6/23/2021 if you aren't allowed boundaries you'll come to resent other people for having needsRead Now I'm so, so tired. When I first realized I was a lesbian, five or so years ago, things weren't like this. I made a tumblr post while crying with happiness, celebrating women's bodies and how overwhelmingly happy I was to have made my peace and accepted my attraction to them. Now, I'd be scared to make the same post for fear of being called transphobic. No one cares that I'm only into female bodies. Weekly I see posts come across my dashboard saying things like 'if you equate lesbianism with not liking dick I'm going to attack you' (word for word quote) and mocking lesbians with genital preference.
I entered the LGBT community ready to accept everyone, but it's got to the point where this quote comes to mind: 'if you aren't allowed boundaries you'll come to resent other people for having needs'. I think that's the point I'm at now. I just want to be left alone to love women. I'm tired of being called bigoted just for existing. I just watched one of the only lesbian bars left release a formal apology because their security guard told people (I'm assuming men) at the door that the bar was for q*eer women only. Im heartbroken that they had to apologize for that. Think that through. Lesbians bars have to apologize for being lesbian bars and have to remind everyone that actually the bar is for EVERYONE because it would be so fucked up and evil if the lesbian bar was just for lesbians apparently. It wasn't rando christian homophobes horrified at the security guard's statement. It was our supposed community. This man was literally just trying to keep us safe and the rest of the LGBTQ community made the bar do something about him. I feel so hated by BTQ. We are so hated.
6/15/2021 I started Googling how to go back into the closet while preserving my mental health and found no good adviceRead Now On Twitter, a big-name trans philosopher said that homosexuals and heterosexuals are inherently immoral because we exclude people by our very nature, and she got a ton of likes and retweets for it. That tweet has haunted me. I broke down crying multiple times after reading it over knowing that people think I'm disgusting and cannot even become a moral person for something I cannot change. One of those times, I started wondering if this meant I didn't have a right to be alive, and my mind went to a scary place that I thankfully pulled myself out of. A god must be looking out for me. That's when all of the rhetoric about TERFs went from being about awful people hurting trans women to me realizing that it was targeted at homosexuals like me even though I wasn't harming anyone by just breathing and living my life. All of this has started to impact my productivity at work due to the constant anxiety and uncertainty about the future. I started Googling how to go back into the closet while preserving my mental health and found no good advice. I now wish I had never come out because the anxiety and uncertainty is so potent. I no longer interact much with LGBTQ people because I could get accused of being an assimilationist TERF if they knew more about me. I have always been a lesbian who isn't culturally queer, and it has always caused issues. It made me worry about my relationship with my mom if she realizes what my lesbianism means. She has trans friends. I've always felt like her love for me would go away if I stopped being the perfect daughter and it's hard to shake that feeling even after so many years. Somehow, all of this hurts more than the homophobia from before marriage equality and the end of DADT and all of the comments people made about gay people when I was a girl.
In Wicca, it's become taboo to talk about or use female fertility images, but somehow it's still okay to talk about phallus-related fertility and to use that symbolism in ritual. People who mention wombs are being bullied online by pagan influencers for being TERFs when womb iconography and mythic symbolism is part of the history of some goddesses like Hecate. People are saying that being inclusive means we have to remove all references to procreation in Wiccan liturgy in order to "include" LGBTQ+ people. I know where sperm at the fertility clinic comes from, and it is very insulting for them to think people like me are so fragile that we need entire ritual liturgies changed to obscure the realities of biology. I feel so alone. I can't be myself anywhere but my journals. Everything has become a cage. The future looked so bright after marriage equality. Now I can't think about my homosexuality without significant mental stress. How is this situation inclusive when it is hurting so many human beings? 6/15/2021 But how can you be born in the wrong body if there isn’t a woman essence that we all have in the same way? Where does that live? Where God does?Read Now In my Women’s Studies classes, we learned that gender is a social construct, and that while even biological sex isn’t always binary (but we meant intersex people or heterogeneous chromosome pairs; trans issues were barely a thing in Women’s Studies depts as recently as 2008), there is no inherent “woman” essence because the idea of what a “woman” does and means is a function of language and interaction, not anything (personality/psyche wise) inherently “feminine” in our minds. Like, you couldn’t “feel like” a woman because, if “woman” is an embodied concept, a woman is whatever people who are called women do, and people who are called women are as different from each other as we are from men.’ But the distinction still matters because it affects our material reality. One of my old professors tells me that, now, they teach the “born in the wrong body” line. But how can you be born in the wrong body if there isn’t a woman essence that we all have in the same way? Where does that live? Where God does? In our made-up hearts? Like, if “woman” is a linguistic concept that still organizes the world, how can you even be nonbinary? You only affirm the existence of the binary when you step outside of it. There is no embodied experience that exists outside gender discourse. Like, I’m not a “girly girl” and never was, but I always knew I was a girl even if I didn’t feel the exact way “a girl” or woman is supposed to feel (say, not giving a shit about babies or lacking a fondness for pink) because, to everyone who sees or otherwise interacts with me, I’m a woman (maybe outside some online spaces). It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m a woman either way because we live and create meaning in a society. I have no idea how this got past feminist and especially queer theorists. I think they were all too afraid or, if they tried to write something rigorous that’s also not exclusive in a cruel way, no one would publish it because they wouldn’t want to get canceled (because that’s who actually gets canceled: women. Men apologize, and trans people cry oppression). No one’s keeping anyone from being a masculine woman. Why the need to make it your whole identity if gender is a social construct, and we should all be cool with the thing a minority of people want us to “center” now?
