What Katie Hill’s Resignation Means for Young Queer People in Political Life

Rep. Katie Hill (D-CA), a bisexual woman, was a representational and political win for the LGBTQ community when she flipped a House seat from red to blue last year. But less than a year later, after the beginning of divorce proceedings and the release of texts and nude photos without her consent, she has resigned. And although her choice to get involved with at least one subordinate can’t be overlooked, it would appear that her gender, her sexuality — and to some extent her non-monogamy — singled her out.

The resignation of Katie Hill from Congress felt nothing short of gut-wrenching for me, for many other millennials, LGBTQ people, non-monogamous people, and for women. It tells many of us that we don’t belong in government and that straight cis men who have been accused of far worse personal conduct will pass muster nearly every time.

In her speech on the House floor on Thursday, Hill said, “I am leaving now because of a double standard… I am leaving because I didn’t want to be peddled by papers and blogs and websites, used by shameless operatives for the dirtiest gutter politics that I’ve ever seen, and the right-wing media to drive clicks and expand their audience by distributing intimate photos of me taken without my knowledge, let alone my consent, for the sexual entertainment of millions.”

First, one has to understand what led up to her resignation. Hill told her husband, Kenny Heslep, that she was leaving him in June, according the Los Angeles Times, and then the couple moved forward with divorce proceedings. Then RedState published multiple articles about Hill’s alleged relationships with people she worked with. One October story quoted Heslep, who claimed on social media that Hill was involved with a male Congressional staffer. According to the Times, Joe Messina, a former campaign adviser for the Republican incumbent she challenged, Steve Knight, received nude photos of Katie Hill as well as texts. He did not publish them on his blog but noted that he received them. He also reportedly checked in on the National Republican Congressional Committee to see how widely they’d been circulated and learned that “they were all over the place.”

Soon, RedState published a nude photo of Hill brushing a woman’s hair and texts that RedState said were exchanged between Hill and Heslep, in an article from Jennifer Van Laar, a former advisor for Knight’s campaign. RedState never disclosed in the piece that she worked for the former Congressman in 2014. The Daily Mail published a story with multiple nude photos of Hill. The RedState story included information about Hill’s relationship with a 22 year-old female campaign staffer — a relationship that included her husband — which Hill has acknowledged. Hill and her husband are both in their 30s. Hill has denied having a relationship with a Congressional staffer, Graham Kelly, a relationship that would have violated House rules. As for Heslep, he told his parents that he his computer had been hacked just before the publication of the photos, according to BuzzFeed.

Following the release of these photos, Hill characterized her relationship with Heslep as abusive. She wrote in a letter, “This is what needs to happen so that the good people who supported me will no longer be subjected to the pain inflicted by my abusive husband and the brutality of hateful political operatives who seem to happily provide a platform to a monster who is driving a smear campaign built around cyber exploitation.”

When Rep. Hill mentioned this alleged abuse, I immediately thought of the research on abuse of and sexual violence toward bisexual women. Although we don’t know for sure whether Heslep released the photos or precisely what his relationship with Hill was like, it’s difficult for queer women and nonbinary people not to be affected by Hill’s description of an abusive marriage and by our knowledge of intimate partner abuse of bi women in relationships and the high rates of sexual violence bi women experience. The Centers for Disease Control’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey found that bisexual women have a higher prevalence of intimate partner violence than heterosexual women. Bi women are 1.8 times more likely to report intimate partner violence and 2.6 times more likely to report having experienced sexual violence from intimate partners compared to straight women. Eighty-nine percent of bisexual women reported that they experienced intimate partner violence, rape, stalking only from male perpetrators. And of course there are other kinds of abuse, such as emotional and verbal abuse, that may be higher for bi women as well. According to a Lehigh University researcher’s 2017 work, unique considerations for increased sexual violence against bi women are “social construction of bisexual women as especially worthy of distrust, jealousy, and other emotions” and the hypersexualization of bi women by men, which is reinforced by media representation of bi women.

Hill stated herself that she was fearful that people would continue to release similar photos and texts if she did not step down. In that respect and others, the power dynamics of the situation and the actors involved in it are different than many other situations in which lawmakers are asked to step down over some kind of inappropriate relationship or sexual misconduct. Hill’s bisexuality and all of the stereotypes that people continue to identify with it — deceptive, promiscuous, greedy — are all amplified by similar stereotypes that people apply to polyamorous and other nonmonogamous people. This all occurred after outlets slyly accused her of not being queer enough because she was married to a man.

Her bisexuality and relationships with multiple people are surely judged more harshly because of her gender. Women in Congress are not supposed to show that they have any sexuality at all, much less a queer sexuality or non-traditional relationships. We’ve seen this slanted coverage of bi women before. Following Amber Heard’s abuse allegations against Johnny Depp, tabloid media frequently referred to her bisexuality to discredit her. Add to this that women in political life are certainly not supposed to be seen in nude photographs, and when they rarely are soon nude, are dismissed on both sides of the aisle. Many so-called progressives with #Resist in their Twitter bios enjoy calling out First Lady Melania Trump for posing nude as a model rather than her support of her husband’s birtherism. It’s not surprising then that when biphobia, sexism, and judgment of polyamory collide, you have someone as prominent as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) putting the onus on young people to stop taking nude photographs if they want to be major players in government.

