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The hunger for effective gay liberation movement is real. It would seem at least Mr.Thorstad is tired of rearranging the gender-identity deckchairs on the good-ship “Oppression Titanic”.
“By the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall in 1994, I regarded the gay movement as already mostly dead, although the commemorations did include some radical venues, such as the large “Spirit of Stonewall” alternate march. By then the gay movement had been taken over by marketing and corporate interests. Repeal of sodomy laws—the movement’s most important demand—had long been put on a back burner because it focused—uncomfortably for some—on sex acts instead of identity and liberal “rights” and because it challenged religious superstition and the oppressive Judeo-Christian tradition that underpinned the laws. Instead, the “LGBT movement” was pushing for marriage, hate-crimes laws, and the right of gays to serve openly in the imperialist military. The Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling throwing out sodomy laws was the most important victory for the gay and lesbian movement. Since then, the other demands have also been won, none of which advance the cause of sexual liberation. The former liberation movement is now mired in genderism and assimilationism.
By 1994, the hateful, antigay word “queer” was increasingly being used to describe same-sex love. Things have only gotten worse since then, with “queer” widely used, even by the straight media, despite its being a vile, self-hating term that threatens violence. The struggle for sexual liberation has been diluted by a focus on dozens of fanciful and questionable genders and has resulted in a virtual erasure of gay males and lesbians. Sex is not even part of the alphabet-soup vocabulary. Highlighting victimhood is in. Instead of fighting social injustice, the LGBT goal is to assimilate into a heterodominant capitalist system, aping its failed institution of marriage, promoting monogamy (a bit player in the mammalian heritage), and espousing patriotism, militarism, and conventionality. Gay Inc. has swallowed up the original “liberation day” marches and turned them into billboards for the profit motive. Even the main U.S. spy agency, the NSA, commemorates “pride” by lighting up its headquarters in the rainbow flag colors. The LGBT movement has jettisoned the goal of liberating the repressed sexuality of everyone, including heterosexuals, in favor of seeking mere “equality.” Equality is a low common denominator that does not challenge heterosupremacy. It is the goal of a movement that has been tamed and lost its spirit of radical struggle.
In the 1970s, one could hear a gay youth contingent in a gay pride march chant this playful provocation: “2, 4, 6, 8, How do you know your husband’s straight? 3, 5, 7, 9, Hey, lady, your husband’s mine!” Today, such a chant would be unimaginable.
This degeneration is widely recognized by older activists, less so by the younger set. As a result, this year another alternative march is planned for New York City to the official Heritage of Pride corporate sponsor. The Reclaim Pride Coalition (RPC), organizer of the alternate event, condemns the inclusion of floats and is marching “against the exploitation of our communities for profit and against corporate and state pinkwashing,” and in “resistance against police, state, and societal oppression.” OK so far.
But RPC has a serious flaw: astonishingly, it is calling its “alternative” event a “queer liberation march.” That’s an insult to gay men especially and belies its claim to inclusivity. Nothing could drag me to a march that bills itself as “queer.” That is antithetical to the “spirit of Stonewall” and to gay pride. It is viscerally offensive.
RPC criticizes HOP for not addressing the “urgent continuing needs” not of gay men and lesbians, but, in a reordering of myriad oppressed categories, presumably by order of importance, of the “Trans, Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay, Queer, Intersex, Two-Spirit, Asexual, Non-Binary, Gender Non-Conforming and related communities.” What a mouthful!
And it promotes a mind-numbing collection of politically correct causes: “We March in opposition to transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, racism, sexism, xenophobia, bigotry based on religious affiliation, classism, ableism, audism, ageism, all other forms of oppression, and the violence that accompanies them in the U.S. and globally.”
On 21st January Judith Butler, Queen of the Queer Theorists, penned a spectacularly whiny article for the New Statesman, that was rather ironically titled “The backlash against gender ideology must stop”.
It’s ironic because ideology is exactly what it is and a bonkers, batshit ideology at that.
Butler of course, can be considered the grand dame of current gender ideology and is an enthusiastic proponent of the frankly ludicrous idea that biology is a social construct.
In Butler’s Orwellian world, where up most certainly is down, and wrong is right, it’s radical feminists that have got things backwards, since gender, is you know, innate.
