With my own eyes, I just saw a lesbian on twitter say she was being oppressed by asexual folks because their flag is everywhere, and it’s asexual people’s fault that lesbians are now ‘the last on the conveyor belt in the LGBT community’.
Like. Dude, if you need a scapegoat for your suffering, capitalism is right there. Institutionalized religion is also a great contender. Saying asexuals caused all your suffering because their flag is slightly older and therefore more recognisable than yours is like. my god, have a snickers.
No. No. If they want a scapegoat, turn to the TERFs. There was a perfectly good lesbian flag that was well known in the 90s, that nobody uses anymore because the TERFs took it over. It was known and used before the ace flag was a glimmer. You want to be pissed, get pissed at the part of your own community who is trying to set up walls. Take that shit back if you want it. Use it while holding signs of trans sisterhood. You gave your flag up and are looking for recognition for a new one. That’s why your flag isn’t well recognized yet. Signed a transgender man, former part of the lesbian community for ~14 years.
You want to be pissed, get pissed at the part of your own community who is trying to set up walls.
This is so important.
We need a tag or shorthand phrase for “that thing where the TERF/SWERF/radfem crowd invades lesbian communities, makes it seem like any attack on them is an attack on the lesbian community, drinks all the punch, poops on the floor and leaves the next generation growing up without symbols or a cohesive community”, because it’s fucking happening again.
This is the older lesbian flag, the one that got grabbed by radfems /
TERFs / SWERFs and that very few anti-radfem / anti-TERF lesbians ever
made a concerted effort to reclaim. The Labrys flag:
It was created in 1999, eleven years before the creation and popularization of the ace flag. That gets thoroughly ignored, because it’s not convenient to the radfem rhetoric of ‘lesbians are the most oppressed members of the community EVER’
(uhhh…. trans women of color would like a word? Trans people in
general? I’m not even going to get into m-spec people and every study so
far showing that our parameters re: everything from rates of sexual
violence to poverty are much worse than those of both straight and gay
people, because that’s not the topic of this post).
I want to be very clear on this. When a young lesbian who’s been brainwashed by radfems says that ‘lesbians are the last on the conveyor belt in the LGBT community’, what she means is ludicrous nonsense such as this:
all those ace pride flags? They should be lesbian pride flags instead, because under her beliefs, lesbians deserve absolute prioritization over other members of the community, on the basis of being ‘most oppressed’
the community being seen as a coalition of EQUALS IN MUTUAL SOLIDARITY isn’t
acceptable (at least not at more than shallow, declarative level),
because acknowledging equality of marginalized orientations and refusing
to build the community under a hierarchy is seen as ‘de-centering lesbians’
remember what radfems actually said, in opposition to ‘queer’ as a term? ‘Queer de-centers and erases lesbians / lumps lesbians in with bisexuals anddeluded men (hella transphobic code for trans women) and stops them short of naming their actual homosexuality.’ Changing the discourse to be solely about personal harm was a move of genius
attention being given to issues that affect ace/aro people / activism for ace/aro people
automatically takes away valuable time, valuable resources and valuable
effort, that should have been spent on lesbian issues instead – therefore, any sort of ace/aro-centric work and the presence of ace/aro people is harmful to lesbians.
hell, attention being given to issues that affect bi/pan people / activism
for bi/pan people automatically takes away valuable time, valuable
resources and valuable effort, that should have been spent on lesbian
issues instead – therefore, any sort of bi/pan-centric work and the
presence of bi/pan people (particularly ones that aren’t ‘SGA’) is harmful to lesbians
insert
the exact same thing about nonbinary / genderqueer people, about trans
people (though most of the Usual Suspects haven’t quite gotten to the
point of open and blatant transphobia), about intersex people (it’s my theory that this is at the base of that sudden and widespread campaign of ‘drop the I, intersex people are making their own community’, even
in the face of many intersex people who fought like hell for their
right to remain included and to keep the letter. Some, like @vergess, got rewarded for their effort by being called ‘pedophiles’ and being run off Tumblr)
And I could keep going! The spearhead of radfem infiltration within lesbian communities if two-fold – one, the rhetoric of ‘you are the most oppressed and any sort of attention being paid to these superfluous identities directly harms you’ and
two, the notion that radfems are the ultimate champions of lesbian
rights, the ones who will make certain that lesbians are always centered
and prioritized. That’s how you end up with large recruitment into
radfem ranks of young, inexperienced lesbians, who (naturally) feel
flattered, protected and prioritized. That’s how radfems can shield
themselves of criticism for their fuckery, by saying that any criticism
of radfem rhetoric is an direct attack on lesbians. That’s how you end
up with wankery such as ‘TERF is a slur used to demonize lesbians.’ It’s
my prediction that in several years’ time, the currently-in-use lesbian
flag (the lipstick one) will end up as much of a widespread symbol of
radfems as the older Labrys flag, in the exact same way that the other
flag was taken over.