In a press conference after Hill’s resignation, Pelosi called the release of the photos a “profound violation” but also said, “I do say to my own children and grandchildren, especially young children, you know, some of these–I don’t know what to call them–appearances on social media can come back to haunt you if they are taken out of context and that. But I do think that we have to be careful.”

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said that the release of the photos will surely deter young women from running for office. It isn’t a question of if what happened to Hill will happen to other young women who run for Congress, but when. Twelve percent of people 18 to 29-years-old said people shared explicit images of them without their consent, compared to 5 percent of those who were over the age of 30. This issue is not going away for future generations of lawmakers. Instead of telling people that they must never share nude photographs if they want to be part of political life, political leaders need to gather the moral courage to tell people that nude photographs are not in themselves disqualifying. Women and femme nonbinary people and queer people’s nude bodies are not disqualifying.

Katie Hill said in her Thursday speech, “I came here to give a voice to the unheard in the halls of power. I wanted to show young people, queer people, working people, imperfect people that they belong here because this is the people’s house. I fell short of that and I’m sorry.”

If Democratic leaders want their party to have a future, they need to have more awareness of the world young, queer, imperfect people currently live in, and act accordingly. I’m a bi femme nonbinary person who has been in at least one relationship that could be characterized as abusive, which involved one incident of sexual assault. For years, I asked this man to stop contacting me through various phone numbers and emails where he tried all kinds of ruses to get my attention. A decade after it first began, I still hear from him and need at least an hour to gather the strength to calm back down. I have also tried polyamorous relationships and found the judgment from people who didn’t understand my relationships, as well as stereotypes that poly people were only interested in sex, difficult to navigate. For all these reasons and more, it’s hard for me not to feel personally angry at how quickly many powerful Democrats shrugged their shoulders at Hill. I don’t believe that months from now, prominent Democrats will express regret, as so many Democrats did when they told the New Yorker that they shouldn’t have supported the resignation of Rep. Al Franken (D-MN), a man who was accused of sexual misconduct by eight women. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) and other lawmakers have faced sexual harassment allegations over the years and remain in Congress.

I recall reporting on her campaign to flip the 25th Congressional seat in California for ThinkProgress. I sat down with her in a small white room with bare walls to ask her questions for a small window of time she made available. She nimbly addressed my questions about healthcare, homelessness, education, and more. She addressed my questions about how her bisexuality affected her campaign and how she would address the health and safety needs of other bi people. Anyone who watched CNN and the Human Rights Campaign’s town hall in October, where few questions acknowledged bi people, know how difficult it is to get most politicians to acknowledge the unique safety and health issues affecting bi people. Before the House’s passage of the Equality Act, Hill spoke passionately in favor of the sweeping nondiscrimination bill, which clarifies and expands housing, employment, public accommodations, and other protections, on the House floor. House Republicans repeatedly perpetuated lies about trans people that essentially called them enablers of and participants in fraud.

Hill said, “I can tell you that no trans person is trying to game the system to participate in sports. That does not happen. And that is a sad scare tactic that has no place on the floor of the People’s House.”

She added, “You, my colleagues, are on the wrong side of history.”

A voice which cut through the noise on policy issues affecting LGBTQ people, including economic inequality and homelessness, has been lost. There are clear power imbalances in relationships between employees and their direct supervisors and employers, and the nature of the relationship itself makes consent thorny to navigate, to say the very least. There was enough of an age difference between the couple and the staffer to raise other issues about the power dynamics of their relationship. It can also be true at the same time that the people driving the conversation about Hill and her behavior appeared to be extremely invested in the gendered and queerphobic sexual humiliation of a young member of Congress in a way that suggests they’d like to deter the next Katie Hill from thinking twice about political life.

“I’m Not Missing Anything in My Relationship”: Bi Women and Nonbinary People on the Challenges and Joys of Dating

As I sat across from my date at a bar patio, the orange hue of street lights creating a halo around her, I shared the story of an awkward date. She asked for the gender of the person. Yes, this was a man, I informed her. It seemed like a harmless question until later in the date, when she proceeded to talk about her poor experiences with bi women. At our next bar, she talked about how her previous dates and online connections with bi women eventually ended without any physical connection and surmised that they really wanted to date men. She questioned if these people actually wanted to sleep with women at all. I wasn’t sure what she imagined they wanted out of their dates with her.

There’s no comparable situation with men. The world still assumes heterosexuality as the norm and the world generally sees me as a straight woman rather than a bi nonbinary person. So men usually aren’t going to assume that my lack of interest in sleeping with them, whether immediately or never, means that I’m not interested in any men at all. When I have told straight men I’m dating that I’m bi, the reaction has often been a swift change from sharing favorite movies to overtly sexual comments. Once, within minutes of mentioning that I’m bi, my date escalated his aggressive behavior to sexual assault. I felt that the way bisexual women and femmes in particular are portrayed as performing their sexuality for men may have made it easier for him, along with other misogynistic ideas he may have already held, to justify this dehumanization. Bi people of all genders have consistently treated me with more respect, with one date waving her hand at me over a couple beers and saying “You don’t have to go through your dating history with me.” In my experience and my bi friends’ experiences, we’re often asked to share our romantic and sexual histories with various genders on dates, and it gets tiresome.

