In Pennsylvania, A Woman In Power Confronts Nothing New
The offensive mocking of Dr. Rachel Levine is both a rare example of public discourse wrangling with a transgender woman with power and an all-too-familiar example of the mistreatment faced by any other woman in power.
My first interaction with Dr. Rachel Levine — Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health — came as the state was gripped in a far different public health crisis than the one we see today. An apparent lifetime ago — 2018 — Levine was guiding the state through an opioid overdose crisis that had struck the state’s rural counties, including massive spikes in overdoses in York and Lancaster Counties.
Covering health care for a local business paper at the time, I was attending a press conference at the State Capitol in Harrisburg held by her, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, and Governor Tom Wolf. The administration had made the historic decision of declaring a state of emergency over the crisis, extending the power of several state departments to respond to the crisis and Levine’s Health Department in particular.
While listening to her explain new emergency room protocols and the dispersal of the overdose-reversing naloxone at pharmacies, I (egotistically and characteristically) got lost in marveling at the presence of her and I in that room, in the State Capitol, each performing a job with little direct relationship to our identities as transgender women.
Secretary Levine, as an out transgender public official, is a rarity in American politics. Trans people currently hold no position of power in all three federal branches, and our success in state politics has largely been halted at the level of state legislator — of which we only have four, three of whom are white transgender women. Christine Hallquist lost her 2018 bid to serve as Vermont’s governor, and the few trans candidates for Congress have largely fallen flat.
Secretary Levine — directing the heath policy of a state with close to 13 million people since 2015— is definitively one of the most powerful transgender people in the country, a position she has held with little fanfare and comparatively little controversy. As she guides Pennsylvania through its response to the coronavirus pandemic, however, the political temperature of the moment has raised her identity from an off-hand aspect of her career to the front page.
Levine’s work juggling lockdowns and mask requirements in a state that has already lost over 7,000 residents to the virus has been met with a campaign of ridicule, mockery, and cartoonish transphobia — providing a rare glimpse into how people respond to a trans person in power and a new angle into the role of misogyny in diminishing female leaders.
In May, Levine rebuked a local radio host after he continually referred to her as “sir” during an on-air interview. In June, a county commissioner near Pittsburgh fought restrictions on the state’s economy to thwart the spread of the virus by whining “I’m tired of listening to a guy dressed up like a woman” (leading to his resignation). By July, a large fair in the state’s rural center held a dunk tank with a man in a dress, which the fair openly called an impersonation of Dr. Levine. This past week, a Tioga County tavern drew attention after it named an item on its menu — fried cheese balls — after the woman trying to coordinate statewide efforts to save lives from both an infectious pandemic and a continuing opioid crisis.
In an emphatic and earnest statement, Levine responded to these and other attacks against her — stating the actions “perpetuate a spirit of intolerance and discrimination against LGBTQ individuals” while noting “frankly I have no time for intolerance:”
“I call on you and all Pennsylvanians to work towards a spirit of not just tolerance, but a spirit of acceptance and welcome towards LGBTQ individuals…Our children are watching. They are watching what we do. And they are watching how we act, and to all LGBTQ young people, it is okay to be you, and it is okay to stand up for your rights, and your freedoms.”
Noted mask skeptic and Republican State Representative Russ Diamond responded to Levine’s call for maturity by promptly mocking the statement, issuing a verbatim copy of her comments with the phrases “LGBTQ” and “transgender” replaced with “unmasked.”
The response to these attacks — the administration of Governor Wolf, and local and national media, and by Dr. Levine herself, — has largely characterized them as disgusting and transphobic — and they most certainly are that.
The more fascinating lens to view these attacks, however, might be a more traditional understanding of Dr. Levine as a woman in power. Female leadership draws ire in proportion to the degree it challenges existing power, and the government action necessary to control the coronavirus pandemic has put more than a few women in the crosshairs of conspiracy theorists, astroturfed “reopen” protests, and violent threats.
President Trump has characteristically led this campaign of sexism, reserving his harshest scapegoating of the virus’ spread for women like General Motors CEO Mary Barra and Michigan Governor Meg Whitmer. In March, Orange County Public Health Officer Dr. Nichole Quick left her post in the crowded California region after being threatened by local residents online. June saw the resignation of Dr. Amy Acton, Dr. Levine’s Ohioan counterpart, who was personally targeted by reopen protests at her private home. That same month saw the exit of Emily Brown, a public health officer in Colorado, who resigned after receiving a wave of violent and sadistic threats.