What’s the solution? Widespread acknowledgement that no one is owed automatic centering solely on the basis of their identity and that the community wasn’t created to serve the needs of predominantly one or two groups. Thorough education on what ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’ actually
mean in the context of the struggle against
cis-perisex-heteronormativity and actually implementing them in
practice, rather than keeping them on as empty buzzwords.
Acknowledgement that just because one has suffered under oppression, it
doesn’t mean that others haven’t as well and that acknowledging and fighting against the oppression others deal with doesn’t lessen or ignore one’s own.
Read this and then read it again. Keep it in mind another TERF/bi/panphobe/REG arbitrarily accuses you of Lesbophobia.
And don’t let them conceptualize themselves as representing the entire Lesbian community. That’s unfair to us AND lesbians as a whole
FUN FACT: it seems like more and more people are coming out as asexual because we finally feel safe enough to do so, it is not a fad, it is not a trend, and if you think it is one of those things please hop on the shut-the-fuck-up train to don’t-fucking-speak-to-me-ville.
Holy shit, it’s been put into words.
💜🌈💜
Also, people are coming out as asexual because we finally know that this is a thing that exists. We are reading things on the internet and thinking, “Oh, this sounds like me,” and, “There are other people who feel like this?” and, “Maybe I’m not broken after all.”
I wasn’t aware asexuality even existed until a couple of years ago. I mentioned asexuality to a coworker maybe a month ago and her reaction was astonished joy and, “That sounds like me!” I spoke to a woman in her fifties who said, “I always just assumed I was broken.”
People are coming out as asexual because they’ve learned that asexuality exists.
We’re also finding out more information about asexuality so even if we already knew it was a thing but thought “But I can’t be because X” can now go “Oh, the X thing doesn’t actually change that!”
This shouldn’t be surprising in a general sense – this is exactly, exactly, EXACTLY what happened with bisexual folks and trans folks, especially nonbinary and genderqueer folks.
Fun fact: when I first knew I was some variety of queer, I would sit in my bed at night and whisper ‘I’m a lesbian’ to myself bc I didn’t know there were other options. And then I snuck out books by fucking Kinsey in the library when my mother wasn’t looking, because this was 25+ years ago, and looked up sexual orientations… and found out bisexuality existed.
And then a few years later, after saying ‘oh gosh you know if I could just have a dimmer switch for gender I’d love that, or if I could swap my body and my gender around or if I could just present this way one day and this way another’ for a long time, I found the words ‘genderqueer’ and ‘genderfluid’ as those became more part of the queer vernacular… and it was like a light went on.
This is part of why bi and trans and genderqueer/genderqueer and trans ppl keep saying ‘look, it’s like what happened with us.’ It’s not ONLY because of the way that people are treating aces, telling them AMG YOU ARE NOT ONE OF US U FAKER, it’s because THE WHOLE THING is so much like what happened with us. Including the lightbulb moments and the realization that we’d always been this way, we just needed the words.
Yeah i even followed the link to their explanation and im still really not getting it like… If some people wanna use mlm or wlw thats their choice. There’s about 10 billion posts all over tumblr using every single term for anything under the Sun, if you want something different go get it. Untill there is a LGBT+ grand council to tell us what the One True Terminology is then its up to the individual to decide what they like best.
You know whats REALLY exhausting? Infighting over nothing.
i’m not real interested in replying at length, because you don’t sound all that interested in listening, but tl;dr: bisexual men & women desire men *and* women. in theory, WLW/MLM should include bi men & women. in practice, as in this post, it doesn’t. and in that post specifically, it basically takes a giant shit all over m-spec/bi+ folks and says “lol ur basically straight”.
make more sense now? or you wanna keep sticking ur fingers in ur ears?
