The Hidden Implications of Calling Lesbianism Cissexist

Of course I watched Magdelen Berns’ latest video response to Riley Dennis. In this video Magdelen dissects the claim that “genital preferences” are cissexist. I want to talk about it to reinforce the concepts because this has pretty big implications and I don’t want to forget.

 

At 4:01, Magdelen points out that calling lesbianism cissexist is saying that lesbians have institutional power which influences people into homosexuality, putting them in a place of power of transwomen, from which you can draw that homosexuality is an oppression that trans people face at the hands of homosexuals.

It was at this point that I realized just how insidious trans politics are and actually became a bit frightened. Trans advocacy has already convinced a large portion of people that women have this institutional power over trans and nonbinary males and are already replacing sex based protections with gender identity protections, and this may seem all well and fine to you if you believe that “trans women are women”, but the fact that institutional power includes ECONOMIC power, that’s where it get’s really scary.

Magdelen hints at this at 6:40 — after pointing out that Riley is also calling rape victims liars, and again at the end of the video when she asks you to think about who might be funding Everyday Feminism — when she points out all of the huge male run corporations that are pushing transgender policies. Just think about this for a moment. This view that women have some sort of social and economic power can and is being used to attack our gains. You may think it’s not so bad now, but when they start putting in place affirmative action laws to prioritize males over females in job placement and schools, when rejecting someone based on their biological sex can be considered hate speech, when males take all of the extra funding that goes towards women owned small business to fund more male businesses, when funds for medical research specifically for us (because the default is male) are turned to trans males, you will feel it.

Women are already being kicked out of the shelters that they fought for and funded for being uncomfortable with having to share a room with a male. If you don’t realize that it can and is getting worse, then you don’t realize how recent and fragile our rights are. They can be taken away in an instant.

 

Keep Aware of Missing Black Children

Originally posted on Truth- A Right to Fight For…: Repost… It does not take long to share… Please, get the word out in an already too silent nation. Repost: (Washington DC) Wednesday March 29, 6pm, at the African American Civil War Memorial Museum 1925 Vermont Ave NW the National Black United Front (NBUF) will host…

via In Washington D.C.? Please Attend this Event For Missing Black/Latino Children — The Militant Negro™

The Male Oppressor Doesn’t Give a Shit About Your Gender Identity

Neither does anyone else, to be honest. I am so tired of males telling me to shut up and listen to trans males. I’m tired of them acting like women don’t have things so bad and that horrible things that females face is nothing like their gender feels, and shrugging when the harm that trans ideology is doing to women because a “few men slipping through the cracks” and assaulting women is a small price to pay to make sure that the transgender males are taken care of first.

I don’t know why this popped up in my medium feed, I don’t even read political articles on there, but it did. I decided to respond to this one based on the title. It looked like this conversation was going to be productive for at least one of us, at first. (I’m not including the original article, but it was some basic Chimamanda bashing)

Faux Intersectionality of the Left

Not news, obviously.

I stumbled upon this blog, Muslim Bushido, through this interesting post. Ignoring the blatantly ableist title, this is an important topic. Part of the discussion is about the lack of coverage in the media on things that affect black lives, and when there are stories concerning black people, even in black communities, they center around men.

In the first video, starting at 34:18, Yvette Carnell says, “You see all these things . . . All these stories about black women’s hair and all this stuff –I’m not saying people can’t talk about their hair– but you look at the proportions of these articles to articles that actually matter in terms of black life, that actually matter in terms of what’s happening to black people, and you wonder how that happens; you wonder ‘how did we get here?'”.

This is something I definitely noticed within supposedly intersectional liberal feminist spaces. I saw A LOT of articles about black women’s hair and about Beyoncé. I did not see things about policies that affect black women, I did not see things about black children and school, I did not see things about the Flint water crisis. There was some mention about Black Lives Matter, which of course, is male centered. In fact, in this article, the author of Muslim Bushido criticises Yvette Carnell’s channel as too male-centric, and — in other posts — advises black women to stay neutral in the conflict of police brutality against black men. I’m definitely going to be reading her posts on that and may post a compilation of notes and references to multiple opinions on this.

