Reweaving

Renegade Evolution made a post in which she said

Oh, and there are sooooo many people who just need to fuck off and shut their mouths. I am pondering a new policy…if you’ve never done sex work or been prostituted…you need to just shut the fuck up. You are not Judge Dredd, you are not the law.

In fact, you want to know what a lot of sex workers say, even unhappy ones? “I hate peoples assumptions about me”

And though I disagree with her position on sex work I totally agree with what shes saying here, because plenty of people who have never been involved in the sex trade feel free to tell those who have what its like for them and how they feel about it.

But I wanted to build some bridges and have a real dialouge about it so I wrote

But where does that leave those of us who have been prostituted and still want people who buy sex criminalised?

Though I do agree with the assumption thing, it never occurs to anybody ever that I was prostituted. Because that obviously doesnt happen to women who are (now) educated and middle class.

and Ernest green replied to me with

And anonymous, your personal desire to see sex buyers criminalized does not take precedence over the human cost to other women of such retrogressive ideas. Check out what Swedish sex workers, linked from this blog just a few threads down, think of that great idea.

So where does that leave you? On the opposite side from every sex worker who hasn’t had your good fortune and still needs to make a living in what is already a very hard business.

I expect ignorant comments like these on some sites, but when they crop up here, that’s truly a dark day.

This just pissed me off, I know I was lucky to get out but the word “fortune” in no way relates to any of my experiences as a prostituted woman, because yeah I’m just so lucky to have been repeatedly gang raped and beaten up for two years, to have had knives and bottles used on me, to have had a broken rib, a forced miscarriage, to be living with post traumatic stress disorder, what is “fortunate” about that.

When people come and want to dialog honestly and you know maybe learn stuff, making massive assumptions about their lives and experiences and completely dismissing them means they are probably going to stop listening to you.

For my part I do think sex work is not good for anyone involved or a wider society but i also think people involved in sex work should have access to health care, education, housing, and be able to be safe and get their safety concerns taken seriously.

Obviously some women do choose to do sex work but if all women in the world had access to other jobs and financial security and places to go so they could get out of the industry then I’d be more comfortable believing that those that say they choose it actually do choose it rather than it being the only option or the best of several bad options.

I know I need to learn more about those working in the sex trade, and that’s why I read Rens blog and Boundnotgagged but that doesn’t mean my own views should be dismissed, if its important to listen to all people who’ve been involved in the sex industry then we should be listening to those we disagree with also.

When transwomen stop committing or attempting to commit suicide, being murdered, loosing their homes, their jobs, their family, their friends, then we can talk about wether they have more privilege than cisgendered women.

Giving oppressed people a space to survive in is an act of political resistance to the status quo, to the capitalist patriarchy. We should be supporting transwomen not ostracising and othering them.

Where did the idea come from that transwomen can’t be radical feminists? who made that decision

Radical feminism is against upholding gender binaries. One of the rules of the bigendered system is that people are supposed to identify and live as their gender they were assigned at birth, transgender people don’t do that so how are they upholding the binary gender system again?

and for what its worth. I thought this post was pretty awesome

I think one of the reasons I don’t belong to a “queer” community is because I didn’t feel I had the right to. After i made a commitment to my male partner, I felt like i “let the side down” or “betrayed the cause” and so no longer had a right to spend time with other non heterosexual people. Why should I feel that? why should I feel more of a fraud, more of a failure  being in a relationship with a man than I would if i were in a relationship with a woman.

And partly I think its because radical feminists  talk so much about not giving our energies to men, about being woman identified about not collaborating with the patriarchy

often heterosexual radical feminists have frankly odd conversations about weather they should leave their partners and become lesbians because that would be more feminist of them, somewhere along the line I swallowed this whole without thinking and  started to think that if it was expected of het women wasn’t it even more expected of bisexual women? (except it isn’t expected of het women, they rarely do it they just talk about it)

But i think that’s ridiculous, surely part of feminism is upholding women’s rights to have relationships with whoever they want, It also makes me think that many heterosexual feminists have no idea how power struggles and infighting play out in lesbian communities and relationships. It seems some heterosexual women don’t know that lots of lesbians are not feminists, that lots of lesbians perceive themselves and express themselves through certain sorts of masculinities, (in fact almost all of the women that make me go ooohh her! do  this)  that are often  seen as the antithesis of radical feminism

And it feels like these women are downplaying and have no idea of the lived realities of lesbians  or women in lesbian relationships, the prejudice, the danger, the fear the heterocentricsims of the world, the rejection from friends and family.

And that lesbian sex is not all sugar drops and rainbows, that there are as many different ways of having sex as their are lesbians and some of those ways do not gel with narrow focused radical feminism.

I find the whole self flagellation of “oh I’m in a heterosexual relationship, what a bad feminist I am” really disturbing. Seriously If you don’t want to be with him leave him, but if you want to stay don’t witter about it on the Internet its disrespectful to those of us  who are attracted to women on a gut physical and emotional level and it disrepects your partner who presumably you have made a commitment to.

I find it totally possible to be in a heterosexual relationship and be woman focused but maybe that is because of my sexuality, while having a conversation the other day i realised that maybe the reason  women only spaces are so important to me is not because I’m a feminist but because I’m bisexual and I need that deep connection to women, without it I get sick, I get restless, i feel like I’m missing part of myself. So maybe I make more space for women in my life than most heterosexual women do because I need it more. And maybe I need to stop feeling guilty about being bi and just be bi with all the glorious messy complications that entails

I recently had a very drunken, rambling but for me very profound conversation about, transgender, gender diversity, queer, non heterosexuality and alliances and i feel in a way it bought me back to myself, gave me a space to reremember my history, to pay homage to who and what made me partly who I am.

