Tag Archives: Lesbian

Lesbians Are Under Attack

This is a piece I wrote for the upcoming anthology: Spinning and Weaving: Contemporary Radical Feminist Theory

 

Lesbians are under attack. Some of the attacks are coming from the usual places: heterosexual women throwing us under the bus, ignoring our contributions to feminism, and ignoring their own privilege[i]; bisexual women appropriating our lives and culture by claiming to be lesbians or worse, “bisexual lesbians” (context: there is no such thing – it’s a lesbophobic concept)[ii]; and of course, men beating, raping, and killing us in the most grotesque ways possible. Oh, we experience violence from heterosexual and bisexual women as well,[iii] but not to the degree, the depth, the depravity of men.[iv] We lesbians have been dealing with the aforementioned for centuries. We’re used to it. We expect it. It’s part of what makes us such strong women, sisters, and friends. But there is another group of people attacking, both verbally and physically, lesbians and lesbianism today: transgender activists and their allies.

I saw a joke on Twitter the other day. It said that “the homophobia is coming from inside the community,” humorously referencing the tag line of an old horror movie, A Stranger Calls, where the police trace phone calls coming into the house to terrorize a woman and the police tell her, “the calls are coming from inside the house!” It’s terrifying because we are supposed to feel safe in our own homes. Surrounded by our things, our family, our pets, and behind locked doors, we all feel safe inside our own homes. Lesbians have never had that safety inside of the LGBT community. We were on the front lines of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, taking care of our gay brothers, marching with them to bring attention to the crisis, etc.[v] But those deeds were never reciprocated. Most gay men don’t really care about lesbians or women in general and some are downright misogynistic. For decades, they took most of the LGBT resources and used those resources on themselves, not bothering to address anything to do with their lesbian sisters.

But, as bad as all of that seems, nothing prepared us for what came next: transgenderism. The vast majority of trans women are heterosexual: straight men claiming to be lesbians[vi]; and a good number of trans men are straight women claiming to be gay men. Almost all of them are homophobic to one degree or another, hence “the homophobia is coming from inside the community.” For the past few decades, heterosexuals have been encroaching on LGB spaces, lives, and culture. They go to our bars, they take over our Gay Pride events, and pretty much the only people calling themselves “queer” these days are heterosexuals, in an attempt to be cool and edgy.[vii]

There’s another reason for that phrase about homophobia coming from inside the community: young lesbians (and gay men, but I am focusing on lesbians for this essay) are transitioning due to homophobia – their own internalized homophobia and/or the homophobia they face from family, friends, their church, and/or their government. That homophobia pushes young lesbians into transitioning so they don’t have to be homosexuals, they can be “men” loving women, aka, “straight.”[viii] This makes transgenderism the new gay conversion therapy for young lesbians (and young gay men).[ix] The young lesbians of today feel lost and without community. That is, until they start searching online and find the transgender community, made up of mostly men claiming to be women, most of whom call themselves lesbians. They drill the transgender ideology into young lesbians’ heads, convincing them that they are attracted to other women because they are, in fact, not women at all, but are really men, trans guys. Transgender activists convince young lesbians that they are not homosexual, but they are actually straight men interested in women. Because so many people are in their ears about transitioning, these young lesbians take testosterone, bind their breasts, causing permanent damage – or worse: have radical mastectomies – and start living “as men.”[x] As I stated earlier, these young lesbians are then preyed upon by men calling themselves lesbians. You can see this happening everywhere; even the media supports this by publishing essays about how lesbians have sex and focusing almost entirely on PIV (penis in vagina) sex and how to have sex with trans lesbians who still have their penises, because almost all of them keep and use their penises.[xi]

Young lesbians are also being coerced into having sex with trans women (men), lest they be labeled “transphobic” and shunned from the community they so need, especially at a young age.[xii] Of course, this isn’t just happening to young lesbians. Lesbians the world over are being called bigots for not wanting to date and sleep with males calling themselves lesbians.[xiii] Transgender activists call this the “cotton ceiling” (its counterpart for gay men being the “boxer ceiling”) and it describes what trans women feel they are entitled to and how they should go about getting: what is on the other side of our cotton underwear.[xiv] I mean, that’s exactly what it is: male privilege and entitlement to women’s bodies. Men the world over tend to get violent when women say “no” to them and they can lash out in myriad ways: beating, raping, throwing acid, killing, etc., the women who say “no” to them;[xv] and since studies prove that trans women commit violent crimes (rape, murder, etc.) at the same rate as other men,[xvi] lesbians have to endure not just being shunned and name called, but also the possibility of violence and rape from men claiming to be women who feel entitled to our bodies when we say “no.”

The transgender lobby is very, very powerful.[xvii] They have lots of money and backing by the left who have taken “politically correctness” to a whole new level. Laws and languages are changed in the name of “inclusivity” – including everyone but women. Women become things – objectified and dehumanized by being called misogynistic terms such as “menstruators,” “uterus havers,” and “bleeders” instead of women.[xviii] Lesbians of color are attacked for the same reasons, but also when talking about the Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) that they have endured because transgender activists and their allies object to the use of “female” in FGM. Lesbians of color are even accused of lying about their FGM.[xix] Women who dare to stand up and be heard when it comes to our bodies, our lives, our language, and basic biology are not just called “transphobic,” we are harassed both on and offline, we get rape and death threats, we are doxxed, our employers are contacted in an attempt to get us fired (which happens all too often to women), and we are no-platformed from speaking and performing in venues from public libraries to universities – the very places where ideas are supposed to be exchanged, challenged, and debated.[xx] We have to hide behind pseudonyms online and keep our online groups private, vetting each person requesting to join so that we are not infiltrated by transgender activists and/or their allies wishing to attack or out us; and we have to keep our offline meeting places secret, sending out emails at the last minute with their locations so that transgender activists and their allies don’t show up to harass and attack the women attending the secret event. This all isn’t just happening to lesbians, but lesbians are taking the brunt of it.

For us older lesbians, this is both heartbreaking and infuriating at the same time because we remember what it was like to be young lesbians (in my case, a “baby dyke”) trying to navigate in a world that hates us because we have no need or use for men or sometimes, femininity itself. We remember the lesbian book stores, the stores where we got our Gay Pride gear, going to Gay Pride to get even more gear, riding with the Dykes on Bikes in Gay Pride parades, visiting with and meeting each other at Gay Pride festivals and even festivals like the Michigan Women’s Music Festival (MichFest) held each August for 40 years, until its closing in 2015. We remember lesbian bars where we would hang out on the weekends or after softball games in lesbian leagues, where we could meet, dance with, and pick each other up in relative safety. We remember all of this and are deeply saddened that these things are not available for today’s young lesbians. We all want so badly to be there for young lesbians as friends and mentors, to help them navigate a world that hates them, to help them to love themselves and their bodies, to convince them that hormones and radical surgeries are not needed, that they don’t have to transition, and that they can be out and proud women and lesbians. So we write blogs, make videos, take to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Tumblr in an effort to be visible and to try to find young lesbians. We create groups on Facebook specifically for lesbians and hope that they can find us. We are doing everything we can to find our young sisters and to help them find a community of lesbians, not a community of homophobes and lesbophobes who only want to use them for their bodies and as fodder for the transgender ideology movement.

But it’s hard. So many young women are being brainwashed into believing the transgender narrative and rejecting us older lesbians as transphobic, bigots, and TERFs, which is an acronym created by a straight woman[xxi] and it stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, but has now been characterized by courts and other organizations as a slur to silence women who understand biology and know that one’s sex is immutable.[xxii] This slur is sometimes used on men and even transsexual males who understand that they are men and not women, but overwhelmingly, TERF is directed at women, most especially lesbians. See, transgender activists and their allies don’t want us talking to young lesbians. They know that their smoke and mirrors of misogyny and lesbophobia gets blown away when young lesbians actually talk to the older generations and realize that they have been sold a bridge to nowhere. That’s why they no-platform, doxx, and threaten women and lesbians: to keep us silent. Because they know if they let us speak, more women and lesbians will follow and our movement against their hate will grow as their movement crumbles.

Now, thanks to women like J.K. Rowling, who came out in support of women a short time ago and has been battling a sustained attack on Twitter and in the media by transgender activists and their allies who have been threatening and harassing her,[xxiii] every day people who never knew this battle was going on are starting to see with their own eyes the madness that women, especially lesbians have been dealing with for decades. People are seeing how transgender activists operate: threatening women, “canceling” women, calling women names, heaping all manner of misogyny and hate onto women who know that the transgender movement is based on misogyny and homophobia. More women are becoming gender critical, gender abolitionists, and even radical feminists than ever before because they can see that what transgender activists are doing to Rowling and other women is wrong on so many levels. I’ve seen women and even lesbians subjugating themselves to men who call themselves women and lesbians. It is maddening because I can see that they want to be good people and that they think they are doing the right things, but they are merely throwing other women and lesbians under the bus in order to gain male approval. My hope, though, is that now that this issue is becoming more mainstream and more and more women & lesbians are waking up to the misogyny it takes to call women “menstruators,” etc., we will start to see a change for the better.

My hope is to be able to give these women whose eyes are opened to the misogyny of the transgender movement a soft place to land so that they can start to undo their conditioning and start centering women instead of men. So, I will keep writing, keep running lesbian and radical feminist groups on Facebook, still tweet about lesbians and the hatred, lesbophobia, and  misogyny we face on a daily basis. All of this so that other women, but especially lesbians can see that it is possible to be ok in your own body, it is ok to love other women, it is ok to exclude men from our spaces and our beds. Because the only way we are going to be able to defeat the misogynistic homophobes in the transgender movement is if we all stick together and center women. Women are powerful. Lesbians are powerful. Together, we can defeat transgender activists, come out of hiding, meet whenever and however we want, and show the world that we not only don’t need men, but we can exist happily without them because we have our sisterhood.

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[i] Giang, Vivian “Stop Throwing Hairy Lesbian Feminists Under The Bus.” FEM News Magazine 2015, https://femmagazine.com/stop-throwing-hairy-lesbian-feminists-under-the-bus/; Czyzselska, Jane. “Lesbophobia Is Homophobia With A Side-Order Of Sexism.” The Guardian 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/09/lesbophobia-homophobia-side-order-sexism.

[ii] Valens, Ana. “The Phrase ‘Bisexual Lesbian’ Is Perfectly Valid.” @acvalens 2019, https://twitter.com/acvalens/status/1152601292717641728?s=20; Lana_003. “Top Definition of ‘Bisexual Lesbian.’” Urban Dictionary 2020, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bisexual%20Lesbian.

[iii] Newberry, Laura. “Two Women Face Civil Rights Violations After Allegedly Attacking Lesbian Couple at Six Flags New England.” Advance Local Media 2015/2019, https://www.masslive.com/news/2015/07/women_facing_civil_rights_viol.html.

[iv] Listening2Lesbians, https://listening2lesbians.com/.

[v] Taylor, Jeff. “Watch Lesbian Activists Talk About Their Work During the AIDS Epidemic.” Logo-NewNowNext 2018, http://www.newnownext.com/lesbians-hiv-aids-epidemic-round-table/08/2018/.

[vi] “Transgender Sexuality.” Wikipedia 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_sexuality.

[vii] Levin, Sam T. “Too Straight, White, And Corporate; Why Some Queer People Are Skipping SF Pride.” The Guardian 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/25/san-francisco-gay-pride-corporate-orlando-shooting.

[viii] “Lesbian Erasure.” Wikipedia 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian_erasure.

[ix] Gender Heretic. “BBC Newsnight: Gay, Lesbian Kids Pushed To Transition.” BBC Newsnight via GenderHeretics.substack.com 2020, https://genderheretics.substack.com/p/bbc-newsnight-gay-lesbian-kids-pushed.

[x] Doward, Jamie. “Politicized Trans Groups Put Children At Risk, Expert Says.” The Guardian 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/27/trans-lobby-pressure-pushing-young-people-to-transition.

[xi] Ferguson, Sian. “How Do Lesbians Have Sex? 28 Things to Know Before Your First Time.” Healthline 2020, https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sex/how-do-lesbians-have-sex.

[xii] Robertson, Julia Diana. “Anonymous Letter By A Terrified Lesbian.” The Velvet Chronicle 2019, https://thevelvetchronicle.com/anonymous-letter-from-a-terrified-lesbian-thoughtcrime/; Anonymous. “Get The L Out: Shame Receipts.” Lesbian Rights Alliance, Aotearoa 2020, https://lesbian-rights-nz.org/shame-receipts/.

[xiii] Anonymous. “Lesbophobia – Violence Against Lesbians Online.” Google Drive 2020, https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/13vfYxPdJ-HeeLfk_EDg9fR9lUx2NFWpd?fbclid=IwAR2tYUzwEU6C7_GPY5PbpgefGJ0zsDbPzBvSlN8q6oDb7gnkMUaMyVyTlkE.

[xiv] Girl Dick. “The Cotton Ceiling And The Cultural War On Lesbians And Women.” https://medium.com/@mirandayardley/girl-dick-the-cotton-ceiling-and-the-cultural-war-on-lesbians-and-women-c323b4789368; Anonymous. “Get The L Out.” Lesbian Rights Alliance Aotearoa 2020, https://lesbian-rights-nz.org/shame-receipts/; Wild, Angela C. “Lesbians At Ground Zero: How Transgenderism Is Conquering The Lesbian Body.” Get The L Out UK Report 2019, http://www.gettheloutuk.com/attachments/lesbiansatgroundzero.pdf.

[xv] When Women Refuse, https://whenwomenrefuse.tumblr.com/.

[xvi] Dhejne, Cecilia; Lichtenstein, Paul; Bowman, Markus; Johansson, Anna L.V.; Langstrom, Niklas; and Landen, Mikael. “Long Term Follow-up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden.” Edited by James Scott. The National Center for Biotechnology 2011, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/.

[xvii]  Williams, Joanna. “How Trans Ideology Took Over.” Spiked 2020, https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/19/how-trans-ideology-took-over/; Bindel, Julie. “International Women’s Day Has Been Hijacked By Trans Activists.” The Telegraph 2020, https://www.peaktrans.org/international-womens-day-has-been-hijacked-by-trans-activists-julie-bindel-in-the-telegraph-06-03-20/.

[xviii] Berger, Miriam. “A Guide To How Gender Neutral Language Is Developing Around The World.” The Washington Post 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/12/15/guide-how-gender-neutral-language-is-developing-around-world/; Sole, Elise. “People Are Angry Over This Safe Sex Guide Which Calls A Vagina A ‘Front Hole.’” Yahoo Lifestyle 2018, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/people-angry-safe-sex-guide-calls-vagina-front-hole-012527170.html; Murphy, Meghan. “Are We Women Or Are We Menstruators?” Feminist Current 2016, https://www.feministcurrent.com/2016/09/07/are-we-women-or-are-we-menstruators/.

[xix] Cornel, Jana. “Thread On FGM Harassment.” @RadFemJana 2019, https://twitter.com/RadfemJana/status/1206052001399873536?s=20.

[xx] Anonymous. “Object’s Doxxing Dossier.” ObjectNow.org 2019, https://objectnow.org/objects-doxxing-dossier/; Forester, Maya. “I Lost My Job For Speaking Up About Women’s Rights.” Medium 2019, https://medium.com/@MForstater/i-lost-my-job-for-speaking-up-about-womens-rights-2af2186ae84; Pettersen, Thistle. “Thistle Pettersen: How I Became The Most Hated Folk Singer in Madison.” UncommonGroundMedia.com 2019,

https://uncommongroundmedia.com/thistle-pettersen-how-i-became-the-most-hated-folk-singer-in-madison/.

