Paris transgender woman 'humiliated' at protest.

[placemats]

In other words men, yes men, beat up a person (seems like actual bodily harm to me) who presents as a transgender woman in Paris.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47799288

Get it right BBC!

And the only person who steps in to help?

actually I listened to an interview with the woman who was attacked, and the woman who seems to help her actually called her 'Monsieur' and told her 'she shouldn't dress like that'.

She was not only punched but also sexually assaulted as one of the man put his hand between her crotch.

Frenchjunebug The BBC article states the transport police called this person monsieur and said ‘ you shouldn’t dress like that’ .
The Algerian girl is a teenager, seems odd for a teenager to refer to another as monsieur? Where did you hear the interview?

I’m not minimising the harassment, violence and sexual assault it shouldn’t happen to anyone. It was escalated by the chasing down and as ILoveMaxiBondi says walking away is protecting yourself.

Extrapolating (wildly) from that, is the response to an initial unwelcome approach/physical contact the reason why non-domestic violent attacks are higher in men? As in it is instigated by men, most women placate and avoid, men who counter attack end up in a someone wins someone loses physical altercation.

i also wonder what the end result would have been for a woman who chased someone down for an insult and a hair ruffle. I suspect the men would not have responded as violently to someone they perceived as female.

I don't quite understand the context here. Do the transwomen and the men share the same political sympathies?

Sorry, 'the transwoman'

Men get in fight. Not shocked.

Nevertheless, the hair ruffle was not OK. That transwoman should have been able to go about the protest without being harassed. As should any women in the crowd. As should any person in the crowd.

If the TW were actually regarded as a woman then commentators would be on about how she had it coming by wearing a mini skirt. Maybe taking her to task for being culturally inappropriate. Maybe going on about how young women are becoming more violent and what should be done about it. There would be speculation about drink and drugs.

TowelNumber42

Brilliant post. Thank you.

Gangs of young men like that are more than happy to hit and shove women too, Catalogue. I had an experience in Brussels where I was sitting on a bus with a friend and a guy came up to the window and started making lewd gestures at us. I gave him the middle finger salute and mouthed ‘fuck off’ instead of ignoring him as my friend was doing. He got on the bus (which was stationary at a stop) and spat in my face. These street gangs of young guys (mostly Arab / North African in my experience) do not give a shit. They would fuck anyone up, male or female. Doesn’t surprise me at all that they sexually assaulted the trans woman in this case either.

Women in Paris and Brussels and other Francophone cities deal with street harassment like this every day and cope by just ignoring it. It infuriated me when I lived there. I would get angry and react to it, which never helped. They would just laugh as if to say ‘oh a woman getting angry, how funny. What can you do to us anyway?’

Of course whenever women complained about it we were told to be careful going places alone, avoid the Arab parts of the city and always be on alert. No attempts to tackle the toxic culture of masculinity in these communities that drives the behaviour.

Catalogue I grew up in a deeply sexist environment. It would have gone badly for a woman too, worse I expect, and she would have been blamed. There wouldn't have been a video going viral about it either.

i also wonder what the end result would have been for a woman who chased someone down for an insult and a hair ruffle. I suspect the men would not have responded as violently to someone they perceived as female.

Cologne?

I saw that article. Awful male violence. Just made me wonder again why the BBC didn’t cover properly the four trans women who launched a violent attack on a man in the London Underground. All on video and documented ans in this country and yet not worth the coverage of this story. I wonder why.

These street gangs of young guys (mostly Arab / North African in my experience) do not give a shit.

I very much agree with this. There are some groups in the North African communities that have a real problem with being hideously sexist, and abusive with it.
I've found it far more common amongst the Arab groups than the Kabyle.
Oh, and that was a huge, huge manif, loads of gendarmes and CRS. It was absolutely not somewhere to go if you weren't there to protest Bouteflika.

I had abuse and groping almost every day when I lived in Paris. It’s a real problem. I’m keeping my phone line clear in case the BBC want to write about my experience.

TowelNumber42 I also grew up in a very sexist environment, if I (as I did in my bulletproof younger years) called out the catcall/grope I would get more verbal abuse, but not a punch in the face. Regardless of what happened in private in public men rarely hit women. That’s why I was wondering if the escalation would have been different. Admittedly a very different culture so difficult to compare.

I think, and I’m grasping here, male on male violence is different from male on female violence. More physical rather than sexual violence.

Absolutely agree that this would not have been news if it had been a short skirted woman. That’s not a story, that’s business as usual, regardless of the humiliation and fear inflicted.

The NY Times has a big dramatic piece about it

www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/world/europe/transgender-woman-attacked-paris.html

" Video footage showing men assaulting a transgender woman during a demonstration in central Paris last weekend has prompted outrage and debate about transphobic attitudes in the country, in what some activists called a shift in France’s attitude toward transgender people."

It's not clear firstly why a specifically French-Algerian event should tell you much about wider French attitudes towards transgender people.

And I do wonder if the person had not been transgender whether this would have even made the news.

When 1200 women were sexually assaulted in Cologne

www.thesun.co.uk/news/2407734/cologne-new-years-eve-sex-attacks/

the focus seemed to be on avoiding blaming the perpetrators to avoid Islamophobia or whatever.

The nature of the present attackers, also presumably Muslim men, is being neatly ignored in favour of trying to construct a wider narrative about French society.

It would be a bit odd to assume that every community shares the same attitude towards transpeople, but somehow that has been completely ignored?

I heard Julia the woman who was attacked talk on French TV. She also said that she didn't want for people to blame race and religion for this. So please don't blame race and religion. She gets some sort of insults everyday from all sorts.

Culture can play a big part in this kind of behaviour - that kind of treatment is common to women in certain areas/nationalities. I’ve experienced it myself- so it shouldn’t necessarily just be ignored for not being PC. I wonder if the hair tussle was the start- it really seemed to come from that one guy (going by the clip) and escalated when the TW went after him - not blaming the TW but probably unwise.

Julia needs to recognise the suffering and humiliation women face each minute of every hour of every day of every month of every year. Whether it be cultural or socialised, male violence is omnipresent globally.

Sorry but it was my experience that the street harassment came from Arab / North African guys, usually hanging out in groups, when I lived in Brussels and visited Paris. Might not be true of everywhere but it was for me. I got fed up at the time of women being silenced about it to appease certain communities. I’m not going to lie or be quiet about what my experiences were.