Interview of Melinda Mann ― Resistance Radio

May 27th, 2018

Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:

(Sound of barnacle goose)

Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen. This is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Melinda Mann. She is a longtime environmental and social justice activist whose “peak trans” moment three years ago rekindled her deep radical feminism. In response to trans-identified males’ demands for unfettered access to women’s private spaces, she launched a research project to document the sexual and other violent crimes of males who pose as women, creating a Facebook page called “This Never Happens” to publicize the results. 

So first, thank you for your work, and second, thank you for being on the program.

MM: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

DJ: So right now there is an “art exhibit” at the San Francisco Public Library that certainly to my mind seems to glorify and call for male violence against women. Can you talk a little bit about that particular art exhibit?

MM: Yeah. Lots of people are responding to this. I kind of couldn’t believe it and I actually want to share that I have a fantasy that it’s all going to turn out to be a brilliant art project in which these guys show how easy it is to get the entire liberal population to back an outwardly misogynist project. But I don’t think that’s going to be the case, unfortunately. I don’t feel – I wish it was all going to be shown up to be as absurd as it is.

What they did is they have this group called the Degenderettes, which I understand now call themselves “trans dykes” because they didn’t like the idea that “degenderette” might actually mean that they were against gender. They put up what they say are their self-defense weapons, you know, baseball bats with barbed wire wrapped around them, and a t-shirt. One of their main actors, a guy named Jeremiah Birnbaum put up a picture of a t-shirt that says “I punch terfs,” which he has worn out to a dyke march.

This is supposed to be an art exhibit that calls attention to the violence against trans women and their need for self-defense. It even explains on one of the panels, I don’t have all the wording right here, but it says something like, you know, why they could justify punching “terfs” as opposed to the actual men who commit violence against trans women, is that it’s because of our relentless belief in biology, and our saying that women don’t have penises, and by accusing all of us of doxxing and harassing them, which I’ve never seen any evidence of. They actually justify this by saying that it’s possible that “terfs” have actually caused more trans deaths than the actual men who kill them. So it’s quite jarring, I think, to even imagine the twisted logic that gets them to being able to justify this kind of violence against women.

DJ: Let’s back up a moment and define some terms. Can you define “terf”and then can you also define “trans-identified males” or “trans women.” Can you define all these terms for us please, because I don’t know that we will understand all of them. We’re jumping right into the middle of something.

MM: Yup. I will gladly back up here. “Terf” is “Trans-exclusionary radical feminist” and I don’t even know how it started, and it’s not even clear what radical feminists are supposed to be excluding transgender women from, exactly, but it has come to be a slur that means basically any woman who does not submit wholeheartedly to what transgender ideology – it’s used to shut down conversations a lot if you ever question any aspect of gender ideology. It’s often used in conjunction with the word “Nazi.” “Terfs” and “Nazis,” you know, “we can no-platform ‘terfs’ and Nazis.” I’ve heard young women say that they’ve seen that go by, and they didn’t really think much about it. I don’t know about the origins, but it’s certainly come to be just a generalized slur against women. And a lot of times it’s leveled at lesbians particularly, because what, it turns out, of all the things that males who call themselves women are publicly the most upset about, it would seem that being denied access to lesbian women is right up there towards the top of why they’re so so very angry at “terfs.” It’s a generalized slur against radical feminists. I think – the only thing I can think of that we exclude males from is the category of “woman,” but they often will say that “terfs” deny the humanity of trans people, which is to say that we are suggesting that because they are biologically male that they aren’t human. I’ve literally never heard anybody suggest anything like that.

And then “trans woman.” I sometimes say “trans-identified male” and sometimes I say “trans woman” and mostly I try to just say “male.” When I say “trans woman” I am talking about a male who poses as or claims to be a woman. And a lot of people say “trans-identified male” for the same thing, somebody who is a biological male but, for whatever it means to them, chooses to live socially as or call themselves a woman.

DJ: So you used the word “trans dyke” and you said the group that is putting on this, that created this art exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library, that they call themselves “trans dykes.” So is what you’re saying, that they are males who are calling themselves lesbians?

