are you like, NOT aware of the 41% trans suicide rate? or how difficult it is to even get one small slice of gender-affirming medical care in quite literally any country?
of course most people aren’t gonna demand free, full access to everything at once, doing that would put us in an extremely negative light when the optics of trans activism are already devastatingly bleak.
“trans people wanting more than one reason to survive = moving the goalposts” my ass.
So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”
Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”
So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it.
That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender.
When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.
And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.
But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.
But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I wasalso saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”
And that? That gives me hope for the future.
Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”
When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?
And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.
“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.
Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.
That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..
So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.
And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”
I’m a feminist, I love women, but I’m really disturbed by stuff I’ve read lately about how women, women’s relationships, women’s spaces, are all magically naturally pure and free of oppression from violence.
The thing about feminist analysis we need to remember is that when we talk about men and women, we’re talking about statistical probability that’s not able to accurately predict life every time.
A randomly-selected man is more likely to be taller than a randomly-selected woman. A randomly-selected man is more likely to earn more money than a randomly-selected woman. That does not mean that any man is taller or richer than any woman, or that every man is richer or taller than every woman.
So many times in debates about sex and gender, these probabilities get hammered out into flat declarative sentences. We know it’s wrong when sexists say, “Men are stronger than women, so women could never play sports against men,” but somehow give it a pass when a feminist says “Women are less violent than men, so it’s not in a woman’s nature to be abusive.”
And as a feminist who’s worked in women’s shelters, I’m beyond disturbed by how feminists twist statistics about violence into the claim that women just don’t have the capacity to be violent or cruel.
Because what that really says is: Women aren’t fully human. We don’t fully exist in the world; our womanhood renders our anger and our aggression invalid. We’re not capable of the kind of moral choices men are.
That isn’t just bullshit, that’s dangerous bullshit. You know who makes that kind of argument?
A woman who wants to hurt other people and get away with it.
Understanding this is also a good way to spot who’s interested in breaking down the social hierarchy that hurts all of us, and who’s just interested in building a new social hierarchy that benefits them instead.
We can’t liberate everyone just by reversing the axis of oppression. If your goal is to hurt other people and get away with it, you aren’t really fighting to end things, you’re just fighting to take control.
All of the above can be directly applied to how white women treat black people, especially black women. White women (including liberals, including feminists,) are some of the worst when it comes to to upholding white supremacist ideas, especially in the face of black women. If you want to know more, go to the sources. Layla F. Saad @laylafsaad talks about this, check out her “Me and White Supremacy Workbook.” Others talk about it as well, but honestly, just google search “how white women uphold white supremacy” and there will be tons of articles.
There are a lot of ways for humans to be oppressed or hold power over each other. All of us exist in so many overlapping and interlocking social contexts, it just doesn’t make sense to think of ourselves as 100% The Victim All The Time; we usually always have someone who’s smaller or weaker or more marginal than us. We’ve got to understand both sides of the equation, and think critically about how we use the power we have.
Radfem on this site: *posts some meaningful insight into womanhood or patriarchal systems or sex based oppression*
People on this site:
Radfems: so you disagree?
People on this site:…..
Radfems:well….?
People on this site:
so, uh … this is a problem
if OP is a TERF it’s probably best to assume that any post they make is spreading transphobic TERF ideology & rhetoric (even if you can’t tell for sure yourself)
so how about instead:
DON’T REBLOG TERF CONTENT and ALSO DON’T ‘STEAL’ TERF CONTENT TO SPREAD IT ON THEIR FUCKINGBEHALF EITHER
this is how TERF bullshit gets spread so far and wide on tumblr, dammit
PS ‘meaningful insight into womanhood’ = ‘womanhood is [secondary sex characteristics of females and mystical feminine sisterhood that doesn’t exist]’ DOn’T BELIEVE ANDOR’S TRANSPHOBIA
also!!!
‘patriarchal systems or sex based oppression’ = ‘anyone amab, no matter what they do or how they present, benefits from the patriarchy’ and ‘assigned sex at birth = your lifelong gender’ and ‘oppression of women is entirely based on having wombs/vaginas/boobs and being non-aggressive/weaker than men’ and ‘womanly characteristics are inherent to aiab>afab and afab ppl’ and ‘afab people are just inherently kinder and sweeter and better than men in every way’ and ‘amab ppl just can’t help being evil rapists’
it’s transphobia with a massive side order of free gender essentialism and sexism and fuuuuuuuuck that