Several people who spoke with Autostraddle shared their unique experiences dating as bisexual and queer people, including the hyper-sexualization of bi people and polyamorous people in particular, the idea that bi people will always “leave them” for a person of another gender, how bi people seek out other bi people, and the ways nonbinary people have treated their bi dates and partners with more understanding. Being bi has shaped the way they have dated, such as preferring to date other bi people, the hypersexualization of bi women by straight men, managing the insecurities and expectations of other people they’re involved with, or debunking myths about their relationships in their own community. Some of the bi women and nonbinary people Autostraddle spoke with chose to go by either their first name or a psuedonym. They will have an asterisk by their name.

Bi women face a number of health and economic barriers compared to other people in the LGBTQ community. Bi women have reported poorer health outcomes and are more likely to depend on SNAP benefits and Medicaid than monosexual peers, according to 2018 analysis from the Center for American Progress. Some of bi people’s negative health outcomes may be the result of feeling alienated from all monosexual communities, internalization of the stigmas bi people face, and the loneliness that comes as a result of it, researchers say. Bi people are also less likely to disclose their bisexuality to healthcare providers, according to 2012 research from the Williams Institute. Research on sexual violence has established that bisexual women have higher rates of sexual assault than straight or gay women. A 2017 Lehigh University researcher examined why that may be the case and found that sexual violence against bi women may result in part from “social construction of bisexual women as especially worthy of distrust, jealousy, and other emotions” and that the hypersexualization of bi women by men, reinforced by media representation of bi women, is also a factor.

Fear of harassment or uncomfortable interactions with lesbians has affected the way some bi people feel about dating lesbians. Miryam T*, who is nonbinary, said she hasn’t experienced direct harassment from lesbians for being bi but the rhetoric she has seen from some cis lesbians online about both bisexuality and trans people is enough to make her wary.

“Between the combination of experiencing biphobia and experiencing transmisogyny, I don’t really interact with cisgender lesbians if I can avoid it. I don’t go out of my way to avoid them but I don’t trust that they will be really happy to see me in their spaces,” she said. “ …Most of the people I’ve seen in the past few years have been trans men or nonbinary people and there’s a good reason for that. And it’s basically because those are the folks that I feel more like they understand me and I understand them.”

Miryam T said that although gay men have expressed interest in her, she tends not to date them, and tends to date trans people and bi people she can relate to more.

“I’ve been in situations with gay cis men where they were into me and I was into them but they made me feel like they thought of me more as a man, like talking about genitals,” she said. “Mostly whatever else they thought or said, they were so genital-focused… All around I feel safer with more own niche community than trying to see what the ‘proper gays’ are up to.”

Sarah* came out in her late 20s as bi after realizing she was in love with her best friend. She has had one serious relationship with a woman and is now in a monogamous relationship with a man. She said that her girlfriend at the time said she was concerned that she might leave her for a man.

“I don’t think it was so much biphobia as to have a partner who can easily meld back into heteronormativity. I think if I were a lesbian I would fear that too. But also as the person who is dating a woman it feels a little unfair, like well maybe, but currently we are dating,” she said.

She said that when she learned her best friend had feelings for her but that she was going to date a man instead, she said she felt like she was on the “opposite side” of it.

“Is she deciding to date this man over me because that is more comfortable out in the world?” she said she asked herself at the time.

Sarah added, “Knowing myself as a person who has dated a lot of men before coming out, it is comfortable for me to date men so it was a fear that I had that women I’ve dated would not want to date me or that they wouldn’t want to be with me because my experiences were mostly with men.”

She said that partners may use bisexuality as the thing they focus on as a relationship problem when they’re insecure about their relationships in general.

“I think to some extent there is a sense of insecurity in a lot of relationships that you aren’t enough for the other person — particularly in hindsight if it didn’t work out — and gender is a really tangible thing to grasp onto as a reason you think maybe you are unsatisfying to a partner or former partner,” she said. “I think it’s often an anxiety in a relationship with a bi or pansexual person because it’s so surface level. It’s so much easier to think ‘she left me or I worry she might leave me because I’m not a man/woman’ than ‘she left me because I was an asshole.’”

Chaya Milchtein, a queer polyamorous woman and automotive educator said that being poly magnifies certain stereotypes people already hold about bi people. Milchtein’s fiancée is a woman, which also affects how people receive her sexuality.

“A lot of times people assume I will date ‘the opposite sex’ like I’m missing something from my partner and where do you get all those stereotypes of bisexual people? I identify as queer but you get those bad stereotypes — like a bisexual person will cheat on with you with the opposite sex because they’re missing that or whatever. I’m not missing anything in my relationship. It’s fantastic and it’s going great. We just got engaged and who I date who is not her has frankly nothing to do with her and is no reflection on her or what she offers.”

Milchtein said that people’s perception of her sexuality has depended on her community at the time and that trans and nonbinary people have generally understood it better.

“I never dated a nonbinary person but I had the privilege of spending many years in New York where my community was mostly flexible,” she said. “But when I came out to Wisconsin, it’s a lot more rigid. I haven’t encountered many nonbinary or trans folks who are like ‘Oh I want to know who you fuck’ but the cis women have a big issue with it.”