[xxi] Smythe, Viv. “I’m Credited With Having Coined The Acronym TERF, Here’s How It Happened.” The Guardian 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/29/im-credited-with-having-coined-the-acronym-terf-heres-how-it-happened.

[xxii] Jaspert, Bea. “Twitter Thread On TERF Being A Slur.” @HogoTheForsaken 2019, https://twitter.com/hogotheforsaken/status/1158355043667664896?s=09.

[xxiii] Rowling, J.K. “Tweet About Menstruation.” @jk_rowling 2020, https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269382518362509313?s=19; Rowling, J.K. “Tweets About Biological Sex.” @jk_rowling 2020, https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269389298664701952; Rowling, J.K. “J.K. Rowling Writes About Her Reasons For Speaking Out On Sex And Gender Issues.” JKRowling.com 2020, https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/; Tausz, Ramona. “J.K. Rowling Stands Up For Feminism Against Trans Extremism.” New York Post 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/06/17/j-k-rowling-stands-up-for-feminism-against-trans-extremism/; Boodleoops. “J.K. Rowling And The Trans Activists: A Story In Screenshots.” Medium 2020, http://archive.is/DGKqt.

 

BigBooButch 6 – Lesbophobia, AGAIN!

I know that I have talked and blogged about lesbophobia before, but it feels like it’s getting worse, not better! Over the past few months, I have come to the hard realization that there is a LOT of lesbophobia in radical feminist communities & that heterosexual & bisexual women are not Lesbians’ allies.

 

The Lies of The Fathers: His Female Propagandists and The Forgotten Genocide of Women and Girls

 

The following is a post by my friend, Elizabeth Robertson. I loved her post so much that I asked her if I could publish it here as a guest post. Thankfully, she agreed.

 

Every few months the whole “SOME radical feminists want to slaughter male babies” fight does the rounds. You could almost set your clock to it. Everyone knows who is meant when this old chestnut is trotted out for a good old lesbian bashing session that so many male partnered women (funny that) like to engage in.

This narrative of lesbians wanting to kill infant males is to lesbophobic bi/het rad fems what “The Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion” is to anti-Semites. It’s conspiracy theory.

Instead of “The Jews will steal your Christian children and use their blood for their Matzo bread” it’s “The Lesbian Radical Feminists will steal your infant sons and murder them”. The people spreading this myth may not refer to lesbians directly, but it’s often implied even if it’s not outright stated.

Most het/bi female on lesbian aggression is sly and understated given that overt “I’ll knock your teeth out” aggression shows up the lie that is the performance of femininity. Not that physical aggression is unknown, but is generally carried out by a man for the het/bi woman after she successfully manipulates her husband/brother/son/male family member to bully or attack the lesbian she has an issue with.

It’s the same old lesbian hating heterosexual female fear mongering that goes on because het women bring their patriarchal imperative to hate lesbians into radical feminism. It’s a fable that heterosexual women tell each other when they’re uncomfortable with anger being expressed against males in general. It dusted off whenever any woman asserts their bodily autonomy, whenever they decide that they, and they alone, have the right to refuse to bring more males into the world or into her home. They trot this story out as a “cautionary tale”.

Most of the time a woman will earnestly tell you that a woman advocated for the wholesale slaughter of male toddlers. But she doesn’t know where she saw it, who said it, no screenshots. BUT SHE’S SURE SHE SAW IT. These women can never come up with proof.

Just saying that a woman has the right to not bring a male into the world is enough to set some women off. A woman saying she has a right to not produce males is often misrepresented as being a “male toddler killer”. Statistically, after men, the biggest killer of male toddlers is the toddlers own mother. So if you really want to go after those who kill male infants maybe have a look at the factors that result in a minority of het/bi mothers murdering their infant male offspring. The answer to male infanticide in general is a problem with heterosexual culture, not any area of lesbian culture.

There is a sex based genocide going on, but it’s certainly not being perpetrated by the female subclass of lesbians, it’s being perpetrated by the class of heterosexual men. So if a male partnered woman wants to talk about infants murdered on the basis of their biological sex she might want to talk to her hubby. Because hubby is part of the class that is murdering female infants en masse, part of the class that is subjecting women to forced abortions ESPECIALLY if it is a female foetus. But they’re not killing male toddlers (well, not in the numbers that they’re killing female toddlers), they’re forcing the abortion of female foetuses, and of female toddlers. The estimates of “missing women and girls” range in the vicinity of around 100 MILLION. And whilst this estimate must include those adult females murdered by MEN one must wonder how many are forced sex based abortions and murder of female toddlers for being female. The estimates are commissioned by the UN. Not a group known as a bastion of radical feminism by any means. But heterosexual women want to paint lesbians as psychopathic whilst cuddling up to hubby.

Whilst I hate the term “hysteria” it seems apt here. But really it is “testeria” because the origin of this conspiracy theory painting lesbians as genocidal maniacs (when really it’s their precious men) is out of the desire to serve and please men. Patriarchy teaches heterosexual women that lesbians are “bad women” who aren’t “natural” and “maternal” like good heterosexual women. It is a burden placed on women by men to constantly ostracise lesbians from the community of women. Slandering lesbians and misrepresenting us as threats to children is a lesbian hating trope as old as the hills. Under patriarchy these women must be careful to distance themselves from the lesbian who refuses to submit to male ownership.

Looking at the women who continue this slander one will find that they are almost universally heterosexually partnered, often with children. So they are literally part of the nucleus of the patriarchy. Patriarchies building block is the heterosexual family unit. It is it’s epicentre from which all male power emanates. It is a males refuge, his nursery and his main area of personal support.

Patriarchy LITERALLY means “Rule of the Fathers”. This is why men put so many barriers around birth control and abortions. This is why women are heavily punished by male institutions for leaving their husbands after producing children. They know what one of the foundations of their power is even if male partnered women can’t handle the truth. If a heterosexual woman with children wants to find out about male power all she has to do is leave her husband, try it, see how you go.

Many genuinely aware, genuinely radical feminist het/bi single mothers can attest to the reality of men’s power in their lives and often live with a great deal of state backed male control and abuse for daring to break the patriarchal bond of the marriage. But then again the type of het/bi women who sneer at lesbians and tell lies about lesbians are often the SAME het/bi women who support attacks on single mothers and gently palm the halls of their tormentors.

When a heterosexual woman attacks lesbians for refusing to serve men she is serving the male class (often in fact responding to the subtle or overt manipulation of her male partner) and is performing her prescribed gender roles.

Attacking lesbians is central to the performance and submission to gender dictates. These women oppose transgenderism as they see the obvious extra burdens on women, not because they’re opposed to gender. The fight between often married or male partnered heterosexual women and transgenderists is a fight between two groups of genderists, it has nothing to do with radical feminism as these women also are chomping at the bit to attack lesbians who dare to speak against the their brand of genderism.

If one looks closely at these vomitoriums of barely suppressed lesbophobia you will often find that there is some offhand comment they let slip about their precious Nigel. They will often let slip some sarcastic reference to their Nigel being “evil” or “violent”. There we have it, their Nigel’s are offended and saddened by the mean lesbians not fucking and serving the class of men and not producing more of them.

They unknowingly show the source of their aggression towards lesbians – heterosexual males. Excuse me if I’m not surprised. And yet these women moan on and on about women who refuse to partner with men not trusting them and not taking them seriously as feminists. This is not new, many of the older generation remember “The Lavender Menace”. The male partnered feminists feverish assurances to men not to worry, they’ll still be reproducing the Patriarchal family unit. The rule of men is called Patriarchy for a reason, one cannot have Patriarchy if the men don’t become fathers by way of impregnating females. If this makes women partnered with men uncomfortable then all I can say is “Suck it up buttercup”. It’s your discomfort to deal with, it’s your cognitive dissonance to reconcile, not lesbians. Own your shit male partnered women, and stop coming after lesbians because I’ll give it to you straight, without lesbians you wouldn’t have the little you have now. You’d be forced to marry, have no vote, no abortion rights, no ability to work – you would have NONE of the rights you enjoy without lesbians working behind the scenes with a target on our backs (often put there by you). You would have nothing. Lesbians have always been the core of feminism, we are the engine room for theory and work, we are the backs on which the het/bi women stand to address the masses of women. You will feel our absence if we leave. Indeed the existence of part of the ladies auxiliary of the trans, the lesbian TIFS are testament to lesbians learning from male centred women how to be traitorous to the class of women. Look at the pasts of lesbian TIFS and you will find dozens of male partnered women chasing them out of the class of women, enforcing feminised submission, telling them they’re failed women, mocking them for not submitting to men, for resisting feminisation. They sat at your feet and learned all about hatred, male centredness and lesbian hating spite.

They listened to the jeers and saw you smirk at them and then decided that if THIS was a woman – a smirking, spiteful male centred handmaiden then they wanted no part of it. They heard your jeers calling them men and thought “Yep, that’s what I’ll be, I’ll curry favour with the male class not by serving them but by becoming one of them. A portion of the male class will accept me and see that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. It is male centred women that sowed the seed for the hatred of women in the TIFs, often sowed by the male centred mother. The choice between freedom and servility, between the female centred and the male centred is an important one, and women lose every time the female chooses to uphold and support male power over women.

Female TIFS are just the male partnered, femininity enforcing female genderists chickens coming home to roost. And now all women have to deal with their misguided treachery in addition to the much larger, far more powerful psychopathy of the TIMS. They turned the tables on the femininity conforming conservative male partnered women.

Make no mistake, these “gender crits” are supporters of Patriarchy, not opponents. They just want to end the danger of the sociopathic transcult. If it were to disappear tomorrow they would not fight for women’s rights, they are only interested in their own comfort as Patriarchies pets, which, though understandable given the punishments for not submitting, makes them utterly unsuitable for leadership of any group of radical feminists as they have proved themselves without the insight and without the integrity to fully oppose men’s power over women.

 

The Systematic Erasure of Lesbians

I know that I am not the only Lesbian who is not just sick and tired of our erasure, but so enraged by it, I can barely sit here and write this. Just thinking about all of the ways we are being appropriated AND erased makes me want to fucking scream!

I keep reading in my various Facebook groups about how surprised women are that even though the L in LGBT is first, we are actually considered last and we have to adjust the most to what the GBT want. This isn’t shocking. I mean, gay men (as a class, don’t individualize this) don’t really like lesbians and they tend to run over us and do what they want without considering our thoughts, ideas, or feelings. Just look at a “gay magazine” and you will see that almost all of the people running and participating in that magazine are men. Go to any LGBT event and you will see the same.

Add to that the fact that “queer” no longer belongs to LGB people, it belong to heterosexuals who consider themselves quirky, different, maybe even deviants (a common stereotype for homosexuals). I’ve seen heterosexual couples claim to be non-binary and therefore queer. I’ve seen gender non-conforming men who wear makeup and dresses call themselves queer, instead of the obvious: cross-dressers. I’ve seen women who sometimes kiss their friends in order to make their boyfriends happy and horny call themselves queer. Queer used to be synonymous with homosexual, but after decades of torture and abuse under that term when it was a slur and decades when homosexuals re-claimed the word to take away its power, now the word has been taken away from us as straight people use it to seem cool and edgy. It’s fucking ridiculous.

Also, consider this: out of all of the financial resources obtained by the LGB(T)+ last year, only 2% were used for Lesbians. 2-fucking-%. Lesbians have “taken care of,” marched for, and stood by gay men for decades and this is how they repay our loyalty to the LGB? We have almost zero consideration and representation in gay organizations, publications, medical centers, etc. If gay men are not the ones that are taking over homosexual organizations, then you can bet that heterosexual men who call themselves women and therefore Lesbians are.

The onslaught of TIMs (trans identified males or trans “women”) telling us Lesbians that if we do not sleep with them and their penises (which almost all of them retain by the way, there aren’t a ton of surgeries going on out there), then that means we are bigots or transphobic or the slur, “TERF” (this is known as the “cotton ceiling”). It isn’t enough that these men continue to appropriate our language, our culture, and our lives. No, they are erasing Lesbians by calling themselves and their (bisexual or heterosexual female) girlfriends and wives Lesbians. These are heterosexual men, claiming to not only be women, but also Lesbians. They take up Lesbian spaces and use Lesbian resources. I was invited to a dance this past weekend and I couldn’t attend because of a snow storm that hit central Illinois. Not only was there a TIM in attendance, he was actually filming the whole room with his phone camera (probably in order to try to doxx the women – the Lesbians – there).

See, that’s the transgender stuff the mainstream doesn’t get to see. Most people in the mainstream don’t even know what the “cotton ceiling” is. They also have no idea how few TIMs actually have the surgeries for their penises to be inverted and turned into something that Frankenstein might call a vagina. Not that the surgeries could actually make a man into a woman, but in the PC world of liberal feminism, even if they do not have the surgeries, they are still considered (not seen as, considered) women, because feels, and can therefore call themselves Lesbians.

I’ve written about this before in Another Sister Lost to the Madness, but it breaks my heart how many young butch Lesbians we are losing to the trans cult as adult male transgenders (TIMs) talk our young sisters into believing that they are men because they appear masculine or they like to rebuild cars or they are not nurturing and do not want to have kids. Whatever the reason these men are talking young lesbians into transitioning and believing themselves to be men. Many are de-transitioning, but too many of them are buying what the TIMs are selling.

This are also, of course, older Lesbians who mistakenly think they are men and transition later in life. A lot of these butches are deluded into thinking they are men by heterosexual women posing as femme Lesbians who do not want to date men. Well, they do not wish to date Lesbians either, but if their girlfriend is called a boyfriend and if that boyfriend thinks and behaves as a male sexually, then those “femme Lesbians” get the best of both worlds without having to actually be Lesbians; because once they partner with a TIF – trans identified female or trans “man,” they can call themselves straight again, like magic.

See, transgenders like to build themselves as being non gender-conforming or non-binary. They claim to be bucking gender and all of the sexist stereotypes that it comprises. The opposite is the truth here. Transgenders adhere very strictly to the sexist stereotypes that make up gender. They believe strongly that if a boy likes pink, Barbie dolls, and dresses, then he must be a girl; and that if a girl likes blue, trucks, and “boy” haircuts and clothes, then they must be a boy. Somehow, over the course of a couple of decades (since the free flowing 70s), this society has become entrenched in rigid, sexist norms for girls/women and boys/men. If anyone deviates from those rigid norms, then they are considered to be the opposite sex.

This is especially true if one believes that one or one’s child is a homosexual. Transitioning is the new gay conversion therapy. Parents would much rather have a child pretending to be the opposite sex than a homosexual child. Hell, even in some countries, it is illegal to be gay but perfectly legal to be transgender. It doesn’t even seem to bother these parents that they are pumping their kids full of poisons, in the form of puberty blockers, and later hormones of the opposite sex. As long as their kid isn’t gay….

These are just two facets that comprise the erasure of Lesbians, not just in the US, but worldwide. Don’t forget about heterosexual women and men. I touched a little on how heterosexuals have appropriated Lesbian and gay culture and how they have erased us from the new meaning of the word queer. But they erase us in other ways as well. Take heterosexual (I include bisexual women here as well) women, for instance. Heterosexual women, even – or especially – in radical feminist groups on Facebook, are notorious for not just being bad allies, but down right hating Lesbians and wanting nothing to do with us.

It happens a lot on Facebook, this Lesbophobia from heterosexual women, even radical feminists. It’s especially bothersome to be coming from radical feminists because we are all supposed to be sisters fighting together for the liberation of all women, but Lesbians are so underrepresented in that arena as well. Even though Lesbians have played integral parts, throughout history, in helping women to move forward in a world that would hold us back, we are still considered by most heterosexual women to be the man-hating Lavender Menace. We are threatening to heterosexual women because we don’t need men in or out of the bedroom. A lot of Lesbians, me included, are even separatists. Even in societies where that is near impossible, Lesbians try to carve out space just for women and Lesbians and do their best to avoid contact with men. This, too, is somehow threatening to heterosexual women, as they accuse us of hating and excluding their Nigels and Nigel Jrs. from events that should be female only. We are accused of hating the “nice guys,” the ones who are feminist allies, even though that is so rare, it is laughable to even suggest it. It is these lesbophobic women who try to erase Lesbians from radical feminism, for it is these women who are still centering men.

