Will the real Brennan please stand up?
Many trans folk are aware of Brennan for her attempts to overturn trans equality protections, her targeting, outing and trans-shaming of non-cis folk and for claiming that cis privilege doesn’t exist because not all butch lesbians can access all the privilege that comes from not being trans.
About a month ago, Brennan began contacting me. She sent me her personal phone number and email saying that should I ever have questions, I should feel free to contact her. I did contact her. We played telephone tag, sent texts and when at last I had a firm commitment for a scheduled phone call, she apparently ignored my call. Since I couldn’t get her on the phone, 10 days ago I sent her an email with the questions I had for her and thus far she’s ignored them. Moreover, while I was waiting for her to make good on her offer to answer some questions, she apparently contacted a MRA site and asked to be a contributing author on their site.
Yes. Cathy Brennan: MRA activist. But, I’ll get to that in a moment. First, here’s the evidence to back up my previous paragraph, along with the questions Brennan appears to be ducking:
5/6/2013: Brennan extends invitation.
I called her the next day. Here’s an example of the telephone tag that went on for days:
[sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://www.cristanwilliams.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/CB-VM.mp3″]Here’s some of the texts back and forth:
Here are the emails:
After all of this, we still hadn’t managed to actually talk. After more than a week of unsuccessfully trying to connect, I sent her the following email:
Here are the questions Cathy Brennan apparently will not answer:
The first set of questions I have is about you as a person. I (and I’m betting that many) know you primarily via reputation and know next to nothing about who you are as a real person.
- When did you first meet a trans-identified person? What was the experience like for you?
- You’re an out and proud lesbian. What was your coming out process like?
- Professionally, you’re a lawyer. Why law? Also, have you found that your status as either/both lesbian and female affected your ability to pursue your profession?
- You’re an outspoken activist. Was there an event that motivated you to become an activist?
The second set of questions is about your experience as an activist.
- What are your thoughts about the “TERF” label?
- What are your thoughts about the “RadFem” label?
- Internet trolls aside, where do you feel the trans movement shares some common ground with the aims/goals of radical feminism?
- If someone were to ask you what your reputation is in RadFem circles, what would you say?
- If someone were to ask you what your reputation is in trans circles, what would you say?
- I’ve noticed that you’ve had some (publicly) contentious activist relationships with other RadFems. Why do you feel that it came to that level of public contention?
- What is your proudest/happiest/most fulfilling moment as an activist?
- What was your hardest moment as an activist?
- As you understand it, what happened to radfemhub.com?
- Julie Bindel was highly critical of the type of rhetoric that went on at the radfemhub. She said, “I hereby denounce Rad Fem Hub for being rabid maniacs.” Do you feel that people who denounce places like radfemhub are, by their rejection, supporting the patriarchy?
The last set of questions have to do with ideology/theory.
- If someone were to assert patriarchy isn’t real, what would you point to as being evidence of the existence of patriarchy?
- What have you heard trans people point to as being evidence of a set of privileges people accrue by virtue of not being trans?
- I’ve heard some RadFems use the term rape in various ways. When you talk about the act of rape, what action are you referring to? Do you believe that a transwoman can be raped?
- Do you believe that people can have a subjective experience their body outside of the context of culture?
- The FBI defines gender identity as “A person’s internal sense of being male, female, or a combination of both; that internal sense of a person’s gender may be different from the person’s gender as assigned at birth.” When you say gender identity what do you mean?
- The FBI defines a hate group as “An organization whose primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against persons of or with a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity which differs from that of the members or the organization.” Some would argue that the decades-long behavior and rhetoric of TERF leadership qualifies the TERF movement as a hate group. As a leader, in what ways do you work to not promote “… animosity, hostility, and malice against persons of or with a… gender identity which differs from that of the members…” of the TERF movement?
- I’ve had internet death threats, faced doc dropping, internet bullying, targeting of my friends and family, etc. I know that you’re dealt with a lot of this type of crap as well. It seems that this experience of hate-filled push-back is fairly common in the era of internet activism. How have you personally dealt with it? Would you have advice for other activists on how to deal with it?
After getting nothing but silence from Brennan after her apparent willingness to answer questions, I set her a follow-up email:
Hello? Echo-o-o-o
While I’ve not heard from Brennan, the MRAs have.
Apparently while I was busy waiting for a reply from Brennan, she was busy putting herself out there to support the MRA movement. Here’s the email Brennan apparently sent to someone named Loy Finly over at avoiceformen.com:
Hi. I’m Cathy “Bug” Brennan and I want to support the Men’s Rights Movement.
I will say that the email listed on the above email is the exact email Brennan used when corresponding with me.
Brennan’s support of the Men’s Rights Movement is kinda ironic since she tweeted the following earlier this year:
More from the SPLC’s voice of reason on MRA issues
Apparently around the same time that she seems to have decided to support the MRA movement, she changed many of her accounts so that they are not longer publicly available:
Brannan’s personal site is no longer public
Brannan’s twitter is no longer public
I’ve no idea what’s going on with Brennan. Obviously she wants her privacy. Obviously she wants to work with MRAs. At the end of the day, I don’t personally care what what’s going on with her. I don’t care if she chooses to side with MRAs, TERFs or some other fringe group.
