Originally Posted by dreadgeek
Bulldog:
I understand and share your frustration and weariness. I, too, am tired of being told that others identity counts, is sacred, is inherently deserving of respect but that my identity is not worth the paper my birth certificate was written on. If I were a butch who was a transman, or preferred to be called 'he' or rejected the word lesbian then I would be hoisted upon many shoulders and carried through the virtual town square with shouts of Huzzah! Huzzah! However, because I prefer (in fact insist) that I be called 'she' and embrace the word lesbian, my identity, my commitment to equality, all manner of imprecations can be drawn about my motives with absolute and utter impunity.
To me, it is important for words to have meaning and for special pleading to be kept to a minimum. As a black woman, I know--intimately, from the very moments that I was aware that there was a society outside of my family--that in a world where special pleading is allowed to run rampant, eventually, inevitably, I and my people will lose. How so? "All men are created equal (except blacks)". That was the reigning ideology for first 190 years of America's existence as a nation-state. Racism is a case of special pleading "for everyone excepting them". Even when it looks like special pleading might make me a winner by working in my favor, it doesn't. Affirmative action being a particular case. I have heard people say behind my back(and to my face) that I was nothing more than an affirmative action hire. So even a system that allegedly is supposed to benefit me works against me because rules are not being applied equally.
If we can define words to mean whatever the hell we want them to mean, in the moment that it is convenient for us to do so, as if this were through the looking glass, then what is to stop a heterosexual, chromosonal (XY) male from saying "I identify as a lesbian and therefore, I get to come into lesbian spaces and talk about lesbians as an authority because I am a lesbian". If lesbian has no necessary connection to either being woman (whatever your chromosomes are--to me a transwoman is a woman) or homosexual then what is a lesbian? It appears that, in fact, what is being said is that lesbian has neither a proximate or sufficient relationship to either the words female (or woman) or homosexual.
Lastly, it makes me wonder--as I sometimes wonder about the field of biology--what our sins as lesbians (or butches) were that our identities are not worthy of respect. And they are consistently treated as if they are not. It is not all in our heads. Too many of us, from too many disparate backgrounds, all seem to keep coming to this same place of "why is it okay for the most horrible things to be said about butches (or lesbians) but it is a capital crime to say anything, including the idea that lesbian identity is worthy of some respect, that might be taken as diminishing by someone of a different identity". I have tried, to the best of my ability, to step back from this and try to work off the assumption that it is all in my head. I then run little thought experiments based upon my own observations of how my species behaves and end up coming back to 'this doesn't really quite work'. I wish I knew what my sins were, as a butch, female-identified, lesbian so that if they are ongoing sins I could at least change my behavior and put myself, once again, in the circle of those who are considered worthy of respect. If my sins are wholly in the past, I would like to know what they were.
Yet no one will tell us the nature of our crimes, the charges are not read to us and we are not even allowed to challenge our accusers or cross-examine our prosecutors. Any attempts to do so are immediately dismissed.
It seems that all one has to do is say "FOR ME" and one is given a free pass to say anything one wishes about lesbians or butches and call us children of some lesser and unworthy god.
Cheers
Aj
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