I Left Academia after Homophobic Sexual Harassment
And the Title IX Office couldn't stop it.
I can tell you the day I peaked.
Thanksgiving 2019.
Now you'll need some background, both personal and based on the situation. Let's get the autobiographical details out of the way first.
When this happened, I was a PhD candidate working on my dissertation in mathematical oncology: my field is dynamical systems analysis, with a focus on bifurcation theory, but I was working with a pediatric oncology lab to model p53 switching dynamics. My department was chill about math grad students socializing across fields. Usually there's some separation between the algebraists and analysts—or “pure” and “applied” if you prefer—but there was a lot of cameraderie, even though we worked in separate buildings.
Sadly, two other personal details are also relevant. I've been an out and open bisexual since I was 15. And even though I wasn't diagnosed with autism until earlier this year, I was still struggling with the usual autistic things. Following other people's leads in social situations because you know you don't fully understand what's going on, large focus on being nice and agreeable, infinite patience for awkward people still finding themselves.
So, even today, I can stand in one spot and accumulate weirdos. It's a double-edged sword. Sometimes you meet wonderful people with rich inner lives who become lifelong friends. Sometimes you meet people who realize how bad you are at standing up for yourself and who take advantage of that.
That's the personal stuff. We need to meet one other person, whom I'll call Matt, because that is his name. Matt was a fellow graduate student in a different field who realized early on I had massive wells of tolerance to listen to him talk about anime and video games—because who doesn't like a good rant about special interests, right?
He didn't take me seriously, and he said things that were outwardly sexist. Like when I tried the six-day week as an experiment, he made a dismissive comment about how “girls always see things on XKCD and think they can do it too.” Or if I submitted (anonymous!) feedback on a talk he gave, he'd track me down afterward to tell me why I was wrong.
But back then, a couple comments like that were fine. People can change! Given enough exposure to real-life competent and quick-witted women, surely he'll realize there's something skewed about his perception and the way he treats others.
Instead, repeated interactions meant Matt was developing something of a crush on me.
Hard pass. I was married, and even if I wasn't, he wasn't my type at all. And even if he were, the condescending comments about “girls” would immediately disqualify him.
So one day I took him aside and said I was bisexual, and if I were to ever date another person in my life, I would want to date a woman. And only a woman.
His eyes lit up.
From that moment on, the limited topics he talked to me about expanded slightly. Now it wasn't just anime and video games. It was lesbians. Anime lesbians. Video game lesbians.
And porn.
This guy—who, again, is a fellow grad student, a coworker—asked me what kind of porn I watched. When I told him I didn't watch porn, he said “That's a shame.” But I didn't want to hear about his porn preferences either. No lesbian porn, no anime lesbian porn, no video game anime lesbian porn.
It wasn't just incidental, either. He brought up lesbians constantly. If I mentioned a straight or a gay male couple, he would refuse to respond and change the conversation back to lesbians. At some point I was so skeeved out, I took him aside in the courtyard and asked him to please cool it with the constant lesbian stuff. There was no doubt in my mind he had a lesbian fetish and was targeting me because I was bisexual.
What I didn't predict was him taking me aside to that same courtyard and asking a question I'd never forget.
“Do you think I'd be cute as a girl?”
Of course, my answer was no. (Male or female, guy's truly just not my type.) But I didn't say that. Instead, I followed the usual script as dictated by liberal feminism, and said I would support him in his transition.
It was a year before this guy started pretending to be a woman at work. In the interim, he kept talking incessantly to me about lesbians, doing boundary violation things like signing me up for committees I had no interest in joining during meetings I didn't attend, and at one point visited my apartment to play Beat Saber.
When he did start taking hormone therapy—which he got without having a gender dysphoria diagnosis, as he told me—he started telling me weekly how his breasts were coming in and how the hormones were affecting his body. He'd come in to my office, situated between me and the door, and tell me how his breasts felt. And I listened, because I wanted to be nice.
He told me how he “wanted boobs since he was 13.” At work. He told me how he preferred to play female characters in video games and that's how he knew he was a woman. When I said I was fine sharing a bathroom with a man pretending to be a woman as long as he respected boundaries and didn't peek through the cracks in the stalls, he said “Well... sometimes it's hard to tell whether someone is in there,” and laughed it off.
Ok, one more relevant personal note. I've been vegan for 13 years and ever since college, have been cooking gigantic spreads for Thanksgiving. So it'd become a yearly tradition for me to hold a Friendsgiving on my house the day of, inviting anyone who couldn't make it home for the holiday and wanted a free meal of home-cooked vegan food.
In 2019, Matt, now going by Emily and wearing a skirt around the department with his usual videogame shirts, happened to be one of those people. And he accepted my invitation.
We've reached Thanksgiving 2019, the day I peaked.
So the meal prep and eating part of the day went fine. There was a friend of a friend who had never seen vegan food in his life and ended up with 1 molecule of mashed potatoes and 1 cube of stuffing. There was my rabbit, Ada, who was the night's VIP: she hopped out to a room full of strangers, introduced herself to everyone by sniffing their feet, and solved a rabbit puzzle for some oat groats. There was my other rabbit, Grace, who only has so much patience for us mortals. And there was Matt.
