Trans ‘Sex by Deception’: What Are We Really Protecting Cis Men From?
How we make trans people pay the price for cis men’s shame
Content warning: discussion of violent assault, transphobia, and homophobia.
This week details emerged about the brutal assault of a transgender teenager who was lured to a roller disco and then stabbed repeatedly by a group of teens.
The attempted murder happened after the trans girl, sixteen at the time, was forced to out herself as trans after engaging in sexual acts with a boy.
The case raises issues about the role of the law in enforcing transphobia and homophobia and illustrates how trans people often pay the price for the shame cis people are made to feel for being attracted to us.
According to testimony given in court, the girl was invited to a boy's house. Without the girl knowing, the boy was filming them for a live stream. Someone watching the stream texted the boy to tell him the girl was transgender, at which point he apparently questioned her. Fearful of his reaction, given the abuse she had received for being trans in the past, she said that she wasn’t.
The pair then engaged in oral sex (all being live-streamed without her consent— which is illegal), after which someone again contacted the boy to tell him she was trans. He questioned her again, at knifepoint, threatening to stab her if she lied, at which point she told him she was trans.
She apologised and believed that was the end of the matter. But a week later she was lured by her apparent friends to the car park at a roller disco. She was then attacked by several boys and a girl. The teens punched her, pushed her to the ground, and repeatedly kicked and stamped on her. The girl then stabbed her repeatedly in her hand, buttocks, and thighs.
After the attack, the girl who stabbed the victim posted a Snapchat boasting about the attack. She included footage of the attack itself, an image of the victim on a ventilator, and transphobic slurs.
You won’t see this framed as a story about how cisgender women are a danger to trans women, though. However, if the roles were reversed, this event would be used to demonise trans women — all of us.
When paramedics found her, she had a low pulse. In case you didn’t know, a stab wound in the thigh can easily be fatal — it’s where the femoral artery is. Hit that artery and you can bleed out in minutes.
The girl has been left traumatised, with deep physical and emotional scars, and has said that she fears leaving the house.
Some of the commentary on the horrific attack and the events surrounding it has been about as transphobic as you might expect.
The BBC, for once, seemed to have erred on the side of sensitivity in their reporting of the attack and court case — though they still posted a video of the attack, which was caught on CCTV, in their article. They didn’t deadname the teen, though this is almost certainly because she hasn’t been named.
That said, in January the BBC deadnamed a teenage trans student who took her own life, going against journalistic standards and repeated criticism for doing the same in the past. I’m not going to assume they’ve changed from their usual transphobic reporting just yet.
The Telegraph has been much more predictable in its usual transphobic approach. In their reporting, they open by accusing the girl of lying about her gender and linking this directly to her assault. (She didn’t lie about her gender — her gender identity is female).
Their reporting also refers to the teen “admitting” she was trans as if being trans is some kind of crime or something to be ashamed of. And they get the slur tr*nny in there — uncensored —no less than three times, ostensibly in quoting the attackers, but they know what they’re doing.
Because I apparently hate myself, I took a look at the comments sections in the Daily Mail and elsewhere. (The Telegraph makes you pay for the pleasure, which I am not going to do).
Though many people express horror at the attack, they completely fail to link the transphobia that inspired it to the anti-trans moral panic pushed by media outlets… like, for example, the Daily Mail itself. As usual, the people who promote this hate face no consequences, while those who act on it do.
And, of course, people are blaming the victim. According to the victim-blamers, the girl lied about being trans. She engaged in ‘sex by deception’ — a crime that has recently been brought into the spotlight after the Crown Prosecution Service released guidance that reinforces the criminalisation of trans people for not outing themselves as such to potential partners.
That guidance, probably not coincidentally, was released in the interim between this attack happening and the case going to court.
The crux of the victim-blaming is that, because the girl lied about her transgender identity, she therefore deserved, or at least should have expected, what she got. The implication is that the boy — the one who consented to sexual acts and live-streamed them, which, again, is against the law — is in some way also a victim here.
It’s the trans-panic defence: a cisgender person finds out they had sex with or were attracted to a trans person, panics, and attacks or murders them. I’ve written about this before — it’s a defence often used by violent transphobes and their lawyers. And, in our deeply cisnormative and cissexist society, it often works.
Usually in ‘trans-panic’ cases, the assault comes immediately after disclosure as a result of apparent shock— that’s part of the defence. Men obviously can’t control their anger, so their victims are to blame for their violent reactions.
Only in this case, the assault happened a week later. No matter, it’s still being justified using the panic defence by the likes of the Telegraph.
