Rose McGowan and the reversal of victimhood

If women can't name a threat, they can't guard against it. By Genevieve Gluck

In 2018, Me Too campaigner Rose McGowan was at a Barnes and Noble bookshop in New York promoting her memoir Brave, which details the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. During a question and answer session, as Rose was discussing her grief and recovery, a trans-identified male heckled her from the crowd, saying, “We get raped more often. We go through domestic violence more often. Trans women are in men’s prisons, and what have you done for them?” 

The viral video depicts a trans-identifying male with hair dyed pink, wearing a pale pink hoodie, standing among a crowd of seated patrons — who observe stoically — yelling, “This is genocide! This is the AIDs crisis all over again! This is white cis feminism!” an outburst prompted by an interview with RuPaul in 2017 wherein McGowan said that trans-identified males experience life differently from women. The heckler is peacefully removed while chanting, “White cis feminism!” in an apparent attempt to rouse the audience. For their part, the men in the crowd stare at the interloper in shocked silence, and several women laugh.

After the removal of the heckler, urged on by supportive cheers, McGowan rises and shouts, “I do not subscribe to your language!” and proceeds to condemn the use of demeaning labels. A woman in the crowd responds, “We’re so grateful,” and a man offers, “We love you.” These moments of consolation would later be edited out of most of the video clips uploaded to social media and thereby scrubbed from public consciousness.

Rather than taking her side, the version of events put forward by the 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.”

Yet even amid the furore over McGowan’s supposed bigotry, allegations that Dier had preyed on girls quickly surfaced on social media. “Andi Dier personally sexually assaulted me and two of my friends when we were 13 years old,” read one of the claims. A disturbing amount of testimonies were posted to Twitter, with at least one dating back to 2013. So many similar claims of child sexual abuse had been made that someone took it upon themselves to create a YouTube video documenting them.

Seeing the allegations of sexual abuse pile up against Dier, I decided to do some research of my own. That weekend, I discovered damning evidence from Andi Dier’s AskFM blog, which I screen-capped and shared on Facebook. Dier deleted the blog the following day. The format of AskFM is in the style of a Q&A and several entries in Dier’s blog were responses to questions regarding sexual abuse, in which Dier admits to relationships with “younger girls” and claims that statutory rape should not be a crime. Dier’s own words paint a portrait of an openly pedophilic rationale.

Q: True or false: you have been sexually involved with people of a certain age, who if the authorities were notified you would be facing jail time

A: If I had a lawyer I’d assume they’d tell me not to answer this. You can make your own assumptions.

Q: why do u like younger girls

A: I like younger girls in the same way I like brunettes. I just don’t give a sh-t. Age is an insignificant marker. I like cute girls, sometimes they happen to be a bit young. Sh-t happens.

Q: I feel like thats f-cked up of you to say that because a person thinks its wrong for you to get with minors that their morals are flawed. It seems like your morals are flawed honestly

A: It’s f-cked up for someone to tell me I don’t deserve my freedoms because they feel uncomfortable… We’re sending so many college kids to jail for being with someone a few years younger. These aren’t predators. And you don’t mystically wake up one day with the ability to consent. You have it before you’re 18. We’re stripping a populous of their lives. We’re kidnapping them. And many times they’ll be raped -- really raped.”

Here, Dier is claiming that minors can consent to sexual relationships with adults — that statutory rape is not ‘real’ rape — and comparing the incarceration of paedophiles to kidnapping. All this while implying that these paedophiles will be sexually abused in prison and therefore are innocent victims of an unjust law.

So the evidence mounted, alongside a maddening insistence on respecting Dier’s pronouns and comments telling “TERFs” to “choke”. But in time, Andi Dier faded from social media and public awareness, while the stain on McGowan’s reputation remained.

Those who sound the alarm about the ways in which gender ideology is used to excuse or cloak predatory behaviour are often met with accusations of bigotry. They may be fired from their jobs, subjected to sustained bullying and harassment, or otherwise censored in various ways, including permanent suspensions from social media by the very same platforms where the ideology is peddled by those with questionable motives.

