terfmeanslesbian:

clitcheese:

i was researching to find citations for my post connecting the history of radical feminism to biphobia but then i found a terf book – Dykes loving dykes by Bev Jo, 1990, and like

ex-het privilege. Ex-het privilege. As in, if you’re a lesbian who ever mistakenly IDed as straight, you hold privilege over lesbians who never went through that. she honest to god claims that gay victims of coercive heteronormativity, hold a fucking privilege for doing so. The idea goes that lesbians can get ‘accustomed’ to straight privilege, and never truly want to give it up

tfw when you’re such a disgustingly biphobic gold star that you claim that like 90% of other lesbians oppress you

the book goes on to talk about a related oppression: most ex-hets are also femmes, who oppress butches by bringing patriarchically-constructed femininity into lesbian spaces. there’s really a chapter on Fem privilege. she writes that being butch is literally the Only way to live authentically as a lesbian.

it straight up compares femmes to the spectre of trans women ‘invading’ women’s spaces, bc femmes and trans women are both fucking slaves to the patriarchy itself apparently

this whole thing is so amazingly lesbophobic wtf? she’s saying that she’s one of the few lesbians in the whole world entirely untouched by patriarchy, and nearly every other lesbian is a fucking Fake. you can just write about your own superiority complex over other women and that’s fucking Radical apparently

i need to lie down for like a week wtf

what does any of this have to do with trans politics….why are they “”“terfs”“”

because, incidentally, the book is written by terfs? here’s her other wordpress articles, ‘trans women are men, and therefore have the mentality of rapists’ and ‘trans men are self-hating women’ lol? i’m calling her a terf because i have basic reading comprehension. 

but i didn’t even talk about trans politics here. i was talking about how fundamentally warped some of your theorists are. here are some quotes, and here’s the whole book online as blog posts. Chapter 3 deals with the spectre of ex-het lesbians, part 2 of chapter 4 deals with how femme lesbians ‘recreate patriarchy’ in their gender expression, and honestly do you agree with any of this shit? have other radfems ever mentioned this book is flawed? that it only serves to make a hierarchy of lesbians? i was under the impression this woman is a pretty influential radfem, do you agree with these theories? lmao do you get that even if trans people didn’t exist, your brand of feminism would still be a reductive pile of shit?

take all the Us Versus the Horrible Transsexuals out of your theories and you’re left with just this kind of holier than thou Gold Star bullshit. honestly god help the self esteem of all the lesbians who get sucked into your politics. you’re left with this radical version of biology where men are biologically evil, where a penis has such a powerful aura that it will discount a woman’s ability to be a lesbian for her entire life. isn’t this straight up the kind of phallocentrism your ideology is meant to be against? because this system focuses on ‘never-het’ women as the most authentic lesbians, who embody a more ‘pure’ version of lesbianhood and womanhood and therefore should earn a privileged space at the centre of lesbian politics, compared to the ‘corrupted’ version of feminsm embodied by lesbians who have ever thought they were straight. “ Once a female has had the experience of being treated as and feeling like a “real woman,” she never loses it.” It’s also written in the book’s introduction also explicitly states that she considers straight and bisexual women to be interchangeable, equally privileged members of an oppressive class of ‘man-lovers’.

You see what this is right? it’s the virgin/slut dichotomy ripped straight from the patriarchy, with no alteration. Touching a dick once in your life apparently lessens the value of your perspective, immediately makes your intentions as a lesbian and even a feminist suspect. it treats patriarchy not as a set of learned ideas and behaviours, but as some kind of permanent, lifelong stain on women’s souls. the author states outright that ‘het privilege’ can never be unlearned. you get that this is lesbophobic, right? just basically, you’re erasing the sexuality of lesbians who come out later in life, outright making them into privileged oppressors? the author likens this to a fucking invasion of lesbian spaces:

 ’They [Lesbians who have ever dated men] also bring STDs, danger from past husbands or boyfriends stalking them, and dildos and other sado-masochistic sexual practices’,

which are, after all, based on the inequalities and pain in heterosexual/male sex.

this comes from a long passage about how ‘ex-hets’ tend to be more abusive and even less loving than Real Lesbians, caused entirely by past association with men. caused by past what kind of broken ethics system do you need to look through to think this is worth publishing? and, holy shit, i didn’t even start on ‘the patriarchal and oppressive nature of femme lesbians’ because i’ve got no idea where to start there