Speaking of men: of course heterosexual men want to fuck feminine looking Lesbians and beat, rape, &/or kill gender non-conforming or butch Lesbians, like me. Those men that don’t call themselves women and Lesbians, that is, they are a different threat. But it is not just butch Lesbians that heterosexual men was to suffer and die. So many Lesbians each year are dying by the hands of men, some of these men are even family members. Male violence against Lesbians is a real and horrific thing. They want to erase us for one simple reason: we do not need or want them in our lives.

Lesbian erasure is ramping up all over the world. Lesbians everywhere are in real physical danger from men, they are not always supported by heterosexual women, they are talked into thinking they are men, their lives and culture are appropriated, and they are forced into having sex with men claiming to be women and Lesbians. Something drastic needs to happen to stop all of this.

Lesbians like me are trying to make ourselves more visible to Lesbians who think that transitioning is what they are supposed to do. Showing them that there are many types of women and that all of us *are* women, no matter what we do or what we wear. That we can accept our bodies and live happy, healthy lives. We are also making ourselves know in radical feminist circles, trying to show our straight sisters that while we don’t need or want men around us, we are still right there, side-by-side, fighting with and for them. We are trying to make atrocities against Lesbians more visible, since the mainstream and even LGB press do not care to cover our murders. We are especially trying to talk more about Lesbian erasure so that more Lesbians can hear us and come forward to help, not just to stop the erasure of us, but to reverse it and bring Lesbians to the forefront. Showing society that it doesn’t need to fear us, that it can and should, once and for all, embrace and celebrate Lesbians everywhere.

 

#TransgenderAlternativeFacts Surrounding Stonewall & The LGB Riots

Hello and Happy GAY Pride my sisters!! 

Let’s talk about Stonewall, shall we? The bar in New York that sparked the LGB Civil Rights Movement!

I saw this in my Tumblr feed this afternoon and it made my blood boil a bit because we lesbians have been fighting the re-written HIStory for several years now.

Ugh – Transgenders continuing the lie that they were the ones who started the riots at Stonewall, kicking off the Gay Liberation and LGB civil rights movement, when it was actually a butch lesbian woman (Stormé DeLarverie)* & a drag queen (Sylvia Rivera)**. Hell, you could almost say that the butch dyke started the whole thing because as she was being abused by the police & started fighting back, she engaged the crowd by asking if anyone was going to do anything. That’s when the crowd got into it with the police and a revolution started. In Rivera’s own words (interview below), he talks about it all happening around him; not that he started it all.

We have to keep fighting against these lies or a whole new generation will believe them & pass them on, forgetting the actual truth, the actual history!!  

*Stormé DeLarverie (December 24, 1920 – May 24, 2014) was a butchlesbian whose purported scuffle with police, many eyewitnesses recount, was the defining moment that incited the Stonewall riots, spurring the crowd to action.[1] She was born in New Orleans, to an African American mother and a white father.[2][3] She is remembered as a gay civil rights icon and entertainer, who graced the stages of the Apollo Theater and Radio City Music Hall.[1] She worked for much of her life as an MC, singer, bouncer, bodyguard and volunteer street patrol worker, the “guardian of lesbians in the Village.”[3]

She is known as “the Rosa Parks of the gay community.”[1][4][5][6][7][8][a]

Read more here: Stormé DeLarverie on Wikipedia 

**Silvia Rivera: “The early 60s was not a good time for drag queens, effeminate boys or boys that wore makeup like we did. Back then we were beat up by the police, by everybody. I didn’t really come out as a drag queen until the late 60s.When drag queens were arrested, what degradation there was. I remember the first time I got arrested, I wasn’t even in full drag. I was walking down the street and the cops just snatched me.”

Read more of his interview here: Silvia Rivera interview 

 

See, here’s the thing: transgenders want everyone to believe that the Gay Liberation and the LGB Civil Rights Movement was started by them and that we owe them our thanks. They have been peddling this lie for almost a decade and some – mostly youth, other transgenders, and libfem handmaidens – actually believe these #TransgenderAlternativeFacts. We have to deal with this every single year and it is tiresome; but as I said, we have to keep fighting, keep telling the truth, keep reminding everyone that is was not transgenders at Stonewall, it was a butch dyke and a drag queen.

Share this information with the lesbian & gay youth, the straight people, and even the transgenders that you know. Spread the word so that these #TransgenderAlternativeFacts can become the memory, instead of the actual truth!

 

Vlog Post 5: Lesbians Throwing Lesbians Under The Bus For Men.

Good afternoon, sisters! This is my 5th vlog post at youtube.

Here I talk about lesbians throwing lesbians under the bus for the sake of men. It’s terrible to think about there being male-centered lesbians out there, but they are there. Let’s talk about a piece written by a male-centered lesbian who thinks women ID as the slur, “TERF” & who tosses lesbians who don’t agree with the gender ideology under the umbrella of hate.

 

 

If you like what you see, would you mind up voting it at youtube? Thanks!

I hope to hear from you, sisters! Add a comment or drop me a line. 😊

Vlog Post 4: Lesbian Erasure

Good afternoon, sisters! This is my 4th vlog post at youtube.

Here I talk about Lesbian Erasure.

Oh & you get to meet my 4th dog: Sallybear, my other Taiwan Mountain dog. I changed her name from Ming Li, which is what the Animal Rescue Team Taiwan (ARTT) named her when they rescued her. I think Sally suits her better. 😉

If you like my videos, would you mind voting them up at youtube? I am getting down votes & have no trouble imagining transgenders & other members of their cult voting my videos down, en masse! :o/

I hope you like this one! Let me hear from you, sisters!

Banned But Not Forgotten

Yesterday, I was permanently banned from a site that calls themselves a butch-femme site.

Now, this is a site that is owned and operated by a femme and it *used* to be a place for butches and femmes to meet, chat, flirt, or just hang out with one another. But as the TransCult has swept the nation, so has it swept that site, making it a transgender site now.

Ok, first, don’t get me started on what I think about women who think they are men but instead of hanging out with straight people on straight sites, they take over a lesbian site and make their home there. I get it, they are still female and straight women want dick. It’s just a fact of life. It doesn’t make straight women bigots for wanting dick, it just makes them, you guessed it, straight women!

Hence why these women who call themselves men don’t hang out with the straight crowd is pretty clear: they. Are. Not. Men! So, they fall back onto what they know: lesbians. Because we lesbians, we women, have to take in everyone. We cant just be a bunch of lesbians on a lesbian site hanging out and having fun. NO! We have to let in the female transgenders and then cater to them by calling all butches “he” because, we don’t know, maybe that butch over there has decided that “he” is a man now!

So fucking ridiculous. Seriously.

Consequently, slowly, over time, all of these females, these women, who call themselves men or call themselves “male ID’d butches” (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one!) take over the site and the femmes there let it happen and just shift their focus from butches to these man wannabes. Suddenly it’s a trans-femme site, instead of a butch-femme site. Which is also ridiculous because femmes don’t partner with men, whether they are biological men or women who call themselves men. With a few exceptions (femmes partnering with other femmes, butches partnering with other butches). Femmes partner with butches and butches partner with femmes. Neither are, want to be, or want to be *with* men.

I guess I’m saying that it was no great loss to be banned from the site since it was all trans, all the time and those of us who mourned the loss of the butch-femme site had to keep it to ourselves; and believe me, sister, there are a LOT of unhappy campers on your site who wish it wasn’t a transgender site but a site for actual butches and femmes! I’m hearing from them!

But I digress, because here’s what really gets me about being banned from the site. Here is the part that should make every woman’s blood boil: she banned me from the site because of what I said on ANOTHER site! Even though I held my tongue and played nice on her site, not breaking any rules and even being helpful by keeping track of all of the name changes that go on there, because I spoke some truths about transgenders on youtube (my vlog posts), I was labeled a transphobe, “not safe,” and banned from her site.

This is the big take away here: a Woman silenced another Woman, not only for the sake of transgenders, but because she caught the woman saying things with which she didn’t agree on *another site.* She banned a woman from her site because of the OPINIONS that woman expressed on another site!

This is how far we’ve come, dear reader! Women not only silencing other women for the sake of men, but now also for the sake of “men!” Transgender egos are so very fragile that they cannot handle the truth coming at them from anywhere and demand that we are obedient to them on every site on the internet, lest we be banned from a site over which they have complete control. Control based on fear and stupidity. Fear that if one does not agree with them, one will be shunned and branded a bigot, or worse, the slur, “TERF;” and stupidity because I just find it stupid that women would (a) center their lives on men and (b) enable transgenders delusions instead of embracing the truth.

Vlog Post 2: Here, I Talk About “Misgendering”

Good afternoon, sisters! This is my next vlog post at youtube. It’s on “misgendering,” which, honestly, isn’t even a real thing, much less suicide-inducing!

If you like my videos, would you mind voting them up at youtube? I am getting down votes & have no trouble imagining transgenders & other members of their cult voting my videos down, en masse! :o/

I hope you like this one! Let me hear from you, sisters!

 

“TERFs” Do Not Actually Exist, Fellows

I honestly cannot believe that we have to continue to discuss this over and over and over again; but I guess when you are dealing with juvenile young men with male privilege who have yet to have fully developed brains and older men with male privilege going through midlife crisis, not to mention all of the women who, for some disturbed reason, support all of these men, then I guess womyn just have to continue to calmly stay on point and tell these men and the women who support them, again, that they are wrong. In so many ways, yes, but I am focusing on this for a minute.

I am not sure how this has come about, but “TERF” is not an identity. “TERFs” do not actually exist. They are not a community of womyn within the larger LGB community. “TERFs” are not a group of womyn working and plotting against transgenders. They are certainly not working together to exterminate transgenders, something of which I have been accused.

“TERF” is, once again, a slur. This slur is used to silence womyn. None of us actually “identify” as “TERFs.” This slur is actually thrust upon us and shoved down our throats by men who are so upset over the fact that there are womyn out there who are not falling to our knees in our utter devotion to porn sick, cross dressing, autogynephile men who claim to be women, but expect to still be treated and adored as men, with their male privilege, and their penises, intact.

“TERF” may have been created by two heterosexual women trying to give a name to radical feminists who do not wish to have males in their private spaces, but just every other slur in the world, its meaning has changed, morphed into some crazy kind of battle cry for males to use as they attack womyn mercilessly online, threatening to assault, rape, even kill womyn who do not agree with them and who do not fall all over themselves to believe that men (or boys) can be women (or girls).

The slur, “TERF” is a term that includes –all- womyn (and some gay men) who know the truth about biology, all womyn who understand even the most basic science. I am not a radical feminist, but I have been called a “TERF” over and over again, just for stating my opinion, an opinion I am allowed to have and share online or anywhere, an opinion that I share with hundreds of thousands of other womyn (and some men).

I don’t know how much more plainly I can state this, dear reader. “TERF” is not an identity, it is a slur used to silence womyn. We who are labeled as such are not the violent ones here. We do not issue threats of violence. We do not keep lists of male or female transgenders with their contact information so that we may harass them in real life.

Oh yes, dear reader, you didn’t know that? Male transgenders and their female allies keep lists of womyn who they decide are “TERFs.” They say they keep such lists so as to warn other transgenders to steer clear of us, but what they are really doing is targeting women. They keep us and as much personal information about us on a list they call “TERF tracker.” One of the founders of “TERF Tracker” was a woman who aligned herself with the most violent transgenders against womyn. She later tried to align herself with womyn who know the truth about transgenders, but she did so as a ruse, to befriend women (and a few men) so that she could gain information on us. She then turned back to transgenders and now runs a gay and lesbian liberation page that does nothing more than attack womyn like me, womyn who know that men cannot become women and that women cannot become men.

This woman is one of those who makes the assertion that “TERF” is an identity women take on and share with other womyn. She puts forth the idea that a woman who is not a friend to other women is the “leader” of the “TERFs” when there is no such organization of “TERFs,” so there can be no such “leader.”

The other founder of “TERF Tracker” was later found out to be a violent child rapist, He even admitted as much. Just another entitled, cross dressing, porn sick, autogynephile who was later found out to be a child rapist or a rapist of women.

But I digress. I do not wish for my blog to be about these women, one of whom aligns herself with violent transgenders, the other of whom is a woman who enjoys attacking womyn, outing anonymous bloggers such as myself, or that man, that child rapist. They deserve no time or attention on my blog.

No, this post was intended to assert to you, dear reader that “TERF” is not an identity, not a label womyn call themselves, and certainly not a term womyn “reclaim” in an effort to take its power away. Since we never claimed it as ours in the first place, we certainly cannot “reclaim” it now!

No, “TERF” is and has always remained a slur used to silence, threaten, and harass womyn. Make sure to spread this truth around, my sisters, as those who do not know what a “TERF” is are vulnerable to believing the transgenders who call themselves “activists” when they try to assert that “TERF” is an identity we call ourselves. Post about “TERF” being a slur, tweet about “TERF” being a slur, talk to your friends about “TERF” being a slur. Just get out there, sisters, and inform others about this slur!!

Make sure that your friends all know that this label, “TERF,” that is shoved down our throats by transgenders, the very people who claim that self-identification is the most important thing, the people who claim that people who ID them as someone they are not (i.e., “misgender,” which is a misnomer, it should actually be, “missexed”) are actually committing violence against them, the people, mostly men, who claim that “TERF” is an identification that we use to describe ourselves when in reality, they force the label onto us, make sure that your friends know that “TERF” is nothing more than a slur used against women, to silence us and to threaten violence against us.

I call upon all of you, dear readers, to tell, post, tweet, text, whatever you need to do, to make sure that people know that “TERF” is not an ID, it is a slur!

Political and Born This Way Lesbians – Why The Battle?

Last night, I found and was reading a post on Facebook from several days ago that was a discussion between several women who identified either as political lesbians or born this way lesbians.

First, some quick definitions so we all know where we’re at on this:

A lesbian is an adult female who is attracted to other women physically, mentally, emotionally, sexually, and intimately. There are no penises on lesbians or in lesbian relationships (so no men or males).

A born this way lesbian is a lesbian who feels she was born gay, that being a lesbian was not a choice for her.

A political lesbian is a little trickier, because there is more than one definition. Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, a political lesbian was a heterosexual woman who was tired of men personally and politically, so she became celibate and called herself a lesbian. But she was a lesbian in name only for political reasons.

A few years ago, the definition morphed into a woman who came to her lesbianism through her politics, but she was a lesbian in every way.

Now, the definition of a political lesbian is that a woman chooses to be gay because of her politics. Through her work in politics and activism, she realized that heterosexuality was a learned behavior to further oppress women and instead of continuing in that, she decided to make the conscious decision to become a lesbian, but she is a lesbian in every way. Quite a few political lesbians under this definition are late in life lesbians, becoming so after one or several relationships with men and maybe even some children.

I think that covers it. I am sure that if I am wrong on any point that someone will come along and correct me (well, except for the definition of a lesbian)!

Anyway, on to my post. As I was saying, I observed a post between some born this way and political lesbians and almost all of them were being respectful of each other and not arguing against each other’s beliefs, simply arguing for their own beliefs. It was a nice discussion. At first.

Then came a couple of political lesbians who so strongly believed that both heterosexuality and homosexuality are choices that women make, they were convinced that they were right, they were convinced that born this way lesbians were not only wrong, but ignorant for holding their beliefs.

