Sidney Powell’s gender
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Christianity, Politics, Life, LGBT, Sexuality

I go through liberal accounts on social media.

“Sidney Powell is a tranny.”

No accusations of ‘transphobia’. No cancelling.

Kathy Griffin jokes: “Who is this person and should I be glad he blocked me?” Lots of amused commentators. “She’s Foghorn Leghorn in pearls.” “You’re not missing anything. He’s a right-wing nut job.”

But then there’s praise of her masculinity on right-wing accounts? Indeed, Powell is widely seen to have out-manned the entire Republican establishment, who seems effete in comparison to the Texan lady of hazy gender.

“@SidneyPowell1 has bigger balls than the FBI, DOJ, & the @GOP” “I would say @SidneyPowell1 has bigger BALLS, COURAGE, and SPINE than the FBI and DOJ combined AND MOST REPUBLICAN politicians FOR SURE!”

And yet, all along, Powell retains the decorous manner of a lady. Tucker Carlson tried a smack-down of her, an effort to pin her down as the unreliable woman. He said: “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

He read by the base as ungentlemanly, not team-spirited. “I hear Tucker was acting like a dick with hurt feelings tonight,” tweeted Juanita Broaddrick.

She fired back that she’d tried to provide resources for him. “But he was very insulting, demanding, and rude, and I told him not to contact me again, in those terms.”

The dialogue is heavy with gendered terms. Carlson was an aggressive male, too heavy in his approach to the woman. She shut him down.

And the right read him unfavorably, on the whole, in favor of a tall, forceful woman with a touch of queerness.

In the post-election period, the right-wing suddenly became superqueer.

The idea of fraud on the system brought to the fore right-wing leaders who were more or less openly gay or bisexual. The ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies were being organized by Ali Alexander, with Scott Presler and Brandon Straka as prominent advocates.

Advocates came into prominence who might have been disqualified previously on ‘character’ issues, like the lawyer Lin Wood, who’s been married four times.

But none were quite as strange as the new right-wing superstar Sidney Powell, who was patriotic, motherly— even as she was a mannish and apparently childless woman in her 60s.

I’m fascinated to look up the details of her life which have been public over the last decades. In media profiles she doesn’t talk much about influences from her parents. She talks about Perry Mason. She mentions the old T.V. show when profiled in Politico last year. “My mother said I used to come home from kindergarten and watch Perry Mason,” she says.

At age 23 she was already an assistant U.S. attorney, which “probably started from watching Perry Mason endlessly on television,” she says in a 1979 newspaper profile. Her mother, a homemaker, recalls that Sidney decided in fourth grade to become a lawyer and “never wavered from it.”

I’ve written about how Perry, a gay lawyer with probing intelligence, was a performance that changed the world. It injected a new possibility into the world: truthful speech in a world of lies.

Powell doesn’t seem to speak of herself as a feminist, or linger on problems with men.

Her working-class family in Raleigh, NC could little afford to help with her education, but she was enormously aggressive in pursuing a legal education. In high school she worked for a local law firm, “everything from minor research to picking up the laundry,” she recalls.

“I didn’t see any reason in stringing it out,” she says, so she rushes through her undergraduate degree in 21 months, and applied to the UNC School of Law. The dean wasn’t eager to admit so young an applicant. “He said I was showing contempt for the undergraduate institution, truncating my education and demeaning the educational process,” she says.

She got in anyway. Between terms, she clerked for U.S. attorneys offices in Raleigh and San Antonio. She found Texas appealed to her, she says, “mainly because I’ve never been away from home.” In an office with twenty-two assistant U.S. attorneys, she was one of two women.

Her marital details are a little odd.

On December 28, 1980, the newspaper notes she got married to a Jack Gilbert, who was in construction management.

In 1993 her grandfather dies. She’s listed in the obituary, using her full maiden name, Sidney Katherine Powell, except with a different husband, Dr. Keith Brewster of Dallas, Texas.

When her mother dies in 2012, she isn’t listed with any husband. Her younger brother’s child is noted, but she isn’t listed as a mother—though she’ll sometimes refer to having a son. A stepson? Adopted? It’s all left nameless and vague.

She spent a decade working for the government as a prosecutor, then developed a private practice, becoming recognized as one of the top lawyers in the nation. Then she embarked on a public crusade to address the misconduct of prosecutors, which she sees as rampant. She self-published and self-promoted a book, which brought her into the upper realms of conservative politics.

“Actually, I’ve never been political, and didn’t think I was being political when I wrote License to Lie,” she says in a speech. “But I found out it was.”

Following the legal travails of Michael Flynn, she developed an almost psychic feeling for the case.

“I don’t know how, but I can read the way these particular government lawyers say things to know that they are lying and hiding things,” she tells Politico. “And I knew as soon as I started hearing and seeing what was going on with General Flynn that he had been set up.”

Trump liked her, and she liked him. She took over his case for fraud, and readies the “Kraken” she promises to unleash. Is it like a Perry Mason episode? The unusual lawyer with heightened powers of observation getting to ready to lay out the story in a startling reveal.

The president needs do nothing more, she updates on Twitter. “He can sit back and watch the show.”