Dear Rose McGowan, Here’s Why I Won’t Be Watching ‘Citizen Rose’
Rose McGowan seeks to bask in the glow of a compassion only reserved for white women whilst the footprints of her Doc Martens are pressed into our backs.
I employ what one could call a ‘survivor’s leniency’. As a complex PTSD sufferer because of multiple sexual assaults, and the recipient of intense therapeutic support which led me away from drug-induced psychosis and back, into a now thriving recovery, I know well the long-term impact of sexual violence on those of us who have been preyed upon by abusive people. Thus, I have not shouted my dislike from any rooftops what bugs me about Rose McGowan. It started when I heard her on Rupaul and Michelle Visage’s podcast “What’s the Tee?”. They’re consummate professionals who are professionally flattering, well-researched and usually deliver content seamlessly. Yet, they couldn’t hide how clunkily awkward it was when Rose McGowan was their guest. One of the lowest moments in this car crash of a podcast was her misguidedly using the terms trans women and drag queens interchangeably. Her statements about trans women and her racist, TERF and queerphobic ways aren't new, but the cherry on top was a ridiculous anecdote about their lack of interest in her menstrual cycle. “Don’t you think it’s funny that you guys never ask me about my period?” Maybe it’s too much to expect cisgender people to wonder how insidious gender dysphoria might be? That there may be trans girls who mentally spiral downwards in thoughts about not having wombs and not having children? That to this trans girl it would be really disrespectful and insensitive to brazenly ask for details of someone’s menstrual cycle out of the blue? That the idea of asking someone about their genitalia and how they work and how they feel about them is conversational territory that I am not entitled to? #mindblownRelated: ROSE MCGOWAN’S WHITE FEMINISM IS ROOTED IN A LONG HISTORY OF BECKERY
2017 IS THE YEAR WHITE FEMINISM CHECKED HERSELF INTO HOSPICE AND REFUSED TO DIE
May white feminism stay and die in 2017. They have really outdone themselves. My newsfeed curation is constantly being managed by my trigger-happy fingers that have turned ‘unfollow’ into a reflex reaction. Yet, I can be laughing uproariously at some delicious
Don’t Be A TERF: Transmisogyny 101
We cannot divorce transmisogyny from its roots in both transmisia and misogyny, nor can we ignore the ways in which the patriarchy significantly and tangibly impacts trans women.
Time and time again cis folks, including cis women, will invalidate trans women’s womanhood by claiming we do not experience oppression under cisheteropatriarchy. Cis women, for example, will dismiss trans women’s concerns and lived experiences as “crying wolf” and re-center their experiences in all spaces as though they aren’t already saturated with cis experiences. To define womanhood as dependent on experiencing patriarchal oppression has many pitfalls, but in addition, this argument is simply false. Trans women do experience misogyny. In particular, trans women and femmes are hypervisible, fetishized, objectified, invalidated, and abused, facing a confluence of oppressions like transmisia and misogyny. In this, trans women face a specific intersection of these known as transmisogyny. And to disconnect transmisogyny and define other manifestations of misogyny as more “real” is in itself a form of gender-based violence. To assert that transmisogyny or any experience of trans womanhood is less than or isn’t as “real” is cissexist violence and is often weaponized to enact more violence. Although often erased or invalidated, all trans women experience misogyny. Trans women of all ages, all types of presentation/expression, and through all different stages of transitioning (or not transitioning) do in fact experience misogyny in addition to transmisia, often in the form of transmisogyny specifically. It’s in the way autonomy is stolen systemically such as by the medical-industrial complex in gatekeeping life-saving medical procedures or by the state in withholding access to social institutions through so-called “bathroom bills” or “bathroom laws”. It’s present interpersonally in cis people asking invasive and inappropriate questions or touching our bodies without consent to see if they are “real”. Even simply navigating life and existing often means trans women, including those who present more conventionally masculine, experience transmisogyny such as by being constantly misgendered.Related: ON PUSSY HATS AND TRANSMISOGYNY
#IfMenHadPeriods Ignores the Men Who Do Have Periods — And is Fueling the TERFs
Social media campaign #IfMenHadPeriods may be well-meaning, but it gets the whole struggle wrong. OB/GYN Jennifer Gunter created the hashtag, intending to illuminate the struggles that people with uteruses have, but completely ignored the trans population in the process. As we all
Dear Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists: I Don’t Actually Hate My Femininity
It was one of those nights that I couldn’t sleep. Even though I knew it was a bad idea, I kept scrolling through my phone at 3 a.m. after coming across a terrible website, and of course I kept reading