In a spirited diatribe entitled "Dealing With AU's anti-sex brigade" published yesterday in the American University Eagle, AU's resident anti-feminist thinker, Alex Knepper, argues that feminists who rally against rape are turning act of sex into a sorry ritual in which "two amorphous, gender-neutral blobs ask each other 'Is this OK with you?.'” According to Knepper, age 20, feminists are also responsible for stamping out the "yin and yang of masculinity and femininity [that] makes sexual exploration exciting," abolishing passion, and also somehow discouraging "inherently gendered thrills" like erotic cross-dressing. Knepper ends the column by providing a helpful reading list for his misguided peers, including works by Camille Paglia, the Marquis de Sade, and Christina Hoff Sommers.

An unidentified member of the campus community has responded with a more direct retort: They removed copies of the paper from their stands and posted a message above them reading, "NO ROOM FOR RAPE APOLOGISTS."

According to these photos sent in from an American University student, the message for Knepper has been posted near several Eagle newsstands around campus; in one photo, a stack of Eagles appears to have been strewn haphazardly across the floor in front of the paper's offices. "A few people had taken probably several thousand copies and threw them over against our door," says Jen Calantone, Eagle editor-in-chief. The vandalism was light; no papers were destroyed, and newspaper staff have since removed the posters and redistributed the papers. Some copies were crinkled.

In an e-mail, American University student (and campus feminist and LGBT activist) K. Travis Ballie explains the perceived impetus for the move: "In response to the very strong and passionate outrage at rape apologist Alex Knepper's latest column "Dealing With AU's Anti-Sex Brigade," an unidentified student not endorsed by any organization decided to take direct action," Ballie writes. "The Eagle has repeatedly refused for months to show adequate sensitivity, compassion, and common decency to the well-being of rape survivors on campus and is complicit in promoting a rape culture where survivors are blamed for the crimes of sexual assault perpetrators."

Knepper's column anticipated this criticism. In it, he wrote that on American University's campus, "For my pro-sex views, I am variously called a misogynist, a rape apologist and—my personal favorite—a 'pro-date rape protofascist.'" (I guess that one didn't fit on the poster). Knepper's column went on to provide a sampling of some of Knepper's "pro-sex views":

Let’s get this straight: any woman who heads to an EI party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK? To cry “date rape” after you sober up the next morning and regret the incident is the equivalent of pulling a gun to someone’s head and then later claiming that you didn’t ever actually intend to pull the trigger.

“Date rape” is an incoherent concept. There’s rape and there’s not-rape, and we need a line of demarcation. It’s not clear enough to merely speak of consent, because the lines of consent in sex—especially anonymous sex—can become very blurry. If that bothers you, then stick with Pat Robertson and his brigade of anti-sex cavemen! Don’t jump into the sexual arena if you can’t handle the volatility of its practice!

Despite the column's defensive stance on the "rape apologist" label, Knepper didn't anticipate the ad-hoc campus campaign against him; when I called him around noon today he hadn't yet heard of the removal of the papers and the "RAPE APOLOGIST" posters. After perusing the evidence, Knepper agreed to answer some questions over e-mail. "Well, this is the new feminist orthodoxy: censorship," he wrote. "It started with Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and it's an utter betrayal of the ideals of women like Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and even Friedan. I'm also very concerned with the highly fragile view of women that this promotes: I can't say something that offends them without stirring them to vandalism? Carmen Rios states that my column can act as a 'trigger' for survivors. Does anyone treat men with kid gloves like this?"

I asked Knepper whether he thought there was any room for rape apologists at American. "There is no room for rape apologists on campus. If I see any, I'll be sure to rebuke them," he wrote. I also asked him to expound on the whole feminist cross-dressing ban thing: "The entire concept of cross-dressing has no place within feminism," he explained. "[O]ne cannot 'cross' the line of something that does not exist." Finally, I asked him if the "yin and yang of masculinity and femininity" is truly "what makes sexual exploration exciting," then isn't it kind of boring to be gay? "Certainly not," replied Knepper, who is gay. "Gay men—by which I do not mean the eunuchs who constitute the vanguard of so-called queer activism—are far more likely to understand that dressing one's boyfriend up like a girl and fucking his ass with a dildo is to feminize him. The feminine element of sexuality is not literally about being female—it's about surrender and submission. One might say that my homosexuality is the ultimate expression of my deep-seated hatred for women, though, right?"

On Facebook, members of the university community aren't questioning the implications of Knepper's sexual orientation, but they are debating the tactics used to protest his articles. "If you don't like the Eagle, don't read it, support the AU Examiner, write a counter column, or start your own newspaper—DON'T act like children [and] follow the same idea-bashing tactics that the christian-conservo-right do every time they come to a school and insure it has the right books on the shelves," wrote one. "i think a lot of people who might be allies on this are really alienated by this type of vandalism," wrote another.

The Eagle, for one, isn't particularly pleased—but it has been inspired to take some action. "It's upsetting, because our general purpose as the campus newspaper is to start these types of discussions," says Calantone. "We were happy when people started talking about and criticizing this column, but it's upsetting when it devolves into a kind of vandalism situation." The newspaper is planning to hold open campus discussion on Knepper's column this Thursday evening.