Theres no way you would know this, but your not the first bisexual whose opinion on this particular post (or these terms) that I’ve heard. There are actually many bisexuals in my life, and many more online, whose opinions ive heard on this issue. So please dont assume I’m simply plugging my ears to bisexual voices.
A lot of them actually do use these terms, because they happen to like them. You do not. Thats fine. Thats the thing about the multitude of labels; not everyone is going to click with them. I personally use lesbian for myself, but thats mostly for ease of explanation. Like everyone else, my sexuality can be complicated and I use what terms i feel best suit me for the time being. Its useless and counter productive to get mad about any specific term simply because you feel it doesnt suit you. This post really does not exclude bisexuals, nor do the terms somehow imply they are “basically straight”. You are maby the first person Ive seen pull that from this post. But thats okay! Your life is shaped to your experiences so, if you choose not to identify with these terms dont use them. But dont throw shade at them, because others DO like these terms and find use for them.
Tl:dr: labels and terminology are going to vary from person to person because sexuality is complex and multifaceted and going around saying “this label exhausts me” just because you dont personally use it is actually pretty rude, please reconsider.
I am not even gonna bother tryna talk with you because you’re obviously pretty set, and set on being pretty damn patronizing about it, but just replying to let you know: nah, you’re wrong, you obviously are not understanding the actual issue here, and the words we use as identifying labels matter more than just “what sounds nice” or “clicks”.
Nice dismissal of someone’s emotional experience with your little “don’t show me your pain, it’s rude”, at the end there, though. 🙂
‘The only queer part of a bi/pan person’s experience is the part that looks just like a gay experience.’
That’s all that original post and 90% of wlw/mlm posts ever say.
Well, they say this too:
“We’re only interested in relecting cisgender people.”
If we could stop trying to annex the identities of other queer people to serve our own gay interests, that would be super awesome.
^^^ What Dawn said.
Also, suppose we, as bi people, do fall into the “wlw” or “mlm” categories (nvm that they tend to… not be inclusive of nb people). Nine times out of ten posts like the one in the screencap tend to… shit all over men. And “why are men Like That” and a myriad other things and turns of phrase that essentially come down to “ew boys why would you like those”
It… you’re essentially telling us that the only valid part of us is the part that is attracted to the same gender, while completely invalidating the fact that we do, in fact, like the opposite gender. And, worse, telling us that the opposite gender is gross and we have no reason to like them and, by association, we are gross and should be ashamed for liking the opposite gender.
Y’all…. I like men and women. I am dating a wonderful and amazing man. Do you have any idea how tiring it gets to see people who should be supportive of you shitting all over your relationships and experiences because “you’re basically straight”?
The answer is very.
so i’ll admit it took me awhile to understand what the problem was with a post that i thought was p funny but it finally clicked and is super obvious now lmao
(problem in super-clear language for those still brain-farting like i was: the screencapped post basically says that “wlw don’t like men (because they’re “like that” aka gross)”, but “wlw” does not in fact mean “lesbian”, it means lesbians and bisexual women, and bisexual women sure as heck do like men, so the usage of “wlw” in that post is inaccurate at best, and otherwise, well, what the posters above me said)
although, i disagree that it entirely “shits all over m-spec folk” bc the (actually accurately used) mlm slant is “how can we be expected not to like boys when they’re “like that” aka hot as hell”
or at least that’s how i interpreted it?
sorry if i’m still missing a bit tho x.x
m-spec as in multisexual spectrum, not masc!does that help? if… that was the problem. other than that, yeah, you got it! (mlm still has the exact same problems in common usage, and in that post, as wlw tho. it’s still just working as a synonym for gay.)
thanks for your clarifying explanation for others tho! i’ve been super aggravated by the acronyms for ages, and i’m well aware the saltiness of my OP is a bit obscure for anyone not tuned in to the same wavelength.
worst of it is, the post wld be pretty cute and funny…. if it just said gay & lesbian instead.
oh yes i was reading m-spec as masc-spec lol thanks
i don’t feel that the post excludes bi men though, bc it’s not saying they’re not attracted to women as well, just that they’re not limited to women bc men are (also) hot? that’s how i’m reading it at least
and yeah i can 100% understand your fatigue lol
Yeah, you’re giving it the pretty charitable reading. After seeing so much usage of MLM to mean gay, I’m pretty unwilling to be so generous, lol. It could be read as you are reading It, or it could be seen as just reinforcing the idea of “why be (attracted to women) when men are Like That”.
Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”
And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”
Her response was, “Well, are you?”
My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.
The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”
I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.
Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular – but guys, value your allies.Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.
Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.
Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place – when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.
Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.
Signal boost to this unbelievably important message.
I’d reblog this a thousand times if I could.
Stop attacking allies. Educate. Not hate.
This is incredibly important. Please read!
Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving.
don’t use gay, it’s a derogatory term that’s been used against us for years and still happens today!!!
you can reclaim it for yourself, but there is no gay community because it’s a fucking slur, not an umbrella term.
teddyisabear said: I know this post is a joke but like you’re being really insensitive and ugly. Queer is a fucking slur and gay has never been a slur lmao get it together
have you perhaps been outside or at least in a public school or maybe looked at LGBT+ history
growing up, gay was quite frequently used as an insult. Constantly used in a derogatory manner.
growing up, the word gay had negative connotations. Do I ask people to tag things as g sl*r? No, because that would be homophobic. So why the fuck is it okay for people to tag stuff as q sl*r?
High school was a constant parade of people calling bad things “that’s so gay” meanwhile there were no publicly out students or any GSA type organization until after I graduated. But no one there was getting called queer as a slur, just gay. I recognize that use of negative meanings of queer is regional, but “that’s so gay” was pretty much universal for several years at least, in recent memory.
When I was in high school, I knew damn well who was gay or bi. But we literally didn’t dare utter the words. The only way I heard that word at all on school grounds was as a weapon, usually backed by a fist.
The time I spent in public school taught me 6 neat ways to remember the formula for calculating speed, and that if you don’t like someone, the first thing you do is call them gay.
when someone keeps referring to ‘the queer community’ and ‘queer people’
plot twist, the queer community is a separate thing. literally its for lgbt+ people who identify as queer.
added to that, ‘lgbt’ erases a whooooooooole lot of people. and that’s even without dredging up the cesspool that is Ace Discourse.
pan people, intersex people, questioning people, people who don’t feel comfortable with a label at all and just know they’re not straight and/or cis… all clearly not cishet, but all clearly not included in the acronym.
‘queer’ might not be the best word for The Group Of People Who Are Not Straight, Not Cis, Not Perisex, and/or Not Allosexual/Romantic, but LGBT is even worse, IMO. it’s exclusionary as fuck, it’s unwieldy when you try to make it less exclusionary, it’s… generally not my first choice?
there’s no word that’s gonna cover everyone, but ‘queer’ covers more people than ‘lgbt’ IMO.
Also, I have a language disability. “Queer” is much more possible for me to even say, and that matters to me.
idk if this has been posted yet but i read this thread by @teamarimo and found it SUPER interesting and thorough and thought it’d be good to share it
This is good, just wish it wasn’t posted as a Twitter essay, they’re so hard to read.
[Caption: a series of tweets by twitter user @teamarimo. It reads:
the debate on who can use the terms “butch/femme” keeps coming up so i
did a ton of research & i’d like to weigh in on the issue. i’ll post
sources at the end
too many people credit anne lister (a historical lesbian) with coining
femme in her journals but she was speaking french and “femme” has been a
french word forever
going in chronological order of gay words in the english-speaking world,
“lesbian” began as a synonym for tribade. “tribadism” = scissoring;
both words meant women who slept with women & the sexual act itself.
