Tracking the rise and fall of Rose McGowan’s sheroism (and I have for months) certainly adds color to anyone’s comprehensive reading of the modern women’s movement. But now, in a recent podcast, McGowan has opened up about being a movement outsider and revealed herself to be genderqueer. “I don’t want to be a man or a woman. That’s just the thing: I’m not,” she said in her first public remarks since calling off her book tour last month, on the Nerdist podcast Love, Alexi with Alexi Wasser. She’s refusing to be labeled according to someone else’s “constructs.”
Having first risen from faded celebrity to viral Twitter activist in 2015, McGowan was the movement’s warrior queen. As #MeToo took over, Ronan Farrow’s reporting revealed that after she’d settled with Weinstein he’d paid an Israeli spy to pose as a journalist and gather intel on her. She sees trails of this conspiracy even today: McGowan abruptly canceled all public appearances after a trans-rights protester confronted her during a bookstore Q&A for failing to support transgender women. The event dissolved into a shouting match and derailed her book tour. McGowan suspects
the protester was a plant and that her publicists were complicit in her takedown.
McGowan had been hiding out in a retirement home in Florida, she said on the podcast, and had feared for her safety following the altercation. (She and Ronan Farrow are no longer allies, she also said, complaining of his inadequate empathy: “He kept asking me, ‘You really think you’re in danger?’ And I was like, do you not? What?” He said it “sneeringly,” she added. “I deal in facts.”)
She shouldn’t have to “explain” herself to the haters, she added. “When I quit the press tour recently, I just thought these people were all so low frequency. I don’t explain myself to people because what I’m saying is truth,” she said. “I come in peace, but I also come with ‘f— off.’”
She’d said she shouldn’t have to explain, but explain she did: “That ‘f— off’ is ‘f— off’ to your construct. Don’t judge me by what you grew up with. I didn’t grow up like you, I come from a different background,” McGowan said. It’s also a “f— off” to gender constructs: “I don’t want to be a man or a woman. That’s just the thing: I’m not.” (“We’re all just souls,” Alexi agreed.)
McGowan seemed self-aware when she described her penchant for turning instantly from sweet sloganeering—“I believe in you,” she tells Wasser at one point, with an eerie flatness—to sharp reproach, as when she told the protester, “F— off, you’re boring” and, “I’m not from your planet.”
Weinstein’s people planted the protester, she believes, intentionally to poison her brand with her LGBTQ following. “They studied,” she said, “the monster and all those monsters he employs, where my strongest fan base was—and that was in the gay community.” She then criticized the gay community for turning on her, ungrateful for her support. She “bled for those rights,” she said, of her gay-rights activism. “I can count on my hand the people I know that are gay that have ever marched, bled, donated, that have ever done anything for their own rights. Let alone women’s.”
She knows these remarks won’t be well-received. “A lot of people get upset when I say that. ‘It’s easy for you to say you’re a cis white female.’ I’m like, ‘Look asshole, don’t bore me, don’t put me in your construct, you do not get to say what I am, you do not get to tell me who I am, you do not get to tell me what my intentions are or paint me with a brush that I didn’t buy.’”
Being a cis female—and “cis,” short for “cisgendered,” means identifying as the gender she was born with—wasn’t only essential to McGowan’s acting fame, it was also the key ingredient to her role as Weinstein’s leading accuser, to taking over as keynote speaker at the Women’s Convention last fall from the far-too-male Bernie Sanders, and to the success of the memoir she published in the wake of it all.
Although, seasoned Roseologists should have seen this coming. In her book, she looks ahead to a post-patriarchal paradise. “I can’t wait for us all to be just humans. No gender. No stereotypes. Just humans,” she writes, adding that there’s deprogramming work to be done. “We need to unpack the traditional indoctrinated thought first.”
