When I first wrote the essay below about #MeToo last October, the movement was still in its early stages. The New York Times had outed Harvey Weinstein as a serial sexual abuser just three weeks prior. In that short span, millions of women and femmes — cisgender and transgender — cried out on social media to bring awareness to the exhaustive scope of sexual harassment and assault. But some of their voices were heard more clearly than others, and in the wave of outrage that followed, cisgender women received a vastly greater amount of attention than their trans peers.
Today we sit on the verge of the Oscars, where the industry that protected the man whose brutality launched a movement will, with any hope, publicly reckon with itself. But as I predicted in this piece, the marginalization of trans women and femmes within #MeToo has continued unabated, and will, with near certainty, continue on this Sunday’s ceremony as well.
In this video, we asked British model and activist Munroe Bergdorf to stand alongside three other trans women — writer and activist Xoài Phạm, photographer and activist Jari Jones, and designer Yael Levine — to speak out about their experiences facing sexual assault and its aftermath, and how #MeToo has failed to center their voices. In the process, they share devastating insight into the extent to which trans women and femmes bear the brunt of sexual assault and harassment, from both men and society at large.
“I don't feel like trans women are allowed to be sexually empowered without it being a thing,” Bergdorf tells us. “I feel like that's a cis, privileged thing — that a woman can be sexual, she can be gorgeous, she can be attractive and that just be her. But for a trans woman to do that, it feeds into a whole narrative of us being fetishized.”
“I think there are cis, able-bodied white women who ... [the work] they're doing I think is amazing, but there are femmes and black trans women out there who are doing it to survive and to live, and some of them are screaming ‘me too’ from the ground that they've just been beaten up on,” says Jones. “Some of them are screaming ‘me too’ from the hospital that they’re laying in. And some of them can't scream because they’re dead.”
Their words are powerful and necessary, especially as we consider whose voices are heard, and why, in America today.
When it comes to movements for social change, many of us have a tendency to pay attention to one issue at a time. In the wake of the tragic Parkland school shooting, America’s focus is directed largely towards gun violence. But for movements to have the continuity and momentum they need to effect real change in the world, it’s important for all of us to hold a multitude of pressing issues in our minds. Gun violence is a real and urgent threat in this country, but to devote our attention and resources to it at the expense of movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and others will only weaken each in turn. Just as #MeToo has proven to ignore the voices of trans women, so too must we dedicate ourselves to centering intersectionality in our activism, and holding many ideas in our minds at once, as hard as that sometimes may be.
Many are predicting that the Oscars will turn instead from #MeToo to a discussion of gun violence this Sunday. But advocating for an issue that isn’t about our most recent national tragedy or systemic failure of justice doesn’t mean you’re overlooking it. If the Academy fails to center #MeToo this Sunday, they will prove themselves to be as out of touch as their critics predict. And if we continue to ignore the outcry of trans women as we work to end sexual assault, the #MeToo movement will prove itself to be out of touch as well, and millions of transgender women and femmes will continue to suffer. As the #MeToo movement has proven, justice is in the hands of each of us to uphold, and if we fail to do so equally and intersectionally, each of us will face the oppression that will result. — MT
The article below was originally published on them. on October 27, 2017
As the fallout from multiple accusations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein reverberates throughout Hollywood and beyond, and more powerful men of all industries are exposed as harassers and rapists, the social media call #MeToo continues to spread awareness of the extent and degree of cisgender women’s experiences of toxic masculinity. Yet as the movement to bring powerful men to justice continues to grow, we must also reckon with #MeToo’s limitations, chiefly that the centering of cisgender women’s experiences of harassment and assault excludes and arguably erases the lived realities of those whose gender identity and expression leave them at their most vulnerable — trans and gender-nonbinary people.
A number of trans writers have already commented on the difficulties trans folks have in joining the #MeToo conversation. Sarah McBride writes about the hardships of publicly disclosing her sexual assault as a trans woman, and Raquel Willis advocates for extending the resonance of #MeToo to trans and GNC people. But for both McBride and Willis, there exists an assumption that cisgender women should rightfully reside at the center of the assault and harassment discussion, which does not account for how such a centering oppresses trans and GNC people in ways that are reminiscent of how cis men marginalize cis women.