In December 2020, while researching the influence of pornography on gender ideology, I noticed that Dier had reappeared on Reddit and Twitter, advertising homemade ’sissy’ pornography. Over the course of the past few months, Dier has been active in several subreddits, including both the r/rapefantasies and r/rape forums; the former focuses on rape-themed pornography, and the latter is a support group for victims. Even as Dier advertised in one forum by saying, “trans lesbian rapemeat needs to be f*cked straight,” he was simultaneously commenting in a support group for rape survivors. 

In one case, Dier told a victim that “you can’t compare [rape] to not wanting to do something and ‘going along with it,’” while within the same month posting in r/rapefantasies about wanting to be assaulted in the back of a van. In a classified ad posted to a meet-up forum, Dier says, “It hit me that I’m nearly 30 and would love to live out my lesbian cougar fantesies [sic] with a young teen. I’m a pre-op trans girl.” Strip away the obfuscating language, and this is an adult man nearing his thirties advertising to create pornography with a teenage girl.

Last month, in a subreddit called r/TeenAmIUgly, where predominantly teenage girls post selfies and ask to be rated on their appearance, Dier rated a 14 year-old girl a 9.5 out of 10. The image was deleted, and a pinned message from a moderator warns of “an influx of concern about creepy PMs”. In a subreddit called r/HypnoHookup, Dier offered to go over to the house of someone claiming to be an 18 year-old high school student. In r/AgeGapNSFW Dier commented, “can’t wait to have a teen cutie.” In March of this year, Dier retweeted child sexual exploitation content, including several images of pre-pubescent girls with highly sexualized captions, and one video involving what appears to be a child and an adult. (Not comfortable with simply reporting the accounts to Twitter, I have filed a formal complaint to a child sexual exploitation organization.) 

Among accounts retweeted by Dier include “leggyteenfilms”, which states in their bio “I love porn and chatting about teens,” and that the account was previously suspended. (Consider that a person may be permanently banned from Twitter for referring to a male with sex-based pronouns, but child sexual abuse accounts continue to reappear.) Other names of accounts shared by Dier are “teenobsessed” which has posted images of girls as young as 14 years old. Dier is also “liking” selfies posted by accounts claiming to belong to teenage girls, as well as following accounts that claim to belong to minors, some of which state their age as 13 years old.  There are also profiles with “MAP” in their bios; “MAP” or “minor-attracted person” is a euphemism for ‘paedophile’.

Andi Dier is not an exception to the rule.  It is imperative that this issue is understood as systemic, rather than being limited to merely a few instances; pornography is deeply entrenched at the centre of gender ideology’s view of womanhood. Recently, Reddit moderators staged a large-scale protest against the site’s employment of a trans-identified male, Aimee Challenor (née Ashton), with connections to known paedophiles. Transgender activist Dana Rivers (née David Warfield), who was responsible for organizing the protests that led to the cancellation of women-only, lesbian-centered Michfest, is currently in jail awaiting trial for the murder of a lesbian couple and their adopted son.

    Many other, less visible instances of sexual abuse and predatory behaviour by those protected under the umbrella of “gender identity” go unnoticed or linguistically and statistically erased altogether. Hundreds of such instances are documented on the sites Women Are Human and Transgender Crime UK, both of which are run independently by those concerned about the erosion of boundaries and safeguarding policies under currently fashionable gender identity ideology. On these sites, you will find cases that are not widely known or reported. 

To consider Andi Dier an outlier is to ignore a disturbing trend involving the normalization of dangerous sexual paraphilias and the degree to which institutions have been more concerned with protecting their public image than with defending women and children from male violence. Indeed, women are being banned from social media platforms for calling attention to male sexual abuse as well as for questioning the increasing trend of forced inclusion of male-bodied people in women’s spaces.

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.

(You can follow Genevieve on Twitter)