Reweaving

I’m growing potatoes, tomatoes, carrots courgettes and onions,

I’m painting my house and tiling my bathroom,

I’m drinking red wine in a pub in Cardiff with women who don’t demand my identity card and talking about politics and life in a way that makes sense to us and doesn’t line specific shape boxes

I’m listening to Leonard Cohen and Tom McRae and Tori Amos and Bruce Springsteen and Tanita Tikaram with my head thrown back and my eyes closed in ecstasy,

I’m watching over worthy programs on TV or complete cheap space filling tat nothing in between hits the spot.

I’m watching Buffy over and over again.

I’m reading like I’m thirsty for words making inroads in the shelves of unread books about feminism, politics, god, poetry, sexuality, disability.

I’m lying on the floor with my dog doing nothing for hours,

I’m sorting books in a charity shop once a week

I’m working with people who need people, I’m not campaigning for money, I’m just putting one foot in front of the other.

I’m looking for Sophia, the female aspect of Abraham’s god, while reweaving the old laws into something bendable made out of love.

I’m having long hot bubble baths, I’m covering my skin in moisturiser because I like the feel and the self attention.

I’m propelling myself through the water, teaching my broken body to utilise its self in ways it wasn’t designed for, building muscles in my upper body that will do for me what my legs wont.

I’m writing letters, and making phone calls and trekking cross country to spend time with women who love me.

I’m learning to live with my wounds.

I’m talking on the phone for hours with the most nurturing person I know and sharing with him, laughter love, knowledge, poetry, pointless humanities and flirtations,

I’m making peace with all the people who didn’t come back for me, or who didn’t come back the way I wanted them too.

I’m learning to eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m full but accepting maybe I’ll never get this food thing right.

I’m weaving my body together with the man I come back to, over and over again, and who loves me absolutely although too many of you don’t believe this.

I’m looking for myself in this mesh of life we have to live in.

I’m here, just being honest, Just being J

well no actualy I’m not, but I am going to be away for the next three weeks. I’m going to see some awesome people, take stock of my life and do a bunch of reading. The books I’m taking with me are.

Darling: New and selected poems by Jackie Kay

Feminism and Poetry: Langauge, Experience, Identity in Womens Writing by Jan Montefiore

Moving Towards Home:Political Essays By June jordan

Lift every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies From the Underside. edited by, Thistlewate, Potter and Engel

And the essay, My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the VIllage of Chamonix: Performing Transgender Rage. by Susan Stryker

Have fun, dont blow up the blogsphere etc!

Let me show you it (clicky link)

She is so Fiiiiine!

Sometimes my body disgusts me, sometimes I despise it, sometimes I am so repulsed by it I want to run razors across it, to burn it, to deny it food, to overload with food and then throw it up again, but you know these feelings cant be real they must just be a front, I can’t really feel guilty or negative about my body and food (link)

The attitude in this article really angers me, it is both ignorant and dismissive of women with eating disorders/disordered eating.

In the second to last paragraph of the post Samara writes We’ll only stop this madness if we refuse to join in. I can’t refuse to join in, I can’t suddenly not have issues with food just because I want to. I would love to not have issues with food, but I can’t magic them away and nor can other women. It’s good that Samara doesn’t have issues with food, that she has a healthy attitude to food, that’s excellent but its not okay for her to belittle other women, other feminists who have issues with food.

Also food issues are not by and large about food, they are about control, power, space, unacknowledged emotions. From piecing together my own personal narrative my food issues come predominantly from three places

1)Severe physical neglect in infancy. Studies on this show that people neglected during infancy have a much higher rate of eating disorders than others because the brain doesn’t lay down the right pathways that regulate your food intake, (for me this means, I don’t get hungry till I’m about to faint, and I don’t know when I’m full so I eat too much.)

2)My main care givers through most of my childhood were power freaks over food and removed food as a punishment

3)Severe sexual abuse during my adolescence

My issues with food are complicated, and unless I say, I don’t think its immediately obvious that i have food issues, but I was borderline anorexic for a really long time with a bit of bulimia thrown in there, and now I tend to binge eat and eat things that I know are really bad for me as a kind of self sabotage.