this was long before IDpolitics
so lesbian/tribade was something you did, not something you IDd as, bc
they were labeled by their sexual activity since IDpol hadn’t come
around yet. there was no concept of who was or wasn’t exclusively
attracted to women. that’s why bi women are closer to lesbians than bi
men
tribade dominated the 17th-mid 19th centuries until sapphic & lesbian took prominence. it wasn’t until 1892 that a neurologist used bisexual to describe sexuality. from then until the 1960s, bi was used only in academic contexts. it still wasn’t an identity yet
bi women have always been here but shared community with & organized
under “lesbian” until (and even into) the 60s. before then, any text or
study that said “lesbian” meant gay & bi women unless it (on the
rare occasion) specifies otherwise, so context matters
butch/femme began in gay bars in the 40s-60s. women-only gay bars were
frequented by lesbian & bi women. so for the first decades of
butch/femme history, “lesbian” includes bi women bc there was no bi or
“women-exclusive” yet & they were at the bars, participating in the
culture
in the 70s, lesbian separatism begins with 12 white cis lesbians, the
furies. They suggest that women engage “only (with) women who cut their
ties to male privilege… as long as women still benefit from
heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will…
at some point have to betray their sisters, especially lesbian sisters
who do not receive those benefits.” demon TERF sheila jeffreys says “our
definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does
not fuck men.” this marks the split between bi & lesbian women
lesbian separatism others bi women who shared space, identity &
oppression with lesbians centuries prior. it deems trans women as
inextricable from male privilege they (don’t) have. it others lgbt woc
who share oppression with men & therefore can’t exclude men from
their politics
tldr it’s bad lol. with events like stonewall (1969) & increasing
anti-gay violence in the 70s, anyone with proximity to heterosexuality
in gay spaces was viewed as a threat & shunned. so bi groups begin
to pop up, since they had no place in straight or gay communities
anymore
in the 80s, 2nd-wave bi organizing was feminist bi orgs forming bc
lesbians posited bisexuality as anti-feminist. by 1988, LGB officially
separates lesbian & bi. now lesbians are invested in specific
lesbian history & everything before the 60s says “lesbian.” see the
problem here
texts with the word “lesbian” before the 60s are also referring to bi
women but modern meanings of old words are applied to them, &
consequently, bi women are denied a massive chunk of our history,
including butch/femme culture
in the 60s, ball culture emerges in houses created as safe spaces for
black & latinx queer youth. the genders are butch queen, femme
queen, butch & women. here, butch & femme embody: the
intersections of race, gender & sexuality; the freedom of it; and
the resulting persecution
in the 70s, lesbian separatists say any form of masculinity harms women,
materializing against butch & trans women. femmes are framed as
wanting to reap benefits of heterosexuality while still toying with
women (this is heavily wrapped in biphobic rhetoric too, if you can’t
tell)
butch/femme is framed as heteronormative, anti-lesbian &
anti-feminist. so androgyny is proposed as the lesbian ideal. now
lesbian feminism is centered on white, middle class, androgynous
lesbians at the expense of working class + nonwhite lesbians, bi women,
and butches & femmes
butch/femme fall out of popular use, only kept alive by the same working
class & nonwhite women who are ousted by white lesbians.
butch/femme usage among queer youth of color includes lesbians &
nonlesbians as it had since 60s ball culture & since 40s gay bars
with gay & bi women
it’s interesting that people say butch/femme is for lesbians only when
the beginning of lesbian as an exclusively-woman attracted identity
& the downfall of butch/femme go hand-in-hand. it was queer youth of
color who kept that culture alive, lesbian or not
white lesbian TERFs who demonized the culture embraced it again when
genderfluidity became trendy in the late 80s. they claimed it as theirs,
and stripped it of its history with bi women, trans women & queer
youth of color that they wanted no association with
so that history was lost among many, and now well-meaning lesbians who
definitely are not TERFs don’t even know butch/femme’s roots in race,
trans/gnc identity, & class struggle, or its origins among gay &
bi women as one group
tldr: TERFs suck, bi & lesbian women’s history is inextricable, and
bi women were using butch/femme before the bi identity even existed.
historically, “lesbian” encompassed a set of behaviors & became an
identity later
hi here’s a trans lesbian (homojabi@tumblr) saying exactly what I just
said from a trans perspective for the “everyone’s trying to steal from
lesbians” crowd. I’m going back to sleep
@queerly-tony I think you were discussing this a short while ago? Might be of interest 🙂
OMG I was!! Awesome! Yeah, it doesn’t surprise me it was TERFS trying to exclude trans women who started that shit.
