A Mother’s Day video, harassment, and an Open Letter of Support

For Mother’s Day, Prof. Rachel McKinnon (College of Charleston) offered a video in her Making Gender Make Sense series both, as she said in a previous introduction to it, to thank the mothers of trans people (including her own mother), and also to talk a bit about trans women as parents and how or why one might celebrate Mother’s Day. Since that video, she has been the target of harassment and hate speech. An Open Letter in Support of Professor Rachel McKinnon has now been put together by Prof. R.A. Briggs (Stanford University) and can be signed online here.

Review of Kipnis

A review that takes into account the recent lawsuit.

Initially, I came away from Unwanted Advancespersuaded, as Kipnis clearly is, that the charges against Ludlow fall apart under scrutiny. Yet Kipnis is so sympathetic to Ludlow, and so contemptuous of his accusers, that even before the lawsuit, I wasn’t always sure I could trust her. There are holes in the story of the woman who says Ludlow forced alcohol on her. But Kipnis is skeptical of the whole idea that an older man might deliberately get a younger woman trashed so he can take advantage of her. “Let me interject a brief reality check: single non-hideous men with good jobs (or, in this case, an international reputation and not without charm) don’t have to work that hard to get women to go to bed with them in our century,” she writes. Well, let me interject a brief reality check: Bill Cosby.