Now I need to loose weight, not want to, need to, I am edging up to a size eighteen and that’s not comfortable for me. I have a history of heart disease and diabetes in my family and I need to take some pressure of my joints, but I find this really difficult to talk about in feminist spaces, because of attitudes like the one in this post and some of its comments. If i talk about healthy ways of trying to lose weight will I get told that its somehow anti feminist to want to loose weight even though I have good reason for it?

Then we come down to, actually we do live in a society that expects women to be a certain size and shape, and penalises bigger women. Maybe we should be critiquing why there weren’t any women at that press conference who were over a size twelve, are women over size twelve incapable of being journalists?

I also find the thought of someone making “observations” on someone else’s eating really disturbing, If I know people are watching me eat and making judgments on my food intake I either stop eating or finish what I’m eating and then go and throw it up.

yes we do live in a society where almost all women (weather they are technically eating disordered or not) have an unhealthy relationship with food but I don’t think essentially telling them to buck up and get over it is particularly helpful.

Women will stop having issues with food when we are allowed to take up the psychological and physical space we are entitled to, when we are allowed to display negative emotions rather than repressing them, when we stop having our body boundaries breached, when we stop being told both overtly and subtly that our bodies are out messy and out of control and need disciplining.

Working towards these things is much more radical and useful than dismissing women with food issues as being involved in “madness.”

It was what the words were, what the words were for, it was the words that made it work, the man on the stand with the gun in his hand and a book of rules didn’t know this, didn’t understand this, that however many people you kill, lock up or break the words always come back, the important ones anyway like love, loyalty, anger, resistance, compassion, the words that build human cells as opposed to machines, and langauge, especialy this one, the one I am constricted to writing in, makes no sense but then neither do people so thats okay.

They tried to use it against us, they said you have borderline personality disorder, you are experiencing the Elliotic asthetic of self reflexive dislocation in a deracinated landscape. You must learn about the dispacement of desire.
But we said. No: we have been abandonded and are lost and cold in a culture barren of truth but we will find our way home eventualy.
So they said Ah, but you are still envisioning it in terms of cultural dialectics and a teleological ontology.
And we said: fuck off already we have poetry to write and gossip to talk.

And in this langauge are too many nouns and not enough verbs which is why we develop such a rigidity. Instead of flowing round the labels we become them.

But mostly the words work, all the things that are writen here are the ones I am brave enough to say and you are brave enough to listen to. It will be this that saves us in the end.

[This post is not obviously or on any level about feminism, but that's because it was threatening to get unwieldy so I've broken it up into several pieces, the next piece will be posted next week]

Poetry is my first love, always has been and always will be. Poetry is the blood in my veins, and my breath on the wind, without poetry, without being able to read it and write it I get sick

Poetry gave my raging, angry silenced, adolescent self a language that was formed by edges, silences, half truths pauses and metaphors, which gave me a way of understanding my fractured unintelligible life.

Of course I came to poetry through middle class white men, twenty years ago, even more so than now, they were the voices that got heard, I still learnt from them, I still loved them, we take our survival wherever we can find it. And even today I still love them, partly because they were there when I started, they opened a door for me and partly because they still have things to say to me. Eliot, Hughes, Auden, Causley, Mcgough, Armitage, I do come back to them and they still move me. I know not enough people who are other than white, other than male get published but it was white men who made me realise that with poetry I could carve out a space to breathe with, a space to think with, that poetry could be my breath and my protection and, when you are drowning you cling to any life raft regardless of it origins,

Its not even that poetry written by others isn’t important to me, I have at least as much (probably more) poetry by women as i do by men, i have Eastern European, Russian, Irish, welsh, afro Caribbean, South American, Spanish, African poetry (all in translation obviously, but still) and women poets do matter to me, more often than not they do resonate with me, they do see the world more often the way i do, Jennings, Rich, Olds, Duffy, Fanthorpe, Boland but also i am not going to pretend that Ariel by Plath is more to me than Birthday Letters by Hughes because Birthday Letters shoots deep deep inside in a way that to me for me Ariel doesn’t. And these men, Mcgough, Elliot, Causley and the war poets will always have a place in my personal cannon, because they gave me this, they gave me poetry, they gave me a way to save my life.

Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

I loved Elliot, and he still influences my poetry now, in ways of both form and content, he gave me a lifelong fascination with post apocalyptic landscapes, a way of describing what my life felt,

Ted Hughes and I have always had a complicated relationship, a lot of his work I hate, and I go back to Crow, over and over again, not because I like it but because it repulses me, its like a car crash, or toothache. but birthday letters I loved, and I think one of the reasons I loved it was because it could have been written about me

The Shot

Your worship needed a god.
Where it lacked one, it found one.
Ordinary jocks became gods -
Defied by your infatuation
That seemed to have been designed at birth for a god.
It was a god-seeker. A god-finder.
Your Daddy had been aiming you at God
When his death touched the trigger.

In that flash
You saw your whole life. You ricocheted
The length of your Alpha career
With the fury
Of a high-velocity bullet
That cannot shed one foot-pound
Of kinetic energy. The elect
More or less died on impact -
They were too mortal to take it. They were mind-stuff,
Provisional, speculative, mere auras.
Sound-barrier events along your flightpath.
But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and done that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. Even the cheek scar,
Where you seemed to have side-swiped concrete,
Served as a rifling groove
To keep you true.

Till your real target
Hid behind me. Your Daddy,
The god with the smoking gun. For a long time
Vague as mist, I did not even know
I’d been hit,
Or that you had gone clean through me -
To bury yourself at last in the heart of the god.

In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.

I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.

Until I sorted my shit out, there have been times in my life where people I loved, people who loved me could have written this for me

And Auden with his

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
“Love has no ending.

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Afica meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.

“I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

“The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.”

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you
You cannot conquer Time.

“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

“In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

“Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.

“O plunge your hands in water
Plunge them up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.”

“The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

“Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.”

“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.”

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.”

It was late, late in the evening
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

This poem had such a deep profound effect on me that it may very well have been Auden who planted in me my love of surreal poetry and my subsequent seeking out of eastern European and Russian poetry which appears to the western reader to have many qualities of surrealism.

Poetry gave me ways of saying things that were never supposed to have been said, looking back now at my early adolescent effort all my writing contains, exile, loss, wastelands. Even later while at university my lecturer said to me, you write like you grew up in a war zone and I just looked at him and thought but I pretty much did

Part of the reason I think I love poetry is because I wasn’t force fed it at school, I was deemed to stupid to understand such things as poetry and so was put in a really low English set, so I stumbled across it myself while browsing the school library, so I dint have anyone talking about, pentameters stanzas, sonnets, villanelles of some poem that had nothing whatsoever to do with my own life and was written in a language I didn’t really understand, the explanations came much later after i had decided poetry was awesome and I wanted to understand what made it so awesome and the history of its awesomeness.

But to begin with I just read it, soaked myself in it and came to my own conclusions on it. Not learning about it officially left me free to bring my whole self to the experience of it without thinking of it as “work” without thinking of it as something that needed dissecting, I didn’t feel the need to splay its dead legs on a table and poke around its inside, instead a poem was something whole and alive to me.

But eventually I needed other words from other people, eventually middle class white men run out of things to say that make sense to me, that I can connect with, because at the end of the day they are not writing for me.

The Last thing I wrote on my First post(link) about this was

All this has been one hell of a shock, it has really changed the way I think about people, about myself, about prejudice, privilege, power, its really made me think about the way I relate to other people with different oppressions from mine.

