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.
So this post got pretty popular so I wanna repeat that these individual memories don’t have global relevance and certainly can not be taken as universally relevant facts. Statements like ‘so all seperatist women’s movements were terfs?’ or ‘so all political lesbians were like this?’ or ‘so most terfs are straight?’ misinterpret this story.
This is just one story from one city, seen through the experience of one radical dyke at one time in that cities history. There are many other cities, other communities, other times, other stories. Some will be similar, some will be different.
Also dyke is a slur so don’t use in RL
The people in this story self-identify as dykes. They self-identify as dykes now just as they did during the decades they spend fighting for our rights. So I will describe them as dykes. Online and offline.
Dyke is a reclaimed slur that is cherished in radical queer communities and has been for about 50 years already. The backlash against words like dyke and queer is an attempt to create a conservative lgbt movement that excludes radical queers. The dykes in this story had to deal with the shit, appearantly little has changed in that area.
If someone says she is a dyke, call her a dyke. Not a lesbian or a sapphic woman or a wlw, a DYKE. Don’t try to make her identity more respectable. She chose to call herself a dyke, respect that.
QueerAnarchism 