Of course, what I failed to talk about when I was laying out definitions of both born this way lesbians and political lesbians is that neither can prove that they are right or that the other is wrong. These are feelings, you see, beliefs based on how women feel. So while one can believe strongly that they are right, they cannot prove that they are right because, well, it’s kind of like religion: they have faith that they are who they are based on their internal feelings as women and lesbians.

So I was kind of shocked to be reading this, not only the part about the political lesbians thinking they were right and born this way lesbians were ignorant, but the blatant disrespect from these couple of political lesbians toward the born this way lesbians was something I have seen, but that I had hoped we were passed by now.

It was like watching the bad parts of religion, the “my religion is the only right religion and you all are going to hell!” kind of thing; and it was very, very sad to watch.

It made me wonder why we battle so much over this. Why aren’t we just a bunch of lesbians who believe that we arrived at lesbianism in different ways, but that we were all here now and working together?

Based on some of what the one or two disrespectful political lesbians said in that thread, I suppose they would say that by believing one is born a lesbian, one must also submit that others are born straight women and if a woman is born straight then she is born into a life of sub servitude and sex, whether she likes it or not, whether it is painful or not, whether she wants it or not. So by believing one is born a lesbian instead of it being a choice that one makes, one is then buying into and supporting women’s oppression.

That seems kind of harsh, doesn’t it? That because a woman believes she was born a lesbian, she is supporting, ignorantly, women’s oppression?

I don’t believe that for one second. As you may remember from the last post that I did on this subject, I a one of the lesbians who considers herself born a lesbian. I didn’t make the choice to become a lesbian, it was not my choice. It was not my choice to be bullied, bashed, and harassed for being who I am. It was not my choice to be left out in the civil rights department simply because I love women. It was not my choice to not be able to get married simply because I was born a lesbian. Knowing all that we know, I find it difficult that ANY woman would choose this. Even later in life lesbians. I believe they were born lesbians, but they were just in denial for a while and now they are realizing their true selves.

BUT, even though I believe all of that, I still respect political lesbians enough to support them as lesbians, as sisters. I am of the “live and let live” model when it comes to other lesbians. So, I support political lesbian’s right to not only believe whatever they wish, but to also express those beliefs. I support their fight against women’s oppression in any way they can fight it; because, after all, isn’t that what we are ALL fighting for here?

Remember that, sisters. Because yes, we may have come to lesbianism in different ways, on different paths, but we are both discriminated against. We are both denied rights. We are both harassed. We are both bashed. We are both beaten. We are both killed. For being lesbian women. And as lesbian women, we are both fighting for the same thing: to end women’s oppression by liberating women from men and this patriarchy.

Let’s end this battle, sisters!

The Real Goal of Male Transgenders or Trans “Women”

Here’s the thing. The real goal of male transgenders, or trans “women,” if you will is not to be or become women, it is not to be safe from other men, it is not to join women in the fight against the patriarchy. It is simply: to control women.

I was approached on Twitter the other day (accosted really, since he bombarded my feed with tweets even after it was clear I had him blocked) by a male transgender who, after reading my post about the term “TERF” being a slur, had nothing to say about the term “TERF” nor had he any remorse for using a word that a woman (actually, women, plural) was telling him was a slur. He also stated quite emphatically that men were not the problem; because in my post, I mentioned how women feeling safe was a main issue of wanting to have our own spaces and when I mentioned how some male transgenders argue for the same safe spaces, I said that they should create their own spaces because men were their problem as much as ours and we should not bear the brunt of their needs for safe spaces by losing our own.

No, this man was not concerned about using a slur or especially about no longer using it (a perusal of his Twitter after blocking him showed me that he continued to use it as a slur), nor was he concerned about safety from men. His main and, well, only concern was that women see him as a woman. That’s the crux of the issue, isn’t it? Male transgenders don’t want to change the violent ways of men, especially since so many male transgenders are, themselves, violent men. They don’t want protection from said violent men and they of course would never advocate for women to be safe from violent men. No what they want, what they have always wanted is to control women, to make us call them by the names and pronouns that they choose while they force us to be called the names that we do not choose (read: they are hypocrites). These men want to force lesbians to have sex with them by shaming us into accepting the penis as a female body part and that we are bigots if we do not fuck them. These men want to force us to give up our personal and private spaces so that they can have them instead; not for their own safety, but simply because they want them. These men want to force women to see them as women even though our own common sense, science, and biology, hell our own eyes tell us differently. The goal of these men has not been to be safe from violence and share spaces under that common need, it is and always has been to control women. Period.

Here’s the thing, dear reader: if these male transgenders really believed they were women, they would not need confirmation from women. They would not need confirmation from anyone because they would know they are women. Does it piss me off when people see me as a man and don’t see the woman that I am? Of course! It makes me feel invisible as a woman. But I am still a woman, regardless of what others see. Their inability to see that at first glance does not negate the fact that I am a woman. I do not need other people to confirm that fact for me.

Another thing: I am a woman who is very woman-centric; and no, I do not believe that is because I am a lesbian, as I think any woman can be woman centric, regardless of her sexual and/or intimate partners. By woman-centric, I mean I put women first. I advocate for female causes, I donate to women’s shelters, I fight for women’s rights to have women-only spaces, etc. I even buy books by women authors, try to shop at women owned businesses when I can, and even hired a woman when I need to get things done on my property. You don’t see this with male transgenders. They are all still male centric. Even their name for us, “TERF,” is male centric because is supposes that we are centering our wanting to be around other females as an anti-trans thing. The very term is flawed not just because it is a slur used to silence women and not just because not all of us are radical feminists. No, this term is flawed for the very simple reason that it centers us around transgenders when we are not. We are women-centered.

But we all know that male transgenders were born male, socialized as male, and have male privilege, whether external (recognized as male by society), internal (the feelings of privilege they hold), or both. When I say they are male-centric, I mean that they center everything on being male. They come at women instead of to women, they try to dominate women, conversations, and situations, they don’t respect women, female causes or issues, and they could care less about women’s rights.

We even see this kind of behavior and worse from some of the men who have had surgeries to create some sort of facsimile of a woman out of their bodies. They still need outside confirmation. They still act like the men they were socialized to be from birth. They still treat women the same. Look at Janet Mock. Here is a man who is held up as the ideal trans “woman,” who other male transgenders consider the end of the rainbow, where they want to be themselves, who, we all assume, had the surgeries to make him into a Frankenstein-esque version of a woman; but he is still a sexist, misogynistic asshole who clearly has no respect for and, in fact, hates women. That is the man he was socialized to become and a few hormones and surgeries didn’t take those misogynistic feelings away, nor did they change how badly he treats women.

So here’s what I don’t understand, dear reader. Why do women keep falling for this? I mean, intellectually I can understand that women are socialized, conditioned to believe that men are more important, their opinions, wants, needs, etc. matter more than our own. But I still have a hard time grasping how so many women can be so blind to what these men are really doing. In my opinion, it isn’t that they can’t see it, but that they won’t see it. They refuse to see it because they are so conditioned and socialized to clear the way for men that they refuse to see what these men are really doing: trying to control women from the inside.

We saw the same kinds of things in the LGB movement for years and years: lesbians standing up with gay men for male causes, but when it came time to step up for women’s causes, there were no gay men to be seen. Even though we were lesbians and therefore had no need for men in our lives, we were still women and therefore socialized to put men and men’s needs first and foremost.

I do have hope though. I mean, more lesbians have opened their eyes over the years to see that the gay rights movement has actually been the gay male rights movement, so I have hope that more and more women will open their eyes and see that these men are not and cannot become women. These are men still trying to control, dominate, harass, and violate women. They are just doing it under the disguise of “being” women.

Is Being Gender Critical and Butch Mutually Exclusive?

I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a long time now. Can one consider herself butch, aka, a masculine woman while also being critical of gender? It’s a question I have been thinking about for several months and now is the time for me to put my thoughts down on paper, so to speak, and figure this thing out for myself. Some of you will, of course, disagree and that is cool, but I would be willing to bet that there are a lot more of us out there than we think.

I’ve been an out lesbian for half my life now (over 20 years) and I didn’t consider myself butch (or “a” butch, ymmv) until almost 10 years later. It took me a long, long time to come to the realization that butches were women, we didn’t wish to be men, we were women who just happened to be masculine. Once I came to that realization, I was able to accept my true self: a gender non-conforming, masculine woman, or more simply, a butch lesbian; or even more simply: a butch.

It’s hard to be a butch in this world. Don’t worry, I am not about to play the oppression Olympics here, I completely understand that there is enough discrimination to go around and there are hard times for all of us. But let’s be honest here, I cannot speak for femmes, straight women (even the butch ones), gay men, straight men, or lesbians who are neither butch or femme because I am none of those things. So I will stick to what I know: being a butch lesbian in this patriarchal society.

Before I continue, I wanted to put out there that even though I am not speaking about femme’s experiences here, I welcome their input about this post or their own experiences; especially the anonymous femme who briefly talked with me about the hierarchy of femmes and butches in my last post (Who Gets To Decide What “Lesbian” Means?). I hope she sees this post so she can come back to leave her thoughts on the issue.

So let’s dig in to this complicated subject matter, shall we?

As I was saying before I digressed a bit, being a butch lesbian in this patriarchal world is tough. We have almost no “in real life” role models, very few, if any in the media, and when I was a young dyke, there were even fewer than there are now if you can imagine that. Because this society believes that men own masculinity (and women own femininity), we butches have therefore had no choice but to model ourselves after the men in our lives and go by how the media presents men; and this is nothing if not problematic. Because of this society, because the patriarchy frowns on women wearing “men’s” clothing (and vice versa), and because there are almost no butches in the media, these are two very big reasons why a lot of straight and even gay people assume we all want to emulate, if not actually be men.

The lack of butch role models and having to use men or the media’s idea of men as our guides (well, I don’t, but I did when I was younger because I didn’t know any different and I see it more and more in these young butches today) presents other problems. For those unfamiliar with on-line butch-femme communities, there is a clear hierarchy of “butchness” or masculinity and it discriminates against butches who do not identify as male and it especially celebrates the female transgender, or the trans “man.” In this hierarchy, there are the levels of butchness that I mentioned, such as soft butch, butch, hard butch, male identified butch, and trans “man.” Usually we butches who know what sex is and celebrate the women that we are, are set low on that totem pole, somewhere around soft butch.

You see, even in the (on-line) butch-femme world, a lot of people are conditioned into the patriarchy just enough to believe the bullshit that men/males own masculinity and women/females own femininity, that females cannot be masculine, and that to be masculine, one must either be male identified or they must transition into some facsimile of a man, aka the trans “man.” So even in the butch-femme (on-line) world, female, and therefore feminine is “less than” and most people do not consider a butch to be masculine if she doesn’t deny biology and instead accepts and even celebrates that she is also female. In the comments of my last post, I said this maligned treatment comes from femmes, but I meant some femmes, not all; and to be honest, quite a few male identified butches and trans “men” feel this way as well, that female is less than; or more appropriately, that feminine is less than masculine. Like I said, a lot of this comes from the male identified butches and trans “men,” but it can also come from femmes as well. There are quite a few femmes out there these days who clearly want straight men without actually having to date straight men. They like the analogy that butch = man, that they can have only PIV sex, that they use male pronouns, etc. It is quite frustrating, to say the least. As I said, not all femmes are like this, but more and more of them are coming out of the woodwork as sex becomes more and more conflated with gender and the binary, as dictated by the patriarchy, wins out above all else.

To be fair, I don’t have to be a femme to see this coming from the other side of things as well; but even more than the hierarchy of femme, I also see things like how so many butches expect femmes to be like straight women and how a lot of them even toss femmes aside in favor of straight women. I also see the masculine and feminine stereotypes of the heterosexual world playing out in that a lot of both butches and femmes expect the butches to be the dominant ones, or the “tops,” to borrow a BDSM term and they expect the femmes to be the submissive ones or the “bottoms.” This is problematic in so many ways because it relies on society’s assumptions that feminine is always and only for women while masculine is always and only for men, so the above butches and femmes assume the woman (feminine) is always supposed to submit to the man (masculine). That is unbelievably sexist and it is almost always internalized, born of the conditioning we face being born and raised female in this society; and the sickest part, for me, is that all of that sexism is coming from and pointed towards females, women. So because there are not a lot, if any, butch and femme role models, we end up falling into the traps of our own conditioning by believing the bullshit of the binary, by seeing feminine as women and women as feminine, as well as masculine as men and men as masculine. That, dear reader, is where the idea of male identified butches and trans “men” come from: that blind loyalty to the binary and the patriarchy that conditioned us so very well.

I have always held the notion that transgenderism is a fad, a way of being a special snowflake, of distinguishing yourself from the “norm” so that you can be considered “cool.” It’s exactly like the on-line BDSM fad of several years ago in the butch-femme world (the straight and gay men’s world as well, but again, I cannot speak of what I don’t know). Suddenly, there were daddies, babygirls, masters, and mistresses all over the butch-femme on-line communities. Why? Again, it was a way to be different and special, to separate yourself from the “norm” and appear to be “cool.” Transgenderism is the same thing: a fad. I have said before and I will say it again: if society would stop with the preconceived notion that females or women own femininity and males or men own masculinity and instead allowed people to express themselves in any way that they wish, dress as they wish, wear make-up or not, have long, short, or no hair, walk, talk, and act as they wish, all regardless of their sex, then there would be no need for transgenderism and no need to “transition” into anything.

Masculine and feminine, like gender, are socially constructed, but I don’t view them as genders. Masculine and feminine are simply descriptors that do not belong to either sex. This means that that men can be feminine and that there is nothing wrong with that. On the flip side, women can be masculine and there is also nothing wrong with that.

So with that, I think I have come to the end of it, dear reader. It started as a question in my head: whether or not I could consider myself a butch lesbian and gender critical at the same time. While I consider myself a lesbian essentialist, I do not consider myself a butch essentialist. I may have been born a lesbian and was quite the dyke for a long time, but I found butch through exploration and an ultimate discovery of who I was (and am) as a woman.

I was chatting with a friend the other day (at least, I would like to be able to call her a friend) and she said that for her, “lesbian” is a “descriptor that others can understand.” I liked the way that sounded. Oh not for lesbian, but for butch and masculine. For me, butch has always meant and will always mean, masculine woman, but in this society, people get confused by putting those two words together, masculine and woman, so I say butch.

In that context, butch is a descriptor that others can understand, to varying degrees, of course. Like I said, there is the fad of being male identified and/or transgender, neither of which are actually butches, but the premise is the same. I use butch, not as a gender or an identity, but as a descriptor to signify to the world that while I am masculine, I was, am still now, and always will be a woman. I am a masculine woman, a butch.

So the answer is: yes, I can be critical of gender and be a butch lesbian at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive.

Who Gets To Decide what “Lesbian” Means?

Here’s the thing. This whole “political” lesbians vs. “real” lesbians argument really has me baffled (from here on out, I will be leaving off the quotes, to save my sanity in trying to remember them every time, but you feel me here). It comes up a lot and while I have tried not to get involved, seeing some of the things that have been said have pissed me off more and more to the point where I simply cannot hold my tongue any longer. This isn’t a rant so much as it is just that I am so exasperated by some of the bullshit flying around about what it means to be a lesbian, who is a lesbian, who has the right to define lesbian, etc. I realize I may lose followers and “friends” over my beliefs, my stance, and I would hope this would not be the case over this one issue, but so be it. I can be silent no longer.

