I Don’t Feel Safe Around Cis Women.

No identity promises safety.

Photo by Tim Mossholder, courtesy of Unsplash.

This piece was originally published to Medium on November 15, 2022. Why I’m migrating my archive to Substack.

I was walking home one Saturday evening when two women began following and screaming at me.

“HEY! HEY MAN! HEY SIR! HEY MAN!” one of the women yelled, over and over. She ran across the road and closed up the distance between herself and me. “Can I ask you something?” she asked, staring me down hard a few inches from my face.

“Um, sure,” I said with a laugh. Ignoring them had not worked, so I tried being polite. “What’s up?”

“Why do you walk like that?” The first woman asked. She strode a few feet ahead, one arm up, her wrist limp and hips swaying. She cackled at her own homophobic pantomime, while her friend laughed and tugged at her sleeve. I winced at them, and laughed uncomfortably. They were just kids. It stung to see them being so cruel.

“Oh, you’ve got a pretty smile,” the first woman said, returning uncomfortably close to my side. “Look at that, look at his smile. Give me a smile again. Come on, give me a smile.”

My easily-frozen Autistic ass did not have any social scripts prepared for dealing with this. When men harass me, I have always gotten aggressive and fought back. But two young women cornering me, insulting and sexualizing me? I had no game plan for that.

I looked away from them and kept moving. The women continued after me down the full length of my block, mocking my movements, pelting me with questions, screaming at me, and pressing up close to my body while continually demanding I smile.

When I arrived at my apartment the two women stood outside a while, the first woman hollering “HEY GIRL, HEY GIRL” at me, in a mockery of a gay voice while flipping her wrist, until I disappeared inside. I stood in the dark with my back against the door. My shoulders slumped. I began to cry.

This is the type of degrading, gendered street harassment that women routinely report experiencing from men. Moments like these contribute to many cis women’s perceptions of the outside world and strangers, particularly unfamiliar men, as menacing and unsafe. Yet cis women often refuse to believe that I’ve been preyed upon by people they share an identity category with, and that because of such moments, I don’t feel safe around them.

I don’t feel safe around cis women. And a lifetime of bad experiences has fed into that.

I wrote this piece back in August. I’ve been stewing on my draft for months, wondering if sharing what happened is warranted. I worry that by sharing my story, people will call me an overly dramatic, self-victimizing whiner, and woman-hating misogynist. I worry that women will lob the same kind of victim-blaming questions at me that they typically receive when they are harassed: why didn’t I walk away more quickly, why didn’t I say something assertive, it’s all my fault, why didn’t I fight back.

But every time my confidence falters and I consider killing this piece, some new trans person reaches out to me, with yet another story of a cis woman isolating them, groping them, making them uncomfortable. A Black trans mom tells me that white cis women try to pick her up in bars by asking about her anatomy, while their angry white boyfriends leer in the distance. A butch lesbian explains to me she’s had her ass ogled by cis women at every kitchen job she’s ever had. Last week, a trans guy friend messaged me to ask when my essay about feeling unsafe around cis women would be going live. He wanted to share it with people, to help them understand his own experience.

Then, just three days ago, I got accosted by a drunk, recently divorced cis woman at Holiday Club. We were complete strangers who’d played one round of pool together when she announced to me that she was done with straight men and had been looking to get laid on the sapphic dating site Lex. She hadn’t been having much luck.

She told me that she desperately wanted to get topped by a butch lesbian, but that she’d also been aching to fuck her gay male best friend. Then she told me flirtatiously that I looked like Tilda Swinton, a person I in no way resemble and do not share a gender identity with. Then she threw her arms around me and asked her friend to take a photo of us together. I stiffened, but let it happen.

(As I write this, I can imagine cis women asking me why I went the passive and agreeable route, as if they’ve never had to assent to the intrusions of a man and then been blamed for it.)

The woman at Holiday Club kept grabbing at my hands and embracing me throughout the night, no matter what I did. I jammed my fists in my pockets, turned my back to her, and even crossed the dance floor to get away, but she continually came back, dancing around me, hollering, and touching and trying to drag me wherever she went. I was visibly ill at ease. She even asked me once if I was feeling okay — and then she grabbed hold of my arms and twirled herself in my arms, as if that would make me feel better. It went on like this for hours.

