Reclaiming Lesbian Pride

[CherylNYC]

Thank your for all your posts, Aj. Like Kobi, I missed 'once male' altogether. I didn't understand the reference, and giddy with the joy of FINALLY reading posts by and for lesbian feminist butch-femme women, instead of reading posts about how far butches can push themselves towards maleness on the spectrum(sic), I didn't bother to sort out the meaning of the term.

I've been excited about a seeming resurgence in lesbian pride. As much as I wish we were not talking about the acceptance of transwomen in our community instead of lesbian pride, clearly we're not done yet.

Your post has made me thoughtful about my own history. I have a baaad history with men. I've been the object of a lifetime of very invasive, not to mention criminal behaviour. The reason I'm far more wary of men, even though I've also been financially and sexually abused by a woman, is that my issues with men are current and ongoing. I may be pushing 50, but they still sniff up my butt like a pack of dogs. No, there's nothing flattering about it. I would be a fool and a victim if I didn't maintain a VERY guarded posture with most men. For me, safety is relative and the safest space is women's space. Like many feminists of my era, I treasure and guard women's space because it's very meaningful to me.

This is relevant because many lesbians have felt, just as you pointed out, that transwomen are really men who have come to invade women's space. I certainly felt that way for a long time. A close friend, A, changed that view. She's a woman. Period. I don't care that A has a long history as a man prior to her transition. Like you, she holds her head high, carries herself with dignity, and holds herself to a very high standard of conduct. I'm quite certain that she did that before she transitioned, too.

The part that's problematic is that I've met many transwoman who do not. So has A. The half dozen transwomen I knew before I met A had been fully socialised as men, and it showed. They fulfilled all my worst expectations by using typically male power grabs in meetings of our women's groups. Some felt that the loudest voice always prevails. One bullied and abused her tiny wife. One was very adept at conspicuously throwing her money around with the expectation that it would purchase agreement. Yes, I know that women sometimes do these things. I'm talking about people who do these things BECAUSE it's part of their socialised male behaviour patterns. Did these transwomen look like invading men to me? You bet.

My good friend A actually never blamed me for those feelings when I confessed them to her. She told me that she's been equally horrified by male socialised behaviours she sees some transwomen exhibiting, and she worries that others will judge her based on their poor behaviour. She calls it "privilege in a dress".

As far as I know, here in NYC my friend is no longer in danger of being disrespected or made to feel unwelcome in any part of our communities. MWMF is the only event from which she's excluded. I've observed her getting the fish-eye in straight settings, but according to her she hasn't felt or heard any anti-trans actions or words directed towards her from anyone in our LGBT, BDSM, or women's communities. Ironically, she has been vilified by other trans people because of her views about what it means to be a woman. My friend can happily come and go to women's groups and events in safety because there's been such a strong push towards trans acceptance here in NYC.

As Aj wrote, the ticket to that acceptance has been current gender theory. The part that both A and I find mind boggling is that current gender theory is erasing of women, lesbians, and our lesbian feminist history. We both feel strongly that there's a difference between women and men, but that makes us hopeless dinosaurs. Oh, and it makes us transphobes, too. She has been called a transphobe and a token by women who have never been trans. True story. Out of respect for A's wishes I didn't kick anyone's ass, but I'm still seething about it.

Because I need safe space, because I'm a lesbian and a feminist, because I care about our culture and our hard-won space, I'll continue to guard it. That means that when I encounter men claiming to be women I'll question their presence in my women's groups. (A very tall and large man who wore the same clothes he always did, went to the same barber he always did, and changed NOT ONE SINGLE THING about himself to signal to the world that he might be trans, or anything other than a man, while claiming that he felt like a woman. He demanded access and got it. A was chagrined, as was I.) I don't want male crossdressers, who are now claiming to be trans, at my women's sex parties. (Ask me how I felt about the crossdresser with his otherwise naked dick tied up in a bow, who had to get in my face while I was in a compromised position at a women's play party last year.)

The reason that the man who claimed to be a woman could do so is because current gender theory tells him that he's any gender he wakes up feeling on any given day. He maintained that he was a woman if he said he was one, and no hormones, surgery, or changes in any part of his outward body or dress were necessary for him to have access to women's space. That really pissed me off.

The reason that the very male crossdresser who came to the women's play party was allowed to remain was because he said he was trans. The party organisor is a committed trans advocate, and she was pretty irritated by this man's presence. Even though she felt strongly that he didn't belong, she told me that she feared backlash from the trans community for excluding anyone who said he was trans. That really pissed me off, too.

I want my safety to be as important as the safety of people with penises. Why is that so hard?

