Here come the lesbians, here come the leaping lesbians...

[BullDog]

Originally Posted by Heart

If butch women were involved from the beginning, and I believe they were, then who was dictating the terms of their inclusion? Why were butch women not articulating those terms? Why/how did women end up in the back seats?

I don't know the inner workings, but I wonder if the fact that the founder of BV does not identify as a butch woman, and that there seems to be a top-down kind of structure to BV muted the voices of women involved.

One of the things I've learned in the years of anti-violence organizing I've done is that women need to be in the leadership positions. Otherwise sexism takes over. The men I've worked with as allies understand this on a very deep (and feminist) level.

So now, it seems re BV, that women who have been involved are pulling out in order to re-establish their leadership elsewhere. Why they did not have successful leadership roles within BV is not clear. I have also read posts from a number of butch women who did not get on board to begin with because there was a lack of trust in the BV leadership and their agenda.
None of this is addressed in the BV response.

Heart

In the beginning it was hard to get people involved. Joe did do a lot of it, so I believe he was the main one bringing people on board, although I am sure he had input from others.

I think Joe and others who had been involved with conferences in the past had set ways of how things should be structured and how decisions should be made. I wasn't familiar with any of it and didn't like it.

Joe asked me and several other butch women to become involved from the beginning. So yes we were there, but when we voiced our concerns with the way things were going we were told we were being disrespectful to the trans members of the board and being divisive and that there wasn't time for all this, that there was a Conference that needed to be pulled together. Language was added to the website at the time that was suggested by a butch woman.

There was a very successful workshop held by Sasha for butch women/female id'd butches at the Conference and Jeanne Cordova gave an awesome keynote address.