MM: Yes. Exactly that. The word for those people is “heterosexual males,” like most males, but they’ve got it turned around so that, because they call themselves women, women who say that they have orientation towards women as partners should also include them. They have actually a rather creepy slogan, it kind of makes my skin crawl. It’s “trans dykes are good and pure” and I don’t even really know what that’s supposed to mean. It’s pretty strange. It’s the idea that they are just as much of a lesbian as actual lesbians. And it’s on this basis that they assert that women whose sexual orientation is towards other females are bigots for not including them as potential sexual partners.

DJ: There is actually a term that is often thrown around for this, called the “cotton ceiling.”

MM: Yeah. I first saw that a few years ago when a Planned Parenthood chapter was actually hosting a workshop for trans women, for males, to come up with strategies to help talk women out of their homosexuality and get them to consider having sex with males if the male calls himself a woman. That was the beginning of one of many problems for me, when I began looking into this, that my beloved Planned Parenthood would actually host such an event. But they did. It’s actually happening and it’s happening pretty quickly.

DJ: So, to be clear, these are males who – they have penises and they are insisting that lesbians who don’t want to have sex with them are bigoted.

MM: Bigoted and “terfs”and –

DJ: Nazis.

MM: Again, as this San Francisco Public Library exhibit wraps it all up so neatly, that their sexual preferences, their exclusion of trans women is somehow contributing to the deaths of these males who, they would assert, have high suicide rates. I suppose that if you haven’t been swimming around in this for a few years that it’s really hard to imagine how we could have got to this point, that they’re literally accusing lesbians of killing them, men accusing women of literally killing them by not being willing to have sex with them.

DJ: And one of the exhibits – I’ve seen pictures of the art setup and one of the exhibits has an axe and there’s also a baseball bat, and they are in glass cases, and the caption or title is “In case of terf, break glass.” So the clear implication is that if you see a woman who is saying “no” to males, that you should break the glass, get the axe or baseball bat, and then do what one does with an axe or baseball bat.

So that seems pretty clear to me that it is an open call for violence against women. And I just want to point out to all listeners that this is being hosted by the San Francisco Public Library.

MM: Yup. Yes, it is. It’s being hosted and fairly well-defended after a big flurry of requests to the public library that they take down the one t-shirt that looked like a big blood smear on a white t-shirt, that said “I punch terfs.” They did concede that maybe that could be misinterpreted as advocating violence against women. Their argument back is that sometimes you’ll see that ‘terfs’ aren’t women, and that trans women are real women and any woman who doesn’t accept that is not a real woman. The threads of thinking here are very very strange. But the justification is again sort of the Nazi justification, you know, killing people is wrong but killing these horribly, horribly bigoted human beings is somewhat justified as, they call it self-defense. They literally say that they are defending themselves.

DJ: Before we continue, I just want to point out that Robert J. Lifton made very clear that before you can commit any mass atrocity, you have to convince yourself that what you are doing is not an atrocity, but instead a positive good. And every perpetrator of atrocity, from individual abusers to the literal Nazis, perceive themselves as the real victims. The Nazis perceive themselves not as committing mass murder and genocide, but instead as purifying the Aryan race. And also they perceive themselves as having been victimized by the Jews, who, according to the Nazis, stabbed them in the back. And this is all, of course, complete nonsense.

We see this in the Declaration of Independence, where the Founding Fathers were complaining that the Indians were attacking them, as they were of course stealing Indian land. So my point is that we need to be, all of us, including the Degenderettes, need to be very careful when we claim self-defense as a reason for violence. I’m just throwing that out.

MM: Yes. I want to say a little bit, if I could, about who these actual people are, that they are males who identify as women. The category has become this big catch-all. Maybe somebody thinks about some young person who has been dressing as a woman for their whole life. Whatever image comes to your mind, I think if you looked a little more closely at Jeremiah Birnbaum and Scout Tran-Caffee, “Scout Tran” is what he goes by. These are very privileged, maybe not upper echelon, but very privileged white males who grew up in Silicon Valley in one case, and went to elite schools and got MFA’s and BFA’s and they’ve been sort of mid-level artist types in the Bay area or on the coast for quite some time. And they just recently, in their careers, they had art careers as men until their late 30’s. So in just their last few years they’ve decided to call themselves women, publicly. So they have this – they’re not even anybody who can anchor somehow that this was something that they were from childhood, anything like this. These are very well-to-do, or coming from well-to-do families, white males who just recently decided to put on this cap of being transgender and come out. It’s hard for me not to look at that pretty cynically and just decide that this is the latest gimmick for them. And yet they very very casually are willing to advocate violence against women and paint themselves as these huge victims.

