Indictment of a Queer-Phobic Justice System

“Images of dead women have always held a particular, troubling fascination,” reads the opening line of a discussion that remains all too urgent: women continue to face violence and discrimination at disproportionate rates—whether through workplace sexual harassment, assaults on the way home, mistreatment in healthcare, domestic violence at the hands of a partner, or through the scrutiny of investigators and the justice system itself. It isn’t a secret, nor a radical claim, but a sad fact: misogyny runs deep in our society and violence against women is daily fare. After a hopeful surge of feminist energy sparked by movements like #MeToo, which woke many to the glaring injustices, the patriarchy is pushing back with brutal force, stubbornly defending its dominance.
With her new book “An Indignant Plea” (Amazon Affiliate Link), Christina Clemm resolutely pushes back and now continues with unbridled fury what she began in 2024 with her polemic “Against Misogyny”: an indictment of misogyny and also of queerphobia. For Clemm, the category “women” explicitly includes cis women as well as trans women and nonbinary people.

Three Decades of Experience in the Courtroom

Clemm’s indictment begins where justice is supposed to be spoken—the courtroom, a place where compassion is a rarity, as she initially recognized, and which she aims to change, not least through compassionate engagement and direct, respectful confrontation with these conditions. She herself has spent more than three decades as a specialist attorney in criminal and family law. In that capacity she represents victims of gender-based and racially motivated violence. More than thirty years of experience and insider knowledge emerge on every page of the book.
The very broad and painfully real landscape of danger facing women* is grounded in anonymized casework. Through these examples she reconstructs scenes inside courtrooms, as well as the events themselves, usually described in a straightforward, almost procedural manner. The lack of embellishment makes these depictions all the more exhausting. The judiciary, in the cases she lays out, often fails, and perpetrators frequently escape with comparatively mild penalties. Clemm argues that this is the result of a judiciary that has, in large part, internalized misogyny and queerphobia, and is highly sensitive to critique.
“Don’t cry, don’t retch, don’t tremble, don’t yell”
When her clients testify, often describing things that are hard to put into words, Clemm, as their legal representative, “must not cry, must not retch, must not tremble, must not yell.” With such introspective interludes, she also makes palpable the heaviness of her own profession, which sometimes compels her to bear witness to unbearable suffering. Court procedures such as presenting evidence or interrogations can be conducted with a merciless rigidity. She demonstrates, with countless examples, how traumatizing these processes can be for the victims, intensifying their pain. “I am part of this violence,” Clemm concedes, in a moment of stark honesty.
Through her book, she calls for an end to the victim-blaming and to the lack of systemic and societal empathy for those affected, as well as a heightened vigilance against injustice. And with that empathy and vigilance—qualities that the system and society often lack—she highlights the asymmetries of wrongdoing and shifts the focus toward the victims and the lasting harm they endure, rather than on the perpetrators. To accomplish this, she employs a narrative arc that repeatedly guides readers from individual cases to broader reflections.

Fear Must Change Sides

What Clemm writes about is not particularly new, nor shocking to anyone who is reasonably well informed. Yet it is impossible not to be jolted by the number of femicides and other crimes, and by the moral rot of the perpetrators, or by the tragedies she unpacks.
Her demands, drawn from these harrowing situations, are clear, accessible, unambiguous, and sometimes voiced with the wry bitterness of a person who has spent half her life repeating a simple, hard truth: there must be a holistic approach to antifeminist and queerphobic violence, better funding for counseling and prevention services, and comprehensive awareness training for professionals.
Where Giselle Pélicot’s famous line urged “Shame to switch sides,” Clemm expands the idea: “It’s not enough for shame to switch sides. Fear of consequences must switch sides, as must the disgust for these crimes.” Where society has often found morbid fascination with dead women, Clemm demands a more uncomfortable response: look closely, act quickly, and protect women while they are still alive.