"In which I attempt to make redress for the worst article I ever wrote."

June 21, 2018 5:43 PM

How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story. Twenty-five years after the murder of Brandon Teena, queer cis journalist Donna Minkowitz looks back at her Village Voice article that inspired the film Boys Don't Cry and writes a mea culpa for how '90s biases and her own transphobic ignorance and personal projections shaped the story she wrote about Brandon.

"Twenty-five years later, we are in a time of enormous cruelty in the body politic, a time when rebuilding solidarity is the most precious task we have. I hope this article can be my way of making amends by revisiting Brandon’s life and murder — along with those of his companions Lisa Lambert and Phillip DeVine, who were slain in the same moments by Nissen and Lotter. Their deaths became a touchstone for the then-nascent trans movement, and, perhaps more than any other single event, have shaped how Americans view transgender people."


Trans 101. Previously: the 2003 MetaFilter post on the tenth anniversary of Brandon's death is an interesting and difficult reminder of how much the perception of trans people has changed in society and on MeFi even in only fifteen years.

posted by nicebookrack (11 comments total)

Content Warning: descriptions of violence, death, sexual assault, homophobia, transphobia, and child sexual abuse in the article.
posted by nicebookrack at 5:46 PM on June 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

This is important, especially at a point where we're still figuring out what it looks like to apologize for things this huge and hurtful, and I think it's especially important that she goes back to her notes and points out specific mistakes she made both in reporting and in being really self-unaware.

Now, her editor?
Asked to comment, Richard said he did not remember the article, or working on it with me.
Fuck that coward. I hope this is his legacy.
posted by Lyn Never at 6:18 PM on June 21, 2018 [33 favorites]

I admire this honest examen of the self; acknowledging past mistakes is as important as doing better.
posted by lineofsight at 6:18 PM on June 21, 2018 [8 favorites]

We've just had a long MeTa discussion about about not rubbishing things in the first X comments, but ugh to still denying Brandon's transness, both in terms of equating transness with binary identity and/or medical transition and a lack of familiarity with language of the early 90s.

Also some iffy pronoun usage re: Leslie Feinberg.
posted by hoyland at 6:23 PM on June 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

That was Feinberg's preference, it seems like, for something written for this sort of audience.
posted by Sequence at 7:02 PM on June 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

wow. that 2003 thread was really something. the extent to which we patted ourselves on the back for not thinking gay people were some sort of abomination is....yeah. some good stuff in that thread though, like people advocating for preferred pronouns....
i know i've learned a whole lot since then, but as trite as this sounds, mostly i've learned how much more i need to learn about stuff.
posted by capnsue at 9:28 PM on June 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

That was Feinberg's preference, it seems like, for something written for this sort of audience.

That Feinberg did not have a hard stance on pronouns is the reason I said "iffy" and not "wrong" (and checked Wikipedia, hir website and with another person familiar with Feinberg's work before writing that sentence). I stand by the assertion that "she" is the wrong choice for this article (and I think contrary to Feinberg's wishes, which were not to make people comfortable)--it's a means of locating she/zie as a lesbian (and accessing the reader's assumptions around gender that come with that) and not someone outspoken about being both a lesbian and trans.

There's a lot to unpack around Feinberg's appearance in this article and the scare quotes in 'FTM "transsexual"' and I think it hints toward what capnsue said about themselves also being true of the author--she can think about why she made the choices she did, but hasn't really gained a deeper understanding. It feels a little like she missed the last fifteen years or so of transmasculinity (and fair enough given she's a cis woman). She seems to have jumped from a conception of transmasculinity from Halberstam's border wars article to what feels like a generic 2018 progressive person's understanding of transness, but without realising (or at least mentioning) that there was a journey from A to B and that "generic 2018 progressive person's understanding of transness" simplifies the heck out of things (and into which Leslie Feinberg does not fit neatly, bringing this back to the beginning).
posted by hoyland at 3:33 AM on June 22, 2018

I feel like I should clarify that I'm not rubbishing Halberstam's article (or the subsequent chapter in Female Masculinity) or saying it's dated trash. It's hugely important and worth reading. However, there's been a parsing out of transmasculinity from butch (and stone butch) in the intervening twenty years and that's what the article in the FPP seems to have skipped over.
posted by hoyland at 4:52 AM on June 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I remember this story from 25 years ago. We have come such a long way, and we should celebrate that even as we remember the murder of Brandon Teena. Let's count him as the best and most famous person from Nebraska.
posted by mississippi at 9:51 AM on June 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

FYI, Stone Butch Blues is still available to download from Leslie Feinberg's website (PDF).
posted by nicebookrack at 11:52 AM on June 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Twitter Moment collection of reactions to the article
posted by nicebookrack at 8:27 PM on June 22, 2018