Milo Yiannopoulos Harassed a Transgender Student at Her School

In his online career, writer Milo Yiannopoulos has done some truly horrifying things. He led a racist hate campaign against Leslie Jones in light of Ghost Busters. He has called women's liberation a "mistake." He's written that fat-shaming is a good tool to get people to lose weight. Those are just a few examples. In his recent appearance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milo went beyond harassment, though. He publicly outed a transgender woman, ridiculed her in front of the university, and put her life in danger.

According to New York Magazine, Milo made a much-protested appearance at the school as part of his "Dangerous Faggot Tour" that he shops around at universities nationwide. Milo is an out gay man. During his show, Milo put pictures on a big screen of Adelaide Kramer, a transgender woman who goes to the university, and called her a "man in a dress." Milo used Adelaide's dead name, and used graphic, disrespectful language to talk about her. Milo also misgendered Adelaide repeatedly.

This is what Milo said about Adelaide, according to New York Magazine:

I’ll tell you one UW-Milwaukee student that does not need to man up, and that is Justine Kramer. Do you know about Justine Kramer? Have any of you come into contact with this person? This quote unquote non-binary trans woman forced his way into the women’s locker rooms this year. He got into the women’s room the way liberals always operate, using the government and the courts to weasel their way where they don’t belong [Equal rights law Title IX is being] used to put men in to women’s bathrooms. I have known some passing trannies in my life… which is to say transgender people who pass as the gender they would like to be considered. The way that you know he’s failing is I’d almost still bang him. It’s just…it’s just a man in a dress, isn’t it? I should reapply my lipstick.

This is so awful. Not only does Milo use incorrect pronouns and the wrong name to talk about Adelaide, he also refers to her as "it," completely dehumanizing her. Milo didn't even need to call Adelaide "it" to dehumanize her, though, using the wrong name and pronouns had already done that. As director, writer and activist Dominick Evans previously told Teen Vogue, calling transgender people by the wrong name is a tool often used to erase their identity and shame them. Dominick spoke to Teen Vogue about dead naming, when people use the wrong name to talk about transgender people after death, but his comments apply in life, too.

"Using proper pronouns and the chosen name of trans people is a matter of respect. Do you respect the trans individual as a human being? If you do, then you need to respect them by using the proper name and pronouns," he said. "It ignores the struggle trans people have to go through to be accepted, and essentially says to the world trans people are not even entitled to define themselves. It is considered highly offensive and very harmful to do."

But beyond that, Milo put Adelaide's life in danger. Transgender people are much more at risk for violence and murder than the general population, and that's because people still hold a tremendous amount of prejudice and hate against them. Telling the university that Adelaide is transgender could have literally put a target on her back. And that's exactly how she felt.

“I knew Milo was going to regurgitate a profound amount of racist and transphobic hate," Adelaide told Media Milwaukee. "What I did not anticipate was being specifically targeted and called out in the way he did. I hadn’t said anything or made even the slightest disruption: He had his harassment of me planned out well in advance. I’m sitting there and I hear him say ‘Justine Kramer’ and I just froze up. I have never, ever, ever been more terrified in my life of being outed. Ever."

Adelaide said she and many others had warned administrators that Milo might do something horrible like this, though.

"This also isn’t just a case of a speaker going off an a tangent like that, like some random occurrence. It was not a case where you had no way of knowing he would do this," she said. "Quite the contrary: Milo has a supremely extensive, highly-documented track record of doing precisely this. As I’ve already said, ‘YOU KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN. WE TOLD YOU IT WOULD. AND WE TOLD YOU AGAIN. AND AGAIN’.”

Administrators admonished Milo's attack against Adelaide, but Adelaide said denouncing his talks was too little, too late. While there’s nothing wrong with someone stating their opinion, Milo has a history of cyberbullying people he can't relate to, and it should not have been a surprise that he launched a series of verbal attacks at someone whose identity he doesn't understand. While it's wrong to censor someone from speaking their opinion, the school should have taken steps to protect its students before his visit.

Related: Ghostbusters’ Leslie Jones Targeted by Racists on Twitter