any minor slip of language or politics and [trans women] are labeled “crazy trans women,” resulting in trans women being expelled from queer communities.

Yeah. It’s all femmephobia and transmisogyny; no sexism or misogyny at all. Women are shit; it’s only femmes that are any good.

Generations of femmes have written and organized about misogyny and transmisogyny in queer and trans communities, and I’m alive because of this work. But I remain, with many other femme/feminine people, harmed by misogynist ideas about care labor, where endless free emotional labor is simply the role our communities have for femme and feminine people. As a newly physically disabled, working class femme of color in the ’90s, I often felt how the queer and prison justice communities I was part of looked down on my gender, especially when I was sick and broke and surviving abuse and needing support. Then I really sucked—I was just another needy, weak girl, huh? The one place femme people could receive respect in those communities was if we were tough, invulnerable, always “on,” and never needing a thing.

And if they carefully said “femme” instead of “women” because…no, I still don’t know why. To be better than those bitches, clearly, but why she sees that as somehow an advance on feminism I do not know.

Those fuckers.

The Senate voted Thursday to let states block federal family planning money from going to Planned Parenthood affiliates and other abortion providers.

Senators approved the Republican legislation 51-50. Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote after two GOP senators, Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, voted with Democrats against the measure.

…

The Senate measure would roll back a regulation Obama issued shortly before leaving office. It bars state and local governments from denying federal family planning funds to organizations unless they are unable to provide those services. Some states have passed laws preventing abortion providers from receiving the funds.

There is already a ban on using federal funds for abortion except for rare instances.

Democrats assailed the legislation as an attack on women, two months after Trump’s inauguration prompted a women’s march on Washington that mushroomed into anti-Trump demonstrations around the nation.

They’re scum. Scum.

Jack Halberstam on intersectionality at Reed College.

In 1999, just six years after the rape and murder of a young gender variant person, Brandon Teena, and two friends in a small town in Nebraska, Kim Peirce released her first film, a dramatic account of the incident. The film, Boys Don’t Cry, which took years to research, write, fund, cast and shoot, was released to superb reviews and went on to garner awards and praise for the lead actor, Hilary Swank, and the young director, Kim Peirce, not to mention the film’s production team led by Christine Vachon. The film was hard hitting, visually innovative and marked a massive breakthrough in the representation of gender variant bodies. While there were certainly debates about decisions that Peirce made within the film’s narrative arc (the omission of the murder of an African American friend, Philip DeVine, at the same time that Brandon was killed), Boys Don’t Cry was received by audiences at the time as a magnificent film honoring the life of a gender queer youth and bringing a sense of the jeopardy of gender variant experiences to the screen. It was also seen as a sensitive depiction of life in small town USA. Kim Peirce spoke widely about the film in public venues and explained her relationship to the subject matter of gender variance, working class life and gender based violence.

In recent screenings of the film, some accompanied by Peirce as a speaker, others just programmed as part of a class or a film series, younger audiences have taken offence to the film and have accused the filmmaker of making money off the representation of violence against trans people. This at least was the charge made against Kim Peirce when she showed up to speak alongside a special screening of the film at Reed College in Oregon, just days after the Presidential election. Unbeknownst to the organizers, student protestors had removed posters from all around campus that advertised the screening and lecture and they formed a protest group and arrived early to the cinema on the night of the screening to hang up posters.

They removed posters that let people know about the screening and lecture, so they deprived Peirce of a potential audience and they deprived the potential audience of the screening and lecture. I remember Boys Don’t Cry as a very powerful movie, and certainly not one that was hostile to trans people.

These posters voiced a range of responses to the film including: “You don’t fucking get it!” and “Fuck Your Transphobia!” as well as “Trans Lives Do Not Equal $$” and to cap it all, the sign hung on the podium read: “Fuck this cis white bitch”!! The protestors waited until after the film had screened at Peirce’s request and then entered the auditorium while shouting “Fuck your respectability politics” and yelling over her commentary until Peirce left the room. After establishing some ground rules for a discussion, Peirce came back into the room but the conversation again got out of hand and finally a student yelled at Peirce: “Fuck you scared bitch.” At which point the protestors filed out and Peirce left campus.

Fuck this cis white bitch??? Because she made a sympathetic indie movie about a young trans man 17 years ago? That seems…hostile.

This is an astonishing set of events to reckon with for those of us who remember the events surrounding Brandon Teena’s murder, the debates in the months that followed about Brandon Teena’s identity and, later, the reception of the film. Early transgender activism was spurred into action by the murder of Brandon Teena and many activists showed up at the trial of his killers. There were lots of debates at the time about whether Brandon was “butch” or “transgender” but queer and transgender audiences were mostly satisfied with the depiction of Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry. The film appealed to many audiences, queer and straight, and it continues to play around the world.

The accounts given of these recent protests at Reed College give evidence of enormous vitriol, much of it blatantly misogynist (the repeated use of the word “bitch” for example) directed at a queer, butch film maker and they leave us with an enormous number of questions to face about representational dynamics, clashes between different historical paradigms of queer and transgender life and the expression of queer anger that, instead of being directed at murderous enemies in the mainstream of American political life, has been turned onto independent film makers within the queer and LGBT communities.

Is this how intersectionalism should work? I don’t think so.