I Know

“What? Why?”, I ask him. The time and place vary, the questions vary, his specific displays of stress, shame and discomfort vary. His answer does not.

He doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know what it is that he wants. He drops his head, refusing to look me in the eyes. Mumbles, “I don’t know.”

He doesn’t know why he wants to be seen as a woman. But this is what he wants. He wants “to be” a woman.

“Why?”, I ask him.

He doesn’t know. He squirms on the other end of the couch, twisting away from me, stares out the plate glass window.

“What do you like about being seen as a woman?”, I ask.

He doesn’t know. He picks at the cuticles of his fingernails.

“What do you dislike about being a man?”, I ask. “I don’t know!”, he snaps, exhaling heavily, rolling his head back, eyes searching the ceiling.

The truth arises as the questions pour from my mouth:

“At what average age are prostituted women first commercially sexually exploited? How many incarcerated women are survivors of incest? What’s the average pay gap between women and men? How many women per week are killed by men? What percentage of college women will be raped? Why are the majority of prostituted people indigenous women and women of color, and why are the majority of their johns white men? What percentage of girls suffer with eating disorders? In developing countries, what percentage of AIDS victims are girls and women? What’s the annual profit of the pornography industry? How many women and girls per hour are raped in South Africa? How many tens of millions of girls are denied educations simply because they are female? What percentage of trafficked humans are prostituted girls and women? How much does the morning after pill cost?”

He doesn’t know.

Sex, Gender, Lies & Female-Hatred

Radfem Hub

In  “Gender as a Hate Crime” (Dianne Post, Rain and Thunder #41  ) it was noted that “When I was lobbying for the inclusion of gender in the Arizona hate crimes statute many years ago, the man who spoke before me said that crimes against women are so common that if they were included in hate crimes, it would overwhelm the system and no one else would get any attention.”

Indeed.  I guess this is why transgender folks can achieve human rights, civil rights and hate crimes legislative protections but females can’t.  Female-hatred can continue unabated without consequence or even being questioned.  It is so ‘normal’ and so widespread, that it is not seen as systemic structural oppression in its own right.

One of the most common socially approved expressions of this universal Hate, is the continuing metaphor of women as animals, (ie not-human animals), chicks, cows, dogs, bunnies, and often presented…

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“What Michfest Means to Me” – by redressalert

Powerful words. Hear them. Hold them close.

Big Mouth Girl

Below is a link to a powerful testimony on this woman’s first Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival experience.

Here is small sample…

…I can start to glimpse for the first time, flashes of an answer to questions like, “Who would I be if I had been raised with perfect love and support?” “Who would I be if I had not been harmed and twisted?” “Who would I be if I had never been measured against a toxic standard?” “Who would I be if I had not grown up fearing rape?” “Who would I be if I had not had to spend so many years on simply trying to survive, heal, and recover?” Those questions start to get a lot less rhetorical, in light of Fest. The nourishment seems to be unbound by space/time limitations—it seems to reach back to all of my past selves who most need to be fed.

What…

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Almost Famous, real women and the normalisation of self-hate

So, so pretty.

Yes, this is gender. This is the patriarchal control system which demeans, denigrates and demoralizes women, for the enhancement and pleasure of men.

Reminds me of this http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

Jeffreys on the ‘degendering’ of women’s spaces

Female-only spaces are integral to the physical, emotional and political protection of women. It is a violation of women’s human rights to be told we do not exist as a separate, historically oppressed class of people, distinct from our oppressors. It erases us. It hides our oppression. It will eventually eliminate us. Completely.

Follow Me

Thank you for following me. I know I’ve been sort of silent the past months, only echoing other blogs. I appreciate those of you who have stuck it out, listening to my occasional tweets and reblogs.

My silence took me by surprise. I was completely amazed at what shut me up and frightened by how thoroughly it eventually quieted me.

Late Fall/early Winter, Julie Bindel popped a quick tweet out, with a link to some reporting she had conducted 2-3 years earlier. Saying: yeah, there’s this thing out there, it might be relevant to what some of you are talking about, have a look.

I looked. I’m pretty sure everyone who reads this blog looked.

It left me speechless.

Amnesty International wants to legalize prostitution. Amnesty International. Legalized prostitution. Amnesty, that granting of protection from persecution, doesn’t apply to women. Amnesty International, the largest global human rights advocate that exists, now supports widespread international commercial sexual exploitation, an exploitation which overwhelmingly targets girls, women, the impoverished, the oppressed.