And it has been a shock, It has changed what the world looks like for me, how I move, through it, what I need from it, and it has changed the way, people look at me, interact with me, think about me
and something that really shocks me is I never ever thought about this before

I grew up with a really disabled parent so if you’d have asked me I’d have said I was aware of disability issues, that I knew what it was like to be disabled, that I understood the experiences of disabled people, that I knew what disabled people needed, that I was inclusive of disabled people
And it comes down to me now, that this was crap, yes I probably did know more about living with certain disabilities than a lot of people but I never knew what it was really like until I became disabled myself.

And this spans out into my life, into my interactions with other women, It really makes me realize how privileged I am as a white middle class cisgendered woman who was previously able bodied, There were things I didn’t have to think about, didn’t have to negotiate and so never thought deeply, honestly about how much energy it took other women who weren’t me to negotiate the world.

And its this, That I’m never going to be a woman of colour, I’m never gong to be a trans woman I’m never going to be any other woman, never going to know what its like to be them, even if they are my friends, family, lovers, I am always going to have a blind spot, so I need to be aware of this, to know that its there and do everything I can to lessen it, to negate it, to not decide what they need, because that is always going to be deciding what they need from my perspective not theirs.

And it is not okay for me to speak for them, Its important that I support other women who aren’t me in creating spaces where they can speak for themselves, but i cant speak for them

And I need to remember that being inclusive is not going “lets organise this thing and if people who aren’t us feel welcome they can come along” its making sure that it is organised in such a way that everyone feels welcome from the off.

And it has spurred me to read more by women that aren’t me, to listen more to women that aren’t me, because while I don’t think that blind spot can be got rid of I have a duty to lessen it, to make my feminism, my activism, my life, about not just women like me

As its International day against Homophobia (link) today. I thought I’d write a post that I’d been thinking about for a while

Recently I was googling stuff on stuff that was queer affirming christian spirituality and I stumbled upon the true freedom trust (link) website and it shocked the hell out of me. Its a website for Christians who are “struggling” with their homosexuality basically. Its affiliated to the evangelical alliance which is the UK equivalent of the Southern Baptist Convention with the associated wingnuttery and social, political and religious conservatism (the church I grew up in was a member.)

It just makes me so sad and so angry that there are still churches sprouting this shit, that a beautiful, powerful, intrinsic part of people is just wrong, Unlike some ex gay organisations TFT are not so much about the cure but about controlling the “urge” which in practice means that people who have homosexual “urges” don’t have any close same sex friends, which I personally think is heart breaking.

As a woman who has “homosexual urges” (lol!) but has chosen freely to probably not have sex with a woman ever again I would die without my female friends and female connections, because for me same sex attraction isn’t just about sex or even just about sexuality. I would wither on the vine without female friends.

There are some really really disturbing sad testimonies on this web site that just make me want to cry, one woman is talking about how she had feelings for women but had a boy friend as well who sounds like an overcontrolling fuck wit but the fact he doesn’t seem to respect her boundaries doesn’t register with her at all

I tried to end it with him several times but he just persuaded me to carry on. I fell head over heels for my next door neighbour in halls (Jemma) … This time I really was smitten and I wrote about her in my journal. Mark found my journal and read it

Then this

My life nearly derailed in 1991 when I was 23. I met a gay Christian woman called Cath and very soon became attracted to her and the feelings were mutual. …When she kissed me I didn’t resist but it didn’t go further than that. I had such a mixture of emotions. I felt I’d come home, that I was right about my original attraction, and that this was what I had longed for. However I also knew this wasn’t what the Lord wanted for me. I’d saddened Him and I knew I could never enter a physical gay relationship, or an emotionally dependent one without offending Him.

Its so so sad that two people who loved each other deeply couldn’t be together, that she’d been told what god wanted for her, that this type of Christianity doesn’t take into account the cultural specificity or the translation errors of the scriptures. Or the fact that the bible is not in fact inerrant and that Paul (who wrote most of the passages that are used to prohibit homosexuality) was a rabid fundie with appalling gender politics.

The same woman did eventually get married to a man

James sometimes asks me if ‘I’m OK’ with my female friends and I try to tell him if they’re ’safe’ or not. God has blessed me with a circle of ’safe’ friends but I do worry what will happen if I meet someone I become attracted to.

