It’s not just Joe Biden. LGBTQ women are harassed more often than their straight counterparts

Lucy Flores could be any woman — straight, bisexual, lesbian trans. That she’s a well-known Nevada politician with the kind of life story that elevates her to star status is why former Vice President Joe Biden was in Nevada to endorse her for a Lieutenant Governor run in 2014. At that time, Flores alleges, Biden put his hands on her shoulders, smelled her hair and then kissed her on her head.

Flores described the incident and how it made her feel in an op-ed in The Cut on March 29. Several presidential candidates have spoken out in support of her including Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Obama HUD Secretary Julián Castro.

Flores detailed her feelings at the time: “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me? My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me.”

Just days after Flores’ story made headlines, Amy Lappos, a former congressional aide told her own tale of an encounter with Biden in which he took her face in his hands and seemed about to kiss her, but instead rubbed noses with her. That incident took place in 2009, when Lappos was 33 and Biden was in his late 60s.

Biden’s alleged behavior with Flores and Lappos should surprise no one. Biden is known for touching women. And until Flores spoke out in this era of #MeToo, only a few women journalists have called him out on it. The narrative has long been “that’s just Biden being Biden.”

Yet this is the man leading in all the polls for the Democratic nomination.

Men in power touch women without consent; it is a fact of female life. That sexual harassment takes many forms has been clear ever since Anita Hill first challenged Clarence Thomas in 1991, when she bravely told her story of sexual harassment by Thomas when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

That lesbian, bisexual and trans women face even more sexual harassment than their straight counterparts is rarely mentioned, yet it factors so heavily into workplace experiences for LGBTQ women that many have lost employment over it.

That’s what happened to Amalia Diaz, a high school teacher at a school in New Jersey, when her principal discovered she was a lesbian after running into her and her girlfriend one weekend.

“The harassment was constant,” she said. “Comments about my clothes, my hair, the fact that I taught a gym class — all really old-school homophobia,” Diaz said. “I knew he was trying to force me out so he didn’t have to explain a firing, but I decided to leave at the end of the year. It just got to be too much.”

Diaz said the harassment she experienced from her principal turned sexual almost immediately.

“He would ask me how I knew I was really gay. He said he thought maybe I was too young to have decided something ‘so permanent.’ He was just relentless. He tried to get me to talk about my sex life. I guess he knew I wasn’t going to report him because I feared for my future employment and what he might do to damage that.”

Actress Ellen Page had her own experience of sexual harassment on a film set. She revealed the experience in 2017 via Facebook and an appearance at SXSW. She said director Brett Ratner made explicit comments about her sexuality in front of several cast and crew members on the set of “X Men: The Last Stand.” Page, now 32, was only 18 at the time and not, she explained, fully out to herself let alone others.

In front of the full cast and crew, Page said Ratner looked at a woman “10 years her senior,” pointed to Page and said to the woman, “You should f*ck her to make her realize she’s gay.”

Page said, “I was a young adult who had not yet come out to myself. I knew I was gay, but did not know, so to speak. I felt violated when this happened.”

According to the Human Rights Campaign, LGBTQ people experience more sexual harassment and sexual violence than other groups. Bisexual women experience the most harassment and assault of any group. Sexual harassment can lead to sexual assault among vulnerable groups, as outlined in numerous studies. That fact has clear application to LGBTQ women in particular.

Page said when Ratner outed her, “I looked down at my feet, didn’t say a word and watched as no one else did either. This man, who had cast me in the film, started our months of filming at a work event with this horrific, unchallenged plea. He ‘outed’ me with no regard for my well-being, an act we all recognize as homophobic.”

The blowback when women reveal their experiences can be intense, as the reaction to Flores indicates. At a symposium on sexual harassment in the workplace in November 2018 at USC, Anita Hill said while she thinks “much has improved in terms of the courts and society recognizing that sexual harassment is harmful and against the law, there is still much work to be done,” such as exploring how sexual assault impacts the lives of transgender women of color and others who are not the stereotypical image of a rape victim — a young, attractive, white woman.

The former vice president continues to weigh his 2020 chances, but now that the issue of Biden’s behavior has finally been raised, it’s unlikely to be dismissed. There is an opportunity here for a teachable moment that exposes not just Biden, but the culture that allows men to sexually harass women and creates an atmosphere of permissibility for that harassment and much more.

Hill said sexual misconduct “should be treated as a public-health issue, a public-safety issue, a business issue and a civil-rights issue.” For everyone.

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