“I quite frankly haven’t had a serious relationship with a man in a long time but I have dated and had relations with people of other genders,” Milchtein said. “But people are really surprised like I’m betraying my sexuality or something by talking about the experiences I’ve had with men in the past or that I might be interested in in the future.”

Although she said that cis men haven’t seen her attraction to other genders as a dealbreaker, she said they have focused on her queerness so much that all she becomes to them is the potential for a threesome. Milchtein said she doesn’t have a problem with threesomes and has had them and enjoyed them, but doesn’t it want it to be the focus of a date when it hasn’t previously been discussed.

“They just turn into blubbering idiots and whatever you were possibly having a conversation about all the sudden turns sexual,” she said.

Sarah said she has also experienced this assumption that her partner can’t offer her enough satisfaction because she is bi, but from her boyfriend. She said that his anxiety about it is “pretty minor” but that “men showing more than a passing comfort with bisexuality” has been a litmus test for her in any relationship she entered into with a man.

Melanie Cristol, founder and CEO of a queer-inclusive sexual health company Lorals, is a monogamous relationship with a nonbinary partner and said they have been very accepting of her sexuality.

“Their attitude toward bisexuality is so refreshing. They don’t remotely care about the genders of my former partners, and there’s not a weird undertone of fear that I’ll leave them for someone of another gender,” she said.

Another challenge for bi and queer women and nonbinary people is assumptions from monosexual people about their relationships either erase their sexuality or don’t consider that their gender and gender presentation affects which relationships people see.

Miryam T said she calls a relationship a queer relationship if queer people are in it, and being trans and bi can certainly affect how people read your relationship.

“As a baby trans woman who was dating a person who would eventually come out as a trans man in college, we both identified as queer already and we felt super weird about the appearance of being a straight couple. When in reality we were pretty far from that.”

She added, “There’s this interesting phenemenon of two people dating each other and especially two bi trans people dating each other where we’re approaching heterosexual conventions but at a great remove and great distance. If there are two cis people who are both bi and dating each other, they’re not really heterosexual. You do things to blend in and you might do things that are conventional in some ways but there’s a good chance that you’ll both be alienated enough that it will be different.”

She said that dating a trans man she and her partner could be mistaken for lesbians and a straight couple assuming genders one way and then a straight couple again with genders assumed another way all in a matter of a few hours. She said she sees things in being nonbinary and being bi tie their experiences together.

“In gay men’s dating culture there are a lot of rigid roles and sexual interests, at least that they proclaim, and lesbians say they don’t do this but they do this too, especially with the butch-femme dichotomy. It’s something that is subversive of all sexuality to be bi. The fulfillment that comes from feeling like, when things are going well, that you embody something that doesn’t quite fit cleanly into one category or another. That is what I keep coming back to as to why bi and nonbinary and trans people are all linked. We have a lot of common characteristics and experiences even if some of us are cis and a lot of us aren’t.”

Sarah said that since meeting her boyfriend, she has felt less comfortable talking about her sexuality in queer spaces. She doesn’t feel that fear in predominantly straight spaces, where she said she doesn’t have a problem correcting straight people who believe she’s straight too.

“Well I kind of felt like I came out and started dating a woman and it lasted a few months and was exploring my queerness and wanted to be in queer spaces. And then I met my boyfriend and it was unexpected and sort of fell into this relationship,” she said. “He’s great and amazing and I love him. But I do feel like now all of a sudden, I was exploring my queer sexuality and now I’m back in a hetero relationship. I’m a little timid about exploring queer spaces and trying to be open and vocal about my queerness. It’s something I struggle with day to day.”

New York Can Pass Same-Sex Marriage But Not Trans* Protections: How GENDA Died

A few months ago, a bill supporting the rights of transgender and other gender nonconforming people failed to come up for a vote in the New York State Senate. It died quietly years after Republicans and Democrats came together to vote in support of same sex marriage. Like most failed legislative efforts, there usually isn’t one clear-cut reason for its downfall. A myriad of forces were working against the bill: a coterie of Democrats aligned with Republicans, a lack of unity in the advocacy community and a wider political problem in how elected leaders perceive Americans’ opinions of transgender people.

image via Paul Buckowski, Times Union

Let’s start with the obvious: The bill wasn’t prioritized as same sex marriage efforts were, which is not a story only familiar to New York, but the whole country. Same sex marriage has been the central focus of major LGBT rights organizations for years, to the consternation of many LGBT rights activists, who believe issues that impact impoverished people, and/or people of color, have been neglected. After DOMA, one would think this would be the best time for activists to shine a light on other issues, such as hate crimes against LGBT people.

But that hasn’t proven to be the case, at least in New York.

Activists have differed in their approach to pushing the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act. The Empire State Pride Agenda released a radio ad that never used the word “transgender.” The segment started with a voice informing a transgender or gender nonconforming person that they would be evicted from their home. Then it begins:

“In a tough economy, New Yorkers hear bad news every day, but in New York State, you can be evicted from your home or even fired from your job just for being yourself. That’s right, even in 2013, it’s still legal to discriminate against New Yorkers because of their gender identity or expression. Sixteen other states already outlaw discrimination against Americans because of their gender expression or identity. And local governments, including Buffalo and Suffolk County, have fixed this injustice, but New York State has yet to act. To protect the rights of all New Yorkers, Albany must pass the (GENDA). New York has always been a beacon of civil rights and equality. It’s time to protect the civil rights of all New Yorkers. Tell Albany to pass the (GENDA).”

