busyHowever, there is one clothing change that is very old, and if you can make it work, then it reduces certain types of crime by quite a lot -- crossdressing. You have to be good enough to PASS or it just makes you more of a target. But if men are looking for a woman to rape, and they think you're a man, they'll ignore you. If they're looking for a man to murder, and they think you're a woman, they'll ignore you.
Right now, being a black man makes you look like murder bait to some people who are considered free to murder anyone they want with little chance of reprisal. So I figured that I would point out this historic solution. It's not ideal, but it might keep people breathing long enough to effect a longer-term solution.
December 7 2014, 10:51:46 UTC 6 years ago
Okay, here I go: no. Just no. As an idea, it sounds good only if you're cisgender and have no idea what it's like to be trans. But trust me, crossdressing to avoid rape doesn't work. Or more accurately, if you pass well enough it may work for a while, but then when they find out the truth, you become a massive target for violence. Dressing like a man may stop you from being raped for a while, but eventually someone is going to figure it out and when they do, the odds of you being raped skyrocket. And when it comes to people with vaginas dressing like men, once the truth is discovered your odds of being murdered also skyrocket. The average person has a 1 in 18,000 chance of being murdered. Trans people (and cis crossdressers too, I imagine) have a 1 in 8 chance of being murdered.
So no, very bad idea. Monumentally bad idea. And this kind of bad idea is a very good reason why people should always check their privilege (and everyone has privilege, no matter how far down the food chain they are). You never know when something done from privilege-based ignorance is going to get you or somebody else killed.
Oh and trust me, no matter how well you pass, someone WILL eventually figure it out. When I was a kid, I thought I was a boy. I thought I looked like a boy, dressed like a boy, talked like a boy, and behaved like a boy. There was even a few months when my parents struggled to get me to understand that "boy" was not my name. (Though for all I know, I could have just been messing them about.) But my bullies knew the truth. They picked up on the clues even if I didn't; they knew I was actually a girl, no matter what the birth certificate said. And if those bullies could figure out that about me when I didn't even know, back when I was a child (a time when everyone is androgynous to some degree or other), then trying to hide the truth from others as an adult is not going to work any better. I've been lucky so far, in being out as trans, in that I am androgynous enough that - in my mom's words when she told me something she had observed, that I "get far fewer weird looks" when I'm presenting as female, because female seems to be what people tend to read in me anyway.
But yeah: very very very very very very bad idea.