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Kobi:

Thank you for explaining your position. You may have noticed that pretty much the *minute* MWMF was invoked, I backed off the conversation and went silent. That is because I *knew* that it was only a matter of time before something was posted where transwomen would be portrayed as 'not really women' or 'not really belonging to the lesbian community'. At that moment, the space--not just this thread but this entire site--became unsafe for me. Now, I don't really expect the world to be a safe space. I would not have made it into middle-age as a black lesbian if I expected the world to welcome me with open arms. I do, however, strongly prefer to be in spaces where I won't be subject to reading things that explicitly state--for reasons entirely beyond your control, you do not belong here. But it goes farther than that. Yesterday, as I wrestled with saying something in response, a question crossed my mind: is there any amount of time or effort a transwoman could spend in the lesbian community that would allow her to not be thought of as an interloper and to be brought into the circle of 'sister'. My gut instinct is that for anyone who uses the term 'once-males' to refer to transgendered women a million years wouldn't be half enough time. I also get the feeling--and I may be wrong--that if a transwoman carried not just her own weight but the weight of the next 10 women around her, those contributions would *still* not be enough.

So what I read was that transwomen had no legitimate place and in that moment, as I said before, this place became deeply 'unsafe'. So why am I still here? Why did I not leave? Because before I was a queer, I was already black. I know unsafe space. I know how to maneuver around unsafe space. My neighborhood was unsafe space--in the way that being the only black kid in your class from kindergarten to sixth grade can be. At some point in between being subjected to the tender mercies of elementary school children picking on the kid who looks most different to the experience of coming out and promptly being told that I was a race traitor (yes, I have had people say that to me) for being queer, I realized that if someone holds a prejudice against me, there is very little I can do to change their mind. I can, however, decide that I will hold my head high, that I will carry myself with dignity and that I will hold to a very high standard of conduct. My logic is that the bigot will still think me low, undeserving or an interloper but I will, in the fullness of time, make that bigot look like a fool. How? By being a shining star. By being honorable, intelligent, erudite, kind, expansive, friendly and hard-working. What could do more damage to any of the myths that people might have about me because I'm black, queer, etc. than to be the kind of woman you could proudly take home to mother?

Years ago, when I came out and first discovered that there were two groups within the queer community--particularly the lesbian community--that were considered once and for all time outside the circle of sisterhood; bisexuals and transwomen. The blatantly racist or anti-Semitic statement had no place and any woman fool enough to utter it in public would have the wrath of Sappho herself visited upon her. But bisexuals could be spoken of in terms of being vectors of disease contaminating what would otherwise have been an ostensibly disease-free lesbian community. At least bisexuals were not thought to be intentionally volunteering to be disease vectors while transwomen were thought to have truly evil intent--although this being the 90s and post-modernism being what it was, no one used the term evil. Rather, it was couched in terms of transwomen having some nebulous, shadowy but nefarious intent to do undermine the lesbian community from within. At the time, I was writing for every gay or lesbian newspaper or magazine that would publish me. I stumbled across a question that was relevant in 1991 and is relevant 20 years later, what are we in this for? By this I mean the Movement for the rights of queer people to live their lives as full citizens with agency. Are we in it because--as I believe--that it is simply wrong for individuals to be discriminated against in either law or custom because of some arbitrary characteristic OR are we in this because such discrimination is happening to *us*. This is a non-trivial difference. If you believe that bigotry and prejudice are wrong then one would hope one would spread that net as far as possible. It goes beyond the discrimination that happens to me, it is the discrimination I make others the target of. If, on the other hand, one believes that the discrimination that happens to one's own group is wrong but not that bigotry or prejudice are generally wrong, then one need not look to the plank in one's own eye. All that matters is that the other person standing on one's foot get the hell off your foot. IF the queer movement is against bigotry or prejudice based upon arbitrary characteristics of gender or sexual orientation, then our movement cannot give much quarter to a form of bigotry that says "I don't care, nor do I have to care, how long ago you transitioned you will always be, in my eyes, whatever your chromosomes say you are". If, on the other hand, we are concerned only with the more limited question of "lesbians and gay men are subject to injustice because they are gay or lesbian" that allows for the community to have a space for bigotry against bisexuals or transsexuals or transgendered people or, for that matter, butches and femmes.

Twenty years ago, I cast my lot in with that part of the community that believed that the discrimination that happens to bisexuals or transsexuals *within* the queer community is no better than discrimination that happens against all queer people. I would have preferred that gender theory were not the vehicle by which transgendered people gained a greater level of acceptance because I think that post-modernism, upon which gender theory is based, is deeply and profoundly broken because it is incoherent. I almost feel guilty at having benefited from gender theory and its ancestor, post-modernism, because I would be quite happy putting the final nail in the coffin of that ideology.

Cheers
Aj