Yes that’s right, Jude thinks we’re all born with a predestined gender, which is inherent, and cannot be questioned. One is a man or woman merely if one says so. And in her idiotic diatribe in the New Statesman, she even managed to bastardize Simone De Beauvoir’s famous quote “One is not born a woman but one becomes one” in order to prove that you know, sex is assigned at birth not empirically observed.
Using Butler’s rationale, it’s easy to see why all this batshit gender bonkers is causing so much mayhem in political parties, schools, universities, and women’s groups up and down the country.
In fact it’s not just the UK that’s affected by Butler mania and the queer as fuckery ideas she and her ilk birthed. Queer Theory, and it’s bastard child, trans activism is now the dominant ideology among progressives in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and much, much further afield.
Is it fair to place all the blame on Butler?
Not all of it certainly, but consider this. Back in the 90’s where actual feminism was still trying to batter down the patriarchy’s door, Butler’s texts such as Gender Trouble were hugely influential.
Her Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory post at the University of California, Berkely meant her work picked up an enthusiastic following among the progressive crowd, and her ideas spread like wildfire through the academy, slowly eating away at the hard work Second Wave feminists had done like a virus.
Back then of course, it was hard to imagine it would come to this, a world where, men are considered more woman than women.
It wasn’t just Butler. In fact, she didn’t even start it, Michael Foucault did back in the Seventies, with his “progressive” lectures at Berkley that formed the basis of much of Butler and her crew’s “Queer Theory.”
Eve Sedgwick, the original fag hag, also deserves a fair portion of blame, with her lesbian omitting “seminal” tome Epistemology Of the Closet lauded by Gay men everywhere.
There are others too, but Butler’s unique position, privileged platform, and the fact she’s still writing shit articles in the New Statesmen complaining about actual feminists, make her particularly loathsome.
I don’t typically loathe women, but I might have to make a special exception for Butler. Or, at least I would, if I didn’t feel a tiny bit sorry for her.
Did I just say I felt sorry for Judith Butler?
Well, yeah I do, and here’s why.
I know she’s gender non-conforming but Butler’s always struggled with a rather hefty dose of internalised misogyny. Being of the female SEX she’s also probably aware she’s been palmed a raw deal, under patriarchy.
One’s personal issues tend to inform one’s work, and poor ole Judy’s clearly spent her whole life trying to get away from her biology.
What better way than doing away with sex altogether? Brilliant right?
Err, no.
Because as much as it would genuinely be great if we treated female people with as much respect as male people, much as it would be wonderful if we had always given female people the freedom we have always given male people the fact is, women, the XX kind have been stigmatized for centuries because of their biology.
And that still continues. If you’ve got XX chromosomes, people just look at you, and assign you second class status. Here’s news, Judy, they do it to you too!
The only way you might, might escape it is by going trans but then you’d have to volunteer your body as a veritable guinea pig for all those cross sex hormones and surgeries.
And even then, don’t imagine for one minute that trans guys AS A GROUP get treated with the same respect trans women do. Oh sure, one or two trans “guys”, who’ve been through the magical gender machine completely might be able to fool enough people into escaping second class status, but for the most part, trans guys are treated by much of the progressive left as if they’re merely there to cheer on the main attraction, trans women.
Oh I wonder why…
Clue, it begins with P and ends in atriarchy.
To be honest, Judy must know her little project is completely unworkable. But just in case her senses have taken leave of her, I’ll spell out why.
Self Id assumes that people aren’t going to see sex. And it also assumes that when they do, they aren’t going to assign any kind of meaning to it.
This is obviously bogus.
In fact it’s worse than bogus because in our still patriarchal society, when people see sex, they don’t just assign it meaning, they also assign it bullshit gender roles, and they negatively discriminate against the female sex to boot.
JUDITH BUTLER DID YOU HEAR THAT?
If Butler really wants the kind of world where anyone can express anyway they want without being negatively judged, if she really wants the kind of world where “trans” women don’t cause actual women in rape shelters to be traumatized all over again, and so fear those with male bodied entering their spaces, well Butlerface better start doing something right now to tackle the very REAL issues the female sex has to face.
The progressive woke brigade like to sling insults like bigot and terf at radical feminists who are working hard to dismantle the pillars of patriarchy that keep that gender caste system rolling on.
Butler and her crew like to call us biological essentialists and genitally obsessed.
