Cis Women Do Bad Things Too
‘I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.’
Those were the words 16 year old Brenda Spencer told reporters when asked why she had begun shooting at children waiting at the gates of the Grover Cleveland Elementary School across the road from her home in San Diego, California, injuring eight children and killing the school principal Burton Wragg, and custodian Mike Suchar. We’ve become inured to the idea of school shootings these days, but in 1979, when Spencer opened fire, they were a new and terrifying phenomenon. Spencer achieved worldwide notoriety, her chilling explanation inspiring a hit song from punk band the Boomtown Rats (though I prefer the Tori Amos version).
One thing Brenda Spencer didn’t have to go through was the experience of being misgendered by frothing conspiracy theorists before the gunsmoke cleared. Nasim Aghdam, the woman responsible for the shooting at YouTube’s California headquarters on April 3rd, has not been so lucky. Within hours of the shooting, transphobic self-styled ‘feminists’ on Twitter were declaring that the attack couldn’t possibly be the work of a cis woman, and must instead be the action of a TIM — a Trans-Identified Male, which is what these bigots call trans women. Progress of a sort I guess — I remember when they used to call us SCAMs — Surgically and Chemically Altered Males.
After the name of the shooter and images from her YouTube videos were released, the focus of these bigots shifted to trying to prove that Aghdam is trans. All the usual tropes came out to play here: her hands were too big, her face wasn’t classically feminine, her make-up was striking and unusual, her brows were too thick, in some videos she was pictured with what appeared to be digitally enhanced breasts, her biceps and thigh and calf muscles were unusually developed for a cis woman, she wasn’t curvy enough, and so on and so forth. All in all a veritable grab bag of misogyny, a surprising thing to see, one would think, from a group of self-styled ‘feminists’. But when it comes to their obsession with removing trans women from public life or, to quote TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) godmother Janice Raymond, ‘morally mandating [trans women] out of existence’, there is no depth to which these bigots will not sink.
Any trans person will tell you that if Aghdam had been trans, we would have known by now: media reports of the attack would have deadnamed her, and every report of the attack would be accompanied by before and after pics of the trans shooter. Donald Trump would give out about how shooting people somehow proves trans women have no place in the military. The array of anti-trans fringe groups currently trying to scaremonger about changes to the UK Gender Recognition Act would cite her trans status as proof that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to use the ladies’ loos because, well, what if we turned out to be somewhat unstable vegan bodybuilders with access to a firearm?
Indeed, so tempting is the idea of using Aghdam as a stick to beat trans women with that these groups have now cheerfully donned their tinfoil hats and began claiming that she is trans, and the fact we haven’t seen any mention of her being so in the news reports is the result of AN CONSPIRACY by the all-powerful trans cabal, probably aided in some way by George Soros, somehow. Faced with an absence of evidence these Lone Gunwomen have resolved that not only is it not evidence of absence, but the very fact of its absence is itself evidence of the cover-up. This is not dissimilar to the actions of Islamophobic alt-right Internet personalities in the wake of the Quebec mosque shooting in January 2017, as described in the video below:
The idea that Aghdam is trans, and that the media are refusing to say so out of fear of the terrifying global reach of the Powerful Trans Lobby, is of course nonsense. But it speaks to a key element of TERF ideology, which is that violence is a property of male bodies (including, for TERFs, trans women who are assigned male at birth). Women, possessed of the pure, nurturing feminine essence, are never violent, on which basis the YouTube shooter must be trans and therefore, in their terms, male.
Now, statistically, most violence is committed by cisgender men: roughly 90% of violent crimes have cis male perpetrators, and approximately 10% are cis women (trans people figure in the gaps around those approximatelies — there aren’t really enough of us to be statistically significant, but we can be violent too. Unlike the TERFs, I don’t imagine all people of my gender to be beautiful summertime peace elves.) But even though men are in the majority when it comes to violent crime, ten per cent is a statistically significant minority. Karl Popper famously held that once you see one black swan, you have to accept that the hypothesis that all swans are white is false. Ten per cent of violent crimes is a lot of black swans which the theory that violence is a property of male-assigned bodies has to account for.
This is why, for the past couple of months, I’ve been running a Facebook page, Today in ‘Cis Women Are NEVER Violent’, which collects examples of cis women, well, being violent. Some highlights:
- a gang of at least ten cis girls beat an Egyptian engineering student to death in a racially motivated attack — perhaps particularly relevant, this, given the racialised nature of so much of the discourse around how Nasim Aghdam doesn’t conform to (white, western) notions of femininity;
- the new head of the CIA, cis woman Gina Haskel, oversaw the brutal torture of detainees in CIA ‘ black sites’ — including one case where a suspect was waterboarded a staggering 83 times;
- a gang of cis women in the Philippines literally raped a woman with chili peppers in a revenge attack;
- a cis woman bit a Muslim taxi driver in a racially aggravated assault;
- two teenage Russian cis women sadistically tortured dogs and cats, even going so far as to take selfies with the decapitated head of a dog,
and that’s just some of the examples from the page. I haven’t even gone into historical cases of violent cis women like Joyce McKinney, Betty Broderick, or the two cis girls who assaulted trans woman Chrissy Lee Polis in the bathroom of a McDonalds just outside of Baltimore.
Most of the cis women I’ve talked to, in my travels across the country doing poetry gigs, get this. Most of the cis women I know have their own stories of experiencing violence at the hands of other cis women. I myself have been sexually assaulted by a cis woman, endured violent physical attacks from cis girls as a child (including one mass beating and an attempted immolation), and some of the most violent and sexually twisted death threats I’ve received in my life came from a cis woman with an unhealthy, serial killer-ish obsession with trans women’s genitalia. That violence wears a female as well as male face is one of the axiomatic assumptions of this current project of mine.
I don’t need telling, and most women, cis and trans, don’t need telling, that women are capable of being just as violent as men. But to those whose ideology locates violence only in the male body, or in bodies they consider male, the existence of the violent cis woman represents a tremendous source of cognitive dissonance. And, as happens all too often, this dissonance is resolved not by accepting that their ideology could, to say the least, do with some revision, but rather by resorting to smears, innuendo and conspiracy theory.
It is in their disgraceful reaction to this tragic shooting in California that we see the true measure of the soi-disant ‘feminist’ bigots who scaremonger about women’s safety to satisfy their desire to persecute women. It remains to be seen whether those in the British media who have chosen to amplify their voices will finally realise and openly denounce the hatefulness of these transphobes, and the falsity of their alleged concerns.