UPDATE: This story was updated at 2 p.m. with comments from Knepper.

NBC Washington shows what happens when news outlets fail to confirm the correct gender identity of their subjects before publication. The outlet has just posted another story about the two shoplifting suspects who were shot by police near the University of Maryland last Friday. Here's the absurd lede:

Upon closer review, it appears two shoplifting suspects shot by a Prince George's County police officer weren't men, as originally reported, or cross-dressers, as was later reported, but transgender women.

The third time is the charm for NBC, who took four days to get the gender identity of the suspects right. NBC does one better on the Washington Post, at least. The Post first reported that the suspects were women, then reported that they were cross-dressing men, and finally issued the vague and misleading clarification that they were men dressed as women who "were not in disguise."

Apparently, the paper has an aversion to just calling the suspects "transgender women." Interestingly enough, the Post's first iteration—"women"—would have worked just fine. Martin Weil, the Post reporter who wrote the second story on the suspects—the one outing them as "men"—said in an interview that the paper decided to run the story in order to stay competitive with the television news outlets that had reported the suspects' sex as "male."“The police had informed us that the suspects appeared to be men wearing women’s clothing, and we didn’t know too much more about any of the details,” says Weil. “We posted that story on the web so as not to look as if we were totally unaware of the unusual circumstances.”

Weil adds that the original story, which identified the suspects simply as “women,” risked inspiring some gender-related confusion of its own. “When you’re writing about women criminals in the newspaper, it behooves you to be extremely careful, because it alters people’s perceptions of the world,” he says. “When you read about a woman seemingly recklessly dragging a police officer, you get an unusual impression of the range of behaviors that are possible. And maybe it’s an accurate impression. But if it’s not an accurate one, I wanted to correct that in any way that was possible. So I decided, in a burst of enthusiasm, to post that item on the Web early Sunday morning.”

Beyond Weil's enthusiasm for accuracy, the fact remains that “cross-dressing” shoplifters make for more sensational crime suspects than even women do. While women aren't generally seen as criminals, transgender women are often cast in the public eye as fakers, predators, and criminals against humanity—shoplifters or not. Weil says he never meant to capitalize upon the “man in a dress” punchline. “The last intention I had was the demonization of anyone, of any gender, or transgender either,” he says. “I just never thought at the time that they could be transgender. I assumed they must be people in disguise, or people who happen to prefer that mode of dress.”

Illustration by Bonnie Kennedy

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a story about two shoplifting suspects who were shot over the weekend by a Prince George's County police officer. The suspects were shot after they attempted to drive away with the officer's arm lodged in the door of their getaway car. But the Post story was not concerned with the facts of this botched escape—the newspaper had already covered the particulars of the incident a day earlier. The follow-up amounted to a lengthy correction of one fact: the gender of the wounded suspects.

In its first story on the suspects, the Post wrote that "an off-duty county officer shot and wounded two women." In the second story, the Post corrected the record: the suspects "turned out to be men rather than women," Staff Writer Martin Weil wrote. Weil explains:

It was believed at first that the two who were shot were women. But they "turned out to be males dressed in female clothing," Officer Henry Tippett, a county police spokesman, said early Sunday.

That finding was apparently made when medical personnel began treating the two for gunshot wounds, Tippett said.

The headline of the story reads "Two Men Shot by Pr. George's Officer Were Dressed as Women." A link to the story goes further to label the pair: "Cross-Dressing Men Shot By Police."

There are two possibilities here:

(a) The suspects were cross-dressing men who had disguised themselves in dresses, wigs, and make-up in order to lift merchandise from a store. Any man can be a cross-dresser—all you gotta do is put on a dress. Or:

(b) The suspects were transgender women who were born with male sex characteristics, but live their lives as women. Transgender women are not guys in dresses—-they're women whose gender expression differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. They should be identified as women, not men.

For the Post, the distinction between "cross-dressing men" and "transgender women" is an important one. According to the Associated Press Stylebook, transgender subjects are to be identified by their gender identity, not their sex at birth. Media outlets are to employ "the pronoun preferred by the individuals who . . . present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth," the guide reads. "If that preference is not expressed, use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly."

Additionally, the GLAA media guide cautions against using the term "cross-dresser" to describe a transgender person. Cross-dressers, the guide notes, are people who "occasionally wear clothes traditionally associated with people of the other sex." The term should be employed to describe someone who is "comfortable with the sex they were assigned at birth and do not wish to change it," not "someone who has transitioned to live full-time as the other sex, or who intends to do so in the future."

It's not possible, at this point, for the Post to definitively identify the subjects as either "cross-dressers" or "transgender women." One sure-fire way to confirm a person's gender identity is simply to ask them, but the names of the suspects, both 23, have not yet been released by police.

Still, a couple of facts in the story suggest that the suspects in question presented consistently as female, and didn't just dress up "in female clothing" for their little crime spree. Initially, everyone—from the police officer who chased and shot them to the police spokespeople who announced the incident—had no doubt that the suspects were women. The suspects were only identified as biologically male following a medical examination. In short, the Post modified the gender of the suspects solely on the basis of a genital check.