The radio ad was part of a $250,000 campaign by ESPA according to Jimmy Vielkind’s reporting in The Times Union, compared to the $1 million organizers said they would spend on lobbying for same sex marriage, according to Gannett’s Albany Bureau Chief, Joseph Spector. When I asked ESPA how much had been spent on the campaign overall, ESPA would not divulge the money spent in lobbying and advertising for either the GENDA campaign or lobbying for same sex marriage legislation, saying that the GENDA campaign is ongoing.

A video that is basically the same as the radio advertisement showed on local television stations as well, showing a map of the United States, and captions, but never mentioned the word “transgender” or showed any photos of actual transgender people or gender nonconforming people. Contrast that advertisement with an ESPA advertisement run in 2009 campaigning for same sex marriage rights, named “Barb & Don,” in which an older couple talks about their daughter’s wife and children. It is a heartbreaking ad because you see the people ESPA is fighting for. Photo after photo is shown of Amy and her wife and daughter. Both television ads lasted 30 seconds.

ESPA also chose to create a video portraying a trans woman and World War II veteran, Joanne. The video has been shown on ESPA’s social channels and at festivals. But it may have been easier for people to identify with Joanne than with than the clinical, less personal approach taken in the television ad: All of these other states are doing this. New York should too.

Ryan Sallans, a trans man who speaks as an activist on transgender issues, said there is hesitancy from leaders in major LGBT advocacy organizations to use the word “transgender,” pointing out that, historically, trans issues are pushed out of LGBT groups’ legislative agendas.

“The protections aren’t just protecting transgender people… It’s broader than that. It protects other gender non-traditional people, but looking at the statistics it’s mostly transgender people affected,” Sallans said.

“A lot of the time, people think, ‘Bring too much attention to the word and people will look away. Sometimes they drop gender ID from it [nondiscrimination bills] entirely.’ There are multiple factors—It has to do with money, education and transphobia within the LGBT community,” Sallans said.

Although 90% of Fortune 500 companies have policies prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, only 57% have policies prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity. That is a majority but the difference between the number of companies with policies on sexual identity and sexual orientation is striking, and gives more weight to the importance of GENDA and the national ENDA legislation.

There has also been disagreement between ESPA and Human Rights Campaign as to how divided Democrats were on the bill, with ESPA stating Democrats were mostly unified.

“Democrats were actually overwhelmingly in agreement with passing GENDA, as are 78 percent of voters in New York State on both sides of the aisle…We believe strongly that GENDA is not a question of why, but rather when,” Nathan M. Schaefer, Empire State Pride Agenda Executive Director, said in a statement.

Fred Sainz, spokesman for HRC, released this statement, however:

“Despite passing the State Assembly easily, GENDA was not brought up for a vote by the State Senate due to political division between Democrats and the Independent Democratic Caucus (IDC), a small group of Democrats who have allied themselves with the Republicans in order to maintain control over the Senate. The Governor supports the bill but did not make GENDA part of his official legislative agenda.”

Melissa Sklarz, a longtime transgender activist and president of the Stonewall Democrats of New York City, who lobbied on behalf of the Human Rights Campaign, said the effort wasn’t as unified as it could be and lacked some of the necessary manpower. She also argues this kind of legislation had to take place in a nonelection year.

“I wish that the transgender community was more engaged in this. But we go to war with the people and the weapons we have… In nonelection years it’s easier. We will keep doing what we’ve been doing in an election year, but it’s difficult for a bill covering 300,000 New Yorkers in a state of 12 million people,” Sklarz said.

Skarlz said she, along with other lobbyists, would come to Albany every Tuesday to meet with legislators, especially those legislators who live in districts where fights against gender discrimination have already succeeded in those districts’ cities. Many of the Senators from those districts are Republicans, however, and only one of them, Mike Grisanti from Buffalo, voted for same sex marriage. Thomas F. O’Mara and Joseph Robach voted against and Thomas Libous co-sponsored legislation to render same sex marriage void.

I contacted members of the Independent Democratic Caucus, David Valesky, Diane Savino and Jeffrey Klein, for comment, but none of them responded within my deadline.

Sallans said that one of the most significant issues preventing the kind of engagement that is necessary for legislative victories from happening is the lack of transgender people in those organizations’ leadership.

“We need to focus on bringing our community together. When you have two different oppressed groups, often one oppressed group pushes down another so at least they’re further up the totem pole,” Sallans said. “[On finding transgender leaders] It would require the organization to show they’re trying to attract trans supporters and it would take recruiting within that community, to find qualified transgender people, because there are certainly enough qualified people.”

Lisa Mottet, the Transgender Civil Rights Project Director at National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said it is a national embarrassment for New Yorkers, and especially for the governor, that he did not put his full weight behind the legislation.

“New Yorkers should be embarrassed. The governor should be embarrassed. The Independent Democratic Caucus should be embarrassed,” Mottet said. “Iowa, Colorado, and other states have taken this issue on and New York has ceded leadership,” adding that other governors, such as Maryland Governor, Martin O’Malley, have loudly championed the cause.