Look, the female sex, you know, the class we’re fighting to liberate, didn’t ask for all this bloody emphasis on biology. We didn’t ask to be disbarred from education and the professions for centuries, we didn’t ask to be disproportionately sexually assualted, prostituted, beaten, trafficked, misogynised, forced into marriage, raped, groped, catcalled, body shamed, mutilated, and exploited in dehumanising, abusive, violent porn.
We didn’t ask for it. Men didn’t do a survey when this whole patriarchy jig started up asking the female sex if we wanted all that. And all that is what the patriarchy has deemed perfectly okay for the female “gender” role and that bullshit role has been handed out to the female sex for centuries, whether we wanted it or not.
And I don’t think too many of us wanted it did we? But we never got the choice.
So Butler and co can fuck right off with telling women they are cis. The label (insult) Cis woman means that you are a female with XX chromosomes and that you identify with the female gender role, that you are comfortable and totally hunky dory with second class status.
No, no we’re bloody not.
Yes, only this week a TRA on Twitter claimed that because “trans” women had to work to become a women, and “cis” women never had to think about their gender, “trans” women were more “real” than real women.
The female sex aka “cis women” have apparently never had to think about rape, about male violence, about being forced to perform hyper-femininity, about being groped, harrassment etc…etc…ad nauseum.
Fuck. Right. Off.
I quote gender resister Andreas Sofocleous’s succinctly sarcastic Twitter response to that lunatic claim;
“Males are the real women now folks.”
Straight out of Monty Python isn’t it?
And St Judy and her merry band of Genderists, inured from the downright damaging effects of all this lunacy, continue to push gender ideology on all of us.
So yes, Butler’s to blame for quite a bit. But it didn’t start with Butler and it won’t stop with her either, because the ideas gender ideology posits are hugely attractive to some, particularly some rather malignant groups.
Like misogynists who’ve been itching for years to strike back at all those nasty feminists who dared to posit the idea that you know, women are people and should be treated as such. In the workplace, in society, and in the home.
I’ve lost count of the number of Men’s Rights Activists I’ve met who enthusiastically support the idea that trans women ARE women, except of course when it comes to matters sexual.
Ah yes, that’s right, the sickos still remember who real women are when they want to abuse or exploit.
Speaking of which, where are all the woke heterosexual dudes screaming for more trans women to be included in the porn the porn sick little dears all watch. Intact trans women with penises that is.
Don’t want to watch them spreading their “womanly thighs” and waggling their lady sticks in your face wokey bro?
No? Thought not… It’s funny because lesbians feel that way about penis too.
Other groups/ orgs/ bodies that are balls deep (literally) in gender ideology are the paedophile lobby, who are rubbing their hands with glee as they watch child safeguarding policy go to hell in a handcart with the current rush to usher kids into gender clinics, child catcher style.
On the internet, tiny “packers” are being sold to kids as young as 2, that are the basic equivalent of putting a sex toy (dildo?) in a child’’s underwear.
Yeah. Think about that.
And let’s not forget in the rush to embrace all things gender fabulous, the swathe of child drag queens we’re expected to cheer on as great symbols of progress. As they pose caked in make-up and sexualised, right next to adult drag queens wearing next to nothing.
Oh yes, that actually happened. Look up Lactactia the child drag queen. On second thoughts, please don’t.
Capitalist industry’s another major beneficiary of transgender activism and ideology, from the hormones and blockers the clinics peddle, to the costly cosmetic surgeries so many trans people shell out for.
The pornographers, in their unceasing quest to create fresh categories of porn they can spin a profit from, benefit massively from gender ideology too.
Transgender porn has been steadily growing for years, and several fairly high profile “trans” women such as Paris Lee’s are or have been involved in the pornography industry and/ or the sex trade. Like Lees, many are enthusiastic proponents of both.
Coincidence?
As for Butler, will she ever get it? Despite having XX chromosomes she seems to think she can escape the caste system through writing reams of tosh about how biology is irrelevant. Yeah Judy? Really?
Biology shouldn’t come with a stigma eh?
Well at least I can agree with Butler on that. Pity her ideology enshrines the stigma that actual women, of the cunty kind, must face.
So I call on Butler to make it so then. I want to see this world that doesn’t look at someone with XX chromosomes and treat them like less than those with XY.