Money in richer days; letters written; evenings spent on folding metal chairs with a phone pressed to aching head; long hours riding in cramped carpools and church vans; hot wax burns on hands-the scars of which I still bear today; the deadness, the utter deadness, sinking into the soul from accepting that a human being, no matter how heinous their actions, had just been coldly, systematically killed – in my name. All for Amnesty, my contributions towards protecting the persecuted.

Amnesty International supports the commercial sexual exploitation of girls and women. I really didn’t need a lot of facts, figures and statistics to know that this was wrong. I knew it, already.

I also knew that facts, figures and statistics (best when presented in trendy infographic imaging) are expected, no, demanded, as support for anything a woman says about any topic. I knew me saying “This is wrong” was not going to get much visibility or encourage questioning of Amnesty International’s policy. Facts. Figures. Statistics. As existing feminist quotes were tweeted I assiduously retweeted. As links to various web pages were tweeted, I read the short versions, picked a couple of stats, and tweeted those out with the link. As the #QuestionsforAmnesty hashtag was introduced, I began tagging all my tweets, riding that higher visibility. I was confident an apology and retraction were forthcoming. I knew Amnesty, hell, I wore the T shirt once a week in middle school – and that was a loooooong time ago. This would be clarified and corrected. It wasn’t. They doubled-down.

This damaged me. It hurt. And I had only recently recovered from heartsick at closer quarters, so the hurt felt a little more painful than it might have otherwise. I dwelt in that pain for a while, then emerged, recharged, with a personal challenge to find those facts, figures and statistics which, even if they never changed Amnesty’s mind, would at least publicly prove them wrong.

I am not a feminist scholar. I had never even read a feminist/women’s studies book until about a year ago. My position on women’s rights has always been self-informed. I live my life. I know how oppressive it is, and always has been. I have been punished – physically, financially, emotionally – at times quite severely, for my many transgressions against male domination. I have observed that only women share these oppressions and punishments. I know this. But fighting an issue like prostitution, specifically in opposition to such a human rights giant as Amnesty International, was going to take more ammunition than I possessed. I started reading.

An internet friend had provided a copy of The Industrial Vagina, by Sheila Jeffreys. I requested Paid For: My Journey through Prostitution, by Rachel Moran, from my county library. They didn’t have the book in their collection. It took them over a month to find a copy they could borrow in their USA national network of sharing libraries. I feel this is a very telling point. Your, not just my, local library does not feel that the stories which are told by survivors of prostitution are a necessary contribution for them to make to their communities. I ask that each of you request these books from your library, even if you own your copy. Check it out, and return it two weeks later. Create a demand for this knowledge, and someone will be forced to provide it.

Much like prostitution itself.

Reading The Industrial Vagina was rage-inducing. Women are nothing to men. Nothing. Nothing but a hole to fuck. And do not even think about responding to this post with “not all men” in any written configuration whatsoever: if men wanted women to be free from oppression they would have eliminated prostitution and all our many, many other oppressions centuries ago. That they have only continued to add to our oppressions, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, tells you everything about their intent and expectations.

So, I came into the new year angry about the machine that devours women. Angry at my local community services, which along with their national brethren, provided social complicity to this woman-eating machine, in the name of “protecting us from ugliness”. And while waiting for the real story, for Rachel’s heart-breaking words, I stumbled across some research commissioned five years ago. I scanned the 50 page “summary”, saw a plethora of facts, figures and statistics, and went back to pickup the full study.

In 2009, Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center commissioned a study of the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of American Indian Women and Girls. “Shattered Hearts”. You can find the study here http://www.miwrc.org/about-us/reports-publications/

I had a mission. I had a rage, actually a double rage, to fuel me. I had facts, figures and statistics. I started tweeting, tagging as much as possible with #QuestionsforAmnesty #TORL and #HoneyballYes. But the process of reading and digesting information then summarizing it into 140 character tweets began to wear on me. That skill of internalizing knowledge which had benefitted me so much during years of education was now traumatizing me.

The facts, figures and statistics were overwhelming me. My growing understanding of the deliberate mechanization for normalizing paid rape, cultivating a demand for ever increasing exoticness, marketing the lies of entitlement and naturalization to men, calculatingly identifying targets to be prostituted, the coordinated efforts to secure targets and enslave them, and finally the ease of evading the pitiful sham of criminal law enforcement – all this hate. There is no other word for it, than hate. Hate of women. Hate for women. Hate towards women.

