The Queer Community Loves a Protector It Can Use

In response to Sapphire Sloan’s “In Defense of the Mean Femme”, on protection, and punishment.

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Sloan says she is gradually building a reputation as a Mean Femme, and I hope it sticks to her permanently.

In In Defense of the Mean Femme, she describes exactly what this reputation is made of. Men standing outside a lesbian bar talking about turning the women inside straight, a man putting his hand on her hip because apparently saying “excuse me” would have killed him, a food truck worker catcalling a guest at her event, a woman humiliating another woman for the crime of existing where she could be seen. Sloan is mean to these people in the sense that she intervenes, and she makes herself unpleasant to the person creating the problem rather than to everyone forced to endure him.

I read her list and kept thinking that none of this is meanness in any serious moral sense, because it only registers as meanness from the viewpoint of the person whose access has been interrupted, and that viewpoint is usually where the word arrives from. Mean is what a woman becomes when no stops being negotiable, and mean is what they call her when she refuses to preserve the atmosphere for the person already ruining it. The man touching your hip does not think of himself as the beginning of a conflict, since, in his mind, the conflict begins when you embarrass him for doing it. The man outside the lesbian bar can talk about violating every woman inside and still imagine himself as background noise, while the woman who turns around and tells him to fuck off becomes the event. The same trick happens everywhere, because harm gets to be ambient while resistance is what everyone can suddenly see, and Sloan is right to be proud of refusing that arrangement.

I. The Femme Is Supposed to Keep the Room Nice

There is a particular offense committed by a feminine woman who refuses to be pleasant, because femininity is still treated like a public service job. The femme is expected to make the room feel good, to soften conflict, to remember what everyone needs, and to make herself available enough to be desired while staying agreeable enough that nobody has to feel threatened by the fact that she knows she is desirable. Even inside lesbian culture, people can get very comfortable treating femmes as atmosphere, as though our job were making the party prettier and the politics easier to swallow.

Then something happens in the room. A man gets too close, or someone starts harassing a woman who does not know how to respond. A person everybody finds annoying becomes an acceptable target, and the room goes quiet in that specific way rooms go quiet when everyone has noticed and nobody wants to become responsible for noticing. Someone has to move, and the feminine woman who moves becomes a bitch.

This is what I appreciate about Sloan’s piece: she does not describe meanness as an aesthetic, and she is not selling the internet another personality type with a cute font over it. Her meanness has an object, because somebody is doing something and she responds to it.

She also does something important when she speaks about masc lesbians, plainly acknowledging that masc lesbians are marginalized and harassed because they violate the femininity society expects from women, and her defense of the Mean Femme does not require pretending otherwise. Good, because there is no reason to turn this into another lesbian oppression tournament where everybody drags out their worst experience and tries to prove who gets the trophy. Sloan is describing a relationship to protection, in which the femme sees what is happening to herself or to the woman beside her and decides that preserving the comfort of the person causing the problem is no longer part of her job. That decision gets called mean because it works.

II. Community Loves a Protector It Can Use

I agree with Sloan as far as she goes, and my work begins where the room applauds the Mean Femme and then quietly hands her the keys. I have spent the last few years writing the same problem from different directions, and it always comes back to the fact that community is power, because the second we forget that, every person who has accumulated enough trust starts getting mistaken for an institution.

The Mean Femme becomes the woman everyone calls when something goes wrong. She knows who hurt whom and who is scared of being alone with someone, and she gets asked to confront people because she is good at it, until her temperament is doing work that structure should have done. This is where protection can rot. I have seen communities survive on the labor of one or two women who are willing to be hated, while everybody else gets to remain sweet because somebody has agreed to become the bitch, and then everyone acts shocked when the bitch develops power.

None of this makes Sloan wrong. It makes her argument more important, because her examples have a clarity that much of what gets called community accountability completely lacks. A man touches you and you confront him. A guest gets harassed and somebody intervenes, or a woman is being humiliated and another woman decides she will not be left alone in it. In every case, the response is connected to an action, and its purpose can be stated out loud.

Compare that to the systems many of our communities have built instead, where a rumor moves through private messages until nobody can tell you the original claim anymore, and every new person adds something, so that a woman begins disappearing from rooms before she knows a conversation about her has started. Eventually the punishment becomes proof that there must have been something worth punishing, and we call all of this safety because queer people have become very good at giving appetite a social justice vocabulary.