I find it offensive on a number of fronts, not just on the front of feminism. That they are among the privileged class in this country, and that they assert so strongly this newfound, new-fangled victimhood that then allows them to punch women. Not only do they swing baseball bats. There is Youtube footage right now of one of them at a gun range with his Degenderettes t-shirt on, which is an inverted picture of, you look at the woman’s bathroom symbol, with the skirt, and they’ve turned that upside down and made, instead of the two legs, they’ve bent one of them down at the knee so it looks like they’re flipping off whomever’s reading it.

Again, there’s no big call for women to be demanding into men’s bathrooms. You might see that go by occasionally. But this is so clearly directed at females. And to be at a shooting range and say, as you were saying, that this is all self-defense, you know, they have to prepare themselves in self-defense. Scout Tran is also an expert with using a sling. He’s kind of an amazing slingshot user and can hit things from quite some distance with a sling and marbles. This is not a weak guy who’s being terribly victimized by any real objective standard that we could come up with. I don’t know his personal life and I’m not claiming to, but from a societal standpoint, this is an aggressive, violent, young, privileged male. And that they can turn this all around and say that lesbians are somehow oppressing them is scary. It’s a pretty frightening prospect.

DJ: Which of these artists is the one who wrote a poem about stealing his sister’s underwear and masturbating into it?

MM: Yeah. That’s Mya Byrne, whose name is Jeremiah Birnbaum. This wasn’t any great sleuthing on my part. Like you said, he’s been a musician for quite some time and has done some recordings and opened for some low-level or mid-level kind of acts. That’s him. This is the evidence of their “womanhood,” that masturbating in women’s underwear comes up a lot, as evidence of their true female nature.

DJ: I just want to point out, again, that there is an art exhibit being put on in a public space, at the San Francisco Public Library, that has an axe and a baseball bat with the intent to show that these should be used against women, which should disqualify it from being held at a public space in the first place. But second, one of the primary artists has publicly written a poem about stealing his sister’s underwear and masturbating into it. And that, by itself, I would think, would also disqualify a person from having an art exhibit at a public space. That’s pretty messed up.

MM: Pretty bad.

DJ: So let’s sort of jump to the larger issue. We hear all the time that there are various bathroom bills across the country, that are either set up to make it so males who identify as transgender – so that women are forced to share their showers and bathrooms with them. There are other bills that are attempting to make it so women are not forced to share their bathrooms and locker rooms with males who identify as transgender. And one of the arguments in favor of forcing women to share their bathrooms with them is that males who identify as transgender do not pose, and have never, none of them have ever posed any threat to women under any circumstances. We hear this more or less constantly. So we hear “this never happens.” So can you talk about that a little bit?

MM: Yeah. The story of my learning about this, and probably yours and everybody else’s, to me, is imagining that it can’t really be this bad, and if I could just expose the littlest bit, people would at least reconsider and we could have a reasonable conversation about how to protect the rights of people who are nonconformist in any way, which of course I thoroughly support.

So I first started with looking at just a very few examples of men who had acted out in any way towards women. One of the early stories, I think it’s still up on This Never Happens, is from 2006, where a guy who’s, you know, a 220 lb. martial arts expert punches a woman in the face because she’s in the women’s bathroom and she says something to him like “Hey, I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.” And he does $50,000 worth of damage to her teeth, he knocks her teeth out, and we’re supposed to understand, to hear his version of it, that it was just inappropriate of her to even question his right to be there.

So I remember thinking “Wow, if people just know this, they will understand that this is not just a cut and dried issue and that we need more discussion around it.” And I discovered that there were a few people who had been tirelessly exposing this for a long time, like Gallus Mag of Gendertrender, and I just thought okay, I’m going to start a little Facebook page. And I really thought that once I had 20 or 30 examples of this kind of violence, I fantasized that it would be a little bit of a game-changer, and that any time I had a conversation about this issue I could say well look, here are these people.

And that turned out not to be the case. We now have hundreds of examples of males who raped boys, who raped girls, who are serial killers, a number of serial killers. And unfortunately, what I’ve encountered when I bring this up and show people these examples is “Oh, this is just cherry-picking, there’s just a handful.” There seems to be no number of examples that one could come up with to convince people that these men are a problem. They bait and switch very quickly, from “this never happens” to “okay well maybe it happens occasionally, but the injustice done to trans women by denying them access to women’s spaces is so huge,” that, you know, basically women and children are just going to have to be sacrificed because in the big picture this is such a greater good (laughing).

