Chase Strangio on indicting a system that protects patriarchy.

Over the past week, the country has learned about a devastating and violent alleged rape of a young woman, Jane Doe, at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024. The case is being referred to as the “Cornell 7” or “Cornell 57” to refer to the seven men who participated in Jane’s alleged rape and the 57 men who were on the group chat initiating the alleged rape and said nothing. One of the many questions that has emerged as the country grapples with the endemic violence women face at the hands of men, is why so many political, cultural and media resources have gone into casting trans people - particularly trans women - as a threat to cis women rather than those that statistically do pose a threat: cis men. Many on social media pointed out, for example, that more men were involved in this alleged rape of a single woman than trans women playing collegiate sports. And yet, it is the latter, not the former, that has dominated our cultural discourse for years. Of course, this investment in building systems to theoretically protect women, while actually controlling women, and expanding violence against others is not new and is produced by design.

In the leadup to the 2024 presidential election, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on advertising that demonized trans people, particularly transgender women in sports. Alongside these ads, President Trump and other Republican candidates positioned themselves as the “protectors” and “defenders” of women from the threat of “biological males” in sports. All of the oxygen in the election discourse around gender was consumed with demonizing trans people. Even though 2024 Republican candidates, including Trump, were campaigning on a platform that the National Women’s Law Center explained would “impose a hierarchal, gendered, patriarchal vision of society,” it was the anti-trans discourse that became most salient. As Trump himself said, he would “protect” women, “whether the women like it or not,” thus transparently using a paternalistic approach to control women while claiming “protection”.

Then, on his first day in office, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order under the guise of “defending women” from what his administration deemed “gender ideology extremism”. To this administration, “defending women” means excising trans women from the definition of womanhood and surveilling all women to accomplish that goal. Two weeks later, the President signed another executive order to “protect” women from the “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous” possibility of participating in sports alongside trans women and girls. All of the language of “protection” meant instrumentalizing a system in which a subset of women and girls would be perpetually excised from the category of “woman” giving the government and bystanders the power to question all women as to whether they fit inside or outside the legitimate government construct of womanhood. And behind all the theatrics about “protecting women” from trans people, the Trump administration has been trying to reverse landmark progress for gender justice, from dismantling Head Start, to overturning key prohibitions on sex discrimination, to restricting abortion access.

Though the contrast between the rhetoric of “protection” and the practice of causing harm is particularly overt and vocal under President Trump, this duality is a central part of United States political and legal history. The United States criminal legal system has been built on justifications for legal and extra-legal violence against men and boys of color in the name of protecting white womanhood while simultaneously upholding systemic discrimination against all women. From the legal lynching of George Stinney, who was executed after being wrongly convicted in the murder of two white girls, to the extra-legal lynching of Emmett Till, who was murdered for allegedly “disrespecting” a white woman, United States history is the history of expanding harmful systems in the name of protection while continuing to subjugate women under the law. This has been true as both a domestic and an imperial practice. In the early 2000s, President Bush claimed that the war in Iraq, for example, liberated women, while his administration aggressively pursued abortion restrictions and other policies that constrained women’s rights domestically. In other words, the United States government is built on claiming protection for women while diverting attention away from or justifying violence on a broad scale.

Ultimately, a strategy for “protecting” women that identifies an “other” to target and criminalize becomes appealing when the alternative is a reckoning of a centuries-long system of patriarchal dominance and control. In these meta-narratives of protection, the broader public is conscripted into a strategy of building systems of dominance rather than systems of justice and equity. Solutions that orient around a “bad actor” often consume narrative and political dominance because they absolve the system itself and are therefore appealing to those that control and benefit from existing structures of power. If everyone’s attention is diverted to ridding society of the “harmful individual(s)”, no one is contending with the fact that it is the entirety of the system that is causing the harm. In this contemporary moment, what is particularly dangerous is that opponents of gender equity and justice have managed to frame the “problem” within the category of womanhood itself. This means that the scrutinizing lens is not turned to men or to the system of patriarchy but to women. The administration has effectively weaponized a theory of protecting women that has legitimized the public and private policing of women who fail to meet the standards of womanhood set by the men in power.

What Jane Doe’s case brings into sharp focus is that it is not just the trans women and girls who lose under this regime, it is all women and girls. In channeling our rage at the system that produces the violence of rape and the violence of war and the erosion of progress, we must look beyond the individual and indict the system itself.

Chase Strangio is a lawyer and trans advocate in New York City.