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.
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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.
Was thinking about this the other day – do you think this is partly why their radfem successors hate bis and aces so much. I mean, here’s the political lesbian cult insisting all its members are lesbians, and should date other women and only other women regardless of their attraction to them, and that if attraction isn’t a requirement for dating someone you’re practically obliged to date another lesbian…
And then along come the bi community all insisting that just because they’re attracted to women doesn’t mean their attraction to men went away and that non-binary people exist and you can find them attractive as well, and then along come the aces as well and declare they don’t fancy anyone and they’re still queer. And female aces and bis are just that, female bis and aces, they aren’t lesbians. Imagine how galling that must be, to have that info get out. Half the political lesbian community’s membership suddenly realising that their attraction to women does not mean giving up attraction to anyone else? More of them realising that they don’t feel sexual attraction at all, and that that makes them ace, not necessarily a lesbian? Add trans and non-binary ideas into the mix and suddenly another subset realise they aren’t even women, and that that doesn’t automatically make them men either.
Can you IMAGINE how terrifying that must be to the radfem lot? How frightening the possibilty of other queer identities that fit a portion of their members better than the cage of political lesbianism is? Perhaps the worst exclusionists are ones who’ve been wrestling with their own feelings – do they really fancy women, why won’t attraction towards men go away, are they even female?
Scary questions indeed if you’ve pledged to date only women your entire life on political grounds. No wonder they hate us. No cult likes being proven wrong.
Well, I can see what you mean but it’s important to stress there is no chronological sequence of events where bi and trans and non-binary people ‘showed up’. Vocal trans women, non-binary people and bi women existed in queer women’s spaces before political lesbians or TERFs came into existence. While the word asexual has not always been around in these spaces, women who were vocal about choosing not to have any relationships existed too.
And all these vocal trans, bi and asexual women existed in queer women’s spaces the whole time, being very vocal. There has never been a time when TERFs controlled the narrative of what it means to be a queer woman. They’ve always only been able to impose their ideas on their own in-crowd.
What makes these groups so cult-like is, in my opinion, not a secret attraction to men. I have even seen a few people float around a kind of ‘so what if they’re all straight!’ line of thought and I think that is both unrealistic and unhelpful. Obviously tons of lesbian identified terfs are actually lesbians.
But what I think is creating this dynamic is the general threat of social death through exile if you do not stick to the political purity of TERF ideas. Terfs maintain loudly that anyone who does not stick to their definition of woman, their definition of lesbian, etc. is a rapist (or rapist enabler, apologist, etc). And if that is you, that means you can be thrown out of your living space, doxxed online, deserted by all your TERF friends, etc.
Imagine you are living in the TERF community and have seen that violent process up close many times. You told yourself every time that it was justified. But then you start to have doubts. How terrified would you be that it could happen to you?
QueerAnarchism 