Seriously if my partner policed weather I was attracted to any of my female friends I would flip my shit, If i want to tell him who I’m attracted to I will, if I don’t I wont, and he doesnt care any way, one of my friends who I am attracted to and who is attracted to me, when she comes to stay with me we sleep in the same bed, and he doesn’t bat an eyelid because he trusts me (my relationship is consciously monogamous) that just seems to buy into the whole “people who aren’t straight have to have no control over their sexuality” thing

Another woman writes of her “healing”

But I ran into difficulties. My childhood years had been traumatic with violent male figures and no male/female happy family life. All of my 20’s were spent in the gay scene. My ability to relate to family life, men, how to dress appropriately, was poor

Lots of the testimonies and articles insinuate that women have lesbian feelings because of abuse, if that were true wouldn’t there be way more lesbians in the world? and what does “dressing appropriately” mean?

And this one from a mother who thinks shes doing all the right things but is failing miserably

He told us how much he loved his friend, which was really hard for us to hear…My heart went out to him and we both affirmed our love for him. But we also made it very clear that we could not condone his choice of lifestyle. At one point I said the day would come when we would feel able to meet his friend. I asked Michael just one thing - if they stayed under our roof that out of respect for his Dad and me they would refrain from any homosexual activities.

This really sounds like my parents immediate response to me coming out, like “we love you but we have to point out how sin full you are being” and calling his partner his “friend” and pressing how they were such martyrs because they would be working so hard to get to a point where they could meet his partner (actauly after the initial coming out my parents didn’t contact me for 18 months but that’s a whole nother story)

On the next day I tried to talk to Michael about the pain his Dad and I were feeling and I asked what he thought we should do about it. He was honest and said he didn’t know. But he was confused as to why we couldn’t be happy for him, because he was happy now we knew. The physical pain I felt was awful - it was like a knife had been plunged into me, and a heavy weight applied to my chest.

yes because clearly your son deciding to be true to himself and maximise his life full fillment should cause you pain

And it just pissed me off that the church is so backward, so rejecting of LGBT people, so unlike Jesus would have been. How is it ever okay to reject someone who is seeking spirituality or to force them to shut down a part of themselves if they want to remain in a spiritual community.even many of the churches that are not seen as extreme are still homophobic, and growing up in an extreme church while being queer is a nightmare. when you finally do come out it doesn’t actually matter how accepting people try to be because your whole life they’ve been assuming you aren’t queer and telling you everything thats wrong and sinfull with being queer, (seriously when I was about 15 my mother told us she didn’t want us wearing red ribbons for world aids day because gay men had only themselves to blame.)

And too many of us still grow up in this, too many people kill or hurt themselves because the church makes them choose between their sexuality and their spirituality, to many people get rejected by their friends, their family, sometimes their entire community because they are being true to themselves.

However I also found this video on youtube which is awesome

And i discovered Whosoever (link) An excellent online magazine for LGBT Christians

So Debs wrote a post about Women only spaces. I thought really hard about writing this response because I didn’t want to cause more upheaval in the blogsphere than there needs to be but I felt that it was really important to make a stand against some of the things she said in it. I can obviously not speak from a transwomens perspective, but these are my thoughts from a trans supportive radical feminist perspective

I think there maybe times when cisgendered woman only spaces need to be available and I think that there are times when trans women only spaces need to be available but by and large I think women only spaces should be for cisgendered and transgendered women both and that trans women shouldn’t just be tolerated in them but should be actively accepted in them and be an inherent part of the organisation and structure of them.

I also don’t believe that transwomen have more privileged than cisgendered women, they are more at risk of violence, unemployment, homelessness than cisgendered women, not to mention prejudice from friends and family.

This is not an attack its a critique and I’m quite happy to have a dialogue about it with Debs or anyone else

To begin with Debs writes

When I first had the idea for a women-only radical feminist meet-up back in March of this year, I naively thought that everyone would naturally understand that ‘women-only’ meant ‘female-born women only’.

