kids and teens are allowed to be angry without having that anger dismissed as a “tantrum” or “hormones”. they’re allowed to be angry with adults, including their parents and teachers, without being dismissed as “disrespectful”.
they’re allowed to be sad without being dismissed as being “moody” or “whiny”. they’re allowed to feel resentment without being dismissed as “ungrateful”. they’re allowed to be uncomfortable without being dismissed as “oversensitive”.
they’re allowed to feel restless without being dismissed as “badly behaved”. they’re allowed to feel lonely without being dismissed as “attention-seeking”. they’re allowed to be tired without being dismissed as “lazy”.
young people’s emotions are valid, despite the fact that our language has an entire vocabulary designed to make them feel otherwise.
This week I had a lovely conversation with an older dyke who reminded me how much a lot of people have always hated TERFs and SWERFs.
She was talking about the time in the 1970s and 1980s when she was a young radical dyke and how many of the awesome dykes in the radical scene were trans women. So I asked her if there was ever any problem with TERFs and SWERFs. She didn’t know those words so I described them. Her reply was (paraphrasing a longer conversation):
“Oh, you mean the political lesbians? That’s what we called them at the time, no one really considered them radical. They hated everyone. They hated bisexual women who dated men. They hated us leather dykes and kinky dykes because they thought we were ‘copying the patriarchy’, they hated trans women. None of us in the radical scene liked them. A lot of them later left and admitted that they were straight but were presured to identify as lesbians in that group because being a feminist to them meant cutting all ties with men. They were like a cult. They often lived together and if you didn’t walk the political line you were dead to them. Intense stuff.
”
And like, I know her memories don’t have global relevance and there have also been places where TERFs had a much more prominent impact on the local radical women’s community, but still, to hear how despised these TERFs have always been by these truly radical dykes cheered me up a lot.
You mean to tell me, that hating TERFs is literally lesbian culture?
Jup, and actually it has been since TERFs first got started.
TERFs began to colonize the RadFem identity as early as 1973 at Radical Feminism’s biggest event: the West Coast Lesbian Conference. The conference was specifically trans-inclusive, but TERFs disrupted the event, demanding that trans attendees be removed. TERF icon Robin Morgan incited violence by telling the TERFs to “deal with” a trans women who was known to be in attendance.
When a group of TERFs tried to physically assault the trans woman, Radical Feminists stepped in to protect the trans woman. Instead of beating the trans woman, the TERFs instead beat the Radical Feminists. After the TERF violence, the conference still voted to remain a trans inclusive space, but the trans woman left the conference
voluntarily to avoid further TERF violence and disruption to the conference.
Perhaps the most iconic Radical Feminist institution was the Lesbian Separatist music collective, Olivia Records. This collective is largely responsible for the rise of women’s music movement of the 1970s. The Collective was trans-inclusive and even helped trans women access trans medical care. TERF icon, Janice Raymond discovered this and began a campaign against Olivia and the trans member of the Collective. This resulted in numerous death threats to the Radical Feminist members of the collective and credible armed death threats against the trans woman. Moreover, TERFs threatened to financially destroy Olivia Records for being trans inclusive with a boycott.
Even though Olivia voted to remain a trans-inclusive space, the trans woman left the Collective to avoid further TERF violence and disruption to the Collective.
[…]
Most of the media coverage around the MWMF casts this as a RadFem/Lesbian/Woman vs Trans issue. It’s not. The MWMF has come to represent a more nuanced struggle between TERFs who target both Radical Feminists and trans people in the name of Radical Feminism. The evidence reveals that almost from the start, the chances were that “there is still a better than 999 in 1000 chance that most Festigoers would welcome trans women”.
Moreover, the evidence reveals that the most iconic Radical Feminist institutions were designed to be trans-inclusive, until TERF violence forced trans people to choose between their own safety, the safety of Radical Feminists, the institution itself and leaving the space. As has always been, TERF aggression comes wrapped in the guise of Radical Feminism, for the purpose of colonizing Radical Feminism.
A photocopied flyer filed in the folder labeled “transsexuals” in the cabinets of
the Lesbian Herstory Archive in Brooklyn invites people to the January 19,
1983, meeting of the Gay Women’s Free Spirit discussion group in Greenwich
Village that will feature “A Very Special Discussion with Riki Anne Wilson [sic] a
Lesbian Transsexual and Radical Feminist” (“Gay Women’s” 1983). This flyer is a
trace of a historical event that would seem unlikely to contemporary feminists.