Just thought I would share this and some thoughts. Everyone reading this surely already realises that no one really gives a damn, even though the left swears up and down that they care SO MUCH. In my time as a liberal feminist I really got the feeling that women of color were there just to be occasionally mentioned to win extra inclusivity points, then pushed to the back to be forgotten.

 

The Evacuation of Standing Rock and More Election Feelings

I’m sure you have seen the video of the women of Standing Rock who have been fighting for their land pleading for help. Standing Rock is to be evacuated. I’m sure you know these women have been subject to sexual assault and strip searches and imprisonment in the wet cold still naked. The Native Americans of Standing Rock have been pepper sprayed and mutilated. I don’t know why this particular instance has been so highly publicized, as this sort of thing happens fairly often (maybe I just missed it?), but it is one of the issues I have feared the most for with this election. I actually don’t know if Hillary would have definitely stopped this. She apparently never took a proper stance, but there was at least a fighting chance with her.

It’s always been that choice — Hillary or Trump — ever since Bernie lost to Hillary. Even if there was voter fraud/suppression (which there always is) I’m certain Hillary would still have won. Yes, a lot of people liked Bernie, but most of moderate America liked Hillary, and many progressives and other people on the left genuinely preferred Hillary.  When Hillary and Trump became the nominees, it was never going to be Bernie, or Stein, or anyone else. Everyone knew that. Throwing a hissy fit every 4 years about having to choose “the lesser of two evils” never changes that reality.

I kept seeing the left bashing Hillary as “as bad as” or even worse than Trump. I watched them throw fit after fit because Bernie didn’t win. I watched them call those who went on to support Hillary “white feminists”. Newsflash, 94% of black women that did vote voted for Hillary, so sit the fuck down. They knew. Everyone who relentlessly trashed Hillary even after Bernie lost, or voted third party, or fucking switched to voting Trump, or didn’t vote at all, contributed to this. Threw us all to the wolves for their fucked up sense of superiority. The assault on women’s reproduction and other rights, further disadvantaging the poor, the threat to disabled children in schools, police brutality, the lives in general of people of color. We are all in more danger now than we had to be. I guarantee you that by the end of Trump’s reign even more of us disabled people will be on the streets.

I thought I was getting over it but I’m not. Every time something new happens I am filled with anguish. The left’s part pisses me off more than the right wingers who voted Trump. People who were going to vote democrat needed to unite. Instead, they broke and bashed each other like the republicans always do and so we lost. I don’t see any of the ones who bashed Hillary owning it, either. I only see excuse articles, trying to absolve themselves of their guilt, or blaming those who were smart enough to realize that it was Hillary OR TRUMP for not magically making Bernie win. That’s another thing that bothered me about the march. How many of the people there didn’t vote Hillary? I know of at least 5. If you didn’t vote for Hillary you weren’t doing your part to keep Trump out, and you shouldn’t have been there. You don’t get to say “not my president”. He is your fucking president. “Not my president” is a whole other stupid thing anyway. Half the population says it every election. It’s meaningless.

I’m going to stop here, I could probably go on forever. I am just getting more upset the longer I type. Please, if you can do anything to help the people of Standing Rock, do it.

You Don’t Have to Accept Men’s Porn Consumption

All the time I see women on the internet and even people I know who have caught their boyfriend watching porn and are split about what to do. It is infuriating and breaks my heart. I just have to rant about it.

Typically, the story is that the woman asked early in the relationship if her boyfriend watches porn and his response “no, never” or “not while in a relationship”. Then, she finds out that he actually does watch porn, through becoming suspicious and searching his things or coming across it accidentally. In the first discovery case, everyone dogpiles on the woman telling her that she is horrible and controlling for invading his privacy and that she should leave him because he deserves so much better. If she found it accidentally, the response is more along the lines of: ‘unless it’s hurting your relationship, you should just let it go’, ‘it’s just a fantasy, he’s not going to leave you for a bunch of pixels’, ”it sucks, but that’s just nature! All guys watch porn.’ or even ‘try watching it with him!’.