So yeah. It happens much more than I ever thought, and it’s happening, as far as I can tell, more often, because as the laws change to enable men to go into women’s spaces, they’re figuring this out, and there have already been a number of examples; of men up in Canada going into a women’s shelter, a convicted sex offender, and demanding that he has the right to go in. He doesn’t look like a woman, he doesn’t look like he’s trying to, but it’s Canadian law. So he went in and of course engaged in a couple of assaults of women sexually, climbed into bed with one woman. He did not rape anybody but he was sexually abusive to several women before getting kicked out. And recently we’re seeing more guys going into women’s bathrooms. In Washington State in the last month I think a guy went in and stood on a toilet and was looking over the stall wall and masturbating, and then as the security guard is taking him out he says “This is my gender identity.”

People are learning. So there’s a combination of things. There are of course many, many trans-identified males, people who actually run around claiming to be women day-in and day-out who commit violent crimes against women. But there’s also the added ripple effect that when you decide that any man has the right to claim that he’s a woman and thus access women’s spaces, you’re giving a blank check to predators to do this. And we’re seeing this. Paul Dirks up in Canada, he and I have been doing some documentation. He’s much more thorough than I am. He’s got hundreds of cases of men abusing women in women’s locker rooms and bathrooms. And most don’t claim to be trans, in all fairness. They’re not necessarily woman-identified. But he finds that it’s about twice as likely to happen in areas where there are laws on the books giving males access to women’s locker rooms and other spaces. So how is it not only going to extend out from there? There’s never an answer, as far as I have heard, about what would be the proper way that we could tell who is truly transgender versus the people who just want to come in.

But back to the original point, even among the people who “truly identify” as women, there’s no evidence whatsoever that their sexual and violent criminal history has any other trajectory than that of other males. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that they have more criminality than other males.

DJ: Can you mention that study, I believe it was done in Norway or Sweden? The long-term followup of male criminality?

MM: Mm-hmm. And I think this is an interesting point too. It’s not really the point I’m always making, but yeah, that even after transition, and I think this is very important. This was in Sweden, perhaps the country with the most acceptance of transgenderism, and I think it was 260 people or so. It’s a longitudinal study. No reduction in criminality was found, and this was after they’ve transitioned. This isn’t like before they transitioned they became criminals. Their criminality after they medically transitioned remained the same as that of other males.

Every time I mention this I often get feedback like “Well, that probably happened because they were so frustrated,” and, you know, fill in the narrative here about how that must be different now, but the truth is that no, even afterwards they retain the same rate as other males. And interestingly, females who undergo medical transition, or whatever version of transition they had in this study, have increased rates of criminality. So women increase and males stay the same. It’s hard not to point to this as not being an effective deterrent for criminality whatsoever.

One of the studies that comes up a lot, like if you’ve ever heard that 41% of trans women attempt suicide, which is a ubiquitous figure out there, I see it quoted constantly. It all comes from a large survey that was done and published in 2011, which is all self-reporting, people self-reporting their suicide attempts. It’s a notoriously unreliable report because all people tend to exaggerate their suicidality because it’s a means of expressing to others how poorly they were feeling at the time. So it’s a notoriously unreliable statistic, this 41% claim of suicide attempts. But something I never see anyone mention is that in that exact same study, where they’ve done this huge self-reporting study of trans people in the U.S., that they also report being incarcerated at much higher rates than anyone else. Extremely high rates, in fact. White men who are – there are a lot of different ways to measure it – have basically a 4.4% chance of lifetime incarceration. Well, among white males who identify as trans, it’s 12% have been in jail or prison. Three times more than the standard rate would be.

So it’s not just the one study in Sweden. Their own self-reporting of their own criminality is three times higher than other males. It’s like ten times higher than actual females. And yet the cherry-picking on the side of people who promote transgender males as victims and whatnot, they always manage to find that particular number, the 41%, and yet I almost never hear the bigger number. It’s actually 21% of all male-to-females self-report that they have been in prison or jail. One-fifth. It’s a huge number, a huge portion and it’s almost never mentioned along with the things that are mentioned from the very same study.

