Not a costume party
This is one of those times when the kind and courteous agreement to call men who have transitioned to being trans women “women” with no further qualification is not a good plan. People who go into convenience stores to swing axes at random shoppers are rarely female.
The headline: Sydney axe attack: Woman guilty of trying to kill strangers
The text:
A woman who attacked two people with an axe in an Australian convenience store has been convicted of attempted murder.
Evie Amati, 26, carried out the unprovoked attack in Sydney last year.
After entering the 7-Eleven store, Amati used the axe to strike a man in the face and a woman in the back of the head. Both victims suffered serious injuries.
Amati had pleaded not guilty, arguing that she was experiencing a psychosis at the time of the attack.
The New South Wales District Court convicted her of three charges on Friday, after almost two days of deliberations by a jury.
During the trial, the court heard that Amati’s victims thought she had come from a costume party when she entered the store about 02:00 on 7 January last year.
See the axe? It connected, knocking the guy down and breaking his face.
Amati attacked her second victim, Sharon Hacker, near the door, leaving her with a fractured skull.
Amati then attempted to strike a third person, Shane Redwood, outside the store, but he managed to use his backpack as a shield. She was arrested shortly later.
Her lawyer, Charles Waterstreet, told the court that she had been “out of her mind” at the time, and was affected by drugs, alcohol and prescription medication.
Amati testified that her mental health had declined after she began taking hormones to transition from male to female.
And that’s how long it took the BBC to make clear that Amati is trans. Most people reading the story won’t have read that far.
I’m confused. What would you like to see done differently, and why?
I hope this doesn’t come across as argumentative. I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to tell us, and I would like to. Thanks.
I’d like the BBC to say “trans woman” instead of “woman.”
Addendum: I believe OB’s comment above could be clarified with “…in the heading and/or first paragraph.”
In Australia, the reporting has stated that Amati is a transgender person in the first paragraph. All the headlines were very affirming of Amati’s present gender, though.
I am finding it slightly horrifying that upon reading this story I absolutely rejected that a person raised with feminine gender training would do this, but accepted that a person raised with masculine gender training would.
Our reporting was very focussed on Amati’s claims to have been experiencing a psychotic episode. Then we got to see the police video of the interviews: Amati sits calmly saying “I respectfully decline to answer”. Got over the psychotic episode very quickly, it seems.
Amati also stated in court that a rejection on a date earlier in the evening was a catalyst for the attack. (Can’t understand why everyone didn’t just say “Oh well, that’s all right then” straight away.)
Wanted to add, if Amati didn’t identify as a woman, the headlines would have read “Axe Attack in 7-11” and Amati wouldn’t have been mentioned at all until the third paragraph. When a man commits a crime it’s reported as “Victim Got Hurt”, when it’s a woman then it’s “Woman Attacks/Kills”.
Do you really believe that?
I have seen nothing like that. In the US we even have the “Florida man” trope, which formed organically when people noticed there seemed to be an inordinate number of “Florida Man [commits some crime or does something crazy]” headlines.
But maybe your claim is specific to Australia. Looking at a random Australian news site, I don’t see any evidence for this:
https://www.smh.com.au/topic/sydney-crime-62n
Here are the first four headlines at the time I’m writing this:
Continuing down the page, I find no evidence for your claim.
That’s okay, Skeletor, I don’t think you ever find evidence for any claim made on this site (even when such evidence is so easily available the next three commenters are able to direct you to it without any difficulty).
I can’t speak to Australian press, or the BBC, but I do think it is more likely in my home town that a man committing a crime will not be identified by his gender, but just generically. That is not to say that all of them will be that way (it’s spotty, probably depending on how to sensationalize the headline the most), and since I am not aware of any major crime committed by a woman in the time I’ve been in this town (12 years), I don’t know how they would report that.
Don’t be silly, we all know that transgender people don’t physically attack other people. Sure, anyone who says anything they don’t like may be “attacked” in self-defense, but those folks aren’t really people anyway so they don’t count.
And anyway there’s no such thing as a transgender person because they’re just men/women with no qualifiers. Just more evidence in favour of the “Bitches be crazy, amirite?” theory.
(Lest there be any confusion: Yes that is all sarcasm.)
Skeletor @6
Try Googling “use of passive voice in journalism”, you’ll learn a lot. HTH.
iknklast: Australian media is rotten with it. “Murder-Suicide” – even “Tragedy in X” – if a man is the perp. “Woman kills X” when it’s a woman.
Some questions for the first poster:
Why do you think feminists care about how women and violence are portrayed in the media?
Have you ever seen anyone talking about how women are just as violent as men, and are responsible for 49% of all “domestic” violence?
Is socialisation real? Are men taught to respond aggressively and women submissively in stress situations?
Have you ever seen approval of men acting aggressively, concurrent with disapproval for women acting in the same way?
Feminism, what is it for?
‘Not a costume party’ really hit home today. Went to a women’s group lunch, and someone showed up in a wig, miniskirt, heels, full makeup and nail polish (the rest of us were wearing what most people wear on the weekend), and introduced himself as ‘usually Paul, but today I’m Patricia’. On the plus side, he mostly sat quietly (next to me, unfortunately, which kept me from talking with some of the other women there), but wtf? I guess I knew this was going to happen at some point when I joined this women’s group. What magical woman things did he think we were going to talk about? And seriously, what would a group of men think if someone showed up at an informal lunch get-together in a pinstripe suit, pocket watch and bow tie, announcing ‘I’m usually Patricia, but today I’m Paul’? It felt to me like we were being mocked.