This is the distinction I keep trying to force into the room. A boundary has something to do with what happened, while public punishment can keep going long after anyone remembers what it was supposed to change. The Mean Femme in Sloan’s examples says stop, and a community that has lost its mind says never stop, and those are different forms of power.

III. I Have Been Called Mean Before

I know what happens when a woman becomes inconvenient to the moral story a community tells about itself, because I am a Black transsexual woman who has spent years writing about what happens when the people promising safety are also the people controlling access to housing, friendship, sex, drugs, social life, hormones, reputation, and the right to remain in the room. I have written about rape inside T4T scenes, about domestic labor disguised as love, about rumor becoming governance, and about care becoming a word people use when they want something from you, and people have called the work cruel.

People who say they want trans women to speak honestly about harm tend to mean harm from somewhere else, from cis men and conservatives and the state and the acceptable monsters. The second the finger turns inward, tone becomes the emergency. Suddenly the problem is that you were too mean when you described what happened, that you should have been more careful with the feelings of the people who were never careful with anyone else’s life, that you should have included a paragraph explaining that everyone involved is probably wounded, and that you should have made the woman reading your account feel reassured that nothing you wrote could possibly implicate her. I stopped doing that.

For me, the price of meanness is racialized before I open my mouth. A Black woman can become the threat in a room that was threatening her, and a transsexual woman can lose the fragile recognition of her femininity the second she stops being useful. I know this game well enough to recite its rules from memory: you can be beautiful, vulnerable, the girl everybody wants to protect, right up until you say no in the wrong voice and watch how quickly they remember every reason they never saw you as harmless. This is why I refuse the demand that protection arrive in a voice nobody can object to, since the person being stopped usually objects.

IV. The Problem With Nice Communities

I am deeply suspicious of anyone whose answer to community harm is that everybody should become nicer, because niceness is cheap when somebody else pays for it. A nice community can let a man stand outside a lesbian bar talking about turning women straight because confronting him might escalate the situation, and it can watch somebody get touched while waiting to see whether she looks upset enough to justify making things awkward. A nice community can let one woman become the joke of the night because correcting everyone would ruin the mood. Then the Mean Femme appears and ruins the mood, and thank God she does.

The problem is that we keep building spaces where ruining the mood is the only safety mechanism available, and that is where my position extends Sloan’s. I want the Mean Femme at the door, and I also want her to get to leave the door. I want the woman who says, “Get your fucking hand off her,” to know the venue will back her up, and I want the event organizer who removes someone for harassing a guest to have a structure behind that decision. I want a community where protection does not depend on one woman having a higher tolerance for being hated than everyone else.

A serious community can respond urgently without pretending an emergency judgment has become eternal truth, and it can require specificity before lasting consequences while still preserving a future for the people involved. That is the work I mean when I talk about what comes after community. After Community has never meant everybody living alone in separate apartments, communicating through newsletters like the world’s saddest collection of lesbians. It means I no longer accept community as a magic word that turns proximity into solidarity, because we still need each other, and we need each other enough to build better than this.

V. Let Her Be Mean

Sloan is right to be proud, because the reputation of the Mean Femme tells us something about the people assigning it. Somebody was made uncomfortable because her access to a woman got cut off, and somebody learned that the woman they expected to absorb the situation had been paying attention the entire time. I want more of that, and I want women who can make danger expensive, but I also want us to stop making one woman carry the entire cost of doing it.

The community that survives because one woman is willing to confront everyone has not solved protection. It has found someone to outsource protection to, and eventually she burns out, becomes untouchable, or leaves, at which point everyone discovers that the safety they thought they had was actually one exhausted woman answering her phone.

We can defend the Mean Femme and demand something larger than her at the same time. We can refuse the politics that treats every sharp word as violence while actual danger gets endless patience, and we can also refuse to turn protectors into permanent authorities whose every action becomes righteous because they once protected somebody. The Mean Femme deserves better than sainthood, because what she actually deserves is backup.

Sapphire Sloan is right that sometimes protecting yourself, another woman, or the people you love will make somebody call you mean, and that is fine, because they were never going to throw a parade for the woman who stopped them. Let her be mean when she needs to be, and then build something strong enough that she does not have to be the whole fucking wall.

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