I was so baffled by the brazenness of it all — the misgendering, the flirtatious remarks, the grabbing, the tugging me about the dance floor — that I didn’t know how to respond. The woman was far shorter and slighter than me. I’m nearly always read as male by other people these days, despite this woman’s undermining Tilda Swinton comment. In an open conflict no one would see me as the victim and her as the perpetrator. I didn’t know what to do. I just froze.

The more I sit with what happened and how long it went on, the sadder I feel — and the more this woman’s mistreatment connects in my mind to a rich web of past ones, creating a long tangled snarl of invasions that began when I was very young.

…

All my life, it has been women who have been the most enthusiastic about harassing me and commenting loudly on my body: how it moves, how it’s shaped, how I cover it or choose not to cover it, how much they want a body like mine for their own, how much they want to touch it, how profoundly I am wrecking its feminine potential with my gender transition, and how paradoxically sexy the “damage” I’ve done has made me.

I have been street harassed and physically assaulted by random men before, too, of course. I’ve been in close relationships with men who became physically and emotionally abusive. So I am no stranger to the danger men can pose, especially when you’re alone in private with them, and have given them your reliance or trust.

Most cases of abuse are perpetuated by a person the victim knows intimately, and who holds some degree of power over them, and I am no exception. My experiences, like the experiences of most victims, give the lie to our culture’s notion that danger comes from the unknown and that only those familiar and similar to us are safe.

Isolation & Fear Will Not Keep You Safe

Most abuse happens within the confines of the family, the church, or romantic relationships. So why are we so afraid of…

aninjusticemag.com

Familiar men have preyed on me. Yet in my experience, it’s been cis women who’ve been far more overly familiar with me, and their sense of ownership over my body seems to both run deeper and be far more socially sanctioned. No one is supposed to feel threatened by a cis woman’s touch.

Cis women engage physically with casual acquaintances, friends, and even colleagues far more readily than men, and rarely seem to fear being accused of violating consent when they do. It’s incredibly rare for anything a cis woman does to be judged as predatory, dangerous, or creepy — especially if she is also wealthy and white.

Cis women have made sexual comments about my body during work meetings, at the doctor’s office, at parties, weddings, and lunch dates. Online, women comment openly on my changing appearance, expressing desire and revulsion in nearly equal amounts.

Women Who’ve Told Me How My Body Should Be

Women have been responsible for some of the most body-shaming, objectifying, sexist experiences of my life.

devonprice.medium.com

Women have followed me down street corners, calling me their angel and asking for my number. A woman once told me I was asking to be street harassed, because of the cut of my tank top. In high school, a teen girl cornered me naked in a gym shower and screamed slurs at me while I stared blankly ahead, scrubbing myself and willing her to go away. She threatened to crush my head against the lockers. There were many women around us when this happened, but no one said or did a thing. They knew I was the awkward gender freak in the equation, so no matter how much she sexualized and threatened me, I deserved it.

Random cis women have asked me about my pubic hair and then told me not to shave it; they’ve categorized my body shape using household objects and fruit as metaphors. When I had breasts, women asked me if I’d gotten implants. When I stopped having them, women asked if I’d gotten a mastectomy. And they’ve touched me, all over, sometimes forcefully, often lasciviously, and assumed that because they are women, I won’t ever complain.

I don’t feel safe around cis women. And I wish there was more space in our culture for a guy like me to say that.

…

Why are women like this to me? Something seems to have always marked me as other to women from the very start. Even as a pre-pubescent child, I inspired a strange blend of condescension, hypersexualization, and ire in women, nearly everywhere that I went.

Of course, women criticize one another and spread rigid standards of toxic femininity between themselves all the time. Yet whenever I complain about just how dangerous experiences like these feel, even sympathetic cis women serve me a blank look. When they are criticized by fellow women, it does not register to them as acutely unsafe.