You’ve done the damage Judy. Under the banner of progressiveness you and your posse of Queer theorist nutjobs have done a real hatchet job on radical feminism.
Do you hate women Judith Butler? Even though you are one? Or are you just so privileged you don’t get how this is playing out in the very real world. The world where other gender non-conforming women aren’t as lucky as you in your ivory tower.
I’m talking about a world where lesbians are attacked, hated and bullied for being same sex attracted. Is that the kind of expression that causes you to get so enraged it makes you want to sit down and pen another pretentious article in the New Statesmen?
I’m talking about a world where masculine women are still hated, where many on the so-called progressive left would rather a girl became a boy than let her run about a football pitch with short hair, as a girl.
I implore you Judith Butler, woman up if you have a conscience.
You want a world where anyone can “express” themselves anyway they like without stigma?
Radical Feminists beat you to it. We’ve wanted that forever.
So stand with radical feminists while we actually make a world where biology really doesn’t matter, at least, not in a negative way.
But you won’t will you Butler. The patriarchy has taught you well. And just like all the misogynists, you hate women too.
Fiction is still fiction, legal or otherwise.
“A brief outline about me and a small list of things people can do to stop this [ideological] trans tide.”
Resource Listing
Hey folks, the woke internet is doing it’s best to deplatform and silence critical analysis and criticism of gender ideology. Here’s the thing, if your ideology wasn’t shit to start with, it could withstand critique and still be coherent. It isn’t, thus the censorship.
The following article was removed from publication on Medium. We present it unedited for readers to make up their own minds.
There’s a lot of chat around about pronouns right now. Specifically, ‘preferred’ pronouns. By which is usually meant, the pronouns a person would prefer other people to use when they are the subject being discussed by those people.
‘This is how I want you to talk about me’.
Almost without exception, the people who request, or demand, others talk about them using specific pronouns, are asking for pronouns associated with the opposite sex to their own.
A simple politeness. A courtesy.
I’ve heard many people tell me they don’t mind doing this, as a courtesy, although it takes some effort to keep up the mental gymnastics of perceiving one sex, but consistently using pronouns for the other. That’s a personal choice, and I respect the reasons why some people make it.
I’ve also heard many people declaring that anyone who won’t comply (usually directed at a woman) is obnoxious, mean, hostile, and unpleasant. ‘Misgendering’ is hate speech. They say.
But I refuse to use female pronouns for anyone male.
Because pronouns are like Rohypnol.
One of the biggest obstacles to halting the stampede over women’s rights is pronoun and preferred name ‘courtesy’. People severely underestimate the psychological impact to themselves, and to others, of compliance.
Pronouns are like Rohypnol to your brain’s defences.
You doubt this absurd claim I just made, obviously. You have the fortitude of mind to be uninfluenced by such trivia, and I have got this wrong. I understand. Bear with.
And try this quick experiment.
The cost of USING preferred pronouns yourself:
Have you heard of the STROOP TEST?
It’s a well known “name that colour” psychological phenomenon. A quick and simple experiment where you have to say the colour of the words written in front of you. Simple as that. Except the speed and accuracy of your answers is heavily impacted by any incongruence between the colour you see, and the actual word itself.
Try it HERE, if you like fun interactive tests. It takes less than a minute to complete. Compare the difference in your times between part one and part two of the experiment.
You’ll find you have to consciously fight the conflict of input to your brain each and every time. And it leaves you confused, distracted, slower, frustrated and fatigued.
Forcing our brains to ignore the evidence of our eyes, to ignore a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us.
USING preferred pronouns does the same. It alters your attention, your speed of processing, your automaticity. You may find it makes you anxious. You pay less heed to what you want to say, and more to what is expected of you. It slows you down, confuses you, makes you less reactive.
That’s not a good thing.
The cost of HEARING or READING preferred pronouns from others:
Experiment 2.
For a week, re-translate all the transgender articles and comments you find, back to sex-based pronouns, nouns and original names. Rewrite them back to the blunt truth and then read them again. Doing this exercise solely in your mind will do just fine, but editing on a screen is better.
Convert female pronouns back to male; use surnames instead of first names, and convert terms like transwoman back to just ‘man’.
Better yet, if you know the original name of the subject, use it, be it David, or Rhys, or Ashton, or Jonathan.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, yes? It shouldn’t matter. No-one else will be hurt or affected by this private experiment. It’s entirely between you, and your own resilient mind.
