Trans women pose no threat to cis women, but we pose a threat to them if we make them outcasts
Dear ladies who are fearful and hostile to trans women, That I grew up and spent most of my life in San Francisco I consider one of my greatest strokes of luck, because it was in its heyday the loudest, proudest queer town around. Even as a straight girl, maybe especially as a straight girl, I benefited endlessly from that. I went to my first gay bar here when I was about 14, with a gay man who was the kindest person in my adolescence. The drag queens who were his friends were also kind, and fortysomething years later my life in and around the queer community has been largely an experience of kindness. Of kindness and liberation, because all these people made it clear to me that gender was what you made of it, and biology is not destiny, and that was really helpful.
As I’ve watched transphobia explode in the American right and the British whatever, I’ve thought over my own experience. San Francisco has been for a century or so a sanctuary city for dissident, rebel and queer people, so I suspect I have lived my whole adult life in a place with more trans people per capita than almost anyplace else. Transphobes are always warning us that if trans people live in peace and legal recognition and even have rights, there will be terrible consequences, but I assume that we here have long realized, at least to some extent, that dreaded future, and we’re all fine.
Despite this, people – many of whom are supposed to be feminists – keep coming up with lurid “what ifs”.
My response to them is: trans women do not pose a threat to cis-gender women, and feminism is a subcategory of human rights advocacy, which means, sorry, you can’t be a feminist if you’re not for everyone’s human rights, notably other women’s rights.
Second wave feminism produced the classic 1972 children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which I’d like to point out was not titled Free to Be Me But I Get to Define You. Back then we thought gender really was kind of binary and defined by genitals; science has gotten smarter in the decades since and we now know it’s a complex interplay of chromosomes, hormones, primary and secondary sexual characteristics and other stuff, some of which is in the brain, not the pants, and also that quite a significant number of people are born intersex, and some are misgendered at birth, and male and female never were airtight categories anyway. Cultures from Native America to India have long recognized that there are other ways to be gendered. This complexity and fluidity can be
a blessing and it’s something feminism embraced when it demanded that “woman” not be a category be so tightly defined by roles, relationships, appearances and limits set upon our options.
At this point in my life I have trans friends and nonbinary friends, bisexual, gay and lesbian friends who are poets and photographers, doctors and nurses, climate organizers and professors and historians and one gay Buddhist priest who’s also a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, speaking of San Francisco things I’m proud of. I’m not speaking for any of them; so many queer and trans people have already spoken up eloquently, but perhaps there’s something useful for a cis-gender straight woman to say to other cis-gender women, which I’m gonna say as someone who is also a hardcore feminist: the major threat to women, straight or not, cis- or not, always was and still is straight men and patriarchy.
Every category is leaky and there are exceptions to every rule, but that’s where the lion’s share of violence against women comes from, as rape and domestic violence and harassment and murder. One of the really weird fears about trans women is that they’re men pretending to be women to do nefarious things to other women, but that’s either a fear of straight cis-gender men who do horrific things to women incessantly all over the world, in which case the problem is still straight men, or a deep misunderstanding of what trans women are. And yes, men who want to harm women could dress up as women, but they could also pretend to be repairmen or emergency workers to get into our homes, and actually have, and we haven’t banned repairmen and emergency workers yet.
As a young woman dealing with endless street harassment and menace from straight men, I used to breathe a sigh of relief when I got to the Castro District, because that was the only place I was confident I would be safe. Reflecting back on these four decades, I figure I must have spent a ton of time around trans people in bars and clubs and street parties and protests (and yeah, public restrooms) without really noticing, which is maybe the point. OK, in 2015, at the last night at the Lexington Club, San Francisco’s last lesbian bar, I did gradually realize that the many nice young men in the crowd were trans men.