Cis women feel more at home around other cis women. When one woman tells another to quiet her vocal fry or sit more demurely, it’s presented as a helpful corrective to keep her safely within society’s lines. It only perpetuates sexism in the long run, but it’s poison served with a smile, a tip for how to keep one’s social status intact.

But when a woman comments on my appearance and mannerisms, she’s indicating I am no longer a person on the same level that she is. And that means that she, a woman and a cis person, has free reign to send all kinds of degrading hostility my way.

To put it another way: When a cis woman tells another cis woman to follow sexist social rules, she often does so as her equal. But when a cis woman tells a trans person to follow sexist societal rules, she does so to demonstrate her own power.

Women bully and insult other women all the time. Such abuses have inspired countless teen dramedies and Taylor Swift songs. But I’ve never seen a woman follow another woman down the street, begging for her number, oohing and ahhing provocatively at the swishing of her hips while demanding her victim give back a smile. Those are the actions of a person with gendered power. It’s the kind of aggression men routinely direct toward women in order to keep them oppressed. But it is also the aggression that cisgender, straight women weaponize against trans people, queer people, and gender non-conforming men.

…

Stop Trying to Make “Womxn” Happen

Cis people, stop imposing catch-all “gender inclusive” language on us.

devonprice.medium.com

I routinely get invited to gender-exclusive spaces, usually ones organized by cisgender women. These spaces say they are for women & trans people, or women & nonbinaries, or they are for womxn, or women & femmes. What unites is that they are for women, by which the organizers mean cisgender ones. Everybody else is considered either a hard-to-parse afterthought who’d better try their damndest to resemble a cis woman, or an unwelcome, unsafe, unrelatable man.

Cis women say they want women’s only spaces for reasons of safety, but what they actually want are spaces where there are no cis men. This leaves them as the most powerful gender minority around. Any sense of safety that hinges on holding power over other people is a false one. Abuse is made possible through imbalance and inequity.

I know several trans women who outright refuse to shop at certain feminist bookstores or attend certain women’s-only dance parties and kink events, because they know those spaces are not truly for them. Many cis women equate a person’s anatomy with their degree of safety, and thus never reflect on their own ability to commit sexual violence or abuse. They see trans women as more capable of violence because of their bodies, and view themselves as incapable of danger for the very same reason. This tweet illustrates the double-bind trans women are put in quite well:

In addition, cis women’s spaces often completely overlook the unique needs and oppressions of trans feminine people — for example, by discussing reproductive justice only in terms of who can access an abortion. Yet the reproductive rights of trans women are also under widespread attack. Trans women are forcibly sterilized in nearly every country in the world, often as a requirement of changing their legal gender marker. Yet almost no women’s health centers or reproductive justice organizations take this threat to women’s reproductive rights seriously. Many women’s shelters refuse to provide services to trans women either, despite them facing one of the highest intimate partner violence rates.

While cis women’s spaces frequently disregard the concerns of trans femmes, they also regularly go to great lengths to include trans men like me, even though we are not women, and by definition do not belong. Counting trans men as just “one of the girls” is not just annoying or rude. It prioritizes other people’s views of our bodies over our own agency. Forcing trans men into women’s spaces is the “your mind is telling me no, but your body is telling me yes” of gendered projections. You can’t really get more predatory than that.

Cis women frequently try to fold my experiences of sexual assault into their own, casting me as a woman who was mistreated by a man, entrenching their own status as the ultimate authority on victimhood in the process. It’s quite literally objectifying, taking my body and the wounds it has endured and using it to reinforce their own social status. These women are baffled when I reveal that I actually feel the most free and comfortable within “men only” and “no cis women” spaces.

Violence actually has very little to do with the identity a person holds, and everything to do with their power. I’m a gay, transgender man, and an awkward Autistic one at that, so cis women have frequently recognized they hold social power over me. And they’ve used that power to put me in my place all my life.

In her book Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality, sociologist Kristen Schlit presents research showing that when transgender men come out at work, the straight cis men around them adjust to the news pretty easily. As long as the organization as a whole is supportive, cishet men quickly adapt to treating their trans masculine colleagues like any other dude, calling him the right name, using the right pronouns, not asking any weird questions, and quickly seeming to ‘forget’ a change has even happened.