Mottet pointed to polls showing that Americans largely support legislation offering transgender people protection against discrimination in housing and at work.

“If people are worried about this legislation, they don’t understand the political dynamics in this country,” Mottet said.

Taking a national look, a poll commissioned by the admittedly left-leaning Center for American Progress found that 73 percent of voters supported protecting LGBT people from workplace discrimination.

A poll of 600 New York voters by Global Strategy Group found that 78 percent supported its passage. Seventy-nine percent of New York City residents, 82 percent of downstate suburban voters and 74 percent of Upstate New York voters supported it. Even 67 percent of Republicans and 78 percent of Independents polled supported the bill.

When Women Rape: Everything We’re Not Talking About

Studies over the past two decades have explored the issue of female-on-female rape, with mixed results. The studies may be limited in that they don’t always include bisexual women raped by women or straight women raped by women. Studies done in the 1980s and 1990s (Brand and Kidd, 1986, Sloan & Edmond, 1996, Duncan, 1990, Lie, Schilt, Bush, Montagne & Reyes, 1991, Loulan, 1988, Renzetti, 1992, Walfner-Haugrud & Gratch, 1997, and Waterman, Dawson & Bologna, 1989) that focus on violence between women, excluding violence perpetrated by men, have found the number of women reporting violence from female partners ranging from 5 percent to 57 percent of their study population, with most studies finding rates over 30 percent, according to Lori Girshick, author of “Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call it Rape?” There have been few studies that focus on lesbian sexual violence since then.

If one looks at CDC statistics, lesbian violence would appear to be higher than heterosexual violence, but these numbers can be misleading. According to the CDC, 43 percent of lesbians have experienced rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner compared to 35 percent of heterosexual women according to 2010 CDC statistics. The number is even higher for bisexual women at 61 percent. However, the numbers relating to lesbians are flawed because they don’t account for sexual violence experienced from an intimate partner before coming out.

In order to get a better idea of intimate partner violence experienced by gay, bisexual or lesbian people, Naomi Goldberg and Ilan Meyer of UCLA used a probability sample of California residents defined by mutually exclusive categories of sexual identity and behavior in men and women to provide population estimates of intimate partner violence. They tested risk factors for intimate partner violence like psychological distress and alcohol abuse to help explain sexual orientation disparities.

The study found that all three groups of minority women, bisexual, lesbian and women who have had sex with women had greater odds of experiencing lifetime and 1 year intimate partner violence, but the difference was only significant for bisexual women. It is worth noting that bisexual women with greater prevalence of intimate partner violence had been battered or raped by a man 95% of the time.

In San Francisco, one in three lesbians reported being sexually assaulted by another woman, whereas one in five women of the total U.S. population have reported being raped, according to 2005 California Coalition Against Sexual Assault and San Francisco Women Against Rape data. These numbers don’t tell us anything about straight women raped by other women, however.

If police ignore these victims, it is because of sexism and homophobia, two types of bigotry that are inextricably linked. Homophobia exists because sexism exists and vice versa. A 2002 study, “Effect of Victim Sex and Orientation on Perceptions of Rape” found that traditional gender role attitudes were positively correlated to victim blame and to more blame being assigned to homosexual rape victims. A 2005 study, “Gender-Role Stereotypes and Perceptions of Heterosexual, Gay, Lesbian and Domestic Violence” found that this attitude extended to domestic violence, with respondents were more likely to consider violence perpetrated by men on women more serious and deserving of attention. The perception that men were more capable of injuring victims and that female victims were more likely to suffer serious injury, played a big role in their responses.

When the police ignore or dismiss a woman who wants to report her female rapist, they are telling that woman that women are incapable of rape, of force, of violence. They are also telling her that a rape, and furthermore sex, cannot take place without a penis. They are telling her that a crime was not committed.

Police Reaction

Suzana Flores, a clinical psychologist based in Chicago, said that it is common to hear police tell victims that a crime hasn’t been committed.

“The most common is that they will say, ‘There was no penetration by a penis and therefore there was no rape.’ And she would say, ‘If there was forced oral sex by a male would it have been rape?’ And the response was, ‘There was no penis.'”

Flores said the stories she has heard from rape survivors convey three types of assumptions from authority figures, whether they be police officers, school counselors or hospital staff.

“The three main implications are ‘Women are too weak to harm someone,’ ‘Lesbian rape is hot and it’s harmless. It’s not real.’ and ‘All rapists are men,” Flores said. Flores added that she recently spoke to a young woman who approached a college staff member and informed him of the rape. He responded by telling her that it was simply “experimentation,” something that everyone does in college.

When authority figures tell these women that they have not experienced rape, their experience is invalidated and they go through the trauma all over again. It is a common experience for all rape victims, but for rape victims who do not fit the typical mold, the minimization of their rape can be even more prevalent.

The exception to the rule is a female rapist and an underage female rape victim. Recently a 22 year-old basketball coach was accused of raping a 17 year-old student in Utah, which drew national media attention. Whether or not that media attention is the result of shock that a woman would prey on a teenager is another question.