Hate. Hate. Hate, because we are women, born female.

Confronting this, seeing it for what it really is, took my breath away. It smothered me. I felt as though I had contracted a virulent flu. My body ached, to the bone, with this knowledge. My muscles grew tired and sluggish. My joints burned with every motion. My bones ached, with a cold, heavy deadness. Trying to understand why we are hated was fruitless. There is no reason, we just are. Trying to feel the pain of women on the frontline of this hate was like taking a blow to an already wasted body – it was just dead, empty thuds. Trying to reconcile my own history with where I am and why I wasn’t there was terrifying. You can’t absorb this. Their trauma, my trauma, our trauma. It’s just too much.

So I had to lie still, recover, regroup, renew. I feel clearer now. Not necessarily stronger, yet, but I have some sense of clarity. I’m hopeful it will help me, help us.

Sex or Gender: Does the Form of Transition Matter?

Sex or Gender: Does the Form of Transition Matter?.

Gender hurts women and girls.

The stereotypes which limit our opportunities in life keep us perpetually under paid. The social expectation that we be caretakers to not just our own immediate family, but to extended family, neighbors, schools, co-workers, basically any stranger in need, means we are chronically exhausted, afflicted with multiple stress-related illnesses and are afford little, if any, down time in order to recuperate. We live under constant threat of sex-based violence. We are the largest population of people who have no effective voice within our society. Our bodies are not even our own, white men in dark suits control our reproductive processes.

All of this is done by gendering us. By implementing a coordinated system of social control which limits what females are allowed to do, say or be.

Gender is control system used to oppress the female sex. Gender hurts. It’s supposed to hurt.

A Post of Her Own

I made the following comment in response to Choco, regarding Lesbians who unknowingly enter into relationships with transgender birth-males. https://outofmypantiesnow.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/was-it-rape-or-is-it-fraud/#comment-110

“It is hard for me to express the horror that I feel for any lesbian who finds she has been targeted for abuse by a male-birth transgender, at any stage of his transition or presentment.” I chose those particular words in the previous sentence very carefully, in an attempt to acknowledge both my visceral reaction to the Cotton Ceiling agenda and my own confusion over why I should feel so strongly about this.

The Chosen Words:

Me – I have always considered myself to be bisexual. I’ve had relationships which were involved enough to include sex both with women and with men. I like to think that has been a choice on my part, but further introspection indicates it was largely conditioning. My interests, personality and communication styles are all stereotypically masculine of center. That is mostly a function of my upbringing. I tend to have more in common with men, and get along better with men, than I do with most women. I prefer having sex with women’s bodies, though. Hetero-normative is easier, but less satisfying, to me. So I have always oscillated between the two, trying to find the right fit.

Being bisexual is a problem for me. I don’t really fit anywhere – I am either suspicious or suspect. Inevitably, men interpret my dual orientation as being open to a variety of their sexual fantasies. I’m not. In fact, just the thought of their fantasies ends the relationship on my part. Lesbians don’t really trust me, and I don’t blame them. I have no interest in having a relationship with another bisexual woman, either. I tend to view bisexual women with the same expectation of “You want me to do what?!?!”, which I have always experienced with men. So, I guess I don’t trust them myself. Or, perhaps I didn’t trust the young ones, those with no significant same sex relationship experience. It’s been a while since I considered this. Which brings me to my next specifically chosen words.

Hard to Express – Not only do I not fully know what I want to say, but I also worry that I don’t really have a right to say anything. It feels presumptive to admit that I have very strong feelings about this. Especially, immediately following my own statement of historical bisexuality. It feels like appropriation, that I am claiming the pain that someone else is feeling for my own, when clearly, my life path has been different, and, in many ways, easier. It is hard to identify why I feel so strongly. It is harder to find words that don’t feel off limits to me. I do not want to alienate or talk over anyone who has been a victim of male appropriation of lesbian.

Horror – Horror, horrible, horrific. They all fit. As do many other words of fright and fear. I have a visceral, physical reaction to the thought of any woman-centered-woman opening herself up, in a trusting relationship, to an imposter. To someone who has fetishized her, and reduced her to an object, in order to not just possess her, but to displace and replace her. To erase her, and write himself into her place. It is demonic possession. Cannibalistic. Woman, consumed by man.