If she goes through his things, fair enough, she did invade his privacy, and that’s not right either, but to act like that absolves the guy of all sins and saying that he deserves better is ridiculous. I find it hard to blame the women for their actions in most cases, as it begins to really hurt their relationship in many ways but he just continues to deny it. I guess she could just leave if she is suspicious, but it’s easier said than done. You don’t want to believe that kind of thing is true. Then there’s the dismissiveness in other cases. Everyone just waves away the fact that he fucking lied to her. Other than the fact the he broke her trust first… If a woman says she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who watches porn and you lie to her about it, you are tricking her into a relationship she doesn’t want to be in! Weather the reason is personal or political doesn’t even matter. She can break up with you over what you ate for supper last night. It doesn’t matter how stupid it seems to you. She chooses under what conditions she has a relationship. You don’t get to make that choice.

The reluctant women who have learned to accept it makes me so sad. It always comes off as just so hopeless to me. “It hurts, but boys will be boys. You learn to live with it eventually.“. That they are supposed to willingly accept men objectifying women and using them and contributing to the abuse and trafficking and grooming is just disgusting. There are men who actually don’t watch porn. There are men who will stop watching porn when they find out how harmful it is. Why would you want to be with someone who is ok with not only hurting you, but hurting all women? You don’t have to settle for an asshole!

Could the Pussy Hats Be the Snowflake That Starts the Avalanche?

I am fed up with queer politics. It was the moment that my nonbinary identifying friend said that the pussy hats at the Women’s March on Washington triggered him and his friends. The anger welled up inside of me, not just because of the further mangling of “triggers”. Once again, women are being  told that our bodies are oppressive. We must not talk about anything female specific because we might hurt male feelings. It doesn’t matter that Trump was talking about us –females– grabbing our pussies, not males. It doesn’t matter that he is attacking the rights of females specifically. Our voices, our realities, our truths must be silenced.

Now, I’ve been disenchanted with “liberal” feminism for a long time. I came into it about 5 years ago, when I found first got internet and found out about feminism, and I became an “intersectional” feminist. It took me a while to find out that I was like the only one in the entire intersectional movement that didn’t like porn and didn’t want prostitution to be legalized. I have a heavy, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach every time these topics are discussed. I was told I felt that way about these issues because of my own insecurities. They are probably right to an extent, honestly, but I never saw how accepting porn and legalizing prostitution could ever do anything other than hurt women. Other than that, I have found that liberal  feminism almost completely leaves behind disabled people. There is rarely even mention of disabled people, other than as props. I’m talking like one article every few years. There’s also issues with race and class. It’s broad –leaving behind only groups they don’t care much about– and largely ineffective. In fact, I would argue that there’s not much actually being done for women! The only advancement since I became active that I can think of off the top of my head (in the US) is women allowed on the front lines. Yet, I can think of several things we have lost thanks to queer politics! I was becoming disinterested and  annoyed by hypocrisy I would see, and with the election of Trump I felt defeated and hopeless.

I’ve actually been questioning the trans ideology for about a year. Before I had just automatically accepted it and would parrot “trans women are women!” when the whole bathroom thing started. However, I started to feel fake and uncomfortable in my feminism. I thought these people deserved the respect of me to at least know the basics of their struggle. So, I headed to trans communities to read up. Reading about what gender was and how it’s “a spectrum, not a binary”, I thought, “Wait– Isn’t the entire feminist movement based on the idea that gender doesn’t exist?… Ah, well, they’re not hurting anyone. They have a right to live how they want to in peace!”. I saw the MtF misogyny and how they made their bodies into caricatures of women but dismissed it as internalized misogyny. Then I came across the term “truscum” on a trans woman’s tumblr. They were calling out another user as a truscum and saying they need to die. I found out that truscum is a slur trans women throw at other trans people when they disagree with any part of the trans ideology or call out sexism. It made me feel sick that they would turn on people who share their struggles and tell them to go die, and that’s when I started to wonder if maybe trans women are a bit misogynistic and have ‘residual male privilege’. I learned about the cotton ceiling. I thought it was going to be a useful commentary on how patriarchal beauty standards affect how trans bodies are viewed. It wasn’t. Instead all I could find was like this. Even the less awful ones had obviously lesbaphobic veins.