(Try not to get banned from anywhere during this experiment)
Read your translated version again.
If those small acts of preferred pronoun compliance are truly meaningless concessions, (although, see above banning potential for contradictory evidence of import) given as a courtesy to others at no cost to you or to other women, then this private exercise will change nothing, cost nothing, affect no-one. You’ll walk away thinking, yep, as I thought, fuss about nothing.
After all, nothing *should* change, should it, simply with the alteration of pronouns and names? You already know the actual sex of the subject you’re reading about. Pronouns, male or female, add no incremental information. How can they in any way alter your perception, or influence you when you already know all the facts? They’re an irrelevance, the easiest concession to make. Not worth consideration, inconsequential. Right?
Cognitively, you should be immune to the effects of such linguistic cross-dressing. Pronouns are irrelevant, so you concede them easily, because they have no power to influence you, since you already see clearly. Yes?
[And you can confess here, it’s OK. You may already think that the minority of women who refuse to comply with pronouns are just awkward buggers, who can’t think strategically, don’t know when to let it go, probably are extremists. Do themselves no favours, damage their own ‘cause’, even. Unreasonable.]
But try the experiment. Translate pronouns and references back to male. Insert ‘dead-names’ or use surnames. (No-one will know but you) Read it a second time. And be honest with yourself.
Do you feel differently, on reading it this way?
Do you react differently?
How’s your anxiety?
Are you angrier?
Do you feel more scared?
Is your sense of injustice alerted?
What level have your natural defences armed to?
You may discover that, despite yourself, you have a viscerally different reaction to what is before your eyes.
Same story, same players, same core knowledge.
Different pronouns, different reaction.
Pronouns are like Rohypnol.
They dull your defences. They change your inhibitions. They’re meant to. You’ve had a lifetime’s experience learning to be alert to ‘him’ and relax to ‘her’. For good reason. This instinctive response keeps you safe. It’s not even a conscious thing. It’s like your hairs standing on end. Your subconscious brain is helping you not get eaten by the sabre tooth tiger that your eyes haven’t noticed yet.
Incongruent pronouns also make your brain work much harder; not just when you are using them, but when you are receiving them as information. You are working constantly to keep that story straight in your head. Male or female? Which one, again? Concentrate harder. Ignore your instincts, ignore your reaction.
And that’s just you. You’re already aware of all the pertinent information, already alert, you know the score, no flies on you.
And you’re still affected emotionally and instinctively by incongruent pronouns, nouns, and names. Despite your efforts to be immune. You’re not immune to this effect. You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them she instead of he.
So what then, is the impact on everyone who isn’t even aware yet, hasn’t fully comprehended yet what’s going on?
Pronouns are Rohypnol. They change our perception, lower our defences, make us react differently, alter the reality in front of us.
They’re meant to.
They numb us.
They confuse us.
They remove our instinctive safety responses.
They work.
If you do this experiment you may still decide to accept or use female pronouns for male people, perhaps a little wiser, but cognisant of their influence on you and others. That’s a choice you may make. At least now you understand that you may be voluntarily suppressing your own natural response. Your eyes are more open.
Maybe you’ll continue to mentally translate ‘preferred’ pronouns and names in your head back to reality, every time, as I do. We give ourselves the best chance to understand the reality of the situation before us. It becomes easier with practice. I want my instincts as intact as possible.
Maybe you shrug. You can live with this little phenomenon. Or it didn’t work for you, you don’t see it.
But please. Don’t judge so harshly those of us who refuse to submit, refuse to comply with preferred pronouns. There are good reasons why we might be doing that, for our own sakes, and for the sakes of others.
Pronouns are Rohypnol.
I want to be alert. I want others to be alert. I want people to see the real picture, and I want those instinctive reactions that we feel when something is wrong, to be un-blunted, un-dulled by this cheap but effective psychological trick. I feel like I owe this to myself, and I absolutely owe it to other women.
And more than anything, I owe this to girls. I don’t want to play even the tiniest part in grooming them to disregard their natural protective instincts. Those instincts are there for a reason. To keep them safe. They need those instincts intact, and sharp.
And that’s why I won’t use preferred pronouns.
Using Rohypnol on others isn’t a courtesy.
We found this amazing letter on Mumsnet and approached the author for permission to share. It is powerful and needs to be heard.
