Unpublished comment for the Fe-Mail/MailOnline
I was contacted yesterday by a reporter for the Fe-Mail/MailOnline for a comment about the poorly written BBC article claiming that there was a newsworthy problem with trans women pressuring cis lesbians for sex (see screenshot below). I agreed to write a boxed comment (to ensure it didn’t get clipped to somehow frame me as a predator myself or justifying abuse).
Edited: since writing this, Lily Cade, self admitted sexual abuser and one of the primary sources for the BBC piece, has written 4 essays calling for the murder of named trans women and trans women in general. This should have been predicted in advance from emboldening a hate movement.
The article simply went to print without my comment at 6am this morning. It posts screenshots of tweets from 2 cis left wing media figures, neither of whom I would regard as a “trans activist”, in terms of the other side being discussed.
The text below would have been my comment. I stand with all survivors of sexual coercion and would like to call for unified efforts to bring an end to sexual violence.
The right to choose our sexual partners is a freedom that protects everyone. Authentic consent is the standard any conversation about sex should be built on.
Despite working on the article for over a year, the piece used shoddy evidence — a small social media poll from 2 years ago, multiple case studies the author had to reach to North America for to pad the story out, and a tweet reacting to a sticker based disinformation campaign spotted and challenged publicly by trans activists as early as February 2020 — to inflate a small number of incidents into a threat we are told is being pushed by “trans activists” on cis (a.k.a “non-trans”) lesbians collectively.
The piece shamed trans women in general: it blamed “trans activists”, but we all get labelled activists whenever we speak up for ourselves. It also misrepresented sexual coercion as a problem mostly perpetrated by one minority group against another. To support this idea it quotes a cis lesbian porn performer talking about feeling pressured to do a scene with a trans woman, while erasing her notoriety having at least somewhat admitted to multiple accusations of rape and sexual assault made by many other women working in porn, and admitted online to getting off on pushing women’s boundaries around STI barriers. Erasing this context obviously helps make the one sided story of trans abusers and innocent cis people a lot simpler to tell.
Despite the headline “We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women”, another of the reported cases describes pressure from one cis woman to another to engage in a threesome she didn’t want. Let’s be real: there are countless people who have experienced inappropriate pressure from a partner to have a threesome they don’t want. It is never okay, but it is a wider problem around consent culture and trans women as a group are not more responsible for this than anyone else.
Stereotyping trans women as repulsive and predatory helps enable some forms of sexual violence. Many of us who have experienced sexual violence were told that the perpetrator could not have attacked us because “they’re not interested in THAT”, or “noone would want you”. Or in some cases our partners are shamed about their relationships with us and hide us from family or attack us to prove themselves to their peers.
Lesbian and bisexual cis women who date us are often shamed for it within the lesbian community, the same way that men who date us are shamed by other men. In fact well-known cis lesbians who even speak up for trans rights have been facing a torrent of sexualised abuse online from anti-trans groups as punishment for daring to stand by us.
Scapegoating trans women distracts us all from dealing with sexual violence, onto fighting over false divisions between “trans activists” and other rights groups. As a bisexual trans woman and feminist I’ve stood against sexual violence since my teens, and I think we should all refuse to play into this culture war.