Patriarchy would like gender to be fixed and a lot of its violence is punishment of women who aren’t submissive enough, men who aren’t straight enough, and anyone else who steps out of line. It’s no coincidence the American right is obsessed with border walls and with airtight gender definitions and racial discrimination to keep others in their places. Also, I can’t believe we even have to talk about the bathroom issue, which on this continent is a strictly rightwing rile-the-base issue. I have been using public restrooms in this exceptionally gender-diverse city for the past 40-something years, and also reading the local and national papers, plus I know a lot of schoolteachers and parents of schoolchildren, and in all that time I have never actually heard of, or read of, let alone seen, an incident in which a trans woman or girl somehow caused unpleasantness in a women’s room, and it does not appear to be something anyone worries about here. In the Year of Our Lady 2020 there’s still a fuss in the UK about the bathroom business.
When there is so much real violence against women, it’s a sad waste of time to focus on imaginary maybe presumably it-could-theoretically-happen violence. Trans women pose no threat to cis-women, but we pose a threat to them if we make them outcasts and pariahs (and insisting they use men’s bathrooms endangered them horribly). Trans women live dangerous lives, because gender nonconformity is punished in innumerable ways, speaking of patriarchy, and black trans women are murdered at a horrific rate, generally by cis-gender men.
There’s also a hullabaloo about young people choosing to be trans who may change their minds. I’m sure they exist. Also, we all know they’re rare, and that people are not trying on genders like they were Halloween costumes, because this is not easy for them. We all know that being cis-gender straight is the easiest and most encouraged thing to be, and if some young women are daunted by the prospect of being women under patriarchy, the thing to fix is patriarchy, ie apply more feminism here.
What I also know is how formerly many people whose assigned sex did not correspond to their gender identity were unable to find the chance or the courage to transition until later in life and how often they had ruinously miserable lives beforehand. Lots of them wrote books about it, so anyone who wants to know it can know it. It’s great that people can transition earlier, and in those early cases parents and medical experts tend to be exceedingly careful about how those decisions are made, and a few of those parents are my friends and family, and in their kids’ cases it’s worked out really well. We all need to trust them and recognize that that’s their business and not ours.
Finally there are about 4 billion women and girls on Earth, and we are not in danger of being erased. But also there is no one-size-fits-all definition of what a woman is; some of us are born with absent or divergent personal parts, or with chromosomal or hormonal anomalies; we come in many shapes and styles (patrolling bathrooms against trans women has led to some nonconforming cis-gender women being harassed and humiliated). It’s not about having a uterus or breasts or periods or about giving birth, because women are not breeding stock (and, sorry I can’t stop boasting about my city: the first man to give birth was in San Francisco). Some of us had mastectomies or hysterectomies or in the case of Angelina Jolie, who I’m pretty sure everyone accepts as a woman, both; and so many other variations exist, because nature is restlessly creative and gender is more a spectrum and a circus than two lockboxes.
I was proud of being from the queerest town around before Silicon Valley ate it for breakfast. And now, though there is so much else to loathe about my country now, I’m proud to have supported Elizabeth Warren’s run for the presidency, in part because during it she said more about trans rights than pretty much all the other national politicians in the US put together. I’m proud that Brooklyn put on a giant march to say that trans black rights matter, that San Francisco has the world’s first trans cultural district, commemorating the 1966 Compton Cafeteria Riot (sorry New York, our uprising was three years before Stonewall, and yeah everyone who thinks trans women are some new thing, they were central to both these 1960s insurrections). I’m thrilled that, miraculously, the US supreme court ruled in June that trans and queer rights are protected rights in the workplace. One of the beautiful things about that is that the basis for that decision comes from the 1964 Civil Rights Act; those who stood up for racial justice so long ago laid the groundwork for gender justice too.
It’s all connected, or rather we are, and that’s good news.
Best wishes,
Rebecca
RebeccaSolnit is a US Guardian columnist. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters
system (electoral commissions and the police), is the growing consolidation of the civil society. Belarusians – those inside the country and the Belarusian diaspora all over the world – have already reached into their pockets to crowdfund money to assist those who have been repressed and detained. We are at a turning point. Lukashenko has little option other than to cling to power, which makes the possibility of more state violence against his own people likely. At the same time, this level of popular protest against the intolerability of life under Lukashenko has never happened before. Even if he manages to suppress the protests in the coming days, Belarusian society has awoken to a freedom struggle that will not go away any time soon.