To the woman who shrieked at me that I am a bigot and a terf and a hateful transphobe for defending women’s rights,
Ten, fifteen years from now, I ask you to remember me.
Remember me when you have your first baby and you’re referred to throughout your pregnancy as a birthing individual, a pregnant person, and it makes you feel kind of dehumanised and you wish they’d just call you a woman, a mother, because that’s what you are. But they’re not allowed, because it’s illegal to say only women can be pregnant and give birth.
Remember me when you give birth and you feel vulnerable and exposed and you really want a woman beside you who understands what you’re going through and instead your midwife is a six foot man with stubble in a dress and you know he isn’t a woman but you’re not allowed to object, even when you need to be examined and you just want a woman to do it but you know you can’t say anything because that would be hate speech, even though your body is screaming no.
Remember me when your elderly mother, who has lost her mind to dementia, goes into a care home and is told that her carer, Susan, is a woman, because you asked that she only be cared for by women. And even in her addled state of mind, she knows that Susan is a man, and you know Susan is a man, but you cannot object, and she has to allow Susan to perform her intimate care, because to object would be hate speech.
Remember me when your daughter comes home from school crying, the daughter who has spent the last five years training to be the best athlete in her class, her school, her district, she’s crying because Lucas in her class, one of the fastest boys, has decided he identifies as female for now and so is allowed to run in her race, and she knows it doesn’t matter how hard she trains, he will always beat her, and she can only ever hope for a silver medal now. Or bronze, if there is another Lucas.
Remember me when you go into a toilet late at night, perhaps in a bar, and there’s noone else around, and a guy walks in, he has a beard and is wearing jeans and a t shirt, and the way he looks at you seems off, and you feel afraid and unsettled and worried he might hurt you. But you can’t challenge him, because if you do he’ll say he’s a woman and has as much right as you do to be in this toilet, a place where many years ago you might have come to feel safe.
Remember me when you go for a promotion, for a board position at work that’s designated for a woman. You’ve put in the hours, you’ve worked so hard, you know you deserve it. And the position goes to Lola, who until last year was a 50 year old man. Lola will never do anything inconvenient like needing time off to have babies, or to deal with any health issues that you, a woman might face, like endometriosis, breast cancer, PND. Lola is a woman just like you, and your company are happy that they have fulfilled their quota of women members on the board.
Remember me when you read on the news that crime statistics for women committing rape and murder are on the increase, and now women carry out a much higher number of rapes and murders than they did when you were a teenager or a young woman. And you know that these ‘women’ are men and that the statistics are wrong, but to challenge this would be hate speech. Remember me too, when these women rapists are locked up with vulnerable women in female prisons and cannot escape, because to challenge the presence of the women rapists with penises in prison with them would be hate speech.
Remember me when your son comes home from school and says that he’s learned at school that you can change sex and that some girls have penises and some boys have vaginas and that his teacher said that because he likes playing with girls and dolls that maybe he is really a girl in the wrong body. And you think, no, you are just my wonderful, unique, son, and you were born in your own body. Remember me when a few months down the line the teacher calls you in and says she’s concerned that you are not validating your son’s identity and that she’s noticed you are still referring to him by the name you so carefully chose for him when he was born, and calling him a boy, when he is actually a girl, and that she doesn’t want to have to involve social services but she’s worried she might have to if you continue to misgender your son and deny his real identity. And you know that she will, because it’s happened before in a school near you, and you are afraid.
In this brave new world that you helped to create, look around for your transactivist friends, your lefty male allies, the ones you stood beside and yellled ‘terf, transphobe, bigot’ with, with you shouting the loudest, because you wanted to show what a good ally you were, how inclusive, how progressive. Where are they now? Why, they are where they always were. Benefitting from the patriarchy. Enjoying the new, improved version of it that you helped them to build by crushing the resistance from the women who spoke up for their rights. This has all cost them nothing; it has made the world a better, easier place for men. It has cost you and your sisters who campaigned with them for virtue cookies, everything.
And me? I’ll be where I’ve always been. Fighting for your rights. Fighting to undo the damage.
I’ll have your back, as I always have done.
by CR
This incident explicitly shows how transactivism is not only anti-feminist, but anti-woman, and patriarchal to the core. Women don’t move to remove funding for rape crisis centres. Entitled males do.
