Two months ago, the long-awaited trial of Dana Rivers began.
Rivers, a trans-identified male person, was convicted of murdering Patricia White and Charlotte Reed, as well as their son, Toto Diambu. Rivers killed his victims in their home before setting it on fire and trying to escape the scene covered in their blood. White and Reed were a lesbian couple, and for that reason, I’ve been following this case since the murders occurred in November 2016.
At the time, the online reactions to the case could be described as lukewarm to nonexistent. I remember reading this Reddit thread, where some users of /r/transgender discuss the then-rumour that “the” Dana Rivers had been arrested for murder. The top comment states: “I thought this week couldn't get worse. Queue the media to start flogging the homicidal trans trope”. Another adds: “TERFS gonna have a field day. Can trans people please fucking keep it together and stop losing their shit for a while for the sake of the rest of us?” (Note that here, “losing their shit” means murdering three innocent people.)
Another comment, “There's bad people in every group”, is followed by a strange response from another user: “It's hard to call her a bad person without knowing what, if anything, these people did to her first.” Appropriately, this comment is met with some backlash, where other users comment that it is unlikely that Rivers’ victims provoked him in a way that justified killing them.
The grief and sadness expressed within the comments is directed at the idea that Rivers, a formerly prolific trans activist, has committed a crime and might be responsible for spoiling the reputation of the trans community. No-one directly expresses sadness about the three lives taken by Rivers’ rampage. Compared to a much more normal thread on /r/oakland, where people discuss the case and mourn the loss of the victims, I think that the former response was unsettling.
It took almost six years for this case to finally go to trial. Now that it has, it has ignited debate about trans-identified male people being housed in women’s prisons to the extent that a group of gender-critical feminists were recently physically attacked while protesting Rivers being housed in a female facility.
This incident, which to me is a culmination of six years of inappropriate responses to this triple homicide where a lesbian couple lost their lives, exemplifies to me the obscene standards that lesbians are held to in order to be, in the eyes of the LGBT community and its allies, a “good lesbian”.
The general public has its own standards for being a “good lesbian”. These are the ones I grew up exposed to, at a time and place where being a lesbian was ‘okay’ as in ‘not criminal or deviant’, but not ‘okay’ as in ‘you’ll still be presumed to be a decent person’. You could be a ‘bad lesbian’ (ugly, weird, socially outcast) - or, if you worked hard at it, and followed certain rules, you could achieve a level of social acceptability as a lesbian woman.
For example: a good lesbian should be womanly - she should know that her place in society is that of a woman, and not that of a man. A good lesbian should be friendly and accommodating - she should never be mean and hostile to others. A good lesbian should have limited awareness of her social condition, and be happy with her lot in life - she should not be a feminist, an activist, or in any way a free or radical thinker.
The culmination of all three of these expectations is that a good lesbian absolutely must not be a ‘man-hater’. Although it may be grudgingly accepted that she will not to date, marry and sleep with men, that does not give a lesbian permission to shut men out of her life altogether. She must still talk to men, laugh at men’s jokes, and spend her time and energy on men. She must include men in her life and her space. She must welcome men into her home. A good lesbian must integrate into heteronormative society insofar as she does not challenge the idea that women need men, if not as sexual then at least as social counterparts. A good lesbian understands that life without men is unacceptable.
In the present LGBT community - subscribing to what I’ll call ‘radical queer’ ideology, though it’s no longer quite so radical or queer since entering the mainstream - the idea of a good lesbian has become even more twisted and harmful.
To be a good lesbian in the LGBT community, you must believe that men can become women and can therefore also be lesbians. That is, you don’t just have to like men, or spend time with men, or have male friends - you have to believe that some men (male people) are literally the same as you are: a woman who loves other women. A good lesbian accommodates lesbians who happen to be male.
However, good lesbians don’t just tolerate the existence of these men. A good lesbian is expected to fully embrace them. We are expected to see a male lesbian as an equal, a sister, and a potential lover. While mainstream society expects the good lesbian to have no social boundaries, the LGBT society expect the good lesbian to dispense with her sexual boundaries as well.
As well as socially and sexually engaging with male lesbians, the good lesbian is expected to devote a significant portion of her life to supporting this demographic. The good lesbian is an activist and an advocate for trans people - to be otherwise would be selfish, bigoted and cruel. A good lesbian must know herself as an ally - must make sure that her thoughts as well as her actions are appropriately in line with her allyship. A good lesbian must lie to herself every single day about the idea that men can become women - and then she must lie to others.
In the context of the Dana Rivers case, this means that a good lesbian must suspend her disbelief about exactly what unfolded that day. Instead of a case of male violence against lesbian women, Rivers is also a ‘queer’ woman - thus, this can’t be considered a case of femicide or even lesbophobia. Every lesbian is expected to push aside and forget about every time a man has made us feel unsafe - has been irrationally angry with us, or a little too interested in us, felt entitled to us, stared at us… Dana Rivers is not that man. Dana Rivers is a woman: thus, this is a case of a LGBT woman killing two other LGBT women is outside of the framework of male violence lesbians are familiar with. A good lesbian sees it as an inexplicable neighbourly feud between women - not the unrestrained violent misogyny of a man.
In the last two months, I think that things have escalated even further. Somehow, all of this isn’t enough to be a good lesbian anymore.
Because, in addition to all of the above, being a good lesbian means that when a trans-identified male named Dana Rivers murders two lesbians and their son, it’s somehow your responsibility (as a good lesbian) to insist that he is incarcerated with other female people.
In a sane world, it might be expected that the lesbian community is allowed to feel anger towards Rivers, with the caveat that anger at Rivers does not translate to anger at all trans people. That the lesbian community is allowed to grieve without thinking for one moment that they should feel sorry for a killer, to muster the empathy to consider how Rivers feels and what Rivers is going through at this time. At the absolute bare minimum, the lesbian community should be entitled to apathy: to simply not care what happens to Rivers, after the atrocity that he committed. In a sane world, Rivers would be considered to be somebody else’s problem.
But the LGBT community isn’t a sane world. And the expectation on lesbians is to not only eschew anger or hatred towards Rivers, but to view him as a victim because of the off-chance that he might be misgendered or placed in a male prison at some point*. Lesbians are supposed to concern ourselves with potential violence directed at Rivers which has not even happened. Lesbians are supposed to go out on the streets and advocate for Rivers’ safety and dignity. After Rivers, for unknown reasons, decided to murder two lesbians and their son.
Meaning: in 2022, a good lesbian is not only expected to engage socially with men, to have male friends, to accept men’s self identification as lesbian women, to have sex with men if they identify as lesbian women, to dedicate time and energy to being an advocate for the trans community, and to respond with only moderated apathy when a man who identifies as a woman kills a lesbian couple. A good lesbian must also, on top of all of these things, somehow convince herself that this violent man is actually a victim - a vulnerable woman - and that is her responsibility, as a lesbian, to protect him.