• Katsiaryna Shmatsina is a research fellow at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies
traces to 17th century English common law. It gives people in every state, except Vermont and Washington DC, the right to use deadly force against an intruder in their home, with no duty to retreat. In Kentucky law, those protections do not allow someone to harm police officers who enter their home, as long as the officers announce themselves or the homeowner reasonably should have known they were police. This is how Walker was initially arrested and charged with attempted murder of a police officer for opening fire first. Those charges were dropped in May.
The officers, in turn, took gunfire in a place their search warrant gave them legal permission to enter. That would seemingly provide them a selfdefense justification for shooting back inside Taylor’s home. Thanks to US supreme court rulings, officers can invoke self-defense even if their behavior was objectively unsafe or likely to provoke a violent response.
But the gunfire involved more than just the officers and Walker. Police fired more than 20 rounds into Taylor’s home, missing Walker and instead hitting Taylor as she stood in her hallway. Several of the officers’ bullets also entered a neighbor’s house, according to images shared by the Taylor family’s lawyer and a civil lawsuit filed by the neighbor. The suit accuses the officers of “spraying” bullets into the apartment complex “with a total disregard for the value of human life”.
Those facts open up another facet of the self-defense laws, Miller said, and could argue for an indictment. Kentucky law specifically says that even if a person has a valid self-defense justification, the protection doesn’t extend to “wanton” behavior–essentially defined as knowing something is extremely dangerous and doing it anyway in a reckless manner.
If a jury found the officers’ conduct was wanton, directly causing the death of an innocent person, “then that is murder under Kentucky law, and selfdefense would not be a viable defense”, Miller said.
Michael Mannheimer, a law professor at Northern Kentucky University, said that a more realistic charge may be manslaughter, rather than wanton murder. It’s a somewhat squishy distinction in state law, but generally wanton murder charges require a mindset of “depraved indifference”, which can be a steep bar.
“This is not very technical, but the best way to think of it is: manslaughter is when you’re reckless and you kill someone. Depraved indifference is when you’re really, really reckless and you kill someone,” Mannheimer said.
As an example, he said to imagine a person walking into a crowded room and firing wildly in all directions, unprovoked. That reflects a more “depraved” state of mind than firing back wildly, after you’ve been shot at.
The differences in punishment if convicted are substantial: five to ten years in prison for manslaughter, but 20 years to life in prison for wanton murder, which is technically also punishable by death.
‘This city is going to burn’
So far only one officer, Brett Hankison, has been fired. The other two officers have been temporarily taken off the street. In a termination letter, the Louisville police chief, Robert Schroeder, said Hankison violated department policy on the use of deadly force, and accused him of “wantonly and blindly” firing 10 shots into Taylor’s apartment without a clear line of sight.
In a subsequent appeal, Hankison’s attorney David Leighty disputed these claims, calling the firing a “cowardly political act”. Leighty noted that the preliminary investigation has not even concluded which officers’ bullets went where yet. He declined to make any further comment to the Marshall Project.
Lawyers for the other two officers did not reply to messages seeking comment.
Taylor’s family has called for arrests of all three officers. But not everyone protesting Taylor’s death is rooting for arrests. As the current moment in US policing pushes conversations about defunding and abolition of police and the justice system generally, some activists are seeking accountability in other ways. Chenelle Helm, a co-founder of the Louisville Black Lives Matter Chapter, said she fully understands the calls for arresting the officers in Taylor’s case, but she hasn’t joined them because her organization is actively working to dismantle the prison system.
“If we’re asking for the officers to be arrested that’s contradictory to abolition work,” Helm said.
Four other Louisville activists are on a hunger strike demanding that all three officers are fired and are stripped of their future pension benefits.
Vincent Gonzalez, one of the strikers, was torn about arrests as a desired outcome. He said he’s influenced by the same abolitionist ideas as Helm, and doesn’t see the officers’ arrest as a beall and end-all, but also said that arrests would be gratifying in some ways. “It would mean so much to show some courage, make a statement and say that this is unacceptable behavior, and you are not allowed to do these things in our community,” Gonzalez said.
