Questioning Transphobia

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), the longtime leader of efforts to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s funding that goes towards women’s health programs, has released a statement saying that the videos produced by Lila Rose’s radical group Live Action should push Congress to defund Planned Parenthood. The Religious Right has consistently tried to demonize Planned Parenthood in order to strip the organization of its federal funding, and Live Action’s videos have encouraged anti-choice groups to step-up their activities. While Planned Parenthood notified the FBI of a possible sex trafficking ring promptly after members of Live Action tried to scam clinic workers, anti-choice leaders embraced the discredited videos anyway. Pence is now calling on Congress to pass his legislation that would end federal funding of Planned Parenthood:

The recent release of an undercover video exposing duplicity and potential criminality by an employee of Planned Parenthood is an outrage.

Every American should be shocked that an employee of the largest recipient of federal funds under Title X has been recorded aiding and abetting underage sex trafficking.

The time to deny any and all funding to Planned Parenthood is now. In the wake of yet another scandal involving Planned Parenthood, I urge Congress to move the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act to the floor for immediate consideration.

Dear Lisa,

This is it. Right now, Congress is considering a provision to strip all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers.

This is truly an emergency for Planned Parenthood and women’s health. Call now and tell your U.S. representative to vote NO.

Anti-choice leaders in the House are forcing a vote that would deny Planned Parenthood health centers every dime of federal funding.Without this funding, many people would lose access to their only source of basic health care.

We need you to act now by calling your representative. Click here to be connected, or just dial 202-730-9001 and tell your representative to vote NO on any attempt to defund Planned Parenthood.

Critical public health programs including Title X provide funding for birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, and other lifesaving care for those who can’t otherwise afford it — and all of this funding is in danger. For many women, Planned Parenthood clinics are theonly source for these services.

The consequences of passing this bill are clear — and they would be devastating. More women would have unintended pregnancies. Cancer would develop, undiagnosed, in countless women. There is no doubt: cutting off millions of women from care they have no other way to afford places them at risk of sickness and death.

That’s exactly what Congress is voting on this week. It’s up to us to tell them NO. It’s up to us to protect local health centers and the people who rely on them every day. It’s up to us to make it clear that we will not stand for these outrageous attacks on Planned Parenthood or any effort to undermine access to lifesaving care. Speak out now — demand that your U.S. representative vote NO.

Thank you for standing with us and helping to protect Planned Parenthood and the women, men, and teens our health centers serve.

I only heard about this a few hours ago and it’s already been blogged about at least twice. Since I seem unable to assemble a complete post today,

Cara at the Curvature:

Trigger Warning for anti-trans violence, ungendering, victim-blaming, and police and media transphobia/transmisogyny.

Yesterday a man badly beat a woman who was riding in his car and then dumped her in front of an apartment complex before driving away, seemingly for no reason other than that she was trans. Though this is awful enough on its own, police and local media decided to add insult to that injury by fitting as many transphobic tropes as they possibly could into barely one hundred words. The KENS5 news story starts as follows:

A man was in for quite a surprise after learning the woman in his car was a transgender person.

Police say the suspect apparently snapped and beat the woman in the face repeatedly before dumping her off at an apartment complex in the 3200 block of Hillcrest.

The first sentence here is utterly despicable. Rather than identifying with the woman who was assaulted — who I imagine was in for quite a surprise when the man who she was in the car with started beating her in the face — the phrasing immediately and intentionally identifies with the man who assaulted her. Stating that he “was in for quite a surprise” suggests that any normal person — presumed to be cis, of course — would be “surprised” to learn that they were spending their time with a trans* person. And more than surprised, any such person would be rightly appalled. To say that trans* people are inherently “surprising” is to register them as inherently strange and abnormal, their very existence and identities as shocking and upsetting.

The rest at the link

Also, at Deeply Problematic:

Trigger warning for description of violence against trans women .