Female coworkers, on the other hand, are far more likely to ask invasive questions about a trans man’s genitals, chest, and any surgeries he might be pursuing, and to make comments that invalidate or police his identity. So are gay men.

Schlit theorizes that cishet men are less inquisitive about their trans male coworkers because they think taking interest in another man’s body will make them seem “gay.” Women and gay men are more socially permitted to take an interest in men’s bodies though, she says.

I am a gay man, and Schlit is not, and I’ve got to say I think she’s completely off the mark. Gay men are expected to reign in all signs of our sexualities at work, to a far greater degree than straight people are. The idea that it’s socially acceptable for a gay man to ask a male coworker about his genitals or sex life is absurd.

On the whole, the cis het men in my life have been quick to act like my transition isn’t a big deal. They always address me appropriately, and don’t make a fuss when encountering me in the bathroom. A cis male coworker advocated for me beautifully when I was newly transitioning at my job, treading a careful line between always using gender neutral language for me but never outing me before I was ready. The most awkward thing a cishet man has ever done in response to my transition was give me the nickname “Dev” — then immediately cringe at himself for it, which I found quite endearing.

Cis female coworkers, on the flip side, tend to radiate a ton of attention and curiosity my way the moment they find out that I’m trans. They ask inappropriate questions about my body or where I plan for my transition to “go” next (surgery wise). They comment on my hair, clothes, and changing cup size. They size me up from head to toe and ask me how the transition is “feeling” with a conspiratorial grin, as if they’ve been let in on some alluring secret. And they are far more likely to verbally and socially group me with women, even if they say that they are supportive.

So my experiences track with the patterns in Schlit’s data, even though I disagree with her interpretation. I don’t think straight men are more respectful to me because they’re afraid of seeming “gay.” If anything, cishet men have become more warm and affectionate to me now that I’m visibly a guy. They feel more relaxed around me because they genuinely see me as one of them. It’s cis women (and sometimes gay men) who are on edge in my presence.

Workplace sexual harassment isn’t really about sexual desire, not any more than sexist catcalling is caused by finding a woman walking down the street hot. Instead, it all comes down to power: who has it, who craves it, and who feels insecure about their relationship to it and chooses to lash out.

Generally speaking, groups with unrivaled power don’t have to use social aggression to protect themselves. The popular kids in school are not the ones who bully, for example; it’s the kids who are in the awkward, insecure middle tier between popular and unpopular who do that.

In secure-feeling workplaces, there is less bullying as well. It’s only when the unemployment rate rises and workplace turnover increases that things like racist workplace harassment go up precipitously. Usually the ones leveraging it are the white people whose positions are on the chopping block. Aggression signals a position that’s in need of defending.

Cishet men are in a very secure position in most institutions. Many of them feel no need to maintain their place in the pecking order by socially aggressing against others. Women and gay men, on the other hand, are in a more perilous position. They have some institutional power, but it’s conditional on them being a ‘respectable’ member of their group. So when another gender minority upends the status quo by transitioning, I believe many women and some gay men feel a need to put him in his place using the very same sexual and gender-based harassment they have regularly endured.

I’ve heard many Black men (both trans and cis) share that they’re privy to a similar dynamic, with white women invading their physical space at work and at social events, rubbing up on their biceps, commenting on their attractiveness, and making sexual come-ons. White women seem to presume that because they are in a social category marked as higher-status and prized, it cannot be possible for a Black man not to want their advances. Think of how eagerly Lena Dunham expected sexual attention from Odell Beckham Junior, and how publicly she rebelled when she did not get it.

Several trans men of color told me that after they transitioned, cis women began projecting inherent sexuality and aggression onto their bodies without their consent.

“As soon as I started showing up to parties looking more masc, women started treating me like a living sex toy or a way for them to experiment,” said one.

“I actually became less safe in public on testosterone, because now white women interpret anything I do as even more threatening,” another told me.

