So I promised a lot of people that I would tell them how men treated me differently once I started passing as a man. Which is basically that they respect me as a human, and they are very nice. As a female passing/visibly gender non conforming person, when a dude approached me in public, 99.9% of the time it was to ask me for money, hit on me, or go into some homophobic "you need Jesus" type thing. And if I tried to say no, they would often get very aggressive. There was also the occasional yelling of dyke/tranny/lesbian (that one confused me because "lesbian" isn't a slur?). Now, men mostly talk to me to ask for help connecting to the wifi, to tell me they like my shirt, to start a conversation about how the movie version of The Black Panther didn't live up to their childhood dreams based on the comics, etc. And if they are hitting on me or asking for money and I say no, the response is usually something like "ok, have a nice night man". What surprises me most is that I'm not particularly gender conforming man, but men still seem to respect me even if I'm in a crop top and heels. Maybe that's just acceptable gay mens attire in Miami?

I've been thinking for a while about the various ways that organizations that do not really care about sexual harassment set up rules about sexual harassment that end up hurting vulnerable people and furthering the gender binary. Some examples:

• Gay Catholics (the vast majority of whom are not abusers) being pushed out of the church in response to increasing reports of abuse by priests 
• The rise of rules about faculty and graduate students not drinking alcohol together, which functions to shut down mentoring spaces while doing nothing to punish faculty to act inappropriately in such spaces. This happened to me recently when I was told that my presence at a staff and faculty party was "inappropriate" even though I attended as a plus one to a staff member.
• The very gender rules of research at sea which say that I must share a cabin with a man, because I am a trans masculine person, and cabins are always gender segregated to avoid issues of sexual harassment and assault. Never mind that harassment can occur between people of the same gender, and that I am not confident that US research vessels are taking other steps to curb harassment. There isn't much research on this so I can't state numbers, but given the high number of women who report harassment in field work, it would surprise me if the number who experience harassment at sea was low. 

My point is: #metoo is being coopted in a very bad way by organizations who care more about not being sued than they do about curbing sexual harassment. I'm not saying all rules are bad - some are helpful and even necessary. Probably you shouldn't sleep with someone you have direct institutional power over. But many rules are made to protect the institution from lawsuits, and not to prevent sexual harassment.