A woman was brutally beaten this week for being trans. Media coverage has been scant, and little information has been released by the police, but here is what has been released: an unnanmed 24-year-old woman went on a date with a man with whom she had some kind of “arrangement”. When he found out that she was trans, he thoroughly beat her around the face and left her at an apartment complex. She had to knock on a stranger’s door begging for help to get medical and police attention.

The San Antonio police department are investigating this crime not as the hate crime it pretty clearly is, but as aggravated assault. This could have something to do with the fact that the Texas hate crime law excludes trans people (but of course, protects sexual orientation). But as John Wright of the Dallas Voice points out, “the new federal hate crimes law passed last year does protect transgender people and presumably could be used in this case. If the man beat the victim because she is transgender and not cisgender, then yeah, we’d say that’s a hate crime.”

So I want to talk about ignorance, not strictly as an individual problem (although that’s how we usually interact with it) but as a systemic, institutional problem.

Ignorance is not a neutral state of lack of knowledge. It’s not a situation, typically, where a person just doesn’t know anything about a topic. Ignorance is a malignant, hostile state in which people learn about things based on received wisdom, common sense, media representation, and how it’s slanted as news. Ignorant people are not malignant and hostile, but their ignorance is informed by this malignant hostility.

Take trans women – what is someone who is ignorant of trans women likely to think? Some totally false and harmful ideas include:

• Trans women are really cis men in dresses
• Trans women transition because we have a sexual fetish about feminity or femaleness.
• A trans woman who has sex with a cis person (especially a cis man) is probably tricking that cis person into sex by not disclosing that she’s trans and thus “really a man.”
• That if the cis person attacks, injures, or even kills her for this, his crime is “understandable” and perhaps this assumed deception could be described as rape
• Trans women do not understand femininity, makeup, fashion, and overdo it to the point of artless hyperfemininity
• Trans women like being objectified as sex objects
• Trans women are really like cis men until one day we decide to transition.
• Trans women sin by transitioning.
• Trans women are entirely focused on surgery.
• Chromosomes define sex and gender
• Genitals define sex and gender
• Cis women are “biological women” and trans women are not.
• Trans women are dangerous predators and should not be allowed to share restrooms, showers, DV and rape shelters, and other spaces with cis women

And I could go on. These are prejudices that are justified with ignorance, because you know, people don’t know. But I know cis people who informed by these hostile stereotypes can still treat trans women as women and human beings, and I know cis people who have the education and knowledge that these are not correct, and are still toxically transphobic. Like I said in my Empathy and Kyriarchy post, the failure is empathy, the inability or unwillingness to make a connection with another human being because she is different in some perceived or tangible way.

And I want to talk about ignorance from this perspective, that it’s not a state of innocence or a blank slate. That they’ve already been inscribed upon by living in a transphobic, misogynist culture. As I said in my post about socialization, socialization does not indelibly define us for life, and of course people of all kinds have the ability to resist this cultural demonization and come to their own conclusions.

But that doesn’t mean ignorance isn’t harmful and that putting information out there to correct these prejudices is useless. It’s absolutely important to put our own lived realities out there, because this ignorance breeds violence, hatred, it justifies cis people making laws against us, challenging our marriages, our lives, firing us from jobs, never hiring us, refusing to allow us to rent housing.  This ignorance creates a world where the many trans women live in poverty and are unable to work for a living, where the intersections of transphobia and misogyny in addition to race, disability, and class combine to place trans women in a vulnerable position.

This post focuses on trans women, transphobia, and misogyny, but this applies to everything else. One thing I’ve been learning about ADHD is just how much ignorance is out there, how much misinformation the internet and the media are flooded with. How ADHD simply pathologizes “normal childhood behavior,” how medication always turns children into zombies, how ADHD is not really a severe or serious (if treatable) condition, how ADHD is something children have but adults do not, how it’s a totally manufactured disorder funded by pharmaceutical companies to sell pills that no one really needs, and so on and on it goes. It’s there with race and class and we could be here for hours.

