Encounters With Male Fragility, as a Man, as a Woman
Before I came out as transgender in 2019, sexism was of my biggest fears about living as a woman. I’d benefited from some kinds of male privilege up until then: people listened to me when I spoke; when I was assertive, they usually read it as confidence and authority; people rarely questioned my authority or expertise. Being treated as a man made life easier in these ways (and of course, as a trans woman, much harder in others).
In contrast, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, I saw how poorly women were treated by my male classmates. Women were constantly interrupted. When we're confident and strong, male classmates got annoyed or resistant. And men constantly flirted with and even touched my female classmates, as if the men had some right over a woman’s attention, bodies, and physical space. Most of the time, I watched women just silently tolerate these behaviors. But I knew that if I was bothered by this behavior as a bystander, some of the women were probably seething inside. I left every one of those moments feeling guilty that I hadn’t spoken up on their behalf. Part of my reluctance was fear of speaking out of place or on their behalf, but also fear of a negative reaction from men—as if it was somehow my responsibility to protect men from criticism.
As a student, when I saw women give feedback about these behaviors, my fears of negative reactions proved true. I saw men get unreasonably defensive as if no one had ever given them feedback about what they say and do. I watched men call the feedback they received “an assault” or “an outrage.” And the men who responded in these ways seemed to get their way: it usually led to social conflicts that were highly consequential for the women—feeling like they couldn’t share feedback, no longer feeling safe in a workplace, or feeling like everyone around them had abandoned them to deal with the retaliation in isolation—and essentially no consequence for the man, whose greatest claim to harm was being accused of unwanted behavior. These dynamics emerged from male fragility but also reinforced it, and in remaining silent, I was complicit.
This complicity led to shame. So by the time I started my new job as a professor in 2008, I’d resolved to not let these micro and sometimes macro aggressions slip by unaddressed. When my male colleagues would give unwanted attention to women, I would give them an evil eye, and they would get the message, and sometimes get mildly annoyed I was censuring them. When my male colleagues interrupted a woman in a meeting, I would interrupt them, and say, “Excuse me, she was speaking.” When a male colleague was leaving little room for women to speak, I would take some of the unearned platforms I’d been given, and then give it back to my female colleagues. There were also many cases in classes that I taught where a male student had given a female student unwanted sexual attention, and the female student escalated the concern to me. I always responded by finding time to talk one on one with the man, describing his behavior and explaining why it was inappropriate. In most cases, the male student accepted what I said, sometimes begrudgingly, and stopped. These conflicts were never pleasant, but it felt like the bare minimum effort for making up for a lifetime of silence.
These small attempts at feedback eventually led to larger ones. Once, I was teaching a class in which I required teamwork. I made it clear on the first day that teams needed to be safe places of mutual respect, and encouraged students to come to me if they didn’t feel safe. Five weeks later, that expectation led one of the women in my class to ask for some confidential time during my office hours, where she disclosed that her teammate had sexually assaulted her at a party. Mortified, I listened, consoled, and helped her navigate her options, offering to connect her with university services and campus police. She feared retaliation and did not want to report it, and I respected her wishes, breaking up the team without explanation and allowing her to attend another instructor’s class session to finish the quarter. I was mortified that this had happened to her, but I also felt wholly ill-equipped to manage it, and worried that this man left the entire incident unchallenged, and potentially even unaware of his crime.
All of these experiences, of course, happened while I was presenting as a man. As I began to accept that I was a woman, I also began to see myself not purely as an ally, but also as a potential future victim of the sexist behavior I’d seen. Was living as myself in the world worth all of the discrimination and harassment that I’d seen men give women? What kind of power would I lose in my professional contexts? How would being an out trans woman interact with sexism? And what were the chances that I’d suffer some of the worst consequences of sexism, being sexually assaulted, or worse? Women assigned females at birth don’t have the choice of whether to deal with these problems. But I was in the strange circumstance of having to accept some degree of harassment, discrimination, and sexism if I wanted to live authentically as myself.
