Advisory: This essay discusses themes of rape culture. Skip if you’re not ready. I speak about emotions and cry in this live. If you are uncomfortable with other people’s emotions, skip if you are not emotionally literate. Expressions of emotion are a sign of strength, and they always have been, because they point toward clarity and values driven discernment.
To orient you as you watch this livestream, I identify the following seven themes I discuss and describe the ethical and political stakes of these themes. I also cite some key sources so that you may greet my narrative knowing I’ve done my due diligence to be as transparent as I know how to be without becoming a phantasm.
White Patriarchy Teaches White Women to “Eat Shit” + Punch Down on Other Minorities
I talk about how white supremacist patriarchy teaches men to view people, who aren’t white cisgender men, as obstacles to crush or objects for their use, never human beings. They punish those who speak out and have developed an entire injustice system to protect their privilege. They brainwash white women into protecting them or risk facing rejection, violence, and social and economic precarity. White women who do the work of protecting those who abuse power are called crumb maidens.
Transphobia Is Directly Rooted in White Supremacist Rape Culture
I talk about how transphobia, people’s sick obsession with transgender people, is part and parcel of rape culture. The entitlement cisgender people presume to have, to know what’s in someone’s pants, to tell people who they are, and to demand details about how they care for their body is invasive. You have been taught to see us as invasive, because white cisgender men have trained you to launder your anger at their invasiveness onto us.
Exposing a Trans Person’s Identity, in Order to Keep Your Secrets Quiet, is Abuse
Because a former fed is threatening to expose my identity, reveal my location, sue me in order to cover up him being named a rapist, back in 2020, I am calling him out on his bluff by outing myself before he can do it to dominate me. Here I tell you my legal name, where I work1, and precisely how I came to be run out of my house by white Christian fascists who tracked me down because I had the audacity to do my job, as a mandatory Title IX2 reporter, to stand up for my transgender students’ rights. I talk about the Koch-sponsored hit pieces my university’s lawyer appears to have pushed out to frame me as a “bully of white women” so that no one will look at the damning public records, which demonstrate exactly why the former DOJ and DOE were filing amicus briefs on behalf of my case— before the fascist escalation in which the civil rights departments in both organizations were dismantled.
As an act of self-liberation, I have reclaimed myself as Dr. Jude Mikwën. My pronouns are, and always3 have been they/them. Jude stood with the nonviolent Palestinian community organizer, Jesus of Nazareth, at his execution and did not betray him when other “friends” did. Jude is also known as a friend to vulnerable children and the patron saint of impossible cases. Mikwën is the Lenape4 word for feather/quill.
You can still call me Dr. G. My students do, and it’s a term of endearment.
Transgender People Are in Danger from American Fascists: Stand with Them
I urge you to understand how unsafe transgender people are in the United States. We have always experienced fascism, but it is escalating to the point that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Protection has issued no less than ten red flag warnings that Christian fascists, and their adjacent fascist colluders, are slating trans people for genocide. I need you to take this seriously, mark the harm as real, and make a plan to prevent your trans neighbors from being harmed.
The distinction between cisgender and transgender are metaphorical destinations; in practice, we are like you—authentic in our specificity— and we are being annihilated because fascists always need a rigid gender system to turn cis women into property and to police “the color line” through gender binaries.
Stand with us because, when you do, you are also standing up for yourselves.
We are each others’ reflections.
People Who Come forward to Expose Abuse Have the Goods: Don’t Be Gaslit
I also use my own experiences as a sexual assault survivor and a survivor of workplace sexual harassment to explain that people who come forward to name those who have harmed them do so knowing that they will be crushed. The notion that survivors of sexual abuse are not credible and just trying to “damage reputations” is a white supremacist argument— endemic in and reflective of rape culture.
Perpetrators always have the legal upper hand, which they use to abuse. Survivors know this, which is why so few do choose to stand up, because abusers have no shame and will seek to destroy and defame anyone who threatens their carefully constructed image of themselves.
Believe survivors.
Believe women.
Believe children.
Believe Two Spirit people.
Believe trans people.
The people who come forward are walking through flames, not for themselves but for all of us. Their story is our story. My story is your story.
We get out of white supremacist rape culture together.
Internet Search Your Heroes, Because Not All That Glitters Is Golden
I recount the details of an experience that has escalated to the point of ridiculousness, wherein an former federal agent filmed me surreptitiously with Meta glasses. When I spoke out about it and named that violation as part and parcel of rape culture, he panicked. This man is now using his mother as a vehicle to issue legal threats at me for “harassment,” which is a form of DARVO [deny, attack, reverse victim and offender], so that he can keep his veneer in place. The reason I am being scapegoated is because this man had attempted to use Substack, and all the affordances of white male cisgender privilege, to rebrand himself as an enlightened openly gay man hero of the resistance. My story, about Meta glasses being rape culture, hit too close to home. When he threatened to sue me, telling me I was endangering him [also DARVO], a number of women [more than three] immediately messaged me to tell me that this man was named by a woman as a rapist in 2020, to the point he needed to drop out of a run for US Congress as a [wait for it] “non-progressive” Democrat. Had this man not issued threats, after I objected to being glassholed without my consent, I would have never known about the skeletons he was trying to hide.
In the end, he outed himself through doubling down on punching down.
Scapegoating Abusers Who Come Forward Has ALWAYS Been Fascist
Speaking out about abuse is only seen as “harassment” to the perpetrator of that abuse; it is not the responsibility of anyone who is harmed to protect the reputation of abusers. The expectation that people who are harmed “privately take up their issues” with the abusers themselves, or utilize an already weaponized injustice system to seek restitution, is and always has been part and parcel of the trap that has always been in place for any person in this country who isn’t a white cisgender man. We break the trap and get free together by refusing to cover for them and letting them experience the peer review of their own harm.
Naming abuse is not abuse. Scapegoating people who are abused is fascist. It always has been. Fascism isn’t a political party; it is a violent culture of entitlement that teaches you “some pigs are more equal than other pigs.” It is time to take away that story from white cisgender men, their crumb maidens, and their useful tokens.
Thank you to each and every person who spends time with my words. This is a shout-out to NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, Frederic Poag, A. Eevie Bateman, Shayne J 💥🔍⚡, Cryn Johannsen, Leslye Joy Allen, Historian, Deidre Keller, and many others for tuning into my livestream.
All of my work is free and will never be behind a paywall. To make sure you don’t miss livestream playbacks and essays, subscribe to my free blog.
The community that I teach in, on a small satellite campus in a “red” rural area, has offered more welcome and solidarity than the main campus, where my sexual harassment began. Please don’t dog on my tiny campus or make unfounded jokes about rural areas as throw-aways. They are not. Cities and alleged liberal spaces often displace their own bigotry onto rural areas, and it needs to end. I wrote about this here.
When Title IX actually applied to trans people.
Two-Spirit and gender expansive people are older than nations; only white men’s bigoted gaslighting through colonization is new.
Though I am racialized as white [Irish/Polish], I’m also Lenape.