The point of putting all of this out there is to prove that I’ve made a good faith effort to take Cathy up on her offer of dialogue. My questions to her will remain open to her. Should Cathy choose to be honest about her claim that she’s open to dialogue, I’d be happy to talk about the questions I’ve laid out as they’re central to the ideology that Brennan, in particular, has worked to so hard to support.
[alert type=”info”]Cross-posted from Ehipassiko[/alert]
Curiouser and curiouser.
I left a fb comment on a transadvocate post a month ago to the effect that Cathy Brennan has a significant history of saying she was willing to engage, and then simply data mining and continuing hostilities or silence. She, or someone, didn’t appreciate that and fb notified me that it was taken down as offending community standards and blocked me for 12 hours, presumably in ignorance of the fact that CB is clearly a public person in this regard.
Thought it illuminating a year or so back when someone on Bilerico quoted back comments that CB had made in the past to her. The response by CB was to ask ‘Are you stalking me ?’. On being told that the person had googled her and read some of her online comments, CB came back with ‘You are stalking me!’ and exited the discussion.
Clearly it’s of interest to try and work out why she behaves in such an irrational fashion, beyond simple ‘tactics’. Possibly there is a part of her that does recognise that what she does is inherently violent, and she simply refuses to acknowledge her past, however recent and obvious, to wall off that recognition.
Then there’s her odd definition of rape, avoiding forced oral or anal penetration. OK, according to her definitions that means that trans women can’t be raped, but it is fairly gross regarding cis women’s experience. Could that indicate that she is trying to elide a personal history of male sexual violence within her general stance? That something like that has made her supersensitive to ‘guys’ knowing anything about her?
Perhaps, though, thats a typical trans womans thought to explain seemingly irrational hatred. ‘Abuser goes on to abuse’ is a comfortably understandable commonplace. A bit like believing that of course there could have been a major disruption of emails…
Personally, that doesn’t extend to believing her answers here are anything other than something she can quote to demonstrate actual ‘engagement’.
One last, slightly off topic point. ‘Terfs’ makes sense as a term to the trans community. It distinguishes between the bulk of rad fems and those who emphasise the original transsexual empire beliefs a la Janice Raymond. But if they could agree on a neutral term – orradfems for original rad fems for example, I for one would prefer it. One less thing to divide women.
RT @itsjustahobby: Will the real Brennan please stand up?: http://t.co/G6soOQGkdI
That’s because she didn’t actually want to be challenged, she wanted your IP address, phone number and any other potentially identifying information, so she could do some digging — either to uncover dirt, or else uncover vulnerabilities (employer info, places that publish you, etc). And maybe to argue with you, if it meant that you’d give her something she could use as validation of her persecution meme. Watch your back.
You will not get a straight answer from her, because her positions are always relative to who she is speaking, and keyed toward fomenting division between several factions. That’s all.
She now claims she’s never doxxed anyone? My personal encounters with her reflect a different reality: She noticed me posting stuff under my real name on Bilerico using my Facebook account, connected that to what I was saying under my pre-Web online pseudonym at Endablog, and she decided to try and dox me.
She ran Web searches on my real name, found that I had once owned and administered a .NET website, checked the WHOIS history on that website, and decided that since I’m one of them there “sex changes” that I must be the current owner of the site, a man I handed the keys over to in 1999.
I’m not sure if she thought I was assigned female at birth and became the dude who owns my old website, or if she thinks I’m a trans woman who leads a double life or what, but she decided to post several articles on her now-private “iblamecathybrennan” WordPress blog that connected what I said at Endablog as fridayjones to my real name to the first male name she found connected to my real name in any way in a manner designed to indicate that I was “really” that man who now owns and administers my old web site.
So yeah, Cathy Brennan tried REALLY REALLY hard to “out” me by permanently connecting my legal name to a male name, and of course she made sure to accuse me of “rape-iness” for telling her that I was NOT interested in her in “that way.”
What exactly would you call it other than “doxxing” when someone tries their level best to connect a person’s legal name to the term “rape” and to “out” what she believes to be a trans woman’s former masculine assigned-at-birth name to anyone who runs a simple Web search on the trans woman’s legal name?
One thing I will give Cathy Brennan credit for: Even though the old WHOIS lookup would have revealed my actual street address (we were all a bit more naive about security in those days), she did not hand out my street address to her radfem pals, some of whom live in the same region I do, and all of whom seem to be mentally unstable and violent personalities. I believe that there ARE lines that CB will not cross, and that there is still some kind of a human being living inside of that bigoted persona she’s created.
I think that there is still hope for Cathy Brennan, that it’s still possible for her to have an epiphany and wake herself up from her own self-induced nightmare.
Will the real Cathy Brennan please stand up?: http://t.co/EWw1o7VbNU
RT @itsjustahobby: Will the real Brennan please stand up?: http://t.co/G6soOQGkdI