Trans “activists” attempt to make Dyke March unsafe space for dykes. Two trans allies apologize to me afterwards because their friends acted crazy.
I keep looking at the body language and expressions of the three females in the left of this pix.The woman looking away apologized to me afterward. She said “I disagree with everything you say, but they way they acted was wrong.”
I thanked her.
We should be able to disagree without violence.
THIS… this is EXACTLY how it is suppose to work!! The violence is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE! Being accosted at a FUCKING DYKE MARCH is insanity. Tens of thousands upon thousands of female dykes can seem to gather EVERY FUCKING YEAR, all over this COUNTRY… w/out incident of violence. We all don’t agree, we all don’t even have to like each other, we all just want one fucking afternoon were we gather, march and make ourselves visible.Diversity doesn’t mean… as long as we are all the fucking same!!!!!!
Yep. I just wanted to march with dykes. But the crazy trans activists need all dykes to accept them as female, or face violent repercussions.
I was afraid they were going to physically attack me. One of the accosters (a cis female queer) actually said she needed to stop because she wanted to punch me.
This is why we need female-only space.
I am the person in the picture. If what I said was taken as an apology for the way that my friends acted, that wasn’t the message I was trying to get across. What I was trying to say was that I wish that the arguments hadn’t centered on personal attacks that were not related to the question at hand, and that’s because I don’t think that’s effective. There was screaming and violent body language from both sides and while I understand that we’re extremely angry about the violence that Cathy Brennan has and continues to enact against trans women, I don’t think that shouting back and forth that the other person is an “asshole” or a “prick” is a good use of time, nor productive.
I am not a trans woman. I am a bisexual cis woman who is fortunate enough to have amazing friends who are trans women, most of whom are dykes. I date trans women. I call trans women when I am feeling sad. We listen to music together and go out to dinner together and talk about cats together. We stay up all night talking about who we are and who we’ve been and where we’re going. And unfortunately another common thread in all these relationships is hearing about violent sexual assault that’s happened to my friends. It makes me really sad that Cathy Brennan looks at these same people and sees women who are trying to force themselves onto others. This could not be farther from the truth. And it makes me angry that she continues to perpetuate violence against trans women by outing them on the internet by linking their birth info with their current name, address, jobs, and more.
Cathy, you are exposing these women to the threat of assault and death. We talked about how cis women (which I believe you referred to as “females”) are killed every day. Trans women experience the same violence against women and are being massacred. On April 3, Coko Williams had her throat slashed and was shot in Detroit. On April 16, Paige Clay was shot to death on the West Side of Chicago. On April 29, Brandy Martell was shot to death sitting in her car in Oakland. These are murders that occurred in April of this year alone. In sheer numbers, the amount of cis women who die eclipse trans women because the total number of cis women is so much greater. This is not an argument as to who gets to claim their victims of violence against women. I truly do not understand why you refuse to recognize that trans women experience violence against women. We are all endangered by misogyny and we should be working together against that.
Additionally, we did not get to discuss this, but I attended No More Apologies in Toronto and was happy to see the discussion of the cotton ceiling. I had a conversation with a friend of yours in which she told me that she read the description of the cotton ceiling and felt threatened by the language that was used. I am another cis woman who read the same description and did not feel threatened at all. Both of our reactions and feelings are valid. But that does not mean both of our readings are valid.
Avory Faucette wrote an eloquent rebuttal which I would only be aping were I to try to respond. I am linking to it here. Zie says:
This spectre of rape that cis lesbian “radfems” habitually raise, centered around the supposed inherent threat of the phallus, minimizes the appalling rates of physical and sexual violence committed against trans women, particularly trans women of color and sex workers. It also twists the picture of systemic violence to make it look like trans women are a huge, systemic threat to cis lesbians when in fact trans women as a group face incredible systemic barriers in almost every aspect of life.
Certainly there are individual cases of interpersonal violence that one could bring up involving a perpetrator of any description. But, although I may not be 100% comfortable with the mental image of panty-ripping, I find it ludicrous to suggest that trans women, in pointing out their exclusion from lesbian sexual communities and the relationship between common lack of cis lesbian desire for trans women and the structural problem of cissexism/transmisogyny, are threatening rape of cis lesbians or perpetuating rape culture.
On a final note, most of the trans women I know are dykes. They are women who are attracted to other women. They are lesbians. And ironically, they are being attacked for being lesbians by other lesbians, even at the Dyke March, under the guise of “protecting lesbians”. Attacking other lesbians is not protecting dyke space. Refusing to accept that there are plenty of trans women who are lesbians won’t change reality. You told me that there is no way that “all lesbians” (cis lesbians) will ever accept trans women as fellow lesbians and women. I don’t care about what every single lesbian thinks. What I care about is the systematic, hateful way in which you have been willfully endangering people, and will do whatever I can to put an end to this onslaught.
For more resources on this issue, check out the following.
The Trans Women’s Anti-Violence Project is a Tumblr-based project:
The Trans Women’s Anti-Violence Project is a trans feminist project addressing issues of systematic, institutional and interpersonal violence and oppression experienced by trans women (those who were coercively assigned male at birth and identify or are identified as women/female) across multiple identities (e.g., race, class, dis/ability, citizen-status, nationality, sexuality, age, HIV status, and form, status, or age of transition, etc.)
Red Durkin is working on Catharsis: Trans Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence. The call for submissions is open until July 31:
Catharsis: Trans Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence is seeking written submissions from trans women who are willing to share their experiences of sexual violence and assault. The goal is to create a book-length collection of personal essays and stories from trans women about their individual experiences. Through compiling these stories, we hope to counteract the tendency of broader feminist dialog to deal with the subject of violence against trans women as hypothetical, ethereal, and comparatively minimal. We also hope that such a compilation would reinforce the place of trans women among all women and help to bring support and healing to our often overlooked communities.
And finally, the Facebook group Transmisogyny is a Women’s Issue was organized by me and other non-trans identified women.
t’s time to stand up for and with our trans sisters! Let’s join together to talk about what we can do to support trans women and eradicate trans-misogyny, particularly from within queer and women’s spaces! We envision this group as a corollary to the work trans women are doing, and as a place where we can also discuss events and situations as people who are potentially less emotionally involved from these topics by virtue of not being trans women.
P.S. Trans women are totally welcome to join and are NOT expected to be responsible for educating others.
Cosign with tastyanagram.