It also appears to be tearing our community apart, brick by brick, pitting lesbians (and non-lesbians) against each other as everyone scrambles for a “side.” Hell, just a couple of months ago, I read a blog post by and about political lesbians and it was pretty harsh towards real lesbians and when I tried to comment on even the most basic points that it made, I was hushed. True, they allowed my comments to go through, but that didn’t stop them from trying to shush me when I said something about part of what was written. Then another blogger, presumably a real lesbian, wrote a post in response to the first post, taking it piece by piece and making arguments for and against what the first post was saying. I “liked” the second blog post.

A short time after liking that post, a prominent blogger (CB) called me out on Twitter, asking me exactly what it was I liked about that post. When I told her I liked what it had to say, that wasn’t good enough and she pressed on, attempting to bully me into either (a) agreeing solely with her or (b) backing down and staying silent about the whole thing. When I refused to be bullied and instead asked her why she was asking me these questions, she accused me of being hostile and blocked me on Twitter; but she didn’t stop there. She also unfollowed my blog, deleted the reblogs of my posts that she had on her own blog, and stopped linking to my blog on her many Facebook pages and groups.

That is how serious of an issue this is in our community. I lost an ally simply because I (a real lesbian) liked a blog that she herself (a political lesbian) did not like and I then had the audacity to refuse to be bullied into compliance and/or silence. This wasn’t a case of a woman disagreeing with me and deciding to no longer follow me, that is no big deal, it happens. No, this was a case of a woman who refused and continues to refuse to support another woman over a disagreement on this single issue; and it is not limited to just me. Take a peek on Twitter and see some of the arguments that are taking place over this issue. Women are becoming so divided over this, fighting with each other instead on focusing on the actual problem: men and male violence. It’s crazy.

The incidents I describe above were actually the first time I saw this issue develop into a full blown argument among women on-line. As I said at the top of this post, I tried to stay out of it. I mean, who am I to judge, right? I even made a post asking that all of us come together in love and support for one another instead of fighting like this. We needed to stick together and fight the real threat to us: men, not do what men have wanted women and minorities to do in order for them (men) to stay in power, i.e., fight among ourselves. I also laid the foundation of my beliefs in this: that if a het woman who disliked men and was celibate wanted to call herself a lesbian, then that was bullshit. She is  a celibate heterosexual, not gay! But if a woman discovered she was gay through her politics, then I was cool with that.

But this second blow-up (second that I have seen, mind you) brought about a few things from the political lesbian crowd that really bothered me; and while I say that I didn’t give in to a bully, I really did because I and my blog have been silent for almost a month while I have thought about this issue and what I wanted to say about it. I allowed myself to be bullied into silence because I was afraid of the repercussions of speaking my mind. I was afraid I would lose support if I said exactly what I thought about some of the bullshit that has been spewed forth on this issue. But to be honest, I am really angry with myself for allowing other people to affect me, affect what I would and would not say on my own blog. 

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 Fuck it. Here I go. 

So, who gets to decide what “lesbian” means and who gets to be a lesbian? The answer is simple: I do; and women like me, of course. Lesbians get to decide what lesbian means.

I already gave a definition of lesbian in an earlier blog post (Definition Of Lesbian): “The definition of lesbian has been and always will be the romantic and sexual attraction between 2 females. There never has been nor will there ever be a penis in a lesbian relationship.” That definition stands with one addendum: there never has been nor will there ever be a straight woman in a lesbian relationship. If you sleep with men, you are not a lesbian. If you are a het who is celibate because you hate or are “tired of” men, you are not a lesbian. If you are a female who is not romantically and sexually attracted to females, you are not a lesbian. If you are a woman who doesn’t or doesn’t wish to have sex with other women, you are not a lesbian. If you have a penis, you are most definitely not a lesbian.

This is not rocket science here, dear reader, the rule is simple: a female who is romantically and sexually attracted to another female is a lesbian. Everyone else is not.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that we lesbians are born, we are not made; and no amount of yelling, screaming, shaming, or bullying is going to change the fact that I was born a lesbian. No one gets to tell me any differently. If political lesbians wish to believe that for them, becoming a lesbian was a choice, then have at it, I will not stop any of you. But not one of you gets to tell me or any other lesbian that we were not born lesbians. You don’t have that right, any more than a man has the right to just arbitrarily call himself a lesbian.

The only political lesbians I see pulling this shit are the ones who seem to need to come up with some sort of reason as to why they are lesbians now when they weren’t lesbians before (or perhaps to explain away feelings they have always had but denied having). I am sorry you have struggled, sisters, but to be real here, we have all struggled with our sexuality. I, personally, tried to “pray the gay away.” I had feelings for other girls when I myself was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be gay, so I chose to ignore those feelings and deny who I was for a very, very long time. That doesn’t make me a political lesbian, nor does it make being a lesbian a choice. It means I was born a lesbian but I was in denial due to the shame this society places on women who are not attracted to men. Being a lesbian wasn’t a choice, releasing the shame and embracing the fact that I was a  lesbian was the choice.

There are also those who wish to shame the rest of us by claiming that “lesbian” is some sort of patriarchal construct; that if certain women are born to love women then that means certain other women were born to love men, which is women subjugating themselves to men. To that, I call bullshit. Are all girls/women conditioned to believe that they should have sex and be partnered with men? Of course! But that doesn’t mean that (a) some women don’t actually want to be with men and (b) that lesbianism is a social construct and a choice.

Lesbianism is not a choice, dear reader, the choice comes from no longer denying who you are and no longer allowing the shame of not wanting men to cloud your view of yourself. The only choice we lesbians have is whether or not to accept ourselves as we are and to never again allow anyone, male or female (especially those disguised as allies), to shame us into thinking any differently.

We Need To Come Together In Love & Support

So here’s the thing. We, as women, can disagree with each other and still support, like, and even love each other. I have been trying to be consistent with my blog and write in it at least once a week, but this last week or so has left me somewhat heartbroken, watching women on Facebook, Twitter, and different blogs argue over the debate of political lesbianism vs. lesbians who feel they were born that way.

I realize I sound a little kumbaya-ish or like a voice from the past asking, “Can’t we all just get along?” but this is pretty serious. Whether you consider yourself a lesbian who was born gay or whether you consider yourself a woman who came into being a lesbian through your politics, it doesn’t much matter to me. What matters to me is how we treat each other.

True, if one were to go by the older definition of a political lesbian, that is, a woman who is a celibate heterosexual who considers herself a lesbian just for the politics of it; and she is neither attracted to nor does she have sex with women, then that is unbelievably offensive in its appropriation of our lives and words as lesbians. But what I have been seeing over the past couple of weeks is that the older definition is used by few and the more recent definition of a political lesbian is a woman who discovered that she was a lesbian through her politics, through radical feminism. While I, personally, take serious issue with the former definition, I have no problem whatsoever with the latter.

But seriously, the vitriol on both sides is heartbreaking to watch. I have been seeing “born this way” (or b-t-w) lesbians speak poorly about political lesbians, I have seen political lesbians say some pretty terrible things about b-t-w lesbians, and in at least one case, I saw a woman try to out another woman’s pseudonym; and since I am also using a pseudonym, that last one concerns me greatly. It is completely disheartening to think that another woman might get angry with me when we disagree and try to out me all over the ‘net.

I also understand that these same arguments fly over other things like “gold star” lesbians vs. lesbians who came out later in life, lesbians who are for and against the butch-femme dynamic, and lesbians who are for or against BDSM. While I can understand how some women might feel about me identifying as a butch lesbian, it in no way would affect how I would treat those women, assuming of course that they are treating me with the same respect with which they themselves wish to be treated. The same goes for the “gold star” issue: since I have never had sex with a man, I suppose I would be considered a “gold star” lesbian, but I would never presume to deride my close friend (or any other lesbian) who figured things out after first getting married and having children. We are both lesbians, we are both feminists, we both put women first.

One would think that, instead of putting down women who feel they were born homosexuals or who believe they found lesbianism through their politics or who do or do not subscribe to the butch-femme dynamic or who are or are not “gold star” lesbians, that we would all just accept and support each other as we are and work together to fight the real threat to our and every other woman’s life on this planet: men.

Recently, a fellow lesbian got angry with me and cut all ties. Now, do I understand what the hell happened? Of course not, it came out of left field; but I support her right and her decision to not follow or speak to someone with whom she had a disagreement. Just as I love and support my family members who are conservatives; while I would fight tooth and nail against everything in which they believe, I support and love them as my family and as people who have the right to hold whatever beliefs they choose.

So know this: know that I support you all as my sisters. Regardless of how or when you came to be a lesbian (or if you even -are- a lesbian), regardless of whether or not I agree with everything you say (because I don’t, just as not all of you agree with everything I say), regardless of whether or not we “get along,” regardless of whether or not we even speak to each other, I put women first and you are all my sisters, so I support you all.

If I could ask one thing of all of you, it would be this: even if you disagree, even if you don’t even like each other, give one another all of your love and support. We cannot continue this fight against men, misogyny, the patriarchy when we are fighting each other.

 

 

Let’s Talk About Lesbophobia

The word is considered a joke by many and is never really taken seriously. Why? Because (a) it concerns women and (b) it concerns women who have no need or desire for men, or their penises. I see a lot of people throw around words like bigot, homophobia, misogyny, and transphobia. Sometimes these words are being used correctly and there is some hatred going on where the words are being used. But most of the time, these words are being used as a silencing tactic to keep some women from speaking critically about things like transgenderism, the patriarchy, rape culture, misogyny, etc. Moreover, lesbophobia is rarely used and when it is, it is never taken seriously. So let’s talk about it for a minute because as much as men (including male transgenders) try to dismiss it and laugh it off, this is a real thing and it is silencing, harming, and even killing lesbians.

The responses to my post, “Another Sister Lost to the Madness” have been interesting for a variety of reasons. First, I need to make note that a LOT of misconceptions about me and my writing have surfaced; and while they didn’t start with this particular post, seeing the discussions and claims surrounding me and my intentions with this specific post are at the forefront of my mind tonight. I have seen people misread what I say, misrepresent what I write, and even claim that I am someone they know under another name. I will address these things in another post because, while they are important to discuss, what I discovered as I started writing this is that I have something else to talk about first.

I have noticed that with all of the comments, complaints, and down right trolling over my “Another Sister Lost to the Madness” post, for once, not ONE male transgender has commented, been upset about, or otherwise had any kind of reaction to one of my posts. Interesting, yes? This is important to notice and call out because it says something to me and it should say a lot to women everywhere, including those who wish to transition into some facsimile of a “man.” These men don’t care one iota about women, women’s rights, women’s needs, etc. Since that post was about female transgenders and not male transgenders, the men didn’t  so much as peep about it, because they are narcissists who only care about themselves and their needs, which means, sisters, that THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT WOMEN.

You should note that when I make a post about male transgenders, women come out to support them; straight women, bisexual women, female transgenders, even some misguided lesbians, all kinds of women come out in support of these poor, helpless men who just want to live their lives as “women.” Women support these men. Women stand up for these men. Women fight for these men. But when a post pops up that doesn’t directly concern them and instead focuses on female transgenders, where are the men? Oh yeah. They are over there –> trying to figure out how to make the “cotton ceiling” sound like a good thing so lesbians will finally have hot “lesbian” sex with them without pointing out how the whole idea just adds to the rape culture of our society that women have to deal with every single day.

The same thing happens in the gay community. Lesbians have gone out of our way to be supportive of, stand up with, and fight for our gay brothers. We were there at the Stonewall Riots. We were there during all of the AIDS walks and AIDS awareness projects. We have been there with them, side-by-side through every crisis, every equal rights march, every bashing, every death. But we and our wants, needs, rights, etc. are often ignored by gay men. If it’s not about them and their lives (read: penises), they don’t want to hear about it, much less be bothered to stand with us and fight for it.

When the world at large says the word, “gay,” they are almost always talking about men. When the media talks about gay slurs, you never hear them talking about the words “dyke” or “bulldyke,” only about the words “fag” or “faggot.” Whenever discussing gay rights, it is almost always about men, unless of course, they can parade an old lesbian couple around for the “cuteness” manipulation effect. When you read a gay magazine, there is almost always nothing about lesbians in it, unless it is making fun of us. Hell, when you check the inside cover to see who works at the magazine, the list is almost, if not all male, so is it any wonder they have no clue what it is like to be a lesbian today?

Unless it directly affects them and their lives (penises), men couldn’t care less about not just women, but especially lesbians. So it wasn’t really a shock for me to open up my email and see comment after comment made by “male identified butches” and female transgenders who were unhappy with (and mostly misreading) my post. By the way, as a side note, I even got some mail about trans butches. There is no such thing. You’re either trans or you’re butch but you don’t get to be both. Pick one and move on with your life and stop co-opting another person’s identity.

But does any of the above clue you in, dear sister readers? Do you ever wonder where the men are when it is time to discuss rape and rape culture (and note here that I am talking about men in the plural, as in the men of this male-dominated society; not one specific man)? Do you ever wonder where the men are when a lesbian or lesbian couple are bashed, raped, even killed? Do you ever wonder why popular culture focuses so heavily on gay men and if they decide to focus on a lesbian, she needs to be feminized so she doesn’t offend the male viewers? Do you ever notice that the gay magazines rarely cover anything relevant to you? Or how about the gay bars; ever wonder why they are so heavy with gay men and their hags and never really care about whether or not the lesbians even show up to have a drink there?

If you have never wondered about any of the above, I challenge you to do so now. Think about it. Think about all of the times lesbians have been pushed aside in this society as an anomaly or as women who just need a good man or some “good dick” to become better or “real” women. Think about all the slurs we endure day-in and day-out that no one even bats an eye at because they are so accepted. Think about all the times one of our sisters is bashed, raped, and/or killed and it barely makes a blip on the gay media, let alone the main stream media. Think about all the times your opinions and ideas are dismissed by both the gay and straight communities, only for you to find out later when a man or straight person has the same idea, and it is applauded.

While we are at it, we could be discussing why some of those angry female transgenders aren’t thinking about how dismissed they are. We keep hearing about male transgenders getting caught, literally, with their pants down in women’s restrooms, dressing rooms, showers, etc., and all anyone seems to care about are the poor men who just want to use the lady’s restroom and damn the women who don’t want to be in a close, private space, in the nude, with a naked man. But what about all of the female transgenders who get booted out of the male restrooms or worse, get the shit kicked out of them for daring to both look masculine and be in the men’s restroom? You don’t hear about female transgenders demanding to have their naked bodies in the men’s dressing room or shower with other men because hell, they are just one of the guys. True, this has more to do with male privilege than lesbophobia, it has to do with men feeling like they own every single space and are entitled to everything they can see; but it is all rooted in the same pile of bullshit: the patriarchy.

It all boils down to this: we lesbians are dismissed, we are ignored, we are laughed at and not taken seriously, we are even bashed, raped, and killed. Why? Because we all dare to be women who do not need or want men or their penises and that, sisters, is one of the most dangerous ways to live.

It’s time for women to start standing up for women.

Swag, The “Transman” Troll

Swag_10-14-13

I found this response to my post, Another Sister Lost To The Madness on my Tumblr interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, it is clearly a troll account as the person describes her blog as something she uses to “comment on bullshit tags.” So she clearly isn’t really interested in anything I have to say, she just wants to play the oppression Olympics and prove that she has it worse off then everyone else, which is common with people suffering from a trans delusion.

Secondly, while she starts off saying that she would like my opinion on certain things, she spends the rest of her post trying to shame me for my very valid opinions based on a lot of years of lived experience as a butch lesbian.

The rest of her post is filled with a lot of things trans people say to me when trying to “make me see the error of my ways” in my opinion about transgenderism. She complains about how trans people are treated while completely ignoring what gay people go through because, with trans people, it really is all about them.