For once though, the judge seems not to have bought into the panic defence, stating, “At the time of the attack the victim presented no threat to anyone, she did nothing to provoke the attack or justify it in any way”.
The UK’s ‘sex by deception’ laws entrench the idea that cis people must be protected from supposedly deceptive trans people, and are justified in responding violently to disclosure of trans identity.
In the case discussed above, the girl, by the letter of the law at least, could be said to have committed a crime: she was directly asked if she was trans, and she said no.
But just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it’s immoral. And context, so often ignored by simplistic and even harmful laws, is important here.
Most women will know that sometimes they have to be careful about what they say, or how they respond to men. Especially when there’s no one else around. This was even more the case for this girl since she is not just a girl but also trans . We paradoxically face double discrimination: misogyny for being women, and transphobia for supposedly not being “real women”.
The girl, in this case, knew that revealing her trans identity might have resulted in violence; a belief vindicated by the fact that, upon asking the question a second time, the boy did so at knifepoint, and then later engaged in the attempted murder of the girl, along with his friends.
So, yes, she lied. But she did so to protect herself.
And she was attacked anyway. This highlights the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t nature of trans disclosure. We are attacked for being open about our trans identity; we are attacked for hiding our trans identity. We cannot win. Violence and abuse are often the consequences no matter how we choose to handle the disclosure of who we are.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that the young man knew she was trans, but he was still attracted to her and ultimately more concerned about his own sexual gratification at that moment.
But then he also felt shame.
And that’s exactly what laws that characterise trans people as ‘deceptive’ for not disclosing their trans identity are all about: shame.
The very fact that we have to (apparently) have such a law highlights the falsity of the idea that we are attracted to sex, or genitals, alone. Cis men are attracted to transgender women because they are women — because of their gender identity, not just their physical features.
And they are also often attracted to trans women because of their physical features — visit any porn site aimed at cis men, where content is demand-driven, and you’ll see the proof of that. Cis men are open about their attraction to trans women — to every bit of us — in their moments of private sexual fantasy.
But outside of those private moments, cis men are told they should be ashamed for being attracted to trans women. They’re told that they’re perverts, or that they must really be gay.
So they are ashamed; such is the fragile nature of masculinity at the intersection of homophobia and transphobia.
Then when they find themselves attracted to a transgender woman in real life, they take that shame out on us, through violence.
And the law often takes their side. The law essentially gives cis men a pass for their internalised homophobia and transphobia, at the same time reinforcing and legitimising it.
And why wouldn't it?
The law in the UK is deeply queerphobic and serves to maintain cissexist heteronorms which dictate that, among other harmful things, being gay is shameful, trans women are really men, and cis men should be ashamed of being attracted to us.
These laws don’t protect cis or straight people from sexual deception. As Gemma Stone puts it, when we consent to sex, we consent to engage in sexual acts with the whole person, not just their gender identity.
There is no other situation where identity can result in accusations of sexual deception between two otherwise consenting adults — this argument only applies to trans people. This is a reflection of the deep insecurity that our existence poses to the contrived norms of sex and gender embedded in our society, and the law’s crude attempt to reconcile that insecurity.
The fact that a straight man can be attracted to a woman with a penis is too much for heterosexism and cissexism to handle.
So what are laws about ‘sex by deception’ aimed at trans people protecting cis people from?
Mainly from themselves: from their own shame, and from the consequences of transphobia and homophobia which trans people are made to suffer from instead through a process of displacement
In that sense, these laws aren’t protecting anyone. Cis people’s apparent victimhood is just a convenient cover. These laws exist purely to legitimise, even perpetuate, violence against transgender people. And they do so by blaming trans victims for the very transphobia society imposes on us.
These laws lay bare so many of the contradictions they are meant to contain: the false idea that gender is irrelevant to attraction; the false idea that, if you’re a straight cis man, being attracted to a trans woman makes you gay; the idea that being gay is inherently bad or not-masculine-enough; the false idea that it’s okay to be ashamed of being attracted to us — that it’s our fault for ‘tricking’ you.
In these laws, we see the deep contradictions of our transphobic and transmisogynistic society.
Contradictions that a 16-year-old trans girl was made to pay the price for, was nearly killed for, while her attackers are portrayed by some as victims.
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The psychos justifying the attack on this girl honestly terrify me. It's scary to see how humans act when they decide some people are no longer human.
Thank you for writing this. I think we need to talk more about how trans people are fetishized and what a better future could look like.