Maybe this is because lots of women who throw themselves into what they consider radical feminism often don’t actually know that much about feminist history and that there are lots of different strands of feminism and lots of them are supportive and inclusive of transwomen

I was dismayed to discover this was not the case, and some people thought transwomen had a right to attend the meeting. And that is what this issue comes down to; rights.

See I’m not convinced about that, I think what people often mean by rights is comforts and privileges.

She quotes from the London Feminist Network site:

“We are a women-only group because we believe it is vital that women have safe and supportive spaces where we can work together politically to campaign for our rights.
We are the experts on our own lives and on what it is to be a woman, in all of our various identities, in a society where we do not have equal political representation, where we are disadvantaged and discriminated against simply because we are women. All too many of us know what it is to experience male violence, including rape, domestic violence, sexual abuse, pornography, prostitution, forced marriage, female genital mutilation and so-called ‘honour’ crimes.

I have a lot of respect for London feminist network but this really sounds to me that they are saying that trans women don’t experience male violence, including rape, domestic violence, sexual abuse, pornography, prostitution, Statistically trans women are at more risk of male violence than cis women not less

[EDIT: acording to a woman who is on the email list for LFN, LFN are not trans exclusive and when they say "women only" they are including trans women in that]

Debs goes on to say that

Our work in women-only campaigns is not in exclusion of other types of political work and many of us are active in mixed groups for peace, against racism, anti-globalisation, lesbian and gay rights, environmental concerns, etc.

Fine, good but I think that’s like saying “its okay to be racist because I’m doing all this other good work, being elitist and prejudiced in one part of your life is going to effect all the other work you do for change negatively.

The approval of men is irrelevant to our self-organising, as much as the presence of men is obviously inappropriate at a women-only event

While I agree with this totally I don’t see what this has to do with transwomen in women only space seeing as transwomen aren’t men.

She quotes Women’s Space

“For one thing not all men who undergo srs do it because of ‘gender dysphoria.’ There are those who have extreme fetishistic desires to have sex as a woman but who do not describe themselves as having a ‘woman’s gender identity.’

How does she know this? Is she trans herself? Does she have trans friends and/or lovers, is she talking to trans women about this or just other people who are not trans friendly either.

Many straight men who undergo srs then go on to describe themselves as lesbian (because they still want to sleep with women)

Um, yeah maybe that’s because they weren’t straight men in the first place, women who are attracted exclusively to women are lesbians, and I don’t see what the fuck its got to do with anyone else anyway.

There’s a minority among them who are absolutely rabid about forcing & involving themselves on lesbians & in lesbian groups.

Like say oh, heterosexual women who claim they are “political lesbians” while still married to men? And anyway she says “A minority”. A minority of any group of people behaving like arseholes does not mean the whole group are arseholes . And where else are lesbian transwomen supposed to go than lesbian groups? Its really sad seeing oppressed people oppressing other people, and most of the lesbians I’ve met and most of the queer women spaces I’ve been in (which I’m pretty sure is way more that either Heart or Debs) are trans accepting and trans inclusive.

While they may see themselves as ‘lesbian’ for the most part many, many lesbians still experience them as men because they come with all their male privileges, expectations and attitudes towards women absolutely intact

How “many” exactly or is that just her and her transphobic friend, And really I hate this, do she really think in cisgendered only women’s space that peoples privileges and expectations don’t come in to play? That there is no able bodied privilege, white, privilege, class privilege that effect dynamics amongst cis women? There also seems to be no knowledge (unsurprisingly) of how masculinities are often played out in lesbian spaces.

Debs again

That is so well expressed, I could never have put it any better, “They may have changed the penis between their legs but the one in their heads is still fully operational.” Some might argue, and I would be one of them, that it is the penis in their heads that does the most damage to women. The physical body is almost irrelevant, what bits you’ve got, what bits you haven’t; what counts are the attitudes, the self-absorption, the sense of ownership over another’s body. They are the things, among others, that distinguish the ‘male brain’ from the female, and they are the things which keep women in a position of subordination to men.