It is a nightmare come true. If I allow myself to dwell on it, and the underlying misogyny and patriarchal manipulation which created it, I feel violently ill.

I used not to have sex without STD test results. If I ever have sex again, it won’t be without chromosome test results. This saddens me.

Finds – I believe than any woman who is a woman-loving-woman, a lesbian, does not knowingly enter into a relationship with a male. Those that think they do, have become bisexuals or heterosexuals. They are no longer lesbians. His appropriation of lesbian is no less disgusting, but it is known and accepted by those women. They are a woman in a relationship with a man. That’s not a lesbian.

I use the word ‘finds’, to indicate that true sex was previously lied about or omitted. Duplicitous actions, behaviors and words were used to obscure the truth. The advancements in cosmetic surgery have been great. There are still many visual clues to biological sex, but I can understand that a less experienced woman might would find herself unintentionally in a relationship with a post-operative transsexual birth male. Or even emotionally invested in a platonic or pre-sexual relationship.

Targeted – Men have long fetishized lesbians. Their desire to watch two women perform sex for them. Their need to insert themselves into a sexual relationship between women. Their ego at diverting a woman from lesbianism and into heterosexuality. Their fury at being excluded from the life of something, not even a some one, that they have always assumed ownership over. And finally, their envy of our creativity, our ability to create. Men spray seed. Women bring forth life.

Abuse – It is abuse to use another person for your own purposes. It is abuse to mislead and lie to another. Believing lies is very psychologically damaging. You grieve the loss of what you perceived to be the truth. You damage your ability to trust others. You lose faith in yourself. Men who target lesbians do so specifically in order to abuse them.

Male birth – Woman has a very specific personal, political and social identification. It is sex based. Biological. Chromosomal. It is experience based. Phenomenal survival of a highly sophisticated system of dedicated destruction and oppression. It is a curse and an incredible triumph.

Men are not women. Men, no matter how much hormones they take nor how many surgeries they obtain, are not women. They never will be.

Transition is a false illusion. The male inside cannot be so obtuse as not to recognize this. He is not a woman. He will never be a woman. At best, he will look very like a woman. His construction of an artificial shell in which to hide underscores his duplicity. He intends to deceive others. Specifically, he intends to deceive them to his own benefit, for his advantage. His deceit is not done for them, it is an action taken against them.

Conclusion…. Maybe I have put lesbians on a pedestal. Maybe some are strictly attracted to the primary and secondary sex “features”, and don’t really care about the soul of the woman. I don’t feel that I have mis-judged lesbians, though. In my more attractive youth, certainly I felt some women more interested in me than our level of acquaintance and shared interests warranted. But it seemed more of a market availability attraction and less of an objectification. Lesbians comprise a very small percent of the population. In many cases, I felt like I was approached simply because I was interested in relationships with other women, who were also interested in a relationship with another woman. More of a get-to-know-you, less of an I-want-to-do-you.

But in no situations was it ever a deliberate attempt to disguise themselves and target me for abusive satisfaction of their sexualized fetish. It was never an attempt to erase me. To replace me.

It is hard for me to express the horror that I feel for any lesbian who finds she has been targeted for abuse by a male-birth transgender, at any stage of his transition or presentment.

Transgender and Male Privilege

Because I don’t Google, I was unable to post this response to Catherine Winchester’s blogspot.

http://cswinchester.blogspot.com/2013/08/transgender-and-male-privilidge.html

Not buying it.

Males may give up some surface privilege transitioning to transsexual, but they have never, and will never, have that cumulative conditioning that carved acquiescence and subservience into their brains. They might feel the pushback from men, but they don’t feel the deeper struggle within the female mind to not just feel the pushback, but to identify it for what it is, internalize the hate (for it IS hate), and then struggle to convince themselves that they don’t deserve the hate.

MtT don’t have a CLUE what it means to have been born as a second class citizen. 10,000 years of oppression builds a powerful system, a finely tuned, highly effective machine. The experience of having been born into the hungry jaws of that machine cannot not be acquired.

Pink Shorts in Public

Men who attempt to emulate and impersonate women are insulting women. They are reducing our humanity down to cute clothes, long hair, high heels and makeup. Oh, and sex, too. They reduce us to sex. They objectify and sexualize women. They hate us so much they cannot stand to see us as humans. We are objects. Sex toys.