The good news is that the laws are changing and expanding the definition of rape. After a female teacher was raped by a male off-duty police officer, the jury failed to convict because the law did not define oral or anal rape as rape, causing people to petition the state to change the law. The Steubenville rape case, in which two boys were prosecuted for penetrating the victim’s vagina with their fingers while she was unconscious, is also a good example of how state laws have progressed beyond traditional “penis penetrates vagina” sexual assault definitions. The Steubenville rapists would not have been prosecuted had the law not included digital rape.

Some state laws have further to go to, however. Idaho defines rape as “the penetration, however slight, of the oral, anal or vaginal opening with the penetrator’s penis.” The state has a separate definition for male on male rape, but not for female on female rape. In Indiana, rape is defined as a being an act where the victim is of the “opposite sex.”

A change in law does not always translate to the police officers who interpret the law, said Silvia Dutchevici, founder of the Critical Therapy Center in Queens. Dutchevici has also worked at Queens Pride House and Sanctuary for Families.

“We assume the police know the law but the police don’t necessarily know it. It’s more about educating them on what treatment looks like,” Dutchevici said. “With two women, there is a barrier to understanding, because within law enforcement there is a patriarchy and the notion of control and men as more powerful than women. They bring those expectations to the door.”

“If you’re brave enough to report, you have law enforcement and even hospital staff that don’t take you seriously,” Dutchevici said. “People go through the system and then they begin to think maybe it wasn’t really rape. It just creates more hurt.”

There are also different social reasons that factor into a female on female rape survivor’s decision to report. A straight woman may not report because family and friends will either see the rape as consensual and believe she is lesbian, or, assuming they view the act as rape, they may believe the rape “turns” her into a lesbian. Bisexual or lesbian women may not report because they are not out to their family and friends and there is a concern that reporting the rape will expose their sexuality. For women from particularly conservative backgrounds, the fear of being seen as lesbian or bisexual, whether or not they are, is all too powerful.

A former police officer based in Wisconsin, whom wishes to remain anonymous, worked on sexual assault cases during his career. He says that it was difficult to prosecute in part due to the same he said/she said limitations that prevent the conviction of male on female rapists. He also admitted that social perceptions factor into the district attorney’s decision to prosecute.

“People believe males to be sexually aggressive. They don’t think that is true of females. So a jury is more likely to believe a man forced a woman to do something even if there is a lack of evidence,” he said. “Hate to say this but if the DA looks at a case and says ‘Not going to prosecute it’…the next time an officer sees a case like the first one, the officer assumes the DA is not going to prosecute it and will not work the case very hard.”

Sharon Stapel, executive director of New York City’s Anti-Violence Project, said police officers she works with in New York City tend to be more sensitive to female on female rape victims. They are less likely to exercise sensitivity towards male rape victims or transgender rape victims. Stapel said there is less understanding of what female on female rape is, and how to prosecute, in rural areas where there aren’t large gay communities.

“That’s what I hear when I leave New York City,” Stapel said of the Wisconsin police officer’s comment about lack of prosecution and lack of evidence. “The hospital knows how to do rape kits with cisgender women. That (belief that there is lack of evidence) is more about the idea of ‘Oh, we don’t know what women do in bed together.'”

Rape survivors can take legal action other ways, however, if they are experiencing other forms of abuse within a relationship. Lesbian or bisexual women experiencing intimate partner violence tend to go around the system obtaining a restraining order through beatings and other kinds of physical violence. These women know that their intimate partner rapes are not taken seriously.

“If they report abuse within a relationship, they don’t mention sexual assault to police, because the domestic violence is seen as valid,” Girshick said. “When they get a restraining order against their partner it’s based on that abuse and not the sexual assault.”

Lack of Discussion in Gay Rights Movement and Women’s Movement

Sadly, attitudes about rape outside of the male rapist and female victim paradigm are not helped by a lack of research interest, especially for female on female rape. Girshick said there has been very little work done in the past couple of decades.

“In 25 years, I feel like it’s hardly changed at all,” Girshick said. She attributed the problem to a lack of work on rape and domestic violence in general but she has ideas as to why the feminist movement and gay rights movement have put the issue aside.

“In the 1960s and 1970s lesbians were at the forefront of the women’s movement. Then they were purged for a while, and they weren’t major activists—and then it was ‘Hey, let’s pay attention to the lesbians as well,’ Girshick said.

When asked why she thought it wasn’t a strong issue in the gay rights community she said, “The upper middle class focus of the gay movement is a problem. There is great local level work that is done all over the country where individual agencies are working on issues,” Girshick said. “But at the state and national level it’s more likely to be a whiter, higher social class in leadership and that definitely has happened with gay marriage. It has siphoned off attention on other desperately needed work.”

Ann Russo wrote about the struggle to discuss female on female rape within the feminist community, which has heterosexist elements, in her 2001 book, “Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action for The Feminist Movement.” Russo wrote that she has struggled in lesbian relationships characterized by abusive power and control tactics, and has spoken to female students who have experienced abuse and rape at the hands of lovers, friends and family members.

