I Will Not Cede Lesbian Feminism to the TERFs: A Short Reflection for Lesbian Visibility Day 2019
In my writing, I find myself often trying to tell a story about lesbians, butches and femmes, and trans women that centers solidarity & struggle. A story of pasts, present, & futures.
There is a transformative power in this lineage.
When I read this interview with Sandy Stone in Broadly, it reminded me: anti-trans ideology wrapped in a cloak of feminism & a limiting essentialist claim on lesbian identity preyed upon cultural cissexism/patriarchy & was organized into lesbian/queer communities. It was not an inevitable, inherent, ideology or political formation inside of Lesbian communities. Cissexism and internalized transphobia, yes, but not the ideology we have come to call trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF).
Some simple / broad strokes history:
TERF ideology was rising and moving from fringe to center around the same time Christian Right as we know it was consolidating power under Reagan as part of the racist/patriarchal backlash to freedom struggles. The alliance isn’t coincidence of history, they work together.
Late 70's-early 90’s was roughly the period of the Lesbian/Feminist Sex Wars, in which communities were split and a reactionary feminist ideology claiming to be revolutionary cohered around targeting sex workers, BDSM / kink, butch/femme, and trans people.
Mind you, the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States was happening & LGBTQ folks were experiencing collective trauma. Since the late 90’s onwards we’ve seen the rise of a narrative of “we’re just like you” centering white, wealthy, and gender-conforming voices. That led to a reformist political agenda (gay marriage) that neglected many of the material needs of queer/trans people who experience racial, class, ability, & other oppressions. But our history also has a lineage of anti-racist socialist pro-trans lesbian feminisms.
“The women’s movement understood the need for a profound breaking of boundaries when it embraced the slogan “the personal is political”. I would like to carry it one step further: if the personal is political, the more personal is historical. The more personal demands attention be paid to how we fill our days and nights as we participate in any given economic system, how our flesh survives under different political systems, how we humanize gender tyranny, how we experience womanness and maleness is all the superstructures of class and race…This is why I always wince when a gay activist says we are more than our sexuality, or when Lesbian culture celebrants downplay lust and desire, seduction and fulfillment. If we are the people who call down history from its heights in marble assembly halls, if we put desire into history, if we document how a collective erotic imagination questions and modifies societal structures like gender, if we change the notion of woman as self-chosen victim by our public stances and private styles, then surely no apologies are due. Being a sexual people is our gift to the world.”
- Joan Nestle, Preface to A Restricted Country
What I will do is hold the contradictions of these lineages and move towards the world I dream of.
What I absolutely refuse to do is cede this transformative lineage to an ideology in aligned with Christian Right or queer misogyny.