I have no problem respecting trans and non-binary people and using their pronouns and all that, but they’re a sliver of the population, including in queer spaces, and we’ve all had to deal with pedantic silliness that holds back women’s activism because we couldn’t talk about periods without acknowledging that not all women get them. But before trans ideology took over, all women still didn’t get periods (hell, some large percent of adult females doesn’t get a period after menopause but sure lives a while like that and is still considered a woman). It doesn’t mean that periods aren’t a huge part of womanhood and especially girlhood. Girlhood, always a maligned state, is totally dismissed in favor of ideas about trans womanhood. But girlhood is an important component of what a woman experiences. The kind of girlhood you had really shapes you. Sure, trans people can say the same thing—that their “girlhood” was fucked up because they were in a boy body—but they didn’t have a choice, and people treated them like boys. They got called on in class, not cat-called, all that. And now you want to say you’re as much a woman as I am? Because if gender is a social and linguistic concept grounded in and constitutive of experience, you’re not a woman the way I am, and it makes total sense to separate trans and cis women in activism or bars or groups or dating and sex. It doesn’t even pass humanities rigor. How did we all just get stampeded by less than one percent of the population? 6/12/2021 I feel like the niche online beliefs they've internalized are actively making them accept themselves lessRead Now The only other lesbian I know has recently changed their name to a gender-neutral one and switched to they/them pronouns. They also bought a binder because they said they don't like others to see their breasts through their clothes, but they have no issue looking at their breasts naked. They talk at length about how much they hate being perceived as female or a woman, and those feelings are seen by others as proof of their innate nonbinary identity, and as something to be validated and encouraged.
They also expressed significant discomfort with 'genital preference' rhetoric many times before, as they're only into vagina, but they also believe lesbians can enjoy sex with men 'just because they feel like it' just like they believe that 'asexuals can have sex even though they don't experience sexual attraction'. I feel like the niche online beliefs they've internalized are actively making them accept themselves less, and I'm worried that they're going to go down the road of an unneeded medical transition in a few years. I'm not 'terfy' at all and I wholeheartedly support genuine transgender people, but encouraging insecurity and self-loathing, as well as trying to redefine lesbians out of existence does not help trans people. I feel really bad for my friend and how their self-hatred and dissociation is being encouraged. I care about them a lot and I wish I could have a honest conversation with them, but I know I would lose their friendship if I did so, and I'd get branded a 'TERF' and shunned by all my LGBT acquaintances. It hurts to know that gayness has been so appropriated. Actual LGB people face actual consequences in their daily lives all around the world for being gay. Same sex attracted. Gay men are murdered and jailed in the same places where it’s legal (and encouraged) to transition for conversion therapy.