Once I came out in September of 2019, most of the sexism I experienced was a predictable microaggression. I was interrupted more often, even by male colleagues who previously knew me as a man. Strangers in professional contexts ignored me more often. At one conference before the pandemic lockdown, an attendee disputed my position as a tenured professor, until a male colleague spoke up on my behalf; instead of responding with embarrassment, this colleague responded with anger and walked away. It felt like my usual assertiveness and confidence more often led to distrust and skepticism than praise. I was finally living as the woman I was, with all of the blessings of being me and all of the curses of being a woman in a sexist world.
But it got worse. In a class I recently taught, a female student came to my TA, reporting that a male student had given her unwanted sexual attention in a 1 on 1 meeting. My TA shared the details of their conversation with the student’s consent, relaying that the female student had described it as “borderline sexual harassment.” I didn’t learn precisely what that unwanted attention was, or whether the male student was even aware that he had given it. Neither really mattered; what mattered was that the female student was uncomfortable enough that she’d reached out to us for help. As the instructor, I needed to intervene to either encourage repair or separate them, and educate the male student about the consequence of his behavior.
I followed my usual practice of reaching out for a 1 on 1 meeting with the male student. I reached out to the student to ask to speak, without saying what I wanted to speak about. He said he wasn’t available. I offered any weekend time for a phone call. He said he wasn’t available then either. I offered the following Monday, and he declined. Sensing that he did not want to speak to me, I wrote him an email, relaying the feedback that his teammate had given to my TA and then to me, and strongly encouraging him to reflect on whatever behavior was leading to her discomfort. I suggested he address the conflict with her and attempt to restore her sense of safety on the team so that they could remain a functional team. He didn’t reply.
Now, as I mentioned above, when I had given feedback like this to men before, I was presenting as a man. And their response had always been reluctant, annoyed, “Okay, fine, I will respect your authority.” Of course, in all of those previous incidents, I was able to actually have a conversation with them. This student, however, after forcing me to write an email by refusing to meet, responded with outrage. He eventually wrote back an angry email, saying that I had falsely accused him of sexual harassment with no evidence (as if his teammate’s discomfort wasn’t evidenced enough). He expressed fear that I would destroy his reputation and retaliate against him, even though I had expressly stated that I had no interest in making any of his behavior public. And so, rather than expressing any concern or empathy for his classmate and her discomfort around him, he expressed a sense of persecution. In a way, it was good he was expressing his rage at me instead of her. But it also meant I was now his target.
For a time, giving him feedback seemed to have the intended effect: the female student reported no further unwanted attention, and the team persisted in their work. She wasn’t exactly comfortable, but she insisted it was manageable, and so we didn’t want us to further intervene. But just a few weeks later, I received an email from our Title IX office, reporting that the male student had filed a sexual harassment complaint against me, arguing that I had discriminated against him on the basis of his gender and his national origin. The claim was dismissed as not meeting the definition of harassment by our Title IX office—unsurprisingly—but it shook me: since when was sharing feedback on behalf of female student discrimination or harassment?
It wasn’t clear to me what would happen next. He could appeal, but the Title IX office didn’t have to tell me anything in the interim. I learned that he had spoken to other faculty about the email. Suddenly, I was living in an awkward limbo, certain that I had done the right thing sharing the students’ feedback with him, but really uncertain what the consequence would be to me. In an effort to be mindful of my power in the situation, and to respect the Title IX office’s policy of “need to know” confidentiality, I remained silent, and therefore isolated, with no one but my TA to discuss it with. The Title IX office provided no guidance, insight, or support, and so I just waited. (Though I learned later that the strict confidentiality policy was a vestige of previous cultures of silence, the dated language had the previously intended effect).
Things were quiet for a few weeks until one morning I woke up to several Slack messages and emails from colleagues checking to see if I was okay. I’d written a tweet that morning expressing some fatigue about my gender transition and the pandemic, alluding to despair I was struggling to overcome. I thought they were checking in on that. “I’m fine, just a rough week.” But when I checked my inbox, someone had forwarded me a long email that the student had sent to our entire faculty and student population. The email accused me of “bullying, coercion, deflective, and discriminatory remarks” and demanded that I be held responsible for my discrimination against masculine men. He expressed concern about being forced to “uncomfortably conform” out of fear of losing everything because of womens’ accusations. He demanded I be punished for “silencing” him. My colleagues weren’t checking in on my tweet; they were checking in on this email.