One trans guy shared that after he became visibly trans, lots of cis female acquaintances began inviting him on one-on-one hangouts, where they’d get really cuddly and ask to take selfies with him. These women hadn’t ever been interested in getting close with him before. He says it felt dirty. Almost every time, the woman doing the tokenizing and objectification was white.

I work in academia and publishing, two fields where white women hold a lot of institutional leverage. So when it comes to workplace sexual harassment, white cisgender women have been the chief source of predation in my life. In more casual social environments, I have been regularly harassed by cisgender women of all backgrounds.

The two women who followed me down the street mocking me and demanding I throw them a smile were Black. They were young, and live next door in an apartment comparable to mine, so I know that they aren’t wealthy. And I know I’m living in a neighborhood where systematic gentrification has been barreling ahead for years, grinding up numerous Black and brown families in its path.

It would be irresponsible for me to keep race out of the conversation. In this neighborhood, white people like me often invite police violence onto people like these young Black women. Every single time I’ve witnessed police violence in this neighborhood and made attempts to confront it, the cops have gotten aggressive with me, telling me they’re locking up Black and brown people for my benefit, because I don’t recognize that this neighborhood is unsafe for people like me. Every time that I’ve seen the cops getting called on a Black person in the neighborhood, it’s been a white person who was clutching the phone, a wary look in their eyes.

What it Looked Like to Police Ourselves This Summer: An Ode to De-Escalation on My Chicago Block

This summer, my neighbors didn’t call the cops — they looked after one another

level.medium.com

Feelings of safety are not apolitical. And they’re not rational. They are socially erected, built to justify and maintain the very structures of power and inequality that actually render us vulnerable on a wide scale. My Black and brown neighbors have a lot more reason to fear white people and police than I have to fear them. Yet it’s the anxieties and fears of people like me that that the state takes seriously and unleashes violence to soothe.

I think the young women who harassed me had sized me up as a white gentrifier, a person they had many legitimate reasons to be angry with. At the same time, they recognized a social vulnerability in me that made expressing that anger seem possible. So they took hold of the opportunity, and used homophobia and transphobia as tools to express their greater outrage at the world’s unfairness.

I think the drunken woman who harassed me at the bar was mourning her divorce, and believed she’d spied a chance to explore her sexuality that would feel both transgressive and safe. She thought my body could offer the thrill of a same-sex experience, coupled with the familiarity of being with a man. Being with me would allow her to extract pleasure from a man while still being the person with the higher status. I think that’s why she (and many women like her) seem so drawn to hypersexualizing me, no matter how visibly uncomfortable I become.

I think cisgender women are desperate to assert power for many sensible reasons, and that sadly, they often do so in the very same ways that men have leveraged power over them. I think the desire to behave more like a privileged white cisgender man keeps those of us who are marginalized at each other’s throats. Our misplaced fears isolate us from one another and render us more vulnerable to abuse, when we really ought to be joining forces against the shared sources of our pain.

I want women, trans people, and people of color to recognize that the sources of our suffering are largely the same. It’s the patriarchy, the police state, the gender binary, and whiteness that threaten us, not the awkward unfamiliarity of a fellow oppressed person. I want us to stop aspiring to wield the privilege we imagine white, cisgender men have, and start working to comprehend one another’s struggles instead. I don’t want my fear to keep me isolated and lashing out at the wrong targets.

And so I have to keep voicing my concerns, knowing that some cisgender women will care, and can challenge their assumptions about who is dangerous and who is safe. I will keep on challenging and course-correcting my own biases about safety and unsafety too, and reflecting on my ability to unfairly leverage power as a white man. I will call on my white trans masculine brothers to also confront this reality, because we are as guilty of ignoring our power as cisgender women are.

We don’t have to hide away, enshrined by our privileges, viewing everyone that might threaten our social status as proof we are ‘unsafe.’ Privilege, after all, is given to us by the very systems that oppress us. At any moment it can be taken away. But collective power is far harder to dismantle. We have what it takes to keep one another fed, and sheltered, and accepted. We can make the choice every day to keep one another safe.

I don’t feel safe around cis women. But I hope that someday I will.