kissesandshrugs:

queeranarchism:

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:

“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.

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. 

I’m reading Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs atm and this is from literally 1985 and she straight up calls out Radical Feminism for being “constituted totalities” and “producing what western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing –feminists consciousness of the non-existence of women except as products of men’s desire” and having “no room for race (or much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman as a unified or totalizable whole” and she breaks down some theorists as “caricatures” of “radical reductionism” and so yeah. Remembering radfem stuff as the real 70s/80s feminism is totally wrong. People were mad at them. They were assholes then too.