If we operate under the principle that numbers or political power shouldn’t matter, that our priority should be to center the experience of the most vulnerable people in relation to an issue, then it’s clear that #MeToo uses its own centers of power — mainly the sheer number of cis women and the fact that the current discussion involves famous people — to prioritize the needs of cisgender women over trans and GNC folks. There have been many calls for cisgender men who’ve been victims of harassment and assault to yield to the experiences of more oppressed cisgender women, which is necessary and vital work. Yet, if cis women are operating under the principle that those who experience the greatest oppression must be centered, then they might consider yielding to trans and GNC people, because that demographic experiences the greatest oppression because of gender.
There have been numerous examples of the heinous ways that trans and GNC people — especially though not exclusively trans women and nonbinary femmes of color — experience assault and harassment. Islan Nettles, for example, was murdered because a man who made sexual advances on her realized she was transgender; Mercedes Williamson was dating a man and was killed because he didn’t want his friends to know he was dating a trans woman; Victoria Carmen White was shot and killed because her killer discovered she was transgender after meeting her at a club and coming home with her.
Trans and GNC folks are so much more vulnerable than cis women: We not only experience unwanted sexual advances and provocations, but we are also at risk of being physically assaulted or murdered when those who approach us are unable to deal with their own attractions. Transmasculine people are at risk of assault themselves when they’re seen as “less than” men, or if they threaten the superiority of cis men. But because their hardships aren’t connected to powerful men, and because society considers them less important than cisgender women (especially ones who are famous and white), it’s not their plight that sparks news or widespread social media attention.
It’s also vital to note that an often-overlooked thread uniting LGBTQ+ victims of gender-based violence is the way they are often victimized for existing between genders. Though people across the spectrum of LGBTQ+ identity have experienced gender-based violence, what comes into play in dangerous situations is typically not how victims themselves identify, but the fact that the people who attack them see them as not belonging to a binary gender, or subscribing to binary gender norms. This is true whether it’s femme gay men, trans women, or nonbinary transfemmes, or even transmasculine people who are seen as threats to cis men. Any dynamic that casts binary women as the most vulnerable victims of gender-based violence at a structural level ignores how those who fall outside of the binary are even more vulnerable to pervasive and severe attack.
Of course, I am merely speaking of priorities in terms of the social structure we live in, rather than individual victims of harassment and assault. It’s possible to sympathize with individual cis woman victims while also recognizing that as a whole, trans and GNC folks are less likely to receive such sympathy, even when our experiences of gender-based violence are more severe and pervasive. Jane Fonda has made a similar point in relation to race and how white women are more likely to gain sympathy, yet to date, no major Hollywood figure has addressed how brutally trans women and femmes are treated on a regular basis compared to cis women. Even as feminists are now able to glancingly incorporate racial inequality into their ways of thinking, trans and nonbinary people continue to be footnotes in discussions of gender-based violence, even when we’re the ones who are most affected.
As more and more cis women band together through the #MeToo hashtag to make society aware of their plight, it’s vital to understand that there are those of us who are even more vulnerable, but whose experiences are only accounted for if they resemble those of cis women. The current awareness that the hashtag has provoked may lead to better conditions for cis women in Hollywood and other industries, but it does little for trans and GNC people who live their daily lives under constant threat of anti-LGBTQ+ harassment and assault. We are not powerful enough, not important enough, not abundant enough, to spark widespread or viral outrage when our experiences of violence are told or reported on, regardless of how much worse they are compared to famous cis white women. It’s in this way that cis women’s empowerment through #MeToo stands to leave trans and GNC people even more marginalized.
Meredith Talusan is the Executive Editor of them. and an award-winning journalist and author. They have written features, essays, and opinion pieces for many publications, including The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Nation, Mic, and BuzzFeed News. She received 2017 GLAAD Media and Deadline Awards, and her debut memoir, Fairest, is forthcoming from Viking Books, a division of Penguin Random House.