It wasn’t at all clear what would happen next. Some of the women in my community reached out to offer support, but there was a sense that this was typical and routine, and they were just going through the motions of consoling yet another woman through the rage of a man whose behavior demanded feedback. I couldn’t help but wonder why this had happened to me now, as opposed to the numerous other times I’d given feedback to men about their behavior. Maybe it was just this particular student? Maybe it was four years of a president normalizing men’s rights, White grievances, and sexual harassment? Maybe it was just the fact that this time, I was a woman giving a man feedback? Or, perhaps, it was that I was a transgender woman, and an out queer one at that?
Throughout all of this, I kept the incident private. As I had told him, I had no interest in ruining his reputation, and certainly no interest in bringing more attention to the female student, who was just trying to learn. My responsibility was to ensure a safe learning environment for everyone in the class, including any learning about how to treat and respect teammates. No one needed to know about his teammate’s discomfort or his behavior; I expected him to simply learn from it and move on, and I told him as much. Unfortunately, I clearly didn’t succeed at teaching him. And sadly, he was willing to disclose his own identity to our entire community in order to have a platform to express his outrage, ultimately harming his own reputation.
After his email, things escalated further. My school conducted an independent investigation, as the student had requested in his tirade. The student filed another Title IX complaint, this time claiming that my related feedback had caused him to fail a class (though he somehow excelled in mine). This time, the Title IX office conducted a formal investigation, leading to hours of document gathering and interviews, and of course further uncertainty and isolation. All concluded that I hadn’t violated any laws or university policies. But the rapid escalation and weaponization of complaint pathways showed that not only did this student have no interest in learning from the feedback I’d relayed from his teammate; his interest appeared to be ensuring that he never receive such feedback again. And now I’m left to wonder now how he will escalate things further, through social media, the press, lawsuits, or other means, and what his ultimate goal is. To punish me? To prove his innocence? To prove that men are under attack by the “LGBTQ mobs”? I’ll probably never know or understand.
Of course, sharing my experiences here probably won’t make things easier for me. If the student reads this, it will probably make him even angrier, even though he already disclosed his identity and formal complaints to our broader community. But it will help in a way that I think outweighs the pain of further conflict, and any further self-inflicted reputational harm he suffers: it will state, as women have been saying for far too long: men, you need to reckon with your fragility. It’s not the job of institutions or society to protect you from feedback about your unwanted behavior; it’s not women’s job to make space for your behavior by remaining silent or accommodating; it’s not other mens’ jobs to protect your feelings when you do shitty unwanted things. It’s your job, just like it is anyone else’s. Society is no longer going to shield you from that responsibility.
So in case, this male student is reading this, let me model what it looks like to accept responsibility. Presenting as a man until I was 39, I said and did shitty, sexist things to women. Sometimes I was parroting other men; sometimes I was trying to look cool; sometimes I was just being selfish. And I’m guessing there have been countless other times that I said or did something I wasn’t even aware was sexist. But my intent in these situations, nor my awareness of my impact, never really mattered, because when I said those things, they all had the same effect: making women feel smaller, less valuable, less human, and less respected. No one should ever make people feel that way. I deeply regret all of this harm, and I take responsibility for those harms, even the ones I wasn’t aware of. I deeply, sincerely apologize to any women I have harmed.
At the moment, it’s really hard to imagine wanting to give feedback to a male student ever again. Obviously, I will, because I won’t tolerate a society in which men’s behavior goes unchallenged. But if the consequence of me giving feedback is being investigated by my university, publicly attacked by a raging men’s rights activist, and having to remain silent about it, isolating me for months to avoid perceptions of abuse of power or retaliation, it will definitely make me more reluctant to criticize. And that is how we still find ourselves in a sexist culture: the price for equality is millions of women being punished for speaking up about their abuse and harassment.
So let the punishment begin.