My point is, that there’s a lot of territory between active hate groups (such as Focus on the Family) and people whose ignorance shapes their attitudes and behavior toward us more than active antipathy or hatred, but that ignorance itself is fueled and disseminated by hatred. That it perpetuates itself as common sense or received wisdom does not mean that institutionally, that this is anything but malicious. But when we address it, we are addressing people, and I think it’s useful to keep that in mind.

Edit: Just to be clear, if anyone takes the message from this that I am saying to be nice, “watch your tone”, etc, that’s not my point at all. People need to be able to protect themselves and choose how and when they engage. My main point is that ignorance is not a neutral state, and that people who are ignorant are informed by a hostile system. I am more interested in trying to disempower “ignorance” as a reason for hateful commentary.

I can’t write much today because my left arm is in a lot of pain, possibly from typing 10k+ words a day for the past week, so, I wanted to share this article by Courtney Desiree Morris:

Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away. To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence[1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

That’s picked from somewhere in the middle of the post, and is the heart of why I’m linking it here, because of the abuse I was speaking of in other posts. While I doubt anyone involved with this online are informants, they had the same disruptive impact on social justice blogging and thus online activism.

So yesterday, the Bush administration yesterday granted sweeping new protections to health workers who refuse to provide care that violates their personal beliefs.  Jill at Feministe has pointed out that while this undoubtedly chiefly aimed at women’s reproductive freedoms, this is actually not about abortion–which depressingly already has this exception–but easy access to contraception.

One point I want to make about that, which I’ve stolen from Lee Edelman’s No Future, is that America is being organised around the figure of The Child.  Not actual children, let alone the adults those children grow into, but a rhetorical child who must be protected at all costs–from the corrupting influence of gay marriages, porn on the internet etc and who must always be allowed to exist.

The rights of the Child, who is figured as a full person and not as a body of cells or ffs an egg and a sperm, supercedes the rights of adult women to have control over their bodies.  Never mind that people (and I want to make the point that it’s not just women, eg some trans men use birth control too.  Seriously, pay attention cis feminists and stop making the normative assumption that reproductive health equals het cis woman) use the pill primarily for other health reasons–to regulate their periods, to moderate PMS and PMDD etc etc.  And needless to say, The Child does not grow up to be queer, or trans, or sexually active outside the sanctity of marriage.  And The Child is clearly normatively white.

But whilst it is clearly aimed at heterosexual cis women, it will have a massive impact on other groups–especially trans men and women.

From the Washington Post:

“The far-reaching regulation cuts off federal funding for any state or local government, hospital, health plan, clinic or other entity that does not accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other employees who refuse to participate in care they find ethically, morally or religiously objectionable.”

Ok, let that sink in a bit.  Care they find ethically, morally or religiously objectionable.  Now, where is that going to leave trans people?  Sex workers?  People they think are drug users (a highly racialized image after all)?  People with disabilities?

Like queerness, being trans has been framed by many on the Religious Right as a moral issue.  To be trans is to be, by definition, immoral.  By situating health care as a “conscience” issue, this law allows transphobic health care workers–not just doctors, but pharmacists, emergency medics etc etc–full license to indulge their bigotry and to not treat us.  So, even if you can get through the knife lined obstacle course that is the gatekeeper process and get through to a hormone prescription, the bloody pharmacist might not even give them to you.

We all know health care for trans people is already shitty, let alone giving health care providers carte blanche to treat us worse. Remember Tyra Hunter, who died because firefighters decided not to perform emergency resuscitation on her when they discovered she was trans, and then a doctor at Washington General decided not to treat her.  Because she was trans, because she was a woman of color, because she was not a person, she was an “it.”  And, because some people consider that our existence is immoral and must be squashed out.

This is a nightmare of a ruling that potentially allows any person in the health-care business to rule that treating trans people goes against their conscience, and when something serious is occuring, you don’t have the time to shop around for someone who will treat you.