He also said he worries about civil unrest if the officers are cleared.
“I hope I’m wrong,” Gonzalez said, “but when they announce no indictment this city is going to burn.”
Indictment or not, Miller thinks the case could signal the death knell in America for the no-knock raid, the practice by law enforcement agencies of breaking into a home without prior warning.
“I just don’t know if there’s any realistic way you can continue to have noknock warrants in a jurisdiction that has the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground. It seems incompatible,” Miller said.
Taylor’s case is just the latest in a long series of avoidable deaths – of both officers and civilians–that have occurred when officers in no-knock raids are met by an armed homeowner acting in apparent self-defense. Civil libertarians have wrestled with these issues for decades, and momentum appears to be growing.
The Louisville city council unanimously banned such raids last month. US House Democrats have also approved a bill that would ban no-knock warrants in federal law enforcement and strip funding from local police departments that did not follow suit. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has also proposed a Senate bill that would do the same.
Both Paul’s bill and the Louisville ban on no-knock raids are named for Breonna Taylor.
(The book opens with a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote beloved of people who post slogans on Instagram: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Whether shacking up in director Tyler Perry’s $18m mansion in Beverly Hills is quite the pathless existence Emerson had in mind is a question for another day.)
Morton proffered up Diana’s eating disorder and Charles’s affair with Camilla; the most Scobie and Durand get are that Buckingham Palace was bad at protecting Meghan from the press, and William and Kate weren’t very warm to the new couple. That Meghan was treated abominably by an institutionally racist and sexist British press is a fact, and the book, with satisfying brevity, alludes to one particular tabloid columnist whose obsession with Meghan ranges from hysterical to certifiable. He is deftly dismissed as a social-climber with a grudge “after not receiving an invite to the wedding.”
It is not Harry and Meghan’s fault that their book has come out in the middle of a global pandemic, but it does underscore their occasional tone deafness in the latter half of the book. Even in the best of times, one would be tempted to break out a tiny violin to accompany their complaints about “the institution” directly following on from details of their luxury holiday in Ibiza and a stay chez Elton John in Nice. Finding Freedom chokes the reader with banal details (if you ever wondered if Meghan craved sweets during pregnancy, this is the book for you), yet it is opaque when it comes to real insights, such as how much Meghan encouraged the press in the early days of her relationship with Harry. Perhaps the most WTF moment is a casual mention that they “were forced to let [their son’s night nanny] go in the middle of her second night of work for being unprofessional and irresponsible”. Call me shallow, but I’m a lot more interested in why a couple would sack a nanny in the middle of the night than Meghan’s cravings. As for Harry, he comes across as goodhearted but oversensitive and impetuous to a degree one can only describe as Dianaesque, whereas chilly William is 100% a Windsor.
The Sussexes were hung out to dry by the palace and the press; the question the book fails to answer is why, when they were such a boon to the brand. Last year there was a widely circulated rumour that they were being used to distract from some ugliness involving William. Finding Freedom has the space to respond to every other media claim, but on this it stays schtum.
Yet the real story here is Prince Andrew. While palace courtiers bitchily leaked Meghan’s yoga schedule, the spare from the previous generation merrily lived his life, despite his known friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “The couple prefer to keep their thoughts [on that matter] to themselves,” Scobie and Durand coyly note in one of only two references to Epstein in the book, yet here is where Harry and Meghan have a real argument: why were they given such a rough time when a man accused of sleeping with trafficked young women (which he denies) was granted so much leniency for so long?
Their silence may tell its own story. Despite all the fuming, the book is very cautious when it comes to the senior members of the royal family, and it’s interesting that it’s Kate who is the focus of the criticism rather than William. It may well be that, despite claiming he has finally found freedom, Harry is keeping a door open to his gilded cage. His mother could have told him that pulling punches doesn’t make for a satisfying book, but perhaps he also learned from her that burning bridges doesn’t make for an easy life.
• Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family is published by HQ (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.