She also inaccurately calls transgenderism a medical condition when in reality, it is a mental condition. There is no such thing as “being born (or trapped) in the wrong body,” there is only the belief that one’s life would be easier and one would be happier if one could transform oneself into the opposite sex. This is not a medical condition, this is a mental condition that requires therapy, not hormones and surgery.

Of course, the rest of her post is the typical narcissism that we see with trans people, the accusations that I am speaking for all people, the assertion that I have no sympathy or empathy for trans people, the complaints about how we lesbians just don’t get it and have such easier lives, the assumptions of what it is I think when I never said anything of the sort, etc.

Here’s the thing, Swag. From your post, it sounds like you are a young straight woman who is unhappy with her life. I would venture to guess that you have been subjected to a lot of sexism in your young life and were under the belief that living as a man would make things easier for you but you are now faced with a very harsh reality that giving up on the woman that you are means you gave up the power you had inside of you to deal with said sexism. Or perhaps you thought being trans would make you “special” or unique and now you are feeling the opposite of that and are struggling.

Either way, I feel very badly for you and wish that you could see that conforming to the binary and trying to “be a man” was just a cop out for you. You have a lot of choices and this one, it’s a really bad one.

Yes, being trans is about society, it is about the patriarchy, it is about conforming. Gender is nothing more than a social construct based on the sexual stereotypes put forth by this patriarchal, misogynistic society; and you, my friend, have bought into that, hook, line, and sinker. When a person gets so completely caught in the gender shell game of biological stereotypes, they assume that to dress this way or to enjoy these things, etc. then they must be the opposite sex. This is a sham. 

Swag, I can understand a hatred of one’s self and I can even understand the homophobia or lesbophobia, given what you may have faced in your life, but what I would seriously recommend is being seen by a therapist to help you with your contradictions: the self hate coupled with the narcissism. You are a wonderful and beautiful woman who doesn’t need hormones, surgeries, or to hate lesbians to live a healthy life.

I wish you much luck; and if you ever need to chat, shoot me an email.

 

Another Sister Lost To The Madness

I was at the store the other day when I heard one of the most heartbreaking things that a dyke can hear one of her sisters say. It was a convenience store, so when we all stood in line and were then waited on, we were all side-by-side facing the 2 clerks behind the counter. When I got up to the counter, this young butch dyke who was helping me was talking to a young gay man (customer) next to me. I would guess they were both around 20 years old. The young dyke was saying that she didn’t know how to tell her mom something, which being gay, made my ears perk because hey, we’ve all been there, right?

Then she says that her mom already knows she is a “lesbian” (she used air quotes there), but that she wasn’t a lesbian, she was “trans” and “wanted to live her life as a man;” and she didn’t know how to tell her mom this.

As I said, this was sincerely heartbreaking; to see and hear a young butch dyke talk about transitioning and living her life “as a man.” I wanted to reach across the counter and shake her like a mom who just caught her child running across the street without looking, consequently almost getting hit. It was sad to see this young woman, a sister to me in many ways, speak about transitioning; and I have to say, she didn’t seem happy about it either. She seemed resigned, like it was something she had to do, not something she wanted to do.

I wanted to tell her not to drink the trans kool-aid. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to take drugs or have surgeries and mutilate a perfectly healthy female body. I wanted to tell her to not give in to the binary and conform into societal demands. I wanted to tell her that it’s ok to be any kind of woman you want to be, patriarchy be damned.

I wanted to say all of that and more, because it sickens me to see the kind of pressure young women like this deal with on a daily basis. I dealt with it as well. I was so masculine looking, I was “passing” in high school, even with long hair. In my early 20s when I came out, people still thought I was a man, but it was made worse because I was a lesbian and to so many people, a masculine looking lesbian “wants to be a man.”

Forget that I didn’t want to be a man. Forget that I loved being a woman. Forget that I loved my body. Forget that I was ok with the non-conforming woman that I was. I received so much pressure to transition, I almost did. I figured I was supposed to transition, that it was something everyone expected me to do, so I should just do it.

I am thankful everyday that I decided against it.

But not every young lesbian is that lucky. So many of them feel so much pressure from society and from the trans community that they should transition, they end up making the biggest mistake of their young lives. Sometimes, that mistake is irreversible.

I was reading some comments yesterday from straight men and women and it was pretty astonishing to see not only how little they know about lesbians and trans people, but also how little they really actually care about lesbians. Here is this blog, created and written by a butch lesbian about her lived experiences and her opinions based on those lived experiences and these straight women and men were commenting about how there is no such pressure to conform, there is no such pressure to transition. Hell, they even commented on how harmless the cotton ceiling is and how it doesn’t attempt shame lesbians into having sex with men who call themselves women.

Instead of believing a woman who has lived these experiences and knows about them first hand, these straight people also drank the trans kool-aid and believed the rhetoric spewed forth by the trans community. Instead of listening to what I had to say about lesbians, butches, and trans people, these women and men decided that I was just another silly woman screaming about how awful the menz are and that they shouldn’t take me seriously.

So it shouldn’t be surprising to see young butch dykes out there who are subjected to the trans propaganda, feel like they should transition. It shouldn’t be surprising that young dykes out there who are confronted daily by a society that ignores, ridicules, and even tries to exterminate butch lesbians, feel like they should transition. I shouldn’t be surprising that young dykes out there who hear from the straight community all of the homophobic, lesbophobic, and misogynistic crap they say about lesbians and women, while praising trans for “being brave,” feel like they should transition.

It isn’t surprising to those of us who felt, and still feel that kind of pressure from the straight, trans, and sometimes even gay communities. but it is heartbreaking. When you are a woman who doesn’t conform to what society believes a woman should be and then you thumb your nose at society again by not conforming to the man they believe you should transition into because of how you look, dress, or act, life isn’t just hard, it can sometimes be down right unbearable.

Life as a non-conforming lesbian can be especially difficult when faced with women from your own group, such as other lesbians or feminists, who are so conditioned by the patriarchy that instead of celebrating the kind of non-conforming woman that you are, they also disbelieve your lived experiences, they also feel that you should just transition already, and they also put your needs as a woman on the back burner for the sake of men.

No, it isn’t surprising that this young woman was resigned to her fate. It isn’t surprising  that she was ready to stop being a lesbian and conform to what people everywhere shove down non-conforming women’s throats about transitioning. It isn’t surprising that she was ready to live life “as a man.” It’s heartbreaking, because I, like so many other women out there who refuse to conform to this patriarchal society’s demands, have been there; and sometimes, it’s just easier to go with the flow of those around you and do what is expected.

Someone on my Twitter joked about staging an intervention for this young woman; and I really wish we could. I wish a group of us could sit her down and tell her that she is beautiful and handsome and wonderful just the way she is, that she is part of a community filled with a rich and amazing history, that she is loved and cherished for the non-conforming woman that she is. Our intervention could even consist of women who I keep meeting through my blog, women who went through the transition stages in their attempts to become men and who, years later, regretted that decision and are on their way back to the women they always were.

I could tell her what I told myself so many years ago when faced with the pressure to transition: Fuck society. Fuck the patriarchy. Fuck conforming. I like the woman that I am and I refuse to become something I am not, nor would I ever want to be in order to satisfy the world’s misogynistic view of woman.

Lesbians, Dykes, and Butches: The Real Gender Non-Conformists

Let’s talk about public bathrooms. And airport security. And dressing rooms. And all of the other places that lesbians who don’t conform to the patriarchy’s ideal of what a woman should look like go where we are incorrectly identified as not being women. Places where we are accosted, detained, assaulted, barred from entering, humiliated, mocked, abused, beaten, and even raped; all because we dare to thumb our noses at the binary and proudly remain the women that we are, the women we choose to be, regardless of what the patriarchy demands.

You can even include all of those places where we go for doctor’s appointments, job interviews, etc. Places where our name is called and when we respond, the person calling our name is confused and unable to reconcile the woman’s name on their form with the person in front of them because of how the patriarchy conditions all of us to view women.

A lot of lesbians, dykes, and especially butches don’t fit that perception. We never have. We have always done woman in our own way without a care in the world about how society sees us, while refusing to change who we are when society tries to change us through shame and violence.

We all have the stories, you know the ones. I am walking towards the woman’s bathroom when an older woman walks out the door and then stands there, trying to keep me from entering while telling me this is the ladies restroom, as if I cannot read or see the small female figure in a skirt on the door. Or the times, so many times, I lost count of when I am finishing up in the woman’s restroom, washing my hands when a woman opens the door, looks at me, pauses, looks at the sign on the door, looks at me again, and then just stands there frozen. Or even those times when they don’t stand frozen, but feign confusion asking if this is the ladies room.

We butches, as well as non-conforming dykes and lesbians, we all have stories like these, with varying degrees of danger and humiliation. I have butch friends who flat out refuse to use the woman’s restroom unless a femme friend or lover accompanies them to keep the stares, and the violence, to a minimum. Other butch friends won’t go to the woman’s restroom, no matter what, because they have dealt with such humiliation and violence before that to even consider using a woman’s public bathroom gives them an anxiety attack.

There are other stories, of course: being denied entry into the woman’s dressing room at a clothing store, the stares and murmurs, and even some women moving to another area, while we are changing in a woman’s dressing room at the YMCA, having to go through airport security more than once or, worse, being detained because the people at security look at us and see: men.

These stories go on and on and on for all of us, so it really wasn’t a shock to see news reports online of a woman, Susan Ho, who was using the woman’s restroom at a casino where she was entered in a bowling tournament, only to be unlawfully detained and assaulted when she tried to exit the bathroom and was accused of being a man in the woman’s restroom. At one point, the people detaining her even went so far as to discuss the possibility of removing Susan’s shirt to see if she was actually a woman, as she said. Read the full article here: http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/10/08/61853.htm

I say I am not shocked when I see this sort of thing in the news, but it doesn’t make reading about it any less disheartening. As I said before, some lesbians and dykes and especially we butches don’t fit the patriarchal view of what women “should” look like.  When people see me in my jeans, t-shirt, and hat, they make a snap judgment and see what their conditioning tells them to see: a man.

See, we are the real gender non-conformists. I know that transgenders and their apologists and allies love to make the false claim that trans men and trans woman are gender non-conformists, but that is all smoke and mirrors to hide what is actually happening. Trans people are the very opposite of gender non-conformists. They do everything they possibly can to completely and utterly conform to the binary.

Look at trans men. When on T, what is the first thing trans men do? Go out of their way to grow facial hair because, to them, facial hair is one of the biggest defining factors of maleness, of being men. Forget the fact that there are women out there who have no choice but to shave their faces because for one medical reason or another (this differs woman to woman), they have facial hair.

Then look at trans women. They are one hundred percent about presentation; and that presentation is driven by male desire, by the patriarchy, by what they, as men, find attractive in women. They must dress and act in extremes with the long hair, tons of make up, and dresses all the time because when men think about women, this is how they see women in their minds’ eyes: as a completely vamped up, stylized version of woman.

Both trans men and trans women go out of their way to be as “manly” or as “womanly” (respectively) as they can be because that is what the patriarchy, what the binary demands. Pick one or the other, the patriarchy says. If you wear men’s clothing, you must be a man; and if you wear women’s clothing, you must be a woman. If you are going to be a man or a woman, make sure to be the most über man or woman you can be so that we are positive that that is what you are. It is this same line of thinking that has parents turning tomboys into little trans men and feminine boys into little trans women. In the parents’ eyes, they are doing their child a favor but what they are really doing is forcing their child into the binary box.

Butches, as well as non-conforming lesbians and dykes on the other hand, are who they are while still being women, the patriarchy be damned. Instead of conforming, we, literally, stand out and are the most visible women in the lesbian community. We take a lot of heat for that, yes, but we love our bodies, we love being women, and we are not going to “transition” into some variation of men simply to please the patriarchal binary system.

Transgenderism is, at its very core, conformity. That is the number one goal of transgenderism: conforming to the binary. Butches and non-conforming dykes and lesbians want the very opposite.

Transgenders try to co-opt our words by claiming to be women and even lesbians. They try to co-opt our spaces by forcing their way into women’s restrooms, dressing rooms, and other woman-only spaces. They try to control our bodies by shaming us into having sex with them or else be labeled bigots and transphobes. They even try to steal our histories by turning women like Teena Brandon into a trans man, by claiming the butch and drag queen who started the Stonewall riots were actually a trans man and trans woman, etc.

They do all of this under the guise that they are gender non-conformists, when the truth of the matter is simply this: if trans people were truly non-conformists, there would be no transgenderism. Women would be women and men would be men, regardless of how they dressed or acted; and there would be no back lash, no mocking or shaming, no violence toward them, towards all of us, for being who we are.

No, the true non-conformists are butches, lesbians, and dykes. A professor once told me in college, “You are a genderfuck.” He was right; and I am damn proud of it.

 

Extremist or Realist?

Here’s the thing. We all have our own filters, be they the filter of white privilege, class privilege, male privilege, living as an oppressed POC or, especially, WOC, female, male, gay, straight, bi, etc. The list goes on and on because there are as many filters through which to view the world as there are people in the world.

So I see the comments, the tweets, the discussions, and the arguments about my blog and the posts contained therein. I also see the accusations: transphobe, extremist, vile, vitriol; and those are just a few from the last couple of days.

I have been on-line for a number of years and I have learned that words are very very important. I try very hard to choose my words carefully and while sometimes I leave out the word, “some” when speaking about a group of people, such as trans women, I have never used the word, “all” when speaking about any group of people. If someone reading my blog sees the word, “all,” then that is their own filters through which they are viewing my blog and I cannot (a) be accountable for that or (b) find my way to being offended by it.

I think it says a lot about the reader who sees, “all trans women” or “all bisexuals” or “all” anything in my blog and then gets so angry that they must argue and spew forth accusations like transphobia, hatred, extremist, etc. It is very telling to me to see these kinds of responses to my blog. It tells me that (a) these people see themselves in the mirror I am holding up and this bothers them to the point of wanting to smash said mirror, and/or it tells me that (b) they are so conditioned by the patriarchy and the binary system of being that they cannot fathom a different way, a different system, and anything that contradicts what they have been conditioned to believe must be destroyed.

So let me lay it out for you, dear reader. I am not a transphobe. I do not hate trans people. I do not believe anyone should face discrimination, beatings, or death simply for being who they are. What I do “hate” is that this patriarchal binary system that is currently in place in our society makes some people think their only option is transgenderism. Because let’s be clear, transgenderism is a strict adherence of the binary system. It is not non-conforming, it is conforming to such a degree that drugs and surgery are needed in order to complete the necessary steps to conform absolutely to what society expects to see.

See, instead of letting girls and women be whomever they choose to be, they are being encouraged and conditioned to believe they are boys and men. That tomboy down the street? Her parents, her school, and the media has convinced her she is a boy. Instead of boys and men being allowed to be whomever they want to be, even if that means going through life wearing dresses and make-up, they are conditioned to believe they have to transition into a facsimile of a woman. That little boy who likes to wear mommy’s dresses? His parents, his school, and the media have convinced him that he should be a girl. That is what this patriarchal binary system has created: the need to be one or the other and to never deviate from either unless you are “switching” from one to the other.

But in reality, there is no “switching.” Sex is not gender is not sex. Sex is biology. With few exceptions, human beings are born either female or male. Girls and women are female children and female adults, respectively; just as boys and men are male children and male adults, respectively. This is basic science, biology 101. No matter how many drugs or how many surgeries, females cannot become males and males cannot become females; therefore women cannot become men and men cannot become women.

The very idea that a person has to be one or the other, female or male, is insulting and damaging to the gay community. Lesbians everywhere, this butch included, are non-conforming to the binary. So many different lesbians, refusing to adhere to the binary and thumbing their nose at the patriarchy as they, as we live as woman on our own terms. There are also gay men everywhere who do not conform to the binary, we see this with gay men who are deemed by society to be feminine and we also see this with drag queens, just to name two.