Conventional wisdom in trans and feminist academic, social, and political milieus
remembers radical feminism for its trans misogyny, exemplified by Jean O’Leary’s
1973 attack on Sylvia Rivera at the Christopher Street Liberation Day, the community
pressure put on the Olivia music collective to oust Sandy Stone in 1977,
and Janice Raymond’s 1979 jeremiad against trans women, The Transsexual
Empire. Nancy Jean Burkholder’s ejection from the Michigan Womyn’s Music
Festival (MWMF) in 1991 spurred a queer and trans protest camp that hardened
this political framing in queer and trans circles. When the festival, an enduring
emblem of 1970s cultural feminism, instituted a “womyn-born-womyn” policy to
bar trans women from participating, the factionalism between a 1970s feminism
that defended the category of “woman” as the ground for autonomous organization
and the new trans activists who demanded a move beyond this term of
political alliance seemed intractable and generationally defined.
In her indispensible 2008 book Transgender History, Susan Stryker
confirms this factionalism, writing that “most feminists [in the 1970s] were critical
of transgender practices such as cross-dressing, taking hormones … , having
… surgery, [which they considered] ‘personal solutions’ to … gender-based
oppression,” and identifies transgender feminism as part of “third wave feminism”
(Stryker 2008: 2). Transgender History’s rich presentation of references to trans
women’s political work in the 1970s launched this article, which seeks to prove that
Riki Anne Wilchins’s 1983 discussion was not an anomaly but heir to a rich relation
between women’s liberation and trans feminism that has not been adequately
accounted for in the periodization of feminist struggle. This erasure results from
the amplified voices of trans misogynists and the resultant rise of the narrative of
factionalism in the early 1990s. This relation is evident in diverse models of
political work undertaken by trans-feminine people in the 1970s. This article uses
one example of one of these models of trans women’s organizing—Beth Elliott’s
participation in lesbian feminist autonomous organizing— to argue for a turn
away from the trans misogynists of the 1970s and today and toward an archive of
feminists of trans experience.
Beth Elliott was a folksinger who was a vice president in the San Francisco
Daughters of Bilitis (SF DOB) in the early 1970s, wrote for the Los Angeles–based
newsmagazine The Lesbian Tide, and participated in the West Coast Lesbian
Conference (WCLC) in Los Angeles in 1973. Her participation in the SF DOB
ended in 1972 when some of the women in the organization forced her out for
being trans. After learning of Elliott’s presence at the WCLC, the radical feminist
Robin Morgan rewrote her keynote address to feature a viciously transmisogynist
attack on Elliot’s participation in the conference, and a group called
the Gutter Dykes from San Francisco spearheaded the taunting of Elliott. Morgan
accused Elliott of divisiveness and the metaphorical “rape” of women’s space.
These incidents reflect a strain of radical feminist writing that to this day targets
trans women.
These incidents also reveal that Beth Elliott participated in lesbian organizing,
and that she found something politically significant in these projects.
Elliott’s place within radical feminist practices is affirmed by the fact that many of
her sisters in the DOB resigned in protest following her ouster, including the
entire collective of Sisters, the SF DOB’s newspaper. Likewise, when the organizers
of the Los Angeles conference responded to Morgan and others’ trans-misogynist
request to kick out Elliott, two-thirds of the lesbians in attendance voted that
Elliott should stay (McLean 1973: 36).3 When Elliott was harassed while onstage,
Jeanne Cordova, organizer and editor of the Los Angeles journal The Lesbian Tide,
“walked onto the stage and grabbed the microphone and asked: ‘What is the problem here?’ … Elliott is, Cordova said again and again, ‘a feminist and a
sister.’”
They’re basically a literary prank– the sentence starts out in such a way that you think you know where it’s going, but the way it ends completely changes the meaning while still being a complete and logical sentence. Usually it deals with double meanings, or with words that can be multiple parts of speech, like nouns and verbs or nouns and adjectives.
So we get gems like
The old man the boat. (The old people are manning the boat)
The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. (The apartment complex is home to both married and single soldiers, plus their families)
The prime number few. (People who are excellent are few in number.)
The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississipi. (The cotton that clothing is made of)
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. (As in he ducks out of his responsibilities)
We painted the wall with cracks. (The cracked wall is the one that was pained.)