And the intersection between transness and race here will be even more deadly.  Medicine has a long history of being used against people of color in the US, and this gives health care people legal protections to further that.  As Kristin “the mean one on Feministe” just said to me, making the horrid implications of this explicitly clear:

“I didn’t quite make the connection as to why doctors would want to refuse anyone treatment in the context of a miscarriage at first.  It just clicked.  Why would they want to do that other than to refuse treatment to people they judge to be the “cause” of the miscarriage?   You know, people like, say, possible drug users.  Or people otherwise marked as “unworthy” of care.  Say, homeless people, immigrants…  Fuck.  I mean, why else would anyone demand that kind of “right”?  Fuck fuck fuck…  I think this is going to be even more evil in practice than it looks on the surface.  If that kind of “protection” becomes a fucking protocol, oh my god…  If this becomes widespread…  Organized against a specific group, that’s genocidal.”

Debi Crow, Belledame, Hoyden About Town, Caroline, Renegade Evolution, and Queen of Thorns have all posted responses to radfem concern trolling – whether it’s Polly Styrene’s tantrum that The F Word didn’t approve her usual anti-trans misogyny, Jo22′s concern that trans women like sex workers because we transition so we can be sexually empowerful prostitutes, or mAndrea’s deficient and morally bankrupt logic, the responses are pretty clear: These particular radical feminists clearly do not speak for all radical feminists, all feminists nor all women when it comes to trans hatred.

I don’t really like giving any of them direct attention, as there are real issues that trans women are dealing with right now. Issues that I wish could see more exposure. The vile things that these media personalities are saying about Isis and Angie Zapata are well beyond the pale and we really need to respond to that – especially since these jokes are exactly the same as Andrade’s dehumanizing description of Angie Zapata as he killed her.

But, to be fair, as much as I’d like radfem views to receive less oxygen, Hoyden About Town makes the point about how mAndrea and her commenters talk about trans women:

Isn’t that sort of contempt and disgust exactly what led to Allen Andrade beating Angie Zapata to death when he found out (through an act of sexual assault) that she wasn’t a born-woman?

This, right here. The radfems right now – not just Polly, mAndrea, and Jo22, but many many others – are having a collective – for lack of a better word – tantrum about trans women right now. They’re creating spurious blogs (“eatingblueberriesistransphobic.wordpress.com), organizing letter-writing campaigns to The F Word’s owner because transphobic hate speech wasn’t being approved.

But let them fulminate. Let them explode. Let them reveal their hatred in all its gory ugliness. Why? Before I started blogging, I looked back through the various trans wars that had occurred in the feminist blogosphere, and what I saw, as Emily pointed out:

I have complained numerous times that the feminist blogosphere, such as it is, has one main conversation about trans people, one that is returned to again and again and again – the political implications of our transitioning. Click here if you want yet another example of pointless bloody “analysis.”

I don’t CARE about whatever horrible thing some feminist has said anymore. I care that these discussions centre on cis concerns, even (maybe especially) allies respond mostly to the slurs, but rarely address the real issues.

But this particular outbreak feels different – part of it is, no doubt, that Angie Zapata’s death received a lot of attention from cis feminists. But part of it is also that this hasn’t really been a blog war – the vast majority of it is happening in radfem echo chambers, where they’re exposing all that aforementioned ugliness. And what if the radfems hold their own blogwar, and we don’t come, and the next person who pages through the trans wars finds this mess – finds mAndrea’s series of “why we should all hate trans women” articles, or Polly’s “Gender Delusion” blog, her “How dare the F Word not approve my insightful post!” when her own attitudes toward trans issues are plastered over half the trans conversations in blogdonia already? What if they have cis and trans bloggers talking about actual, real issues that affect trans women (whose concerns, as women, are feminism’s concerns) while the radfems pitch themselves into a fevered frenzy of bigoted, misogynist, hatred?

And there’s real issues that trans people are facing beyond America’s Next Top Model. For example:

Trannies! Send backup!

