An American trans activist who identifies as ‘transfeminine’ was recently featured by the Indian publication Brides Today on their digital cover, prompting criticism on social media. Alok Vaid-Menon, 31, who uses “they/them” pronouns, was interviewed and photographed for the magazine wearing clothing resembling traditional attire for women.
Vaid-Menon’s April 19 appearance in the magazine was presented as a commentary on same-sex marriage, which is currently being debated at India’s highest court.
During the full interview, Vaid-Menon was asked his thoughts on topics such as marriage and love, stating “love is about expansion, not constriction. Permission, not prohibition… I want to be a living love poem. Every day I ask myself, ‘How can I love harder?’ Love breaks through binaries—man and woman, us and them, you and me… Love doesn’t live in should, it lives in what is.”
Yet despite the platitudes, Vaid-Menon has caused concern for a past statement in which he referred to “little girls” as being “kinky” and claimed to have himself once been “a cute little girl.”
In approximately 2016, when Vaid-Menon was using the moniker Dark Matter to promote himself as a performance artist and poet, he published a disturbing statement on his views of young girls’ presumed sexuality.
In the statement, Vaid-Menon rejects the notion that little girls need to be protected from “gender/sexual deviance,” and instead claims that “little girls, like the rest of us, are complicated people.”
Vaid-Menon was writing about legislation that had been introduced in the state of North Carolina that year establishing that public restrooms remain single-sex accommodations. House Bill 2, the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, was intended to protect women and children from being exposed to men while in a state of undress.
Vaid-Menon responded to the bill being signed into law by claiming that single-sex spaces were being upheld under a false narrative of protecting “innocent little girls” from “freaky” transgender people.
“There are no fairy tales and princesses here. Little girls are also queer, trans, kinky, deviant, kind, mean, beautiful, ugly, tremendous, and peculiar. Your kids aren’t as straight and narrow as you think they are,” Vaid-Menon wrote.
He went on to claim that he viewed the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist as being about “a little girl … exploring her sexuality (masturbation and so on) and her own demons/meanness.”
In 2021, quotes from the post began circulating on Twitter and prompting outrage, but users found themselves getting suspended for referencing or reacting to the text.
Conservative political pundit Lauren Witzke was suspended from Twitter for hate speech after retweeting a graphic showing Vaid-Menon’s quote, to which she commented that the views he expressed were “demonic.” Witzke was reinstated on the platform almost two years later, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought Twitter and offered “amnesty” on many previous suspensions.
The views expressed in Vaid-Menon’s Facebook post were criticized by the now-deceased lesbian activist YouTuber Magdalen Berns in a video she titled “Non-Binary Bullsh*t.” Berns concluded that in her opinion, his comments on girlhood made him “sound a bit like a pedo,” and remarked that “even his fans” disapproved, causing him to eventually delete the post.
The following year, in 2017, Vaid-Menon and fellow non-binary activist Jacob Tobia were profiled by Vice in an article titled “Why Can’t My Famous Gender Nonconforming Friends Get Laid.” The article was subject to widespread mockery for highlighting Vaid-Menon’s lack of success in dating, and included comments indicating that Vaid-Menon and Tobia had considered taking female hormones in order to date heterosexual men in an attempt to expand their dating pool.
Vaid-Menon has been a strong proponent for “neutralizing” women’s issues in order to make them “gender inclusive.” He has previously written about the importance of using gender neutral language when discussing abortion, pregnancy, or sex-based violence, also denouncing the term “women’s rights” as not being sufficiently welcoming to gender non-conforming people.
In 2020, Vaid-Menon was featured by menstrual hygiene company This is L and the Phluid Project – a “gender free” clothing and lifestyle brand based in New York – in a promotional video featuring individuals of varying “gender identities” to spread the message that periods are not specific to females. Vaid-Menon had endorsed this belief previously when, in 2019, he shared an article from Seventeen magazine, a publication aimed at girls and young women, titled “What Trans & Non-Binary Menstruators Should Know About Periods.”
Women’s rights campaigner and filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar blasted Vaid-Menon’s activism as “dangerous” while calling attention to the plight of women and girls in India.
In 2020, screenings of a documentary Sundar had produced titled “But What Was She Wearing?” were cancelled in response to previous tweets she had made opposing men in women’s spaces. Her film sought to address the sexual harassment and sexual violence that women in the nation experience, juxtaposing the contrast between what laws on paper purport and the on-the-ground reality.
“India is an extremely caste-riddled society. Indian women across all castes experience profound violence at the hands of men. A large majority still live under acute poverty, devoid of basic sanitation, education, safety, or legal recourse,” Sundar told Reduxx.
“India has one of the highest rates of honor killing and dowry deaths, where newlywed brides are tortured, burnt, sometimes even murdered on the basis of sex. For a man with caste and class privilege living so far removed from the everyday realities of Indian women, Alok Vaid-Menon sure has audacity to call himself a ‘bride,'” she said.
“To import gender identity ideology as some form of progressive ticket to freedom is not just obscene, it is dangerous. In a country that still kills the female newborns and blames young girls for being raped, gender identity is the last thing we want shoved down on us while we haven’t even saved ourselves from the existing misogyny,” Sundar added.
“The only group of people profiting from this ideology are the corporations, medical and pharmaceutical industries. Men like Alok Vaid-Menon are promoters of said industries under the veneer of being progressive and inclusive.”
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