Matt decided he was going to stick around after everyone left to make me watch an episode of an anime—but not before criticizing my cooking (“I don’t like when vegan food tries to taste like regular food”). An anime episode that featured lesbians! Underage anime lesbians! I can't remember whether they were in high school or middle school.
We sat around talking after the episode ended, while my husband was in a different room. That's when one of us made an offhand comment along the lines of “seize the means of production,” and Matt took the opportunity.
“Seize the means of reproduction,” he said, grabbing his breasts in front of me.
I was confused, and asked what he was doing.
He repeated the gesture. “Seize the means of reproduction,” he said, this time seizing his genitals. He kept grabbing his breasts and genitals under the guise of a joke, like I didn't get it and continuing to make sexual gestures in front of me would make my dumb brain understand, as I sat there in freeze mode.
That's when my husband came in to see what was going on, and I blocked out what happened until Matt left.
My husband and I have this dynamic where I'll repeat something that happened to me as a kid, ask “Hey, is that weird?” and he'll always say “Yes.” Because something has to be pretty weird for me to pick up on it being weird. So this time, I asked if it was weird if Matt was grabbing his breasts and genitals in front of a coworker even though I was clearly uncomfortable.
He was appalled.
It's worth noting that at this time, I was not peaked. I was ready to believe Matt was a bad apple, and one bad apple shouldn't prevent me from being my usual nice, patient self to people who were in need of kindness.
No, the credit for breaking me out of this gaslighting goes to my husband.
“I don't understand these tech guys who decide they identify with womanhood,” he said. “Where does their understanding of femininity come from?”
That's when I finally let myself ask the question. Where did Matt's understanding of femininity come from, indeed?
It should be obvious to anyone reading this. Anime. Video games. Porn. Anime porn. Media for men, by men, that represents women as airheaded little fetish objects to be used by men. That's what his idea of womanhood was based on.
That's when I peaked.
This was not a person from a vulnerable population who needed my kindness and understanding. This was a man with a lesbian fetish.
In college, when I first learned that people identified as transgender? I was fine with it. I told people I was fine dating either cis women or trans men, until a man took me aside and told me I sounded transphobic because I wasn't open to dating trans women. Then I begrudgingly changed it to be “everyone except cis men,” which was a lie. But I couldn't set the sexual boundaries I wanted to—as an 18-y.o. autistic woman with almost no intrinsic self esteem, I couldn't stand up for myself. I remembered storming around my room screaming “I'm biSEXual, not biGENDERal.” With this last piece, it was all finally starting to fit together.
I looked online to see if anyone had experienced anything similar, and quickly found gender-critical communities talking about autogynephilia (AGP). This is exactly what I had experienced. This man latched onto me because I was an out bisexual woman, had manipulated me into participating in his fetish without my consent, and had the backing of the department.
I couldn't focus. I felt dirty and used.
My first thought was, I can't let him do this to the other women in my department. They need to know about his lesbian fetish. They need to know that AGP exists. They need to be given a heads up that pretending this guy is a woman is participating in this fetish, and they need to be given the opportunity to opt out.
I set a meeting with the Title IX office. I told them about the sexual harassment above, about him asking for my porn preferences at work, grabbing his genitals in front of me, and laid out my argument for why this man was likely an autogynephile. All the while, I was terrified of being seen as transphobic, and I was very careful to use gender-neutral pronouns and clarify that I was bisexual myself, not some right-wing homophobe using scare tactics.
They told me that regardless of gender identity, “this person” had some boundary issues, and they'd talk to him and ask him to leave me alone.
But they couldn't warn my female colleagues.
There was no department-wide conversation. I just dealt with it in silence. Then, when a well-known man in my field also started pretending to be a woman, a man in his fifties I was conference friends with, I thought, “nope, not again.” I'd rather give up the career I've worked my whole life towards than let another gross man use me as fetish fuel. And then I took an indefinite break from academia.
That's my peaking story.
For the epilogue, my female colleagues were in the habit of scheduling a Ladies Brunch every month. Before I left, I held one. I didn't invite the man pretending to be a woman. I think, at some level, they understood something was off.
I’ve since put my career as a mathematician on hold to join Women’s Liberation Front in fighting this regressive, homophobic, misogynistic ideology that has taken over academia.
Pride Month is bittersweet for me. At one time society looked like it accepted lesbian and bisexual women for who we are, up until our boundaries conflict with what men want. Then we need to “be nice” and center them.
We are not porn categories.
We are only allowed as long a leash as men will let us have. Gay men, too, have also faced homophobia from women declaring themselves to be men. And it’s definitely, definitely worse for lesbians—who are being coerced into corrective rape and effectively banned from forming their own spaces on all but the most protective platforms—than bisexual women like me who can be happy in a relationship with a man. And don’t get me started on medicalizing children.
The colonization chevron is a sign of our oppression, the silencing and demonizing of lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, by proponents of gender ideology. We need to get them out of our movement. We are being manipulated on a mass scale, and they will only appear like they are winning for so long. They will not. They are liars.
Decolonize Pride.