How Donna Minkowitz Nailed, And Botched, Her Apology
CW: transphobia, sexual violence, CSA, murder, family rejection, police brutality, misgendering, sex
This week The Village Voice ran an article by Donna Minkowitz about her “huge error” in reporting the story of Brandon Teena’s rape and murder in the Voice in 1993. The huge error was in presenting Brandon as a self-hating lesbian, a traumatized woman who hated “her” body because of sexual abuse survived in childhood. Along the way, Minkowitz also recognizes having overlooked the grief of Brandon’s mother, changing how she reported the story, and on “victim-bashing” by implying that Brandon was a manipulative and rageful person whose “fury” was extinguished when it was reflected back on him by real men.
(if you’re trans, breathe.)
The organizer me is relieved and grateful to see someone take stock of something so far out of public attention and choose to spotlight and correct it, to see someone modeling accountability by letting their conscience get them into trouble they could have avoided. That she felt moved by her conscience and responded by explaining why the thing she had done was wrong, to help others avoid the same mistakes.
The me that is uncomfortable with what I believed at 23 admires her courage and knows that I’m lucky my early writing was not so influential, because I know what I believed at 23 and thank g-d no one was listening to me.
The me that knows I would be less than I am without people keeping me accountable — often people who are marginalized in ways I am not — is happy to see her acknowledge the criticisms of Susan Stryker and Leslie Feinberg, to honor at least some of them as fair, to frame their pushback as both scary and ultimately positive, and as things she should have taken on board.
The me that teaches emotional skills to activists is grateful that she modeled acknowledgement of how her insecurity, projection, trauma, and defensiveness stopped her from being better at this task.
The me that that loves restorative justice wants to send this to everyone I know and say “it doesn’t matter how long ago you messed up or whether people are still yelling about it — it’s still a good time to fix it.”
And.
The trans me wishes that since she waited 25 years to apologize, she’d taken another, like, two weeks to think about how to do it really well.
The trans me wishes that a trans editor had gotten to read over this piece before it ran, because I suspect that’s not what happened.
The trans me wishes that Minkowitz had taken some time to read some of the books written by the phenomenal trans leaders who had criticized her then, about a trans history she has accidentally erased.
The trans me wishes that Minkowitz, in the last 25 years, had become connected enough with a trans person to know that “she was still my daughter” sounds brutal to a trans son. That ending a paragraph about a mother’s love with a sentence that is synonymous with “my family thinks that they can love me without seeing me” will validate those parents and retraumatize those kids.
The trans me wishes that in recognizing her past transphobia, Minkowitz had thought to double check what pronouns Leslie Feinberg preferred before rendering hir, too, as a woman-who-identifies-as-FTM.
The trans me, the me that’s been told my identity is a product of rape, that I am a broken, self-hating lesbian, that I am what’s wrong with the gay community, wishes that Minkowitz had engaged just a little deeper with what her contribution to American perceptions of trans people continues to mean for trans people.
(if you’re trans, breathe.)
There is so much that went right about this article, and I am not here to tell you that Donna Minkowitz is canceled or only a spotless apology that sticks the landing is worth it. Apologizing is messy. Growth is messy. I don’t know a single trans person who stands by everything they’ve said about transness over the last 25 years. We are all learning.
And. Since I want you to share her article, and read it, and learn from it as a model of self-reflection and accountability, I also want to add some footnotes.
Leslie Feinberg used a broad range of pronouns over hir life. Feinberg’s web bio, as it was last updated, uses both “ze” and “s/he.” Feinberg wrote that s/he used the pronouns that made hir appear the most trans — which might be “she” in trans spaces, or “he” in lesbian spaces, or “ze” in straight-dominated spaces. Minkowitz did acknowledge the complexity of Feinberg’s identity as both lesbian and transmasculine, but for a cis author to default to “she” in the context of acknowledging misgendering another trans man downplays Feinberg’s transness — it doesn’t see him.
[correction: this paragraph previously used “they” in place of “she,” which was not correct and inappropriately portrays Feinberg, whose optimal transness was also as a visible lesbian. I have much more recently pointed to Feinberg when people have claimed that he/him lesbians or nonbinary lesbians do not exist, and erasing this part of hir identity here was a significant and meaningful mistake. I apologize sincerely for the impact this has had on readers, particularly in the context of this specific article. And this next section in which I say why I think I’m right — yeah, I wasn’t.]
Cis people — I hear you saying, “you’ve never met Leslie Feinberg and she has! What makes you think you have it right?”
Honestly, because I get calls from cis queer folks all day long misgendering my colleagues. Maybe Feinberg, amidst the “screaming without respite” told 23-year-old Donna Minkowitz that it was dandy to interpret him as a woman. I think probably, though, that didn’t happen, and even if it did, the books in which Feinberg talked about wanting to be seen as optimally trans in all situations were written after that.
So what was ze saying?
“It’s not so much how I see Brandon Teena, as how Brandon Teena saw himself. I use the pronoun ‘he’ because a), it’s the pronoun Brandon Teena chose, but b), it’s ultimately what he died for.”
Ze was right.
Ze was also right when ze said the article let cops off the hook. Coverage of police refusing to investigate a rape and dehumanizing the victim as an explanation was brief and dispassionate, while pages were devoted to descriptions of how Brandon had sex, complete with quotes about Brandon’s sexual performance. What could have been an in-depth discussion of police negligence was instead speculation about how this sex was threatening to the womens’ sexuality and how it made them unknowing (and unconsenting) lesbians. If I am raped and murdered, I hope my grieving lovers are not quizzed about how hard I make them cum. If I critique a cis colleague for focusing on a murdered trans sibling’s sex life instead of the network of violence and neglect that killed them, I hope my critiques are not described as “unfair” and “screaming without respite.”
In her apology, Donna Minkowitz shares her surprise that “even in New York City, someone like me, a journalist who considered myself very involved in queer radical politics, could be massively ignorant about what it meant to be transgender.” I feel like this is such an easy trap, especially for activists and scholars. It is always easier to not know than to know about a group that’s been erased, and part of the reason is because we trust that we’ve been told the important stuff about a topic we studied. It is a brutal betrayal that we continually recreate pictures of the past that erase trans people.
Like this apology did.
The part of this that cut me the deepest is the implicit but vibrant argument that it was a different time, and nobody knew any better. The trans movement was “nascent” and only later did today’s “plethora of gender identites” emerge. Despite explicitly honoring Susan Stryker and Leslie Feinberg, Minkowitz presents a picture of the past that erases the histories they painstakingly preserved — histories that trans people are still told do not exist.
Although history is not my major focus as an academic, it has become a major focus of my work in trans movement spaces. Many transphobic voices think that trans people are new, or (maybe worse) they have always existed but they have always been shut down, shut out, or destroyed. Just as queer historians have created for queer folks a sense of legacy and foundation by revealing a history of diversity in love and eroticism that is the length of human history, it is so crucial to give our most vulnerable trans siblings a sense of solidarity. Those who are exploring or transitioning or who are traumatized, who are still being told that their existence is trauma, is violence, is homophobia, need to know that people like them have always existed, and moreover that people like them have sometimes been happy. Have sometimes fought and even won. That there is nothing automatic or universal about rejecting them. That they can be healthy, holy, celebrated, accepted. That they can live.
I do not speak for all trans people — for myself, I accept Minkowitz’ apology and I sincerely thank her for choosing accountability. And I hope she will look back at the Carolyn Forché quote with which she ended her recent piece: “Go after that which is lost/and all the mass graves of the century’s dead/will open into your early waking hours.”
Please, keep going. There have been so many more of us than you know.
