there's our catastrophe

everythingbutharleyquinn:

OKAY all my cunty references since last night are coming out in the open.

The cool, popular pretty queers (ie a bunch of thin, white, fairly well-off cis people and trans men) in our community, Melbourne and Sydney based, started up this super super secret invite only closed facebook community called DEEP SEA CREATURES all about celebrating “deep lez” and how amazing it is to be a woman and to have a “deep lez” lesbian history.

This basically consists of talking a lot about eating gluten-free vegan food, loving Tegan and Sarah, “womenstruating”, being attracted to wombs (something I noted last night as being, alongside an attraction for other internal organs, something surely only a serial killer would experience?), stanning for transphobic radfems annnnnnnd posting things like the content of the above image.

which, incidentally, was posted by a trans man.

a trans man who is known for having been violent and abusive to his female exes. 

there are more active men in this group than women (and, until last night, NO trans women). men who feel totally free to talk about how great lesbian sex is and how great lesbians are and to post photos of THEMSELVES for admiration and adulation and talk about how connected they are to deep lez history and a lot of stuff about vaginas.

they have also all characterised any criticism of this mindset as being “bullying” and “lesbophobia”.

now I believe lesbophobia is a real thing in queer community and a really shit thing. I also think it’s upheld and implemented by having your LESBIAN GROUP dominated by a bunch of MEN. lesbophobia is NOT being asked to remember trans women lesbians exist and are part of our community. it IS men placing demands on us to not actually identify as lesbian so we will continue to allow men into our spaces… and knickers.

what makes this whole situation worse is that basically ALL of these people are mid to late twenties, they’ve been in queer community for a while, they’ve been prominent in queer community and have been exposed to discussions about transmisogyny before… in fact some of them - like the person who commented on the link in the screencap above - have been called out for transmisogyny in the past and have performed their apologies and their sincere wishes to change their behaviour.

which is exactly WHY this group was created and kept a secret - so they could continue with the same behaviour without anyone being able to call them out on it. in fact there’s an entire thread about how the community has to stay a secret so none of the men involved get questioned about their heavy involvement in a group oriented around lesbian identity*.

but they’re all old enough and experienced enough and exposed enough to know better. in fact have made a huge production of how much better they know now.  but clearly that is all performative and completely insincere.

and you know my fellow cis people, I’m not saying I have never fucked up - I KNOW that I have and will likely continue to do so. in fact some of this deep lez stuff is a part of my actual history (and not just false nostalgia evoked by reading a couple of old books - I’m a fair bit older than most of these people) and I still catch myself speaking in cissexist terms, even after all this time. you know when I was deep-lezzin’ it up at age 18 making goddamn vagina dentata pendants and flogging them on eBay, the word “cissexist” hadn’t even been coined. but even then my social circle included trans women and always has. and whilst I have demonstrated some truly shit cissexist behaviour over the years without a second thought even whilst having significant relationships with trans women, I have learned. sometimes slowly and painfully, but it’s happened. these people have no excuse. I have witnessed many of them be confronted over and over and profess their true apologies and their commitment to change… only to go back to doing the same old thing. it seems the only thing they’ve learned now is not to do this shit publicly.

these people have a lot of social power and sitting around in their little circle jerk perpetuating these ideologies has run-on effects on the rest of the community and it is entirely disingenuous to claim otherwise.

Australia queer community, we are stuck in a loop.  we continually say we want trans women to be included and then repeat the same old shit that ensures their exclusion. we continue to preference and celebrate men and masculinity - including known abusers - and limit the parameters of our attraction to genitals and organs. we continue to perpetuate a concept of identity dominated by whiteness and cisness.

and when conversation is started, we either feign our apologies or further marginalise those people dubbed being “too difficult” for speaking out against the status quo. there is nothing radical or progressive about this process. it is tired, boring and static.

but worse still, it is HURTFUL and actively excluding of people who should feel as naturally and easily a part of queer community as we do. we have just created a hostile environment for fellow queers, which is nothing more than entirely counterproductive to the whole objective of why we build communities at all. 

when men feel more welcome and represented in lesbian community than women do there is something painfully wrong. 

* lesbian identity for who, though? white westerners exclusively it would seem. also, who gets to define the characteristics of what ‘deep’ even is?

(via mossflowers)

from the “private lives 2 national survey of glbt health”, australia, 2012.  there are a number of problems with this report, most glaringly here the conceptualisation of cis men and women as simply “male” and “female” and trans men and women as third and fourth genders.  but this is interesting for a number of reasons.  I guess I want to particularly draw people’s attention to the fact that very few of the trans women they surveyed identified as “queer”.  the non-representative sampling method they used makes it unwise to extrapolate too much from this data.  but given that I’ve come into contact with a lot of women who reject labels like “bisexual” and especially “lesbian” in favour of “queer” partly because of concerns about transphobia and gender essentialism, I thought it was worth highlighting this.