The trendiness of gay is disgusting. No it’s not about fashion or iced coffee. The only thing that makes you gay is being attracted to the same sex. That’s it. It’s all fetishization, which is the opposite side of oppression. I’m sick of it, and I’m sick of the people who in ten years time, who call themselves “queer” despite no same sex attraction will inevitably grow up, hang up their quirky clothes and get an adult hair cut while marrying someone of the opposite sex. Only the straight people that played as queer will have destroyed the LGBT in the process, and likely become conservative, thus hurting us in the process. Don’t believe me? “Cis gay men are the white ppl of the LGBT.” “Cis lesbians need to get over it.” They hate us because we’re gay and don’t include them. They hate us and after they’re done playing as us, after they’re done saying asexuals and demis are oppressed, that hatred will still remain. I’m scared for the future where gay people aren’t viewed as an oppressed minority and whose suffering and daily pain is denied by the same people who gladly insisted how gay they were. I’m very scared that we are hated by the left and the right. 6/11/2021 I find myself unable to digest the level of reality denial and delusion, or how they expect you to harm yourself and community to uphold this delusionRead Now I'm very angry about what the lgbt community has become, and I haven't been quiet about it. I didn't start angry, but I'm furious as a result of being alienated, threatened, silenced, exposed to coercive lesphobic rape rhetoric, and called a bigot for stating facts. Facts that matter when it comes to sexuality. And in what was the community I used to feel semi safe within (because the lesbian community can be just as racist as any other)
I used to write a lot of lesbian romance. I no longer do. I have nothing to give this version of the lgbt community, and it doesn't deserve anything from me. Least of all my words, labour, and beloved stories. I hate this community now. We all understood sexual orientation was biological and immutable a couple years ago, and now daily, I see homophobia in this community. 'Genital preference,' this or 'genital fetishist' that. The lesphobia and erasure is insane. And if I dare suggest a lesbian open a female only bar, that hypothetical lesbian becomes the object of unreasonable lesphobic hate. Some of the conversations I've had with trans activists have been flooring. I find myself unable to digest the level of reality denial and delusion, or how they expect you to harm yourself and community to uphold this delusion. I hate the lgbt community now. It is my enemy. And it's the enemy of all lgb ppl, only most haven't realised it yet. 6/9/2021 There is no such thing as LGBTQ, and the + makes it even more ridiculous— “+” can encompass literally anything and anyone, and now it doesRead Now Honestly, I think the idea of an “LGBTQ” community is a myth. The homophobic/misogynistic ideology of the T is 100% antithetical to the same-SEX rights of LGB, and any egocentric straight person who thinks they have a super-unique personality can call themselves “queer” nowadays. There is no such thing as LGBTQ, and the + makes it even more ridiculous— “+” can encompass literally anything and anyone, and now it does. There are no lesbian spaces left, no one is fighting for lesbian rights except a few radical feminists, and if we try to create spaces we’re branded hateful bigots. I can’t believe this is where we are in 2021. Honestly I felt safer and more at home in the community 20 years ago before we had any legal rights.
I'm bisexual and while I'm not being impacted in the same way as my lesbian sisters, I'm frustrated by the way they're being treated and by the fact that as same-sex attracted women the attraction we feel toward other women and their female bodies has somehow become taboo again. I'm attracted to both sexes, but I'm attracted to them as their respective sexes. The female body is one of the things I love about women. I'm sick of this being unspeakable, and I'm sick of gender conforming heterosexual people feeling entitled to tell me and other LGB people that we're bigoted or that we need to "educate ourselves" about trans people when we're the ones who exist in overlapping communities. I'm also frustrated with my own people, bisexual women, for often being complicit in the bullying and rape culture toward lesbians. Bi women who are desperate to be anything other than bisexual have found ways to instead identify themselves as lesbians within the terms of gender ideology and then turn around and accuse the actual lesbians, the homosexual women, of being bigots, TERFs, genital fetishists. We're in an ugly place right now.
An organisation for lesbians in my country, Singapore, Sayoni, now offers funding for testosterone for 'transmen' to support their 'transition' during Covid-related lockdowns. When was it okay to pay for lesbians to mutilate and irreversibly change their beautiful female bodies, in order to fit in? How did a lesbian organisation lose its way? In lesbian and gay spaces, gay men applaud articles about men who pretend to be lesbians ('transwomen'). We all know no gay man would ever even consider having sex with a 'transman'. I am angry and disappointed with their misogyny. I feel alienated by the 'lgbt' community. A law still exists to criminalize gay male sex, lesbian and gay couples are banned from affordable housing, and widespread media censorship and discrimination still exists, yet our largest 'lgbt' organisation, Pink Dot, posts endless on Facebook on trans issues instead of seeing how deeply regressive and dangerous to women the trans ideology is. Homosexuals are attracted to sex, not a made up gender identity and that will never change. No, I will not accept that a man who wants to be a woman is a lesbian. I do not accept there is such as thing as a non-binary person. Stop accepting and promoting the mutilation of the female body. Lesbians and bisexual women need to make our own spaces again. We do not accept any male-made definitions. We do not accept any male influence.
|
Details
Archives
May 2023
Categories |