In the book, Russo states why feminists often leave lesbian and bisexual women out of conversations about rape:

“By labeling the source of violence against women as (heterosexual) male dominance and patriarchy, many feminists (lesbian and heterosexual) assume that lesbian relationships are free of oppressive mistreatment…”

Russo hits the nail on the head. It is important to remember that rape culture exists, and that it is pervasive. It also important to look at the ways in which misogyny hurts bisexual, homosexual and transgender people; in this case through police officers who may not acknowledge the validity of the person’s rape. In this case, women are not considered rapists because women are not considered agents of violence or initiators of sex.

The fact that some police officers have trouble understanding how to prosecute crimes because they don’t understand that sex between women, and by extension, rape of a woman by a woman, is real, should deeply upset feminists. It may seem strange and twisted to some feminists that in order to acknowledge women have sexual agency and are fully realized human beings, we must also acknowledge that women are capable of rape and other abusive methods of control and dominance. For the sake of rape survivors, I hope we can confront that truth.

Those Shady Gays: A Reflection on Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Revenge

Everyone is transfixed by the character of Bob Benson. We always knew his actions were not genuine. Who smiles that often? Who always buys two cups of coffee, simply to be generous? Who is always “on” like that? When Pete Campbell came in to Bob’s office and ordered him to stop smiling, and Bob finally dropped his smile, quickly, like turning off a light switch, it was a pretty delicious moment. We all wanted Bob Benson to be hiding something other than his homosexuality. But this representation of homosexuals as deceptive, not only about their homosexuality, but other details of their lives, maybe because of their sexual preference, is not new. It’s actually a trope we see often.

via Huffington Post

Let’s look at the character of Thomas on Downton Abbey. The character is dark and complicated. He isn’t supposed to be a source of amusement for the viewers, as some representations of gay men on television often are. He is a fully realized human being with flaws who happens to be gay. At least it would seem that way, until you realize that he also fits the classic stereotype of homosexuals as untrustworthy. Even his closest friends and conspirators can’t rely on him to keep his word. His nefarious actions are not portrayed as separate from his sexuality.

via Today

The actor who plays, him, James Collier, said part of his character flaws are tied back to his being part of an oppressed group. In an interview for Salon, he said, “He’s an outsider…It was really last year, I was thinking, ‘Well, why is he so angry?’ Everyone’s got a reason. And we don’t have back stories, we have to make our own up, and I think his is rooted in his sexuality.” It’s easy to say that Thomas is simply a bad guy because the world has abused him, and to a certain extent, it’s fair to say that being an outsider makes you a tad anti-social, but not necessarily downright cruel, which Thomas is. I hoped that Thomas could simply be a bastard because he is ruthless, opportunistic and cunning, not because he is gay.

When I first saw the Revenge character, Regina, Charlotte Grayson’s hard-partying friend, I wondered why she was so determined to befriend Charlotte. She was controlling of Charlotte’s time and tried to prevent her from speaking with her brother for even a few minutes. I thought she was part of the Initiative. I thought she may have been paid by some gossip rag that was determined to see Charlotte become the headline producing train wreck she was before.

via PinkIsTheNewBlog

I was surprised but disappointed by the real reason Regina was so interested in Charlotte: she was attracted to her. On one hand, it seemed positive that Revenge added a queer character in addition to bisexual Nolan Ross. On the other hand, the choice seemed lazy. On a show that prides itself on twists and turns, it seemed too straightforward. It was also yet another iteration of the nefarious and untrustworthy homosexual. The show’s rich representation of bisexual men through Nolan Ross almost excused this choice, but not entirely. She also has something in common with Bob Benson and Thomas in that they desperately pursue people they know to be (probably) straight.

Underneath the manipulation there is a desperation to be loved, which makes them out to be submissive individuals with low self-esteem. The straight characters react in disgust to their desperation. It is a bit of an insult to queer people, not to mention slightly homophobic, to suggest they are all attracted to straight people and will do anything to “turn” them. Isn’t it a little backwards to assume that these individuals don’t have enough confidence in themselves, not to mention self -­-awareness, to seek out queer partners? Thomas certainly has high barriers to meeting gay men, but Bob has an inner circle of gay friends and Regina lives in the greater New York City area in 2013.

The deceptive queer character has been around for a long time. There is no better example than The Great Gatsby’s Jordan Baker. F. Scott Fitzgerald takes every opportunity to present her as the fraud that she is:

“Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men…because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness, I suppose she began dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.”

via IMDB and IMDB

As the paper, “Jordan Baker, Gender Dissent and Homosexual Passing in The Great Gatsby” by Maggie Gordon Froehlich points out, Jordan Baker lies about everything because she is a closet homosexual. We know she is a lesbian because Fitzgerald uses all of the appropriate code words: jaunty, hard, muscular. We also know that she lied to Nick Carraway about leaving the top down in a borrowed car, for no discernible reason besides the fact that she is secretly queer and therefore lies about everything from the car to her first golf tournament.

It is important to note that our culture has carried these attitudes from 1920s literature to television shows made in 2013. For some reason it is hard for our culture to accept that closeted gay people could lie about their sexuality and tell the truth about other details in their professional lives or friendships. This conforms to suspicions straight people have always had of homosexuals, whether they are out of the closet or not. There is disbelief that someone could enjoy or prefer a sexual activity other than the widely accepted norm. That reluctance to understand breeds mistrust. That mistrust manifests itself in characters like these, whose homosexuality and deceptive nature are inextricably linked.