… was the call from a steward, at a gay pride parade, when transwomen got somewhat pissed off at being told they weren’t allowed to use the women’s toilets. A transwoman was later sexually assaulted because she was given no choice but to use the men’s toilets.

This still hasn’t been resolved, and it shouldn’t have happened at all. It is yet another instance of trans women’s safety sacrificed for cis women’s comfort.

So, while I’m not specifically asking that no one call out their bigoted assholishness, I am asking that this other stuff – stuff in the real world, that affects trans women, gets mentioned too.

But, since mAndrea wants this spread around to many blogs, I will link and quote a couple comments:

K. A.:

Basically, fetishist MtF collude with every other misogynist man and choose to participate in the dynamic in an alternate way. They spin it as a handicap when it’s really a male-entitled sexual fantasy that actively oppresses women just as any other pornsick man does. It’s the rape and total control over a synthetic female body, giving him and any other man he includes full access to treating women the way they both love to fetishize treating women. They then strengthen the conditioned response to female parts with their misogynist sex. That’s why you see so many misogynists patronizing MtF prostitutes, and MtF prostitutes happy to do it.
Sexist men look out for each other and will cooperate to control women’s bodies in any novel way they can think of.

mAndrea’s response:

K.A., that was a most brillant analysis, and needs a wider audience then what is available here. Hopefully other readers will carry your idea to other blogs, because it was perfect.

There is your radical feminist trans hatred. Rape apologism. Victim blaming. Slut shaming. Does anyone really need any more at this point?

via Autumn Sandeen at Pam’s House Blend.

Update: Donna Rose got on the air with Rover during his morning show, and she has posts up on her conversation here and here. Read freeper style comments by Rover listeners here. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~As I’m writing this piece early August 15th, there are two stories of really dehumanizing comments by large, corporate media outlets towards trans people in the news. The more recent of the stories is from August 14th on the Fox News Channel, in which Fox aired a crude and obnoxious segment concerning the recent announcement of America’s Next Top Model: there’s going to be a transgender contestant on the show. The earlier piece is from August 13th, in which a syndicated Clear Channel Communication morning radio show referred to the recently murdered transgender teen Angie Zapata as a “man,” a “he,” a “he/she,” a “thing,” and an “it.” From GLAAD’s press release on the story from the Fox News Channel: Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett and Us Weekly Editor-at-Large Ian Drew spent the segment gratuitously insulting the America’s Next Top Model contestant, using dehumanizing terminology, inaccurate and inappropriate pronouns and offensive references to her anatomy.While laughing and joking, Jarrett mocked Isis’ description of herself as a woman whose “cards were dealt differently,” and said, “That’s an understatement!”  Drew referred to recent instances of transgender visibility on reality television as “The Crying Game ’08,” going on to call the show “America’s Next Top Tranny.”  Drew then said that she doesn’t look any different from other contestants because “they are not exactly the most high-class group of women.”  Throughout the segment, Jarrett switched back and forth between male and female pronouns, and both Jarrett and Drew suggested that Isis “fooled” people by “blending in.”  They went on to make crude remarks about her genitalia and the pitch of her voice. Here’s the segment: [Below the fold: Fox News Channel Contact Info ; "Rover's Morning Glory" uses defamatory language to refer to hate crime murder victim Angie Zapata.]