I began to wonder why I couldn’t seem to find any FtM trans people but plenty of angry misogynistic MtF trans. That’s how I ended up on radical feminist blogs. What they were saying made so much sense, but agreeing with them terrified me so I left because I didn’t want to hate trans people and contribute more to their oppression. I was also ridiculously afraid that someone in the libfem community would find out that I was unsure about trans, as anyone from  libfem spaces knows that the absolute most horrible thing you can ever be is a “TERF”.

As trans issues came more to forefront in spaces I frequented, I started asking around to speak privately to a nonbinary person to ask questions about it. No nb people would take up the offer, and the best I could get was another feminist who thought they might be able to answer my questions. As we talked I opened up. I admitted that I thought that gender is a bunch of bs, that I was actually kind of  starting to dislike trans women because of the extreme misogyny, and that I was scared about the legislation to allow men into women’s bathroom. I told her I was terrified, I didn’t want to be a hateful terf, I didn’t want anyone to get hurt because of my views. She told me that no trans person has ever assaulted a ‘cis’  woman. I wondered if that was true and googled it. It wasn’t true. There were a few news story, one fairly recent, and ‘terf’ blogs had long lists of offenders, which I verified. I decided not to mention that in my reply to her, instead I only said “but that doesn’t stop cis men from going into our bathrooms”. We talked more. Every point she made I found evidence to the contrary. It didn’t answer any of my concerns, actually it only gave me more questions and anger and led me to spend more time in gender critical spaces. I pushed it aside and forgot about it for a while.

Then, the Women’s March. I’ll be honest, I was not interested in this march at all. I paid it and the rest of the news no attention. Like I said, I was feeling defeated and hopeless. I didn’t see the point of this march. I didn’t understand what the expected effect was. One of my friends did go to the march. He’s nonbinary. He asked me if I had read anything about the march. “Nope”. He told me people were being racist. I believed him. Then he told me that it was transphobic. I sat up, because the literal  one thing I had heard about the march was that they made sure to be completely inclusive. He said there were a lot of women wearing vagina hats and holding posters that said things like “this pussy grabs back”. “What the fuck?! That’s a direct response to Trump talking about sexually assaulting women!”. He said something like ‘well, yes, but also a lot of signs said stuff like pussy power, and like not even all cis women have a vagina so. The pussy hats also triggered some of my nb friends, and to an extent, me.”.

That’s where I lost it. I googled it and of course there was indeed tons of outrage. Like, ok, when you were masturbating earlier to some woman’s naked, objectified body you sure weren’t feeling dysphoric then. It’s only when women are talking about their personal experiences or how sexism affects females that you’re all suddenly “triggered”. Now you’re whining because women were talking about women’s issues at a women’s march. You want to erase our bodies, our past, biological realities, and for us to stay quiet when our sex is being attacked.

Lesbians have seen through it this whole time! They are the ones hurt the most. Young lesbians being pressured to transition, hurting their bodies and traumatizing them. Males infiltrating and taking over our spaces, pushing any lesbian who refuses to have sex with males out and labeling them transphobe vagina fetishists. Making women scared to talk about periods or pregnancy for fear of offending the trans women and being subject to harassment. They are literally erasing lesbians and trying to erase women’s reality and libfems don’t care.

Men have washed in, through several avenues, and taken a control and guide liberal feminism. I actually sometimes feel like they forget that women are even oppressed.

So, that was the final straw. I am no longer questioning my stances. I am officially a gender-critical, sex-negative, intersectional, radical feminist. MY BODY IS NOT TRANSPHOBIC. THE ABUSE I FACED AT THE HANDS OF MEN IS NOT TRANSPHOBIC. YOU CAN NOT SILENCE US. YOU CAN NOT ERASE US. I have seen some new ex-libfem women in gender critical spaces in the past few days. I even saw a friend from a libfem space I used to frequent on several radical blogs recently. Liberal feminists, I know you’re questioning. I know you’re fed up. Join us, and let’s get shit done.