If you're under the impression that a person's genitals should determine the gender used to describe them in print, consider this: Under what other circumstances would the Washington Post force its subjects to drop their pants in order to prove their gender? Let's run that test on some other stories which appeared in yesterday's Metro section. Was Noah Robbins, a 19-year-old local actor headed for Broadway, forced to display his genitals in order to be referred to throughout the piece as "he" and "him"? How about Creigh Deeds and Bob McDonnell—did the Post ensure that the candidates have penises before calling them "men"? Was Debra Rowe, former HIV/AIDS housing chief, only granted a "she" following a medical examination?

In every other instance, a Post subject is considered a woman if she presents as a woman and says she's a woman. A couple of shoplifting suspects, however, appear to have been denied that courtesy. There are several reasons for the Post not to write this story. The suspects' identities are still unknown. The gender identification in the story is contrary to style guidelines. The Post has reason to believe that the gender terminology employed by the police requires fact-checking. Further information in the case could require yet another gender correction here.

There's one reason why the Post would go ahead with this story: "cross-dressing" shoplifters make for more sensational crime suspects than do a couple of women. The story has already generated such helpful online comments as "Was dey pretty? Does dey gets to wear the dresses in prison? Big dummies," and "One can only hope that their shoes matched their dresses." Perhaps the Post received positive feedback for its previous dubious "cross-dressing shoplifter" work, published back in August. The Post is clearly capitalizing upon a "man in a dress" punchline to this modest little crime story. But obviously, the potential for some sophomoric joking is no reason to sacrifice accuracy in reporting. The true gender identities of the suspects in the case are still unclear. When you're writing a story that is exclusively centered on the gender of your suspects, shouldn't you wait until you can get it right?

Illustration by Bonnie Kennedy

—the suspect was gender non-conforming! Police, flummoxed, described the thief as "A black man or woman, in his/her 20s, 6 [feet] tall, weighing 160 to 190 pounds. His/her long black hair was worn in thin braids and pulled back. The suspect was wearing a black and white, checked very short mini-dress with long sleeves and a wide belt at the waist. The shoes worn by the suspect were flat sandals."

On Aug. 10, 20-year-old Jonathan Bradley was arrested in D.C. during a "routine traffic stop," and charged with the theft. Bradley was, again, wearing women's clothing, though—ever the master illusionist!—his driver's license read "male." Here's Bradley in a police photo, after being picked up:

To hear Fox 5's Paul Wagner tell it, Bradley almost got away with the perfect crime—until some hot-shot lieutenant revealed Bradley's true identity as a man! Writes Wagner:

It turns out the person police say lifted a very expensive dress from Saks Fifth Avenue—a theft caught on tape– was a man dressed as a women, just as the lead detective suspected.

It was a disguise so convincing, it lead to a spirited debate amongst investigators in Montgomery County. In the end, 20-year-old Jonathan Bradley of the District has been charged with stealing a $2,400 Chanel dress from Saks in Chevy Chase on July 13, assaulting a security guard with pepper spray on the way out the door.

. . . "This man was dressing up to conceal his identity,” said Lt. Paul Starks of the Montgomery County Police, “and in this case he specifically resisted with force, using a chemical mace weapon to defeat the security guard trying to apprehend him at the time. We're glad to have him in custody."

Let's see here: Bradley allegedly dresses as a woman to steal a woman's dress, and is arrested weeks later . . . dressed as a woman.

My God—it's almost too easy! A man dresses as a woman in order to steal women's clothing, which he will undoubtedly employ as a disguise in a future heist . . . of . . . more women's clothing! Then, instead of returning to his mild-mannered male persona in order to duck the cops—ha ha! that would be too obvious!—he continues to dress in women's clothing, even fashioning his hair into ringlets and applying eyeshadow every day of his life in order to maintain the ruse! It's almost too easy. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that pesky Lt. Paul Starks of the Montgomery County Police!

Or . . . maybe Bradley is transgender?

* Hot on the heels of G. Keith Harris: Another guy claiming to have inauguration tickets wants you to be his date. This 46-year-old writes, "I got the call today from a Senator that I have a relationship with for over 10 years that told me I made “The A List”. So far at my table is Ben Affleck and Mary J and I will know more as the time nears."

* Local GLBT groups are planning their own inaugural ball at the Mayflower Hotel, Metro Weekly reports.

*  Slate's Dear Prudence doles out advice on dads who cross-dress. Hide it:

If your husband lounges around at home every night in a bustier, palazzo pants, and a wig, then I'm voting for repression. It's time for your husband to limit his dressing up to times when he's not with the baby. As your child gets older and mobile, your husband will have to take more steps to separate his fetish from your family life. Perhaps he will need to check into a motel occasionally when he just can't stifle the need to dress up as Madonna.

* File under "busted": Did Elizabeth Frisinger really accidentally text her dad on the occasion of losing her virginity? Follow-up: Did her friend really leak her photo and iphone screen capture to a radio station? Do you really text anyone on the occasion of losing your virginity? Doesn't Lizzy's dad seem kind of cool, under the circumstances? He texts!

Photo via trialsanderrors.