e media was that McGowan launched into a transphobic tirade. In particular, the US Women’s March organization denounced her within the day. Women’s March stated that “denying trans women’s identities is never okay,” in a tweet that also linked to trans activist Katelyn Burns’ interview with the agitator, a trans-identified male named Andi Dier. Dier claimed that those who identify as trans women are more oppressed than women, saying “When someone pulls down her pants and sees a v-gina, she won't be murdered for it. That is not something she fears. That's why she's cis.” The headline for the interview, “Rose McGowan Broke Down in a Transphobic Rage”, intentionally depicted McGowan as hysterical.
The bookshop audience’s instinctive support for McGowan gave way to a long line of commentators condemning McGowan and offering support for Andi Dier. The headline of an article for Slate read, “Rose McGowan’s Anti-Trans Bias Weakens Her Feminism,” and several other major media outlets joined in, including The Independent and Variety. As a result of the corresponding backlash, McGowan cancelled the rest of her book tour, stating that “every person sitting frozen in their chairs” had “a weakness called complicity.” In a video published by PinkNews the following year, McGowan issued an apology, stating: “I didn’t have the correct language… had I said ‘cis women’… now I understand that that’s what I should have said.”
It turns out, though, that this Andi Dier – this trans hero – has a long and deeply troubling history of preying on teenage girls, and involvement in so-called sissy pornography (basically, the fetishisation of being humiliated as a woman) – as Gluck exhaustively demonstrates.
Her conclusion to the whole sordid episode:
Rose McGowan was responsible for bringing to light systemic sexual abuse in Hollywood, and in particular for emboldening victims of film producer Harvey Weinstein. Despite this, she was publicly shamed for defending herself against verbal harassment, her book tour was cancelled, and worst of all, a man with a rape fetish who is clearly engaging in predatory behaviour was defended by a major women’s organisation ahead of her. A reversal achieved simply through gender ideology, which grants any male who claims a female identity the authority to speak over women.
The manipulation of language at the core of gender ideology is essential to its capacity for silencing victims. It is impossible to defend women’s rights if we cannot define women. It is impossible to fight against sexism if we cannot say that sex is real. We certainly cannot protect children from male sexual abusers if we are too afraid of appearing cruel to predators to name them as the men they are.
As for Rose McGowan. She provided two lessons as to the systemic nature of male power.
She was silenced by an abusive, predatory man and his enablers in the media. They said, “it must never happen again”.
And then, almost immediately, it happened again.
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