DJ: Another thing that’s never mentioned when they throw out the 41%, which is, again, a self-reported Internet poll and is thus useless – I remember talking to Judith Herman decades ago about the gold standard study for the rates at which males rape females. And one of the things she was talking about was about how carefully they constructed the questions to try to avoid leading respondents into claiming rape when they had not, and to frame questions such that the women who had been raped but didn’t call it rape, they would somehow neither dampen nor encourage. It’s really both an art and a science to develop those questions so that your results will be meaningful.

And of course that does not include self-reporting on the Internet, because – okay, this is a little bit off-topic. But when the Internet was new, I went to many Crohn’s disease support groups since I have Crohn’s disease. And it was horrifying. I never wanted to go back because so many of the cases were so terrible. And then a friend of mine said “Derrick, of course they are. Only the people who are having a really hard time with Crohn’s are going to go there.” So it’s a skewed sample. And the people who would respond to an Internet survey is going to be a skewed sample in the first place.

So it’s just crazy on all kinds of levels. But another thing that’s never mentioned is that they always act as though that’s a trump card that means that because so many of them attempt to commit suicide that this means that they should be allowed into women’s restrooms or some other complete non sequitur.

I want to mention three things about suicide. One of them is that the highest rate of suicide in this society is among middle-class, middle-aged white males. So you can’t really argue that suicidality by itself is a sign of oppression. The next one is that I recently saw a study of the rates of suicidality, of attempted suicide among prison guards in California. And then that got me curious so I looked up the rate of suicide attempts by prisoners in California. And the rate of suicide attempts by prison guards is twice what it is for prisoners. So they would have to argue then that this means that prison guards are more oppressed than prisoners.

And the third thing I want to mention is that there have been studies that have shown correlations between various factors and suicidality. And the strongest correlations are drug and alcohol abuse and diagnosable mental illness, as in Robin Williams having depression. As in Ernest Hemingway having depression.

And in no way am I undercutting the horror of those mental illnesses or the desperation that will drive people to suicidality. But my point is that if you’re going to do a survey like that, you have to then also, in order for it to be meaningful, you have to account for the rate of drug and alcohol abuse and also what’s the rate of diagnosable mental illness? And only when you’ve separated out those can you then start to draw any other meaningful conclusions from any of that.

I’m sorry to go on so long, but this has just been something that has been a burr in my saddle for a long time. All that information is just grossly misused.

MM: It is grossly misused. I have certainly seen a few studies done that are actual – there haven’t been all that many long-term followups of transgender people as far as I can see. Also a whole lot of people are not really medically transitioning or even necessarily doing it with their documents, so as this whole concept gets more amorphous it’s going to make doing anything like an actual scientific study of people harder and harder. It used to at least be that it was a diagnosable mental illness, so you could at least then go and look at the outcomes for people who had had this diagnosis. And that has not been done very much at all, really, except for that Swedish study.

But I have seen it go by, and often what you’ll see is a relatively small study to start with, 35 young people I think in Boston, who had medically transitioned, and one committed suicide. So compared to a control group, of course there’s probably not, in an average of 30 or even 100 people there’s not necessarily going to be a suicide. Or even in some of the larger ones I’ve seen, the rate looks like it’s doubled because two trans people committed suicide and one person in the control group did.

There might well be some level of suicidality that’s connected with it, but what it isn’t, what I see with this 41% figure that’s quoted a lot; first, as you say it’s self-reported in this huge study, and I’ve looked at the question, it’s just “Have you ever attempted suicide?” And again, without more nuance, people do tend to overestimate their suicide attempts because it’s a form of expression, it’s like saying “Yes, I was so depressed at one point that I considered suicide.” And what they’ll do is take some whole other study in which only, you know, 1.5 or 2% of the rest of the population said that they’d ever made a suicide attempt, which is a much lower number, compare two entirely different studies.

