- Joined
- Apr 5, 2015
I suspect given my age and involvement in vaguely feminist activity at the time, I’m not the only one who will remember this incident. This wasn’t a peak for me. It was an epiphany.
March 2012, Planned Parenthood Toronto runs Pleasure and Possibilities, a community sexual health conference for queer women.
This is the running order of the workshops: https://pleasureandpossibilities.wordpress.com/programming/workshop-descriptions/
There it is, right there opening the conference. The legendary cotton ceiling workshop. The workshop from which actual women were barred, the one with the express mission of “strategizing” how to overcome lesbians’ unwillingness to be fucked by a man, even if he wore a dress.
It was a PUA seminar for AGPs, and it came at a time when a lot of activism was being directed towards the issue of consent and coercion, PUA tactics, stalking, date rape and all that other fun stuff. All the ways in which some men were “strategizing” to overcome women’s refusal to fuck them. And there was a very clear understanding in that context that this was A Bad Thing which women as a class did not enjoy, and that the very foundation of feminism is the right and ability to control whose dick is put in your body and when. If you don’t have the right to not get fucked, every other right is kind of secondary to that. We understood that and were yelling loudly IRL and online about positive consent and campaigning for active consent in rape laws and all that business.
Except, apparently, if the dude said he felt like a lady, and he wanted to fuck people who by definition did not want to mess with any dick. You know, lesbians. Then a woman‘s right to choose if she got fucked and by who was apparently so much olde tyme bigotree, and the bitches needed re-educated out of that sexual rejection shit. Men were entitled to any cunt of their choice. Plus ça change.
It was the announcement of that seminar, and its ferocious defence by TRAs and handmaidens, that made the scales fall from my eyes. These were not people who were unfortunates looking for kindness, respect, and comradeship. These were creepy men trying to figure out how to bully, pressure, shame and coerce women into fucking them when they didn’t want to fuck them, because there is a subsection of guys who are really into making someone fuck them who doesn’t want to. That was all it was. This was a seminar about how women don’t have the right to say no, and now instead of The Implication, we are going to use the tactic of calling them a bigot to break down their refusal.
I quit all trans ally type stuff after that. And I kept my mouth very shut, and I watched very closely, and for the last decade I have seen these very same predatory males grow in confidence and social power. Enough so that now they openly come after kids, too. I have seen how devastatingly effective that “you’re a bigottttt” screeching has been against people who consider themselves allies acting in good faith. I have seen it used to silence first lesbians, then classical feminists, and now literally anyone who doesn’t want fetish porn sprayed everyone in the name of “much trans rights”. I have seen it used to access our protected spaces, our bathrooms and changing rooms, our Title X funding and scholarships, our prisons, our medical care, our political and community movements, our children’s understanding of relationships and puberty, our very bodies.
I don’t care if that makes me a bigot. I say no to gross creepy straight male entitlement, in a dress or out of it. We are entitled to our own spaces, our freedoms of association, our choice of sexual partners. I wasn’t in any way radical in my feminism a decade ago. I still do not consider myself such. But that cotton ceiling shit? That radicalised me against trans inclusive feminism.
March 2012, Planned Parenthood Toronto runs Pleasure and Possibilities, a community sexual health conference for queer women.
This is the running order of the workshops: https://pleasureandpossibilities.wordpress.com/programming/workshop-descriptions/
There it is, right there opening the conference. The legendary cotton ceiling workshop. The workshop from which actual women were barred, the one with the express mission of “strategizing” how to overcome lesbians’ unwillingness to be fucked by a man, even if he wore a dress.
It was a PUA seminar for AGPs, and it came at a time when a lot of activism was being directed towards the issue of consent and coercion, PUA tactics, stalking, date rape and all that other fun stuff. All the ways in which some men were “strategizing” to overcome women’s refusal to fuck them. And there was a very clear understanding in that context that this was A Bad Thing which women as a class did not enjoy, and that the very foundation of feminism is the right and ability to control whose dick is put in your body and when. If you don’t have the right to not get fucked, every other right is kind of secondary to that. We understood that and were yelling loudly IRL and online about positive consent and campaigning for active consent in rape laws and all that business.
Except, apparently, if the dude said he felt like a lady, and he wanted to fuck people who by definition did not want to mess with any dick. You know, lesbians. Then a woman‘s right to choose if she got fucked and by who was apparently so much olde tyme bigotree, and the bitches needed re-educated out of that sexual rejection shit. Men were entitled to any cunt of their choice. Plus ça change.
It was the announcement of that seminar, and its ferocious defence by TRAs and handmaidens, that made the scales fall from my eyes. These were not people who were unfortunates looking for kindness, respect, and comradeship. These were creepy men trying to figure out how to bully, pressure, shame and coerce women into fucking them when they didn’t want to fuck them, because there is a subsection of guys who are really into making someone fuck them who doesn’t want to. That was all it was. This was a seminar about how women don’t have the right to say no, and now instead of The Implication, we are going to use the tactic of calling them a bigot to break down their refusal.
I quit all trans ally type stuff after that. And I kept my mouth very shut, and I watched very closely, and for the last decade I have seen these very same predatory males grow in confidence and social power. Enough so that now they openly come after kids, too. I have seen how devastatingly effective that “you’re a bigottttt” screeching has been against people who consider themselves allies acting in good faith. I have seen it used to silence first lesbians, then classical feminists, and now literally anyone who doesn’t want fetish porn sprayed everyone in the name of “much trans rights”. I have seen it used to access our protected spaces, our bathrooms and changing rooms, our Title X funding and scholarships, our prisons, our medical care, our political and community movements, our children’s understanding of relationships and puberty, our very bodies.
I don’t care if that makes me a bigot. I say no to gross creepy straight male entitlement, in a dress or out of it. We are entitled to our own spaces, our freedoms of association, our choice of sexual partners. I wasn’t in any way radical in my feminism a decade ago. I still do not consider myself such. But that cotton ceiling shit? That radicalised me against trans inclusive feminism.