For transgenders to claim that they are “two-spirits” is insulting to the gay Native Americans who actually are two spirits. For them to claim that they are the ones who are non-conforming to the binary is insulting to hundreds of thousands of lesbians and gay men over generations who spent their entire lives not conforming to society’s rules and expectations. For transgenders to also re-write history so that drag queens and butches of the past suddenly become trans women and trans men, respectively erases our identities and our very histories. If I “hate” anything at all, reader, I “hate” that and will fight against it with every fiber of my being.

What I also “hate” is that a great majority of trans women want to co-opt women’s spaces, women’s words, and yes, women’s bodies. Whether certain feminists wish to believe lesbians or not, this is our lived and shared reality. The “cotton ceiling” exists and it is an affront to lesbians everywhere. Lesbians are shamed and guilted into having sex with male-bodied people who call themselves women and are told that if they do not comply, they are bigots for not accepting trans women as women.

Trans women’s whole state of being rests on how they are perceived. When that is threatened by lesbians who, by the very definition of a lesbian, do not wish to have sex with men, these trans women become so enraged at the very thought that we are denying them that they threaten us with rape, bodily harm, and even death at (a) being “misgendered,” and (b) our refusal to see past their penis and their being male long enough to have sex with them. This is not conjecture or rhetoric. This is reality. This is the “cotton ceiling.”

As a side note for those who do not know and who do not care to use Google, the “cotton ceiling” is a phrase that was created to describe the barrier trans women face when trying to date and have sex with lesbians. See, our panties are that barrier and the “cotton ceiling” represents the attitude that we simply need to be “educated” to accept trans women as women and then we will be willing to date and have sex with them. The very concept is so misogynistic and supports a rape culture that is so prevalent not just in this country, but world wide.

I do understand that even after having read this post, some will still insist that since I do not see trans women as women, then I am a transphobe and filled with hate. That is simply not true. What I am is someone who can see past the rhetoric, past the conditioning so ingrained in all of us, and see that while sex is a biological constant, gender is a social construct that can change with each person who tries to define what it is.

I also understand, and have been subjected to, men who do not even bother to read the entirety of my posts, but still have so much to tell me about what I am thinking and feeling, what I mean, and why I am such a bigot. These are men who feel so entitled, they don’t even feel they need to be informed before dressing a woman down for her words that they didn’t even be bothered to read. This does not hurt my feelings, I simply cannot and do not take these men seriously.

And, for the record, I do not hate men, not even the men who call me names and threaten me and my sisters with rape, violence, and death. What I do “hate” is that because of male privilege, men feel so entitled as to think they can take over women’s spaces, take over women’s words, and take over women’s bodies. Do “all” men feel this way? Maybe. Maybe not. But I can tell you that ALL men are conditioned from birth. ALL men are instilled with male privilege and even if society may see them as women based on their dress and actions in strict adherence to the binary, they still hold those privileged attitudes within themselves. It is that privilege that makes them believe that there is no space they cannot be in, no words they cannot co-opt, and no woman they cannot have.

That is what I “hate.”

Trans “Women” Hope Butches Become a Thing of the Past

Astonishingly, and I say that sarcastically, since this does not surprise me in the least, trans women actually hate women. It isn’t just about men controlling women, this is flat-out misogyny at work here.

It’s no secret that trans women, being men, believe they not only have the right to use the words woman and lesbian to describe themselves and they not only have the right to women’s spaces, these men also believe they have the absolute right to women’s bodies. This is what the cotton ceiling is all about: men demanding that women who don’t want to have sex with them, have sex with them anyway or be accused of being bigots for not having open enough minds to see these men as women.

Let’s be clear, shaming, guilting, or tricking a woman into having sex with you is rape. Period. Full stop. Women, lesbians, have the right to refuse to have sex with anyone they choose for whatever reason they choose. Why? These are our bodies.

So is it really surprising that these same trans women, who are straight men and sexual deviants, do not support or even care about butch lesbian women and actually want to see us disappear altogether?

I am used to it, of course. Men have always LOVED the idea of lesbians, but only in that they are picturing thin, feminine lesbians who eventually just really want to be with men and don’t really want women at all. The thought of butch lesbians repulses men because, as some ignorant people believe, they think we just want to be men. They also do not find us attractive because we appear masculine. So, of course, those women they find the least attractive should be destroyed, especially those of us who threaten their very existence: we don’t need or want men and women want us.

Taking the ignorance of these men a step further, it isn’t really a shocking revelation to see that since they believe all butches want to be men, then surely we are on our way to becoming men just by being butches and we will eventually all transition, making butch lesbians obsolete and, as I said the other day, extinct.

  

David-Dana-Taylor-butch-tweet

 

So much for the LGBT community, huh? That’s transactivist, David “Dana Lane” Taylor, by the way, under one of his many troll accounts expressing his belief that the way for the “terf menace” (another slur created and propagated by trans women to describe radical feminists and, especially, lesbians) to be gone once and for all is to get rid of butch lesbians; and the way to do that is to have us all transition into “men.”

What these men really want is for all of us butches to just hurry up and transition already so we can be trans men and support these misogynistic sexual deviants in their clear cut efforts to own and possess women.

What these men fail to realize however, is that women who transition into “men” are not butch lesbians who want to be men. There are butches who transition, yes, but almost every instance of that is due to the kind of societal pressure these men are expressing; the whole idea that if we look, act, dress, and talk “like men” then we should just BE men. This stems from the belief that there can only be two ways of being woman/female or man/male; and there is never any kind of overlap or in between.

Little girls, who would have at one time been considered tomboys and been allowed to become whatever kind of woman they wanted to be are now being forced into a trans lifestyle by their parents under the guise of “understanding and support.” Young butch women who are happy being butch are pressured into transitioning by a society that includes lesbians telling them that they should just be men and get it over with already. Young women who are straight but hate their lives as women transition as a way to escape the patriarchy into which they have been born as second class citizens. Those are just some of the reasons why women transition into “men,” but make no mistake, they are not transitioning because they are “men trapped in women’s bodies,” they are transitioning because the binary system tells them they should.

This is why the very idea that the binary system could be a lie, a social construct designed by men, is what scares these men to death. The idea that women can be who they are and not want to be men, not want to transition, is unfathomable to these men. Add that to the idea that there are women out there who honestly do not need or want to be with men, dress or not, and you have a full scale panic on your hands that creates rapist thinking like the cotton ceiling and lesbophobic thinking like the above sentiments Mr. Taylor put forth.

And let’s be honest, the above sentiments are lesbophobic and homophobic. To put forth the idea, the hope that eventually all butch women will transition and thank god, so we don’t have to look at or deal with them any longer is unbelievably homophobic and lesbophobic in that it expresses the desire to exterminate all butch lesbians.

At what point, do you think, will lesbians and women stand up to these men and say, “No more!”? There is going to come a time when lesbians and women realize that these men are just your average everyday men who want to own, possess, and eventually do away with women. The fact that they are using the trans lifestyle to promote their misogynistic and homophobic views should wake women up and make them realize they are fighting for the extinction of their own sisters.

So what are you, dear reader going to do about it? What are you doing to ensure that these men will no longer get to dictate with whom you will have sex or which women are ok and which women need to be exterminated?

 

Follow-up to “Ass”uming Butches Into Extinction

Since there were, understandably, a lot of questions about how this butch woman, Doffy, responded to her doctor’s gross misjudgment of who she was as a person, I thought I would follow-up with that information.

I would first like to point out that yes, I know this person, she is a real human being, she is a butch lesbian, and she took and posted the pic herself.

Secondly, As you will see in one of my pics that I will post here, I would like to add that Doffy had absolutely no problem with sharing every inch of the picture, including all of her personal information. The decision to redact personal information including her address, phone number, date of birth, and hospital record number, as well as the doctors’ names, and the hospital she visited was mine and mine alone. It is one thing to say, sure I am fine with you posting whatever, but it is an entirely different beast to have every piece of your personal information posted out onto the internet like that. So I decided her name was enough; and while I am in possession of both the original pic and the redacted version, I still feel that way.

Now that those bits of information are out of the way, on to her response.

When Doffy originally posted this information, a mutual friend of ours asked her what a lot of people are asking: “This was outrageous! How did you respond?”

I was quite vocal at the registration desk. I said with a loudish voice…I am NOT trans, I do NOT take drugs to look this handsome and I have fallopian tubes…the secretary looked at me like I had 3 heads and laughed a bit. Said she’d make sure to note it…which she did not…and I said “I am surprised that the medical industry would assume without question! I am taking my drug free fallopian tubes to the waiting area”

Later, she followed up with:

But dont be mad or upset on this account. I made sure to inform the entire registry office and the registry office in the triage AND the 5 doctors and 3 nurses that I am in fact female… that the doctor who wrote the chart was obviously and easily confused. And the fact that she (the doctor who wrote that without questioning me) did not even order an x-ray on a finger cut to the bone and that that very finger is broken…only proved my point of incompetence both medically and physiologically.

When I was thinking about posting about this, our mutual friend asked Doffy for her permission to post the pic of her chart notes and she responded with the following texts:

 

 Doffy-text-1Doffy-text-2

 

As you can see, she was OK with posting the pic containing all of her personal identification and even had a sense of humor about the whole incident; but that’s what we women do, isn’t it? Sure, we get mad in the moment that it happens, but later we laugh it off as someone’s silly mistake. That is part of what makes this so dangerous and why I felt such a need to post about it. We women need to stand up and know that it is OK to be angry in situations like this, that we can be offended about someone catering to the patriarchy like that and it is OK to do so.

What Doffy went through can happen to any of us who don’t succumb to societal pressure and conform to the binary way of thinking and being. When I was discussing this last night, a horrible thought occurred to me: what if this butch lesbian had been unconscious or unresponsive when she was brought into the ER and the assumption that she was a trans man had been made? It is clear from the texts, that her doctor didn’t do any kind of checking with Doffy when it came to meds. So, what if she were unconscious and they decided to be “helpful” and prescribe this, in their misinformed opinion, “John Doe” testosterone for the duration of her stay at the hospital?

I realize I am taking this to an extreme, but if something like that is even a possibility, how frightening is that for butch lesbians or for any woman who doesn’t conform?

“Ass”uming Butches Into Extinction

Just yesterday, I wrote about how bisexual women, straight women, and men claiming to be women were co-opting the word lesbian in their effort to twist and distort it until it means nothing; and I wondered if the patriarchy, with the help of the “I hate labels” and the “sexuality is fluid” crowds, would swallow the term whole, taking lesbians’ identity away, once and for all. Of course, that is a hard pill to swallow and the majority of lesbians will fight tooth and nail against people who think they can co-opt our words and spaces, bully us into silence, and shame us into having sex with trans women and their accompanying penises by calling us transphobic and bigots because we do not want to have relationships or sleep with men.

So imagine my horror when I was sent this screen cap of a visit to the doctor recently. A butch lesbian, a woman who does not fit society’s definition of what a woman should look like or how a woman should dress, behave, or present herself went to the ER. She checks in, sees the doctor, and before leaving, takes a peek at her chart to see something so unbelievable, for a second, I thought I was being punked when told about it.

 

Doffy1

Posted with her permission,
including leaving her name visible.

 

This doctor decided that the butch lesbian in front of her was not actually a butch lesbian but a trans man in denial. In the chart, she writes that this butch is a 48 year old trans man but adds that the “chart will say female.” There was no conversation, there were no questions about whether or not this woman believed she was trans, there was nothing but an assumption; and that assumption was based on this butch woman’s appearance.

Instead of inquiring, instead of taking a good look at the person in front of her and seeing the woman inside the butch, instead of accepting that a woman can look and dress in a manner deemed by society to be masculine while still being a woman, the doctor assumed this butch lesbian was a trans man and put forth that assertion into the woman’s chart without even so much as a by your leave.

I can tell you, as a butch, that having something like that happen: the complete erasure of the woman that you are in order to appease a group of people with such a debilitating disorder, they cry “bigot” at the slightest foul, is nothing short of humiliating. In induces a rage that, to be honest, I have no analogy for at the moment. I get irritated when I am mistaken for a man, sure, but when the person hears my voice or takes a more-than-glancing look at me, they realize their mistake, see the woman that I am, and, most of the time, apologize for not paying enough attention to the person in front of them so as to see more than a hat, t-shirt, and pair of jeans that led them to their erroneous assumption in the first place.

This is different; and, no, it isn’t the same thing as a trans person being “misgendered.” That’s silly, actually, when you take into consideration that gender is a social construct that, with so many people, changes with the wind. No this is the obliteration of butch women.

Worse than that, this is a person, a doctor, proclaiming that the patriarchy, that men mean so much to her and her conditioning is so complete, she has decided to, without consent, assign maleness to the woman standing in front of her; and she expects that gross misjudgment to be rewarded with thanks and praise for being such a good sheep in the gender pasture.

This is why we must band together and stop this madness, this trans epidemic, this erasure of women, and this annihilation of butch lesbians. Butch female lesbian visibility is a feminist issue, one that is much more important, and vitally so, to women; more so than prioritizing men’s issues. Lesbians should not be erased for the sake of men’s “delicacy.”  

 Our words are important. Our spaces are important. Our sex is important. Every time we take another step back to readjust the lines that should not be crossed, we get closer and closer to the cliff leading to our extinction.

“Lesbians” Who Aren’t Really Lesbians At All

I saw this blog the other day with a video in it that had women who identify as lesbians saying they have sex with men, but still consider themselves lesbians. I really thought that was the stupidest thing I have seen on these interwebs for a very long time until I saw the corresponding Facebook post linking the video and read the comments from all of the, well, I was going to say LGBT and queer folks, but I have a sneaky suspicion that there were a few straight folks in there chiming in as well.

This has to be one of the most insane notions to hit the LGB community and we all know exactly where it’s really coming from here: men. The patriarchy.

Men have been trying to break in to the lesbian communities ever since there have been men and women who don’t want them. Porn, movies, and TV shows have been built around the premise that all lesbians really need is some good dick, that all lesbians secretly really want dick, but they can’t get it, etc. It’s a notion built by men who cannot even fathom for one second that women could live, love, and have sex without them.

Several of the comments talked about how sex is fluid and all labels suck. Have you ever noticed how people who say they hate labels actually have 10,000 labels to describe themselves? And sexuality is fluid? Come on! Bisexuals have been saying that for years; no one bought it then and no one is buying it now. Sexual fluidity is a myth. It’s something people say when they want to be cool or edgy or are so confused about what they want, they can’t land on any one thing.

And labels only “suck” to those who want to fit into one label but can’t so they either grab a whole bunch of other labels, they try to dismantle the label they want and can’t fit into, or they cry about how bad labels are in the hopes that no one will notice they are trying to cram themselves into something that just doesn’t fit. If they can’t have that label, then no one should have it. It’s the logic of a 3 year old child.

It all really comes down to men. Since the patriarchy can’t seem to change lesbians and since we are becoming more mainstream with more acceptance, the only thing left is to destroy our ID from the inside out by having women who are actually bisexual claim to be lesbians and to have straight men pretend to be women and then pretend to be lesbians on top of that.

It’s the same line of thinking that created the “cotton ceiling,” which calls any lesbian who refuses to have sex with a male claiming to be a woman a bigot because lesbians don’t want to have intimate and sexual relations with men.

That’s what this really boils down to: lesbians are women who have intimate emotional and sexual relationships with other women. Men did not, do not, and will not ever fit into that equation. The thing that most trans and trans apologists get confused about is this isn’t just about genitals, this is about two women connecting in an emotional, sexual, and spiritual way that not only doesn’t include or even require men, men couldn’t even grasp the concept.

