"The original writer of the Village Voice story that inspired 'Boys Don’t Cry' looks back on her reporting — and the huge error she still regrets."

Here's how the original story looked in 1993:



See the problem? (From the perspective of today.)

Donna Minkowitz writes:

For years, I have wanted to apologize for what I now understand, with some shame, was the article’s implicit anti-trans framing. Without spelling it out, the article cast Brandon as a lesbian who hated “her” body because of prior experiences of childhood sexual abuse and rape. (One of Brandon’s acquaintances had told me he’d said he was “disgusted by lesbians,” and several friends said Brandon had said, “I can’t be with a woman as a woman. That’s gross.”) I saw this youngster’s decision to lead a life as a straight man as incredibly bold — but also assumed it was a choice made in fear, motivated by internalized homophobia.

At the time, I was extremely ignorant about trans people. Like many other cis queer people at the time, I didn’t know that there were gay trans men, trans lesbians, bisexual trans folks, that being trans had nothing to do with whether you were straight or gay, and that trans activism was not, as some of us feared, an effort to stave off queerness and lead “easier,” more conventional heterosexual lives.

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. In particular, I conjectured that Brandon’s long-term sexual abuse by an uncle and a rape in high school had led him to abjure his “female” genitals and breasts. It’s the aspect of my article that makes me cringe the most today....

Ever wonder about what aspects of the article you're writing today that you will cringe at in 25 years? No, no, today is today's today. Yesterday was yesterday's today. The insights of today are good enough for today. Tomorrow belongs to somebody else, possibly you, but Alien You — Alien You who will look upon the You of Today as benighted and despicable.

I was electrified by the story — which, as I say, I assumed was about a lesbian. Lesbians had been talking for years about playing with gender, taking on different gender identities, and using and even eroticizing male signifiers and roles to take back power from a world that continually disparaged us as barely worthy of notice and boringly powerless. The conversation about genderplay among lesbians had started in the Eighties, when many of us had begun speaking once again about sexual role-playing, dildos, and other ways of freeing our sexualities from the vanilla, non-phallic, and non-penetrative limits the leaders of 1970s feminism had unwittingly placed on it....

[L]esbians and straight men had been in a kind of cultural competition for decades over who truly made the better lovers for women. I believe this is one reason for the fury some straight men have been directing at me since I began cutting my hair butch and short at 18. The screams of “fuckin’ dyke” with which large, hulking men have frightened me for years stemmed from their fear that I could take something away from them. Therefore, the idea that we — any and all lesbians, or any and all women, really — might be able to go out into the world and “become” men galvanized many of the lesbians who first heard about the Brandon Teena story in early 1994....