Okay so the argument most often used by radical feminists against transitioning is that there is no such thing as gender, that there is no such thing as a “male” brain or a “female” brain so how does this even make sense? firstly attitudes are not inherent or hard wired they are learnt behaviours and can be unlearnt if necessary and I hate the assumption that all men everywhere are hard wired to be self absorbed and claim owner ship over others bodies
And really if people cant change their attitudes and behaviours then what the fuck are we fighting for?

Radical feminists, including myself on several occasions, have often been called “transphobic”. It’s a pretty lame and meaningless insult that seems to be hurled by some people as soon as they hear that a woman is planning a women-only event.

The use of “lame” an ablest insult there really pissed me off, and I did actually comment on this but she hasn’t changed it or even posted my comment or responded to it, so maybe unpacking her privilege doesn’t matter all that much to her,

Yes, it must be we who identify the membership in those groups, otherwise the entire meaning and purpose of the group is lost, which means there would be little point in continuing, little point in forming a group in the first place, little point in the group trying to achieve any of its aims

Who is we exactly? I am a feminist. I am a radical feminist, but I don’t agree with other feminists position on this, who decides who the gatekeepers are in these situations? Why is my voice less than other women’s voices, Why are the voices of trans women less than other women’s voices, and while we are at it who decided that it was impossible for transwomen to be radical feminists?

She quotes from the questioning transgender webside

“Exclusion is exclusion. At least that’s what boycotters or those angered over the festival’s women-only policies argue. Maybe that’s true. And in that case, exclusion is not necessarily a bad thing. One of the major traps that people in privilege fall into is not realizing that sometimes they will have to be excluded from certain groups, conversations and spaces. Exclusion is sometimes necessary to prevent the erasure of the specificity of difference. We all know that gender is a social construction; however, gender constructs are very real in that people are oppressed through them.”[emphasis Debs]

So the bit emphasised? I absolute agree with the statement, except its not relevant here, because trans women do not have more privilege than cis women. I feel there is real hypocrisy here. Debs has massive amounts of privilege, she is white, cisgendered, heterosexual, able bodied, maybe she should be interrogating the traps her privilege causes her to fall in to instead of telling people who, weather she want to acknowledge it or not, do have less privilege than her

quoting heart

. Some ought to get over themselves and learn the difference between critiques, analysis, opinions, politics and them. I can critique the hell out of your politics and your theories and ideas and go to the mat for you, love the hell out of you, and be willing to lay down my life for you. This is what any mother knows. This is what any lover knows. If you want to know how to critique and analyze the hell out of something without making it personal, try unconditionally fucking loving somebody, would you? Then you’ll understand. Maybe unconditional love is just so goddamn rare right now, nobody knows what it is any more. And if people don’t learn, then there will not be any revolution, not any time soon.”

while I pretty much agree with this I think its bizarre coming from a set of people who are always rejecting people for not believing the same things or doing the right things, people who don’t have other women’s backs no matter what, who belittle other women, who hurt other women, who ignore other women if they are the wrong sort of feminists or the wrong sort of women

many of these feminist don’t do unconditional love, they very much do “my way or the highway, we will express love and concern to you as long as you believe exactly the same thing as we do” they think its okay for them to decide who is the right sort of feminist or not. I have been on the receiving end of this, and you know what? it hurts, it sucks, it damages feminism.

Debs again

The Radical Feminist Spring Gathering is not for female-born women only out of any kind of fear or hatred or mistrust or disliking or victimisation or anything else of transwomen. As Heart says, the trans ‘issue’ is nothing to do with feminism

So why bring it up over and over again?

The gathering is an oasis in the desert of the male-identified society we live in, many women’s (unless they are seperatists) only escape in the year,

See I don’t even understand this. Yeah we live in a male identified society but that doesn’t mean that women only spaces happen when DEBS make them happen, I’m perfectly capable of creating women only spaces in my life and I do regularly, with women who shockingly are not exactly the same as me. Its not like women only spaces happened when DEBS arrived at feminism.