So, no there will be no catering to your ideology, not after this. Not ever.
Full statement from the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter:
1. On March 14, 2019, at the end of a flawed and unfair process, Vancouver City Council voted to terminate the yearly grant given to us in support of our public education work.
2. Vancouver City Council’s decision is intended to coerce us to change our position and practice of offering some of our core services only to women who are born female. Our organization’s status as an equality-seeking group and our entitlement to serve women who are born female was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 2003, by the British Columbia Court of Appeal in 2005 and by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007.
3. Vancouver City Council’s attempt to undermine our autonomy as a women’s group — to decide who we serve, who our membership is and who we organize with — also undermines the protections the law has granted us. Such conduct has no place in a democratic society.
4. Vancouver City Council’s decision to cut funding from Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is discriminatory. Many Vancouver City grants are given to organizations that deliver programs and support to specific groups of people such as Aboriginal youth, Chinese seniors, deaf persons and migrant workers. Rightfully, none of these groups have been challenged with the demand that they demonstrate “accommodation, welcomeness and openness to people of all ages, abilities… and ethnicities.” Such a demand of these organizations would be incomprehensible, as it would contradict the essence and purpose of their work. Yet, this is what is being asked of us under the guise of inclusivity.
5. Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is the longest standing rape crisis centre in Canada. Since 1973, our group has responded to close to 46,000 women seeking our support in their escape from male violence. Since we opened our transition house in 1981, we have housed over 3,000 women and over 2,600 children.
The operation of our rape crisis centre and transition house are forms of direct action, developed for women by women in the 1970s as a part of the second wave of the North American women’s movement. More than just providing immediate safety, we offer a place to group, analyze, strategize and fight back against male violence.
6. In addition to our frontline work, we put a substantial effort into public education, as it’s an essential tool for social change. We are intentional in organizing public education events that are free, open and accessible to all.
7. We are also active in national women’s equality reforms. In the past year, we appeared in the Supreme Court of Canada case of the murder of Cindy Gladue; we conducted cross examinations and made oral and written submissions as a party with standing at the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls; and spoke to the House of Commons of Canada and to the Senate of Canada on legislative reforms related violence against women.
8. We have no doubt that people whose behaviour is not consistent with the patriarchal socially imposed definition of manhood or womanhood, including transgender people, suffer discrimination and violence. Transgender people deserve and must live in safety and have the equal rights and opportunities that are promised to us all. When it comes to our services, we have a collective commitment to see to the safety anyone who calls our crisis line, including transgender people.
9. As part of ongoing efforts to discredit us, we were accused that we “do not support sex workers” (including by a Vancouver City Council member on social media).
Our services are available to all women who have experienced male violence. We provide assistance to women and girls in prostitution who have been assaulted by johns, pimps or men pressuring them into prostitution. We provide assistance to women who are currently being prostituted, women who are trying to escape prostitution, and women who have been trafficked into prostitution.
We understand prostitution as sexual exploitation and male violence against women. Prostitution normalizes the subordination of women. It exploits and compounds systemic inequality on the basis of sex, race, poverty, age and disability. Our analysis of prostitution as a harmful patriarchal institution and our commitment to abolition is derived from, and is reinforced by, the prostituted women who call us and the members of our own collective who have exited prostitution.
10. Being born female still means being trained, socialized and forced to submit to male domination. The fact that we are born female and raised as girls to adulthood as women shapes our lives in profound ways.
Male violence against us is a harsh but common experience, and in no way the only one. Our sexuality is controlled and manipulated — whether by punishing women for not being virgins, or by the promotion of pornography and BDSM as liberating expressions of women’s sexuality. Our reproductive ability is controlled and manipulated — whether through forced abortion and sterilization, pressuring women to get pregnant, or forcing women’s pregnancy through rape.
Being girls and women in this world often impacts both how we look and how we act in private and in public; what we are allowed to do, encouraged to do and rewarded for; and also what we are discouraged from doing, prohibited to do or punished for.
And from that place, in a woman-only space, with other women, who have the shared experience of being born without a choice to the oppressed class of women we come together to organize and strategize our resistance and our fight for women’s liberation
Donate to the Vancouver Rape Relief and Woman’s Centre – They stand in the vanguard against the unhinged patriarchal assault on women and deserve our moral and monetary support.
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