Well cool. I’m… probably definitely some kind of butch. ❤
Entirely unsurprising that hard division between queer women has at its root extreme prejudice, hard division always does.
@asynca, might be interesting to you? I assume you probably know this, but possible you don’t.
Thanks! I knew some of this, some of it (like ‘tribadism’) is new.
this is my favourite summary:
tldr: TERFs suck, bi & lesbian women’s history is inextricable, and bi women were using butch/femme before the bi identity even existed. historically, “lesbian” encompassed a set of behaviors & became an identity later
Essentially – block anyone who tries to force a wedge between lesbians and bisexual women, between cis women and trans women, etc, etc. Exclusionary politics and separatism is ALWAYS founded in genuinely untrue bullshit, dodgy politics and discrimination.
Important history, darlings. Don’t let anyone rewrite it.
Some folks are asking for LGBTQIA+ history aside from Stonewall and marriage equality – here’s some good stuff.
The Anne Lister claim is especially weird – not only would she have simply been speaking French, as the Twitter thread correctly notes, but the coded portions of Anne Lister’s journals that contain records of her sexuality were only published in the 1980s, and publications about her only started addressing her relationships with women in that decade. (source: Helena Whitbread’s introduction to her edition of Anne Lister’s diaries)
Lister scholarship hit the mainstream in academia with the growth of queer british history study in the 1990s and early 2000s and has only really recently got to the mainstream. The idea that American communities would be calling themselves slang derived from Lister’s diaries, when the only way to decode her diaries was kept locked in a safe in the local library and local authorities pressured academics not to mention this in publications, is a hell of a reach.
so this was a thing
what other citations do we have?
or is this known to be wrong?
this is the first mention I’ve seen of this but the teamarimo thread seems thin on corroboration
(personally, it’s not at all clear to me femme is a lesbian word though—it seems to me possible that some of the characters called femmes in stone butch blues could be bi. there seems to be a strong sense that they favor butch women because men have hurt them, rather than that they’re all, to a person, monogay and “intentionally subverting femininity by performing it to attract women and not men.”)
A thing that frustrates me abt the way talking abt trans women and stonewall is that like, the reason people wanted to highlight trans women’s presence was to show how gay and trans liberation have historically been linked, but the general trend has been to still talk abt it in this adversarial gay vs trans way that talks abt them like they are two separate groups like “trans women gave gays their rights, cis gays had nothing to do w it” (besides being untrue and focusing too much on one event) misunderstands why it’s important to reintegrate trans women into these historical narratives (and to highlight their race/class): to show that they’ve been a part of the communities and actions, and that transness or race or poverty were always a central part of gay lib (not just things to add onto it)
and the thing is if people actually went back and listened to and read what Stonewall vets had to say in their own words we wouldn’t have this problem to such a degree.
Something else that would aid understanding of the interconnectedness of gay and trans liberation in the early years of the movement, imo, is acknowledging that the terms have not always been defined the same way they are today. Identities like “drag queen” (which is what Marsha P. Johnson typically called herself) and “transvestite” may be popularly seen as regressive today, but in the time that Stonewall happened these were real identity labels! They described a way of existing in the world that would likely be lumped in with trans womanhood today but in reality was more nuanced. The kind of hard-line distinction we make today between “cis gay [male]” and “trans woman” didn’t even exist when Stonewall happened so it’s ridiculous to try and apply those distinctions in retrospect.
(Not to mention that nobody who makes these arguments seems to remember that Storme DeLarverie existed.)
Some older discussion of this, including some perspective from Jayne County who was also at Stonewall. (And IDing as gay/doing drag at the time.)
One very relevant snippet from the longer quote there:
Christine Jorgensen actually came to Atlanta to do her one-woman show, so I was aware of the idea of transsexualism from quite early, but I didn’t know where I stood in relation to that. I was relating very much to this blanket idea of ‘gayness’, and my transsexual realisation didn’t come till a lot later. In the 60s, people weren’t making divisions as much as we do now; we didn’t talk about gay, lesbian, transsexual, bisexual, transvestite or anything it was all just one big grab-bag of being different. Sometimes I think we’d all be a lot better off without all that classification and arguing about terms, although I recognise that it’s a very basic human need to be able to say ‘I am THIS.’ But now that people know so much more about sexual minorities, it seems harder. I know people have to learn about other people’s lives in order to become more tolerant, but sometimes that makes bigotry worse. The more straight people know about us, the more they have to hate…
Some common ways of looking at things and terminology have also changed quite a bit just since she wrote that in the mid-‘90s. Incidentally not long after I started getting involved. Come back in another 20 years, and some understandings and ways of describing things no doubt will have changed at least as much by then.