Radical feminism is important to me and has been very healing for me and given me a strong place to stand, but before that there was something else. There was another community of people both in literature and physicaly that I belonged to, that belonged to me, before I found radical feminism, when I was dealing with my non heterosexuality I read everything I could find, to help me feel less abnormal. The first book I ever read that talked about not being straight was okay was Becoming a Man and it was so powerful, so profound, it doesn’t matter to me that it was written by a man, it felt like i was coming up for air. And I read everything I could find about being non heterosexual,

And I read, Pat(rik) Califia, Del(la) grace volcano, Kate Bornstien, Joan Nestle, Camile Paglia and many people who I cant remember the names of but who made it okay to be me, made it okay to be queer

It was then i met one of the people I have been most attracted to in my whole life, a preoperative transman, we absolutely zinged, there was an incredible chemistry between us

and I played femme, real high lesbian femme, because it made me feel beautiful, because I liked the sort of women it attracted, i went out with a woman for two and a half years who was so butch she got called sir, who was way more masculine than my current partner who is male

And when i wasn’t playing femme i was doing soft butch baby dyke, the uniform then was Khakis and strappy tops

I have always been Kiki who I am being and how i am dressing depends on how I am feeling, where I feel I am on the gender and sexuality spectrum at that point.

I lived in a big shared house that was always full of people that didn’t live there and almost all of us were some form of queer: bi, gay, lesbian, trans, undecided, unlabeled, We were young desperate, vulnerable, many of us parentless or faced the possibility of becoming parent less if our parents found out who we were, and many of us were crazy because the pressure of living in a homophobic heterosexist society wore us out, wore us down, there was a place to sleep if parental prejudice created homelessness, we fed each other when we were poor, we mopped up the blood weather it was self inflicted or weather it was a homophobic attack. we visited each other when we ended up in the psychiatric hospital, we went clubbing every weekend to celebrate being us, to celebrate our love for us, to celebrate survival

I have never felt so much that people I loved had my back as I did then, and we didn’t care, it didn’t matter who was fucking who, or how, or what shape their genitals were, or weather they were buying into gender roles.

And I think this, the need for purity is often what stagnates movements because people make alliances with people for reasons other than gender and people make alliances with other people who are similarly oppressed even if that crosses gender lines and people are messy and beautiful and we find our joy and our freedom in unexpected people and situations.

I have always lived on edges and boundaries and I think edges and boundaries are where the truths are, shoring up the boundaries to hard doesn’t create safety, it creates a trap.

for most of my life I have been very fractured and I have only recently, like in the last year been able to start weaving myself back together. Its time to start weaving the queer part of myself together with the radical feminist part of myself, so none of me, none of who I honestly am, gets left behind

This spring from the heart of the mountain runs cool and clear, runs with the knowledge of womens pain, poverty and fear, but also the sound of our laughter and fingerlinked power, quenching the thirst. Fullfilling the need for each others voices, histories, eyes, Saturating us with the knowledge that this stream will wear away the rock and become a river, a torrent to change the shape of the landscape with.

(IWD left me buzzing with joy!)

[EDIT: I notice I've been linked by some pro life blogs, While I respect their right to do that I do not want this post used as fodder to explain that the pro choice position is wrong, I am and always will be 100 percent pro choice]

Last night I went to the abortion rights protest against the pro life road show, protesting is important and obviously abortion rights are really, really important but the way the protest happened really disturbed me.

From the off I was kind of annoyed, as we started gathering one of the protesters pointed out another group of people and there was some discussion on weather they were there for the roadshow or the protest and she said “I don’t think they are pro life they look too nice.” I think that’s really unacceptable firstly aren’t we about getting away from judging people on what they look like, but also because pro lifers are not bad people, they are not nasty people. They absolutely believe what they are doing is right and moral.

The protesters arranged themselves right outside the door of the city temple with a walkway between the middle of them that was just narrow enough to those going to the roadshow to walk through, then when those attending (some of whom were older people and the majority of whom were female) walked through the protesters chanted slogans really loudly, which must have been incredibly intimidating. Some of those in the front rows of the protest were male and from what I could see were the most vocal. So there’s a situation where men are shouting at women and telling them what to think.

If we want to protest and make a difference protesting then we need to unpack and discard the patriarchal attitudes that say the best way to make people do what we want them to is through intimidation and aggression. And really left wing men need to unpack their male privilege and think about how shouting at women because they are doing something they don’t want them to do is upholding a capitalist patriarchal system. Also while I think its good that men are involved in the abortion rights movement if as feminists we believe it is not okay for men to tell women how to think and behave then it shouldn’t be okay for men to tell any woman how to think and behave, even if we find her politics to be reprehensible

I also had a problem with the chanting. One of the chants was ““Pro-life, that’s a lie - you don’t care if women die” I think this is really, really unhelpful. I grew up in a very right wing hard line church that was very anti abortion and although it did many damaging things to women, and had many rules on women’s submission and inferiority, the pro life position is not about carelessly killing women, the pro life position is not about women being less than men. In fact the pro life position from a philosophical perspective is extremely logical

1)Humanity begins at conception

2)Abortion kills the human in the womb

2)Killing humans is wrong/sinful

3) Therefore abortion is wrong/sinful

While it lacks compassion for women it makes perfect sense that a person who thinks a foetus is as human as the woman carrying it wouldn’t think that the woman had the”right” to “Kill” another human being.

Telling the opposition what they think and getting it wrong does not help the cause. It makes us look stupid and vindictive. We don’t appreciate it when they do it to us so we shouldn’t do it to them.

We need to be a movement that understands what pro lifers actualy think so we can refute their actual arguments and not straw ones, we need to be a movement that doesnt use the tactics of the status quo to try and get people to change.We need to be a movement that doesnt automaticaly write pro lifers off as nasty/evil/woman hating