Autumn Sandeen :: Dehumanizing Transgender Human Beings

Want to contact Fox News about this? From the GLAAD press release again: Please contact Fox News Channel and call on them to apologize for these obnoxious, insulting and dehumanizing comments.Fox News Channel Gregg Jarrett  - Anchor (212) 301-3000 gregg.jarrett@foxnews.com Jay Wallace – Executive Producer (212) 301-5168 jay.wallace@foxnews.com Tom Lowell – Senior Producer (212) 301-3000  (outlet) tom.lowell@foxnews.com Over at Donna Rose’s Donna Blog, she reports on what she heard on the radio going into work on the 13th: When I got into the car this morning to drive to work the radio was set to the local “rock” station.  There was some sort of syndicated show on – the typical schtik with 3 crass, ignorant guys and one woman who generally disagrees with the idiots.  I really didn’t think much of it until the ring leader of this little troupe decided that he wanted to talk about Angie Zapata.  That got my attention.This crew is called “Rover’s Morning Glory” and, as you might guess, the main star is Rover.  Others of his crew include Dumb, Dieter, and Chocolate Charlie. …The reason I waste my energy on these people at all is that they spent a good 15 minutes saying things that they need to be held accountable for.  They explained the Angie Zapata story in the most disgusting, vile way possible – making sure to refer to Angie as a “man”, a “he”, a “he/she”, a “thing”, and an “it”.  They explained that her murderer was justified in being angry and in killing Angie.  In fact, Rover said, if he were on the jury he’d vote to acquit.  They implied that others would be justified in similar actions, and that Angie deserved it.  It was disgusting, irresponsible, and crossed any boundary of decency. The defamatory language really would be on par with having DJ’s referring to a Matthew Sheppard as a “faggot” or a “fairy” on air, and saying they’d let his killers go if they were jurrors…It’s really as abhorant as that. The relevant contact info: WMMS– Clear Channel Cleveland 6200 Oak Tree Blvd. 4th Floor Cleveland, Ohio 44131-2510 (216) 520-2600Wanna complain? or give props? e-mail programming: Bo Matthews buzzard@wmms.com Clear Channel Corporate Phone #: Clear Channel 200 East Basse Road San Antonio, TX 78209 Phone 1-210-822-2828 By the way, if you contact Fox or Clear Channel, you probably would want to reference what the Associated Press Styleguide says in their entry on transgender, and the GLAAD Media Reference Guide’s Transgender Glossary on Defamatory Terminology.

Quoted in its completeness, with apologies to Autumn Sandeen. I don’t have the energy today to write out yet more descriptions of how people think it’s okay to dehumanize trans women, to describe us in these ways.

But if you give a damn, please please please contact the above and make complaints. This behavior should be unacceptable.

Update: See Natalia Antonova’s entry for more information. The article below is not entirely accurate (and I admit I didn’t catch the “100% of women are sexually harassed” line.

Per Natalia’s findings, the judge is female, but still unnamed. Many of the numbers in the below article are inaccurately reported or misleading.

I’m still seeing shades of Judge Deni.

Or so says a Russian Judge:

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia’s history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

“He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word,” she earlier told the court. “I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.

This is right up there with judging rape as theft of services.

But this isn’t just about a pithy quote: The article says that the woman hoped to become the third woman in Russian history to successfully bring a sexual harassment case to trial. This is institutionalized thoroughly as the way things are:

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

As Natalia Antonova writes on GlobalComment:

For many women, the post-Soviet reality is one were opportunities are scarce. Anti-discrimination laws may be on the books, but are rarely enforced, especially wherein women are concerned. Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko, much beloved by many Westerners, delivered a sexist and ridiculous speech about the “magic” of women on March 8th, International Women’s Day, this year, and only the truly committed among us called him out on it. Alla Dovlatova, a popular TV figure, recently spoke about how a woman’s best self-defense is either “a disarming smile, or a man.”

When I read that, I remembered the day that Olympian Lilia Podkopaeva, Ukraine’s pride and joy, was robbed and beaten up in in the center of Kiev. Should have the diminutive gymnast greeted her attackers with “a disarming smile”? Was she asking for it because she was not accompanied by a man? I understand Dovlatova’s position, armed defense against a group of thugs can make things much worse for a woman, but the way in which it was stated felt deceptive.

It’s my belief that Dovlatova knows full well the dangers of being female in the post-Soviet landscape, but in public, even an independently successful woman must pretend that men will protect her, that her looks will protect her, because otherwise her feminine magic will dissipate like Cinderella’s carriage at midnight.

Thanks to The Hedonistic Pleasureseeker for pointing this story out on IBTP.