Y’all the white stripe on the trans flag literally is for nonbinary folk, so maybe stop yelling at nonbinary folk that we’re using the ‘wrong’ flag for ourselves.
Also the trans flag was inspired by the bi flag, so miss me with your ‘bisexuality is transphobic’ bullshit. Here’s more of a history on why that shit is ahistorical.
The creator of the bi flag talked with the creator of the trans flag about how she should make the flag. The creator of the trans flag has said, repeatedly, on camera, that the white stripe stands for non-binary folks.
THIS IS NOT UP FOR DEBATE.
For fuck’s sake. Why is Pride Month like this?
Because every shithead gotta come out of the woodwork to make sure you know their garbage opinion on shit that ain’t their business.
It’s true
A little more context (and expansion) for that Barbara Mann quote I posted earlier. Also the other quote from that talk which came up earlier and prompted me to look at the transcript again.
(Source through those links. There’s more of interest in that talk.)
I don’t have a lot of spoons to comment right now. But, what she’s talking about here is relevant to way too much.
Including some of my frustrations dealing with some people who are coming at things from some very different base assumptions, in a variety of contexts.
Also had to think about that rather disturbing bizarro assertion from a while back that “inclusionist ideas are much more abstract and harder to understand” 🤔
Anyway, long quote time:
And one of the things that tells us is that the One Good Mind of consensus actually requires the active participation of everybody in the community, that it can’t be done without active participation by all. So, everybody matters, everybody counts. And I remember my mother specifically saying, “Don’t leave anyone out, don’t leave anyone out”. And if anything was ever counted up and somebody was left out, you started counting again, from the very beginning. Why? Because somebody was left out. And that’s not acceptable, because exclusivism destroys community. It’s the first and best way to destroy community. Inclusivism, on the other hand, is very important to creating community; it hears absolutely every comment, it hears everything that’s going on, and it hears it in the voices that raised the issue. That’s pretty important.
I think one of the most damaging misunderstanding of Good Mindedness is something that, something that Heidi was just talking about, is the assumption that because everyone is equal, everyone possesses equal amounts of wisdom and talent–and, therefore, everyone should share equal amounts of power. OK, well this is a prescription for disaster if I ever heard one. [laughs] Because people simply do not have the same type or amount of talent or wisdom; everybody has a different thing. That’s why, in the words before all else, we acknowledge the special things that each one is bringing. If everybody was bringing the same thing, there’d be no need for those words. It’s basically patriarchal monotheism that thinks that everybody looks alike. You know, seen one seen ‘em all. That’s a patriarchal idea.
Instead, everyone has a limited amount of wisdom, and a limited amount of talent, and the idea is to make it all work together for the good of everybody. No one person is going to be able to do this alone. And each spirit has a limited amount of knowledge; that goes for human beings, that goes for any of these spirits. For example, if you want to know about corn, what do you do? Well, you go ask Sister Corn, that’s what you do. She sure knows a lot about being corn, she knows more than you and I do. She knows more about being corn than Sister Squash does. But, guess what: if you ask her about Brother Tobacco, she might know a little bit about him, but she doesn’t really know about Brother Tobacco. If you want to know about him, you’d better go and ask him.
And one of the important points spiritually about this is that there’s nothing that’s all-knowing. There’s no all-knowing spirit anywhere. Everything is a collective attempt, we all dump it into the center and see what we’ve got when we’re done collecting up all of what we have…
So, there’s no omniscience… [P]eople have frailties, they have failings, and that’s understood and recognized without any prejudice. It’s just something you’re going to work around. So, no one council arrogates the right to dictate to anybody else, it just is not going to happen, it better not happen… [B]asically claiming more wisdom than you have is actually a crime. It’s actually a crime against the people. And all that’s going to happen is that it’s going to create havoc in its wake.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.