To men, it IS all about genitals and about who is having sex with whom. That’s why when trans women started screaming about the “cotton ceiling” and how lesbians who won’t sleep with them and their penises are bigots, all they cared about was the act of fucking. It wasn’t about love, emotions, feelings, etc., just about who we will and will not fuck.

The women in the video and a few of the comments even mentioned how lesbians can be women who love other women but still have sex with men because sex doesn’t matter. This comes back to the male notion that everything is based on sexual intercourse and nothing else. Saying something like the above is akin to cheating on your partner and saying that you didn’t care about the person at all, it was just sex. Well, that’s still cheating and having sex with men still makes you either bisexual or straight.

One woman even phrased bisexuality as being a person who loves both sexes equally and since these women loved women more than men, then they were lesbians. As if there is some sort of scale that measures how much you love one or the other sex or something.

Women who love and have relationships and sex with men are straight. Women who love and have relationships and sex with women are lesbians. Women who love and have relationships and sex with both sexes are bisexuals. Period. End of story. Exit stage left. Close the curtains. Queue the fat lady. The end.

Butch Visibility in a Man’s World

I was doing a very normal thing this morning: taking out my trash. I was casually dressed in sweats, a t-shirt because I was outside getting a few things done; and a ball cap because it was sunny outside. As I get to the trash can at the end of my driveway, a truck pulls up and a guy yells out, “Hey Buddy!” I told him I wasn’t his buddy and asked him what he wanted. He got upset, mumbled something about how he wanted to ask me something and that he didn’t know what he did to me but whatever. I ignored him and went back into my house.

Was I a little harsh? Maybe. A lot of people, and I mean a LOT of people judge me based on my clothing, how I walk and stand, how short my hair is, my ball cap, etc and they conclude within 2 seconds of seeing me that I am a man. I won’t lie, it is upsetting for us butches to be mistaken for men like that. It makes us feel invisible and it discounts the fact that we are women, which is something we still are no matter what we do or wear and we are proud of this fact. We are absolutely nothing like men, so to be mistaken for men shows us that the world did and does see us in the black and white of the patriarchal binary system.

Do you know what I didn’t do? I didn’t threaten to kill him or threaten him with rape for his mistake. I said a few words and wasn’t a polite timid woman apologizing to him for HIS mistake, but I didn’t do what so many men who pretend to be women do: I didn’t threaten, harass, or stalk him for mistaking me for a man.

As I said, we are completely different from men. We don’t think or act like men and we sure as hell don’t want to BE men. When people accuse us of this, it is either because they truly don’t understand what and who butches are or because they are trying to humiliate, discredit, and/or silence us.

Butches are at both the forefront and at the back of the LGB community. A butch was right there at Stonewall as one of the people who started the riots that sparked the LGB civil rights movement. Butches are highly visible, which leads to taunts, slurs hurled at us, beatings, rape, and death. We are antagonized for being butch women because we are not, according to society, the “right” kind of women.

At the same time as all of the above, we are also invisible. We are not represented in TV, movies, or other media. When we do happen to end up on TV, it is either as a caricature that is made fun of or we are expected to dress, act, and BE more feminine to please the general audience.

And then you have a group of individuals who are trying to erase butches from the planet completely. They are doing everything in their power to render us extinct. This group is comprised of 2 types of people: (1) the men who claim to be women and then further claim to be butches (see Tobi Hill-Miller, etc.); (2a) the women who feel the right course of action in this patriarchal binary system is to attempt to transition into men, but still call themselves butches (FtM or F2Tg); (2b) the women who are butches, but insist that they are also somehow male by labeling themselves “male-identified” butches.

These people make it almost impossible for young lesbians who are “different,” who are baby butches, but don’t know where they fit in this world to be ok with the women that they are. These young women are encouraged and even brainwashed into transitioning into something similar to men because they are taught that to be a different kind of woman is bad. They are taught that the binary is king and that they must choose: masculine = man and feminine = woman.

To be anything else, a masculine woman or a feminine man would be an abomination in these binary-loving people’s eyes. So they preach and they intimidate and they brainwash and they bully these young women (and sometimes even older women fall into this trap) into taking hormones, having healthy breasts cut off, having healthy uteri and ovaries removed, all in the name of patriarchy.

So we are disappearing. As we watch our sisters try to embrace all that is male in order to be more accepted by the patriarchy and as we watch more and more young women trying to transform their bodies into something more acceptable to this male-dominated society, butches are disappearing and being replaced by fakes who distort who we are.

Something has to be done soon about this trans epidemic or we will eventually end up with the total extinction of butches; and that would be a shame. Transwomen are already bastardizing the very idea of what and who a woman is by trying to claim the one thing men have never really owned: femaleness. We cannot allow women to continue to hurt themselves by trying to change their bodies and delude themselves into thinking that change will make society accept them.

There is a whole generation of wonderful butch voices that needs to be heard. There are butches still out here who could be role models to young lesbians, showing them that it is k do be different, it is ok to love your butch body, it is ok to be women who the patriarchy and this binary system of being will never accept.

Acknowledge our existence.

Acknowledge our experience.

Know there is a better way of being butch in this man’s world.

Definition of Lesbian

The definition of lesbian has been and always will be the romantic and sexual attraction between 2 females. There never has been nor will there ever be a penis in a lesbian relationship.

You can put the penis under a pair of panties and/or under a skirt or a dress. You can even try to convince the ignorant and those without the capacity to think critically that the penis is a female sex organ; but the fact will remain that it is a penis attached to a male body and neither belong in a lesbian relationship.

Shaming, guilting, and/or intimidating lesbians into accepting the penis as a part of their sex life is sexist, misogynistic, and could even be considered sexual assault. Dare I say, some might even consider that action to be lesbophobic.

Lesbians do not want to have sex with males and their penises, that is the very definition of what it is to be a lesbian; and no amount of rhetoric, no amount of screaming about transphobia, no amount of coercion will ever change that fact.

Guest Post — A Black Butch Speaks: Addressing Female Oppression by Pippa Fleming

This is a fantastic analogy on how we treat young black and butch girls who hate their bodies and wish to change things about themselves in order to become more like the rest of society instead of being taught to love themselves and their bodies, society be damned.

 

As lesbians and especially as butches, we need to step out more, be more visible, let our voices be heard, and even mentor a young butch struggling with her body and how it does not conform to society’s standards.

 

Society needs to change, not the individual it chooses not to accept.

Bev Jo -- Radical Lesbian Feminist writing

A Black Butch Speaks: Addressing Female Oppression

Guest Post by Pippa Fleming

I’ve been holding silence for quite some time but now it’s time for me to speak.

When a Black child presents with signs of internalized racism, we want to protect them. We want them to know they are perfect as they are and loved for exactly who they are. If we are conscience Black folks, we try to infuse our young people with the knowledge, skills, wisdom and support necessary, so they may survive and thrive in this racist society.

If little Lakesha comes home with “mommy I hate being Black and I want to be white” we are shocked, dismayed and sadden by her self loathing and rush to find the source of her oppression. Is it school, the media, her peers, society or all of the above?

So why when little butch Lakesha comes home with…

View original post 300 more words

The Bullshit Surrounding Butches and Male Pronouns

You know, this whole craziness with butches and the use of male pronouns on-line started out innocently enough. There we were, back in the day, flocking to  AOL and/or gay.com chat rooms: tons of lesbians connecting from all over the country and world. There weren’t many butch-femme chat rooms and those in existence weren’t populated by that many women (side note: when I say woman in this post, I mean a biologic female), so most of us hung out in the lesbian chat rooms; because, hello, we were all lesbians. Note that this was well before “lesbian” became a bad word.

While some women had pretty obvious names that let others know if they were butch or femme, a lot didn’t and it caused a lot of confusion. So somewhere along the line, people started calling butches “hy” as a way to recognize that this was a masculine person who was not a man; and “he” was used as well, sometimes as an alternative, sometimes as a preference.

I, myself never used either because (a) I am a woman, (b) I really hate made up and misspelled words, and (c) it felt wrong and stupid calling another woman “he.”

Again, this was JUST on-line. I never ever heard anyone in real life refer to butches with male pronouns.

Unfortunately, that innocent beginning snowballed into this massive cluster fuck of pronouns where everyone has their own opinion as to what butches should or should not be called. Most people, femmes and butches alike, default to “he/hy” for ALL butches, even those who they know have expressed a preference for female pronouns.

Then, there are those butches who prefer to be called “she” but don’t mind being called “he.” This attitude about it really pisses me off because this way of thinking reinforces the default to “he/hy.” It helps to reinforce the invisibility of the woman in the butch.

When butches who prefer “he/hy” are accidentally called “she,” they flip their shit. It’s like the world is ending for them because someone called them “she” or “ma’am” or whatever. A battle ensues, people are accused of “feminizing,” etc. It’s crazy.

On the other hand, those who prefer to be called “she” are expected to love being called “he/hy.” We are supposed to feel honored and happy that someone has just ignored the fact that we are women and created this cloak of invisibility around us under the guise of “respect;” and god help us if we try to correct the person using the incorrect pronouns. You would think we suddenly grew a third nipple in the middle of our forehead or something!

The deeper issue here is, of course, misogyny. Male privilege tells us that women, in this and many other societies, are considered less than. Men are considered better, stronger, faster, and smarter than women. Men have almost all of the power in politics, men compromise almost all of the top corporate positions, men are considered to be the leaders of the world. A man’s opinion is considered to be the only one that matters and god help the woman who dares to stand up to him and tell him he is full of shit.

Because women are considered less than, calling someone (particularly a man) a pussy or a bitch or a girl is considered an insult. In that same vein, calling a butch “she” is also considered an insult.

So since woman is the insult, then man is the compliment. The number one compliment for FtMs or male-ID butches (my god, how that term is SUCH an oxymoron!) is that they are called “sir” in public by straight people. Their ultimate horror is for someone to use female pronouns when speaking to/about them; or an even WORSE thing to have happen to them is to be “feminized” (more misogyny).

Continuing on the thought that being a woman is an insult and being a man is a compliment, then butches, who are masculine women, are then supposed to LOVE being referred to with male pronouns; and if we don’t like it, we just have to suck it up and/or fuck off because that’s just the way it is.

It’s all just so fucking heteronormative and misogynistic. Calling us “he/hy” doesn’t just make the women that we are invisible and it doesn’t just perpetuate the misogynistic view that women are less than, it also makes other people start to actually SEE US AS MEN.

Suddenly, all of the erotica written by femmes and butches has “he” and “she” in it, as if it were about a heterosexual couple. All of the things butches are expected to do are all male related: fixing cars, loving sports, drinking a beer with our hand down our pants while watching the game and bitching at “our woman” to make us a sandwich, etc.

In everyone’s eyes, we BECOME men! This is why so many non-femme/butch lesbians assume that butches and femmes are simply emulating straight couples. How could they NOT think that when all of the butches and femmes are calling butches “he” and expecting us to take out the trash and complete our honey-do list?

It all starts with words. Words are very very powerful and when we are not careful, something as innocent as trying to tell who is who in a chat room can snow ball into all of us falling back into the same old bullshit where femmes treat us like men, straight people and other lesbians think we all want to be men, and the young butches coming out today all think they have to transition because, hell, if they are masculine, then they MUST be men, right?

That, right there, is part of why I decided to stop with the silence and start speaking up about these issues: those young butches out there who think their only choice in life is to transition.

It’s time to change our way of thinking. It’s time to stop using male pronouns for women and denying who we are. It’s time to stop comparing butches to men and treating us as if we think and behave like men. Men don’t own masculinity and it’s time we stopped pretending that they do.

It’s time to stop female invisibility.

What ARE you, anyway? She or he?

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I saw this on Facebook yesterday and it made me think of all those times when a woman around me clearly thought I was a man and treated me as such by clutching her purse, looking over her shoulder, distancing herself from me, etc. On the one hand, I applaud women protecting themselves. After all, men are the number one cause of violence against and death of women; so, yes, please make sure you are mindful of the men around you who you think might do you harm.

On the other hand, when this and a thousand other little things like it happen to me daily, I can’t help but feel invisible in this patriarchal world. People, in general, see the hat and the “men’s” clothing and they automatically see a man standing before them, while the woman who is actually there is completely invisible.

As a Butch, I am invalidated by the straight community, shunned by parts of the lesbian community, and outright mocked by the trans community. The straight community thinks I should be more feminine, parts of the lesbian community think I just want to be a man, and the trans community thinks I am a transman in denial who should just transition already.

But I am a woman.

Butches are women.

We were born women and we were raised women in a male dominated society.

We may be masculine, but we are still women.

True, there are some butches who like to play the pronoun game on-line by demanding that everyone use male pronouns when talking to them. These are women who feel like they cannot be masculine unless they are as close to being male as a woman can possibly get, which includes using male pronouns. These are butches who live completely in the binary that the patriarchy has forced down all of our throats and with which the patriarchy has blinded so many of us into thinking that only men can be masculine and only women can be feminine.

This way of thinking and being is troublesome for butches as it perpetuates the invalidation of the women that we truly are. It continues to make us invisible in this world and creates a false sense of security for those butches who take on male pronouns; as if they are somehow now immune to what the world at large truly thinks of us because they make people call them “he” on-line.

This has also caused a shift in the butch-femme community where most femmes on-line use male pronouns with butches as the default. The very people who know us best, the women who have always seen us and have always been there for us now see only the maleness and no longer see the women that we are. It’s as if, suddenly the yin is invisible to the yang, making neither whole.

In the real world, of course, this does not happen. Butches are all women and we embrace the women that we are, accepting and relishing in the use of female pronouns; but on-line, we are bombarded with male pronouns and treated as if we are strange for not accepting and embracing them as our own.

Butches are not men.

Butches don’t want to be men.

Butches don’t want to be compared to men in any way, shape, or form.

We are women who love women.

Period.

The Beginning

Where have all the butch lesbians gone?

It’s a question I see all the time on-line these days. This is the age of queer and gender theory, when being a masculine woman simply isn’t good enough any longer and one must transition in order to be seen and heard. So tons of butches and young teenage lesbians transition into men, thinking the hate they have for their bodies, the invisibility they feel, and the anger they have towards a society that mocks them daily will disappear.

So, where have we gone?

Most of us are kept silent, forced into the closet we already clawed our way out of because we are not allowed to talk about our lives. We are not allowed to openly discuss our love of our female bodies mixed with our masculine traits. We are not allowed to mention our mourning the loss of our butch sisters as they escape into the patriarchy we have spent our lives fighting against as it drags us, kicking and screaming into its binary system of thinking and being.

To do so means we are traitors to our own community, a community we helped to build and in 1969, a community for which we put ourselves out there and helped to start the Stonewall Riots. That’s another thing we are not allowed to talk about, by the way: Stonewall. The trans community has rewritten history so many times by taking away butches and replacing them with transmen that it is a wonder we even exist anymore.

The Stonewall riots were started by a butch and a drag queen, not a transman and a transwoman. Teena Brandon was a butch, not a transman. These are things we are not allowed to talk about without being called transphobes, without being threatened, without being bullied into silence by men (and the apologists who defend them) who cannot stand outspoken women.

It is not transphobic to celebrate the woman I am. It is not transphobic to not transition into a man in order to appease the patriarchy who demands that women are feminine and men are masculine. it is not transphobic to keep history true instead of allowing it to be changed by those who wish to use it to further their own agendas. It is not transphobic to speak my truths.

So instead of continuing to stay silent, I decided to create my own space where I can speak my truths and talk about my life as a butch woman, as a lesbian. I do not lead a glamorous life, I just lead my life and I wish to remain visible in this world of increasing butch invisibility so that other young women who are perhaps butch don’t get trapped in the false belief that if they are masculine, then they MUST be a man.