@#9: “Some questions for the first poster:”
For me? Okay, but I think you may have misidentified me as hostile. (Or something.) Nevertheless I will try to answer sincerely; I don’t wish to be a drive-by commenter, and there is still something I am trying to understand.
“Why do you think feminists care about how women and violence are portrayed in the media?”
I can’t speak for any feminists but myself, but shouldn’t everyone care about those things? Doesn’t everyone care, even if they disagree?
“Have you ever seen anyone talking about how women are just as violent as men, and are responsible for 49% of all ‘domestic’ violence?”
No. Nor have I heard that. But if I had, what next?
“Is socialisation real? Are men taught to respond aggressively and women submissively in stress situations?”
It seems inevitable that, in a sexist society, children will be taught sexist messages. Is that what you mean?
“Have you ever seen approval of men acting aggressively, concurrent with disapproval for women acting in the same way?”
I have not lived my life in a cave. I saw Clinton and Trump, and the differential ways they were treated, to give one example. (Is “approval“ relevant here? Does anyone “approve” of a person swinging an ax in a store?)
“Feminism, what is it for?”
Humans, as near as I can tell.
——-
Were your questions only rhetorical, or are you actually interested in my thoughts? Did you need me to prove that I’m not trolling? I hope I’ve shown you that I’m a feminist who’s trying to understand attitudes about trans people, because that’s who I am. I know you get a lot of trolls, but I’m not one. I’m posting under my real name.
Is there hostility behind your questions? I hope I have not earned it.
Is pondering these questions intended to enlighten me? Although I have both pondered the questions and slept on this response, I am sorry to say that I still feel unenlightened.
I’ve been reading B&W for years (I think I found it through Pharyngula, when both were on the same system) largely because it’s a voice on feminism that I don’t completely understand. I think I’ve benefited from reading it. I’m sure I will keep on reading it for a long time, even if I don’t find answers to all of my questions here. I’d like to be an occasional part of the commentariat, if I ever have something to say.
I believe I will be a better feminist, if I can better understand what other feminists are thinking.
The reason I’m writing all this is that I’m really still trying to understand the question I asked in my first post: why? Why should something be done differently? Maybe it’s blindingly obvious to others, but the original blog post doesn’t say, and I am indeed missing that piece of the puzzle. I apologize again if it seems like trolling; it’s really not. I may be uninformed, but I am not malicious. It sounds flowery to say, but I come to you humble in my ignorance, and ask sincerely for the kindness of explication.
Thank you.
Hi Tom. There are differing views on the truth-claims people make about what it means to be trans, and on whether or not it’s legitimate or reasonable to make particular truth-claims about what it means to be trans socially mandatory. The differing is why I left Freethought blogs three years ago – I refused to agree with or utter all the socially mandatory truth-claims, and many of the bloggers there reacted pretty much as if I’d shyly confided that I like to eat babies. I consider it a ludicrous and harmful state of affairs. Specifically, when a hostile commenter demanded, “Do you believe trans women are women, yes or no?” I refused to say a loud and unqualified YES – I had the audacity to analyse the question, i.e. to say it depends what we mean by “are women.”
I think people who ask that absurd and bossy question have fallen victim to a political mass delusion, quite similar to the one involving satanic ritual abuse back in the 90s.
I post about the socially mandatory dogma now and then. This is one such post. I don’t think the axe-swinging person in this story should be called a woman, for a lot of reasons.
Thank you very much for taking the time to answer me.
You’re welcome; thanks for being a longstanding reader. Did my answer clarify at all?
Honestly, even if someone is more inclined to accept trans claims of identity than Ophelia, I would argue that, simply by virtue of the fact that the attacker cited her trans-state (and the hormone treatments involved) as part of her defense, she should be identified as a trans-woman up front.
Without that element, I think the issue gets a bit more dicey. If the attacker was motivated by some other factors (say, she’d been a virulent racist attacking an Arab shopkeeper), I’m more of a mixed mind–her trans status should be mentioned in the story, but I’m less inclined to say it should be in the headline.
It’s difficult, it’s nuanced, and Ophelia is absolutely correct in her call for freedom to discuss the issues honestly.
@#14: Yes, it did help clarify, but the central question is still opaque to me. You say “for a lot of reasons”. I would be delighted if you wrote (or linked to) a post telling us any number of your reasons. I apologize if it’s something I should be able to find by myself.
You may be right about “socially mandatory dogma“. I believe that societies suffer from those, much like an organism suffers from a virus. It is difficult to free oneself from misapprehensions embedded in the culture. To me, it seems the mission of feminism is largely helping to inform people about the misapprehensions embedded in their culture. To that end, a blog post would be very welcome.
There’s no room for doubt about the existence of the socially mandatory part of the socially mandatory dogma. One can argue about whether that’s a bad or a good thing, and about how significant it is, but the noisy presence of people who attempt to enforce the dogma with threats and insults and no-platforming and sometimes even violence is indisputable.