If they were calling 1000 random people and asking each of them the same question, as you were saying, then we might have an answer here. And we might well still see that the suicidal ideation among transgender-identified people is higher, but that’s also because of the comorbidity of other mental illnesses is higher. Or at least that’s one explanation for it. So yeah, turning suicidality into the axis on which it can be demonstrated that this group of people is oppressed starts to look quite cynical, especially when talking about this other self-reported information, self-reported actual incarceration rates, when that’s never discussed. In the same exact study that is supposed to be kind of an in-depth look at what’s going on in their lives. It never gets highlighted that “Oh, and by the way this is a group of people who self-report going to prison three times more than other white males do.” Isn’t that an interesting part of the entire picture that you would want to have if you were examining who these people are as a group? And yet it’s not. Instead it’s the most inflammatory, the thing that we can say, that gives them the most sympathetic appeal. And of course everybody’s sympathetic towards people who want to kill themselves. It’s a horrible state of mind to be in. But it’s pretty much never the fault of strangers. And when I say the use of it is cynical, it seems incredibly cynical to me to use something as tragic as a purported suicide attempt to blackmail other people into telling you what you want to hear, all the time. It seems fairly childish.

And what I always think of is that no actual oppressed people get to say this. Looking at black people and all of the ways that we can show their historical and present-day oppression, never is it a big part of the common parlance among left-leaning people that we should pretty much believe whatever a black person says because they are demonstrably oppressed. That’s not how it ever works for anybody. But somehow this interpretation of what oppression is, and therefore what they get to demand on the basis of it is almost entirely something that is fabricated or used cynically by people with an express agenda. It’s an agenda of power. I don’t see how it isn’t. I’m hard-pressed to figure out how that’s not a power-driven agenda.

DJ: So we have about five minutes left.

Women struggled 100 years ago in Great Britain to – do you want to talk about the bathroom struggles in England 100 years ago, very briefly?

MM: If you would like to talk about that, that would be great.

DJ: All I would say is that women struggled 100 years ago to gain sex-segregated bathrooms in England because they wanted a more robust social life. And this was opposed by males who did not want them to have a more robust social life. The reason for this struggle was that women were less likely to be sexually assaulted if they had their own restrooms. And there are many good resources for finding out about this topic. So when women say “We want to have our own locker rooms,” there is a related historical struggle. And there is a male backlash against this struggle that must be considered part of this discussion. That’s all I wanted to say.

MM: I think that’s exactly right. This was a remediation, women having their own private spaces is a remediation that addresses women’s oppression. It’s not a privilege, it’s nothing of the sort.

DJ: So how would you sum up our conversation today? If you could convey two or three nuggets to people – 30 years later, 40 years later, my God I’m getting old – the one thing I remember about Star Wars is “use the Force.” So if anybody hears this interview and they could just take away one or two or three nuggets. “I heard this interview today and it was about blah blah” what would they be?

MM: The baseline would be that you can’t change your sex. That we are socialized on the basis of our sex from birth or even earlier on, and that if ever you are running into males who are claiming that their violence against women is justified for any reason whatsoever, examine that closely. Take a look at why that would possibly be. 40-year-old guys swinging bats at a dyke march. It would be hard to imagine that anybody who isn’t completely indoctrinated into this way of thinking would think that that was okay. That males intimidating lesbians at a dyke march was a good idea. So carefully examine any time you see men threatening violence against women.

DJ: That’s great. And one last thing. Beyond examining, what do you want people to do?

MM: Well, you know, it’s interesting right now because I have been off Facebook for a little while. So there is actually on May 26th, there are hashtags #IWasCalledTerf and #IWasCalledATerf , and women are encouraged to write out why they were called a terf, you know, “I was called a terf for saying that women don’t have penises,” for example, and take a selfie with it. And on that day, tweet it to the San Francisco Public Library. So this is kind of an art project going on. They had a panel this last weekend, but they’re also having another panel related to the Degenderettes’ art exhibit on May 26th. So that’s one concrete step to make soon, but of course the bigger step is to always keep this discussion going and encourage people to have it with friends and coworkers, which is really really hard to do in person. But there are way more people who are questioning this than feel like they can say it publicly.

DJ: Small wonder when you’re threatened with baseball bats when you do.

MM: Yes, exactly.

DJ: Which is the whole point of the baseball bats, is it not?

MM: I think so. It’s hard to imagine what else – if I see guys marching down the street wielding weapons, I’m assuming that they believe it’s okay to use them. And if you’re doing it at a dyke march, I have to assume that you believe it’s okay to use them on actual lesbians.

DJ: Well thank you so much for your work, and thank you for the conversation. I would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Melinda Mann. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.

Filed in Interviews by Derrick Jensen