All of this has unfolded despite evidence states and countries with women leaders are simply doing a better job managing the pandemic — and Pennsylvania under Dr. Levine is no different. Despite a significant spike in cases in early April, the state has done a comparatively good job maintaining a low caseload while tiptoeing towards the resumption of normal life (or something like it). The CDC even singled out Pennsylvania — a state with two large urban centers and a spread-out collection of mid-size cities — alongside Montana and Hawaii for its management of the crisis. PA currently ranks among the Top 20 states in its low positive test rate.
Despite the similarities between Dr. Levine and women like Drs. Acton and Quick — both in their competence as public officials and the monstrous treatment they’ve received in return — the national coverage of the harassment against the Secretary has largely focused on her identity as a transgender person while failing to account for her identity as a woman. NBC profiled Levine in their NBC OUT vertical, citing cisgender gay men like State Representative Brian Sims — something repeated by local media in Pennsylvania, which broadly covered the attacks as an LGBTQ story. In a recent roundup of misogynistic attacks against Acton, Quick, and Brown, feminist stalwart Ms. Magazine notably left Levine out of their coverage. While The Washington Post did include Dr. Levine in their coverage of harassment of public officials, they failed to even use her name—simply referring to her as “transgender.”
You could be forgiven for elevating Levine’s trans identity in this discussion— her own comments have largely focused on the attacks as transphobic and damaging to young transgender people in particular. But as foolish as it would be of me to ignore her identity as a transgender person (and the role it plays in the attacks against her), it’s equally foolish to ignore her identity as a woman and its impact.
The overlap of misogyny and transphobia is more circle than Venn diagram, and this is obvious to anyone who’s experienced both. The silencing condescension, the availability of the body as a public good, the harsh, electric maze of norms and expectations, the indelible horror of violent abuse. All of these are are familiar terrain to trans people. How that same misogyny manifests itself in the lives of cisgender women is not a difference of kind but a difference of degree — with trans people statistically getting the heavier end on nearly every front.
Even that most trans-specific of slights — misgendering someone — is not isolated to transgender targets alone. Powerful women are continually challenged as “mannish,” their womanhood withheld from them as if it were an honorific they had lost the privilege of by virtue of their ambition. Women of color are especially subjected to parsing of their physical appearance for “evidence” they’re “really” a man — from Sojourner Truth being forced to bare her breasts at women’s conferences as evidence of her womanhood to Olympic track star Caster Semenya having her hormone levels parsed on the national stage. One need not look further than the Facebook comments on any Breitbart article about Michelle Obama to understand the inseparable nature of transphobia and misogyny.
The same muscle used by a radio host calling Dr. Levine “sir” likewise asserts anyone with XX chromosomes should be maternal, gentle, and at the service of men. The same kind of man who refuses to take life-saving orders from a transgender woman in a dress out of partisan loyalty isn’t very likely to take those same orders from anyone in a dress. The attacks against Dr. Levine — like those against Governor Whitmer, Emily Brown, Dr. Amy Acton, or Dr. Nichole Quick — are desperate attempts to limit the power of someone challenging a gendered assumption of weakness with sheer, unadulterated competence — a character trait “true” women are never given permission to display.
When this is ignored — when transphobia is treated as a distant neighbor of the systemic prejudice that limits cisgender women — trans people are further isolated from the solidarity the fight against misogyny demands. Anti-trans sentiment has played an increasing role in Republican party politics, including a proliferation of state legislative bills targeting transgender youth, prominent debates about trans athletes in Republican primaries, and a multi-platform campaign waged against trans people by right-wing media. Much of this is done under the supposed banner of protecting women from the “threat” of trans women — an extremely dubious claim for a number of reasons, none more obvious than the opposition of those same players to women’s economic, sexual, and reproductive freedom for generations.
Transphobia and misogyny share sources because they share a mission — the dominance of male power in the home, the workplace, and the State house. But as the right-wing works overtime to cloud over that fact with paternalistic claims of protecting women, it’s more important than ever to recognize the inseparable connection between the two forces. The attacks against Dr. Levine — and the many transgender public officials yet to come — must be rejected for both their misogyny and their transphobia. Ignoring this overlap isolates those least capable of meeting patriarchy’s demands from the pack, leaving trans people more exposed and all marginalized genders — cis women included — more vulnerable for it.
Listening to Dr. Levine at that 2018 press conference on opioids, she was as clear and direct as you’d like any public health professional to be. That she faced comparatively little backlash then — while enacting a program with bipartisan support — is proof enough of how much damage has been done by the politicization of efforts to stem the coronavirus. Grasping for justifications of their foolish disregard of her counsel on masks and social distancing, those who target her do so not only because she contradicts the President and Fox News. They target her — and Governor Whitmer, Dr. Acton, Dr. Quick, Emily Brown, and too many other hers to count — because they can.
