#Radicalesbians

[haggishlyhagging]

Women in the movement have in most cases gone to great lengths to avoid discussion and confrontation with the issue of lesbianism. It puts people up-tight. They are hostile, evasive, or try to incorporate it into some "broader issue." They would rather not talk about it. If they have to, they try to dismiss it as a "lavender herring." But it is no side issue. It is absolutely essential to the success and fulfillment of the women's liberation movement that this issue be dealt with. As long as the label "dyke" can be used to frighten a woman into a less militant stand, keep her separate from her sisters, keep her from giving primacy to anything other than men and family—then to that extent she is controlled by the male culture. Until women see in each other the possibility of a primal commitment which includes sexual love, they will be denying themselves the love and value they readily accord to men, thus affirming their second-class status. As long as male acceptability is primary— both to individual women and to the movement as a whole—the term lesbian will be used effectively against women. Insofar as women want only more privileges within the system, they do not want to antagonize male power. They instead seek acceptability for women's liberation, and the most crucial aspect of the acceptability is to deny lesbianism—i.e., to deny any fundamental challenge to the basis of the female. It should also be said that some younger, more radical women have honestly begun to discuss lesbianism, but so far it has been primarily as a sexual "alternative" to men. This, however, is still giving primacy to men, both because the idea of relating more completely to women occurs as a negative reaction to men, and because the lesbian relationship is being characterized simply by sex, which is divisive and sexist. On one level, which is both personal and political, women may withdraw emotional and sexual energies from men, and work out various alternatives for those energies in their own lives. On a different political/psychological level, it must be understood that what is crucial is that women begin disengaging from male-defined response patterns. In the privacy of our own psyches, we must cut those cords to the core. For irrespective of where our love and sexual energies flow, if we are male-identified in our heads, we cannot realize our autonomy as human beings.

-Radicalesbians, ‘The Woman Identified Woman’ in Radical Feminism, Koedt et al (eds.)

[modernmutiny]

Baby sister called me up earlier bc she needed help writing a play and she was looking to add more interpersonal conflict between her characters that were lesbian activists in the 1960/70s

AKA I legit got called up and asked "give me the cliff notes on queer infighting through history" bc I am legitimately an expert on the topic so this whole thing was amazing and took 2 hours just to scratch the surface. My legacy is that I can correctly reference and cite ✨Gay Drama✨ from 50 years ago 🫳🏻

[theodoreroosevelt]

This was one of my PowerPoint slides today, the Republicans are gonna find me

[unapologeticallygay]

Martha Shelly is a Jewish activist lesbian and feminist.

She was involved in many forms of activism including the Vietnam anti war protests and was an ally to the Black Panthers. She joined the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian civil rights group, in 1967, and later went on to become president of the New York chapter. While working as a secretary in the office of fundraising for Barnard College, she joined the Student Homophile League.

After witnessing the Stonewall riots and seeing the public reaction Martha was inspired to organize a protest. With the DOB and the Mattachine Society they organized the first gay protest march in America, shortly after that, they formed the Gay Liberation Front. She became the face of the movement, going on tv programs and speaking at public events.

As a young adult her therapist put her through a conversation therapy of sorts, she insisted she try to be bisexual as to not “give up on half the world in her dating pool”. She tried for a while, getting with other gay men put in this program and went on to date bisexual activist Stephen Donaldson. But after her working with the GLF and getting more involved with her community she accepted herself as a lesbian.

At the time lesbians were considered a threat to the feminist movement. The president of The National Organization for Women Betty Friedan called lesbians in the movement a “lavender menace” and the organization distanced themselves from lesbian causes and even omitted the sponsorship of the DOB. Women from DOB and the GLF, including Martha, joined together to create the group ‘Lavender Menace’ in response. Together, dawning shirts and signs they protested at a NOW event for lesbian causes to be included.

My job was to jump up on the stage and grab the mic. I explained that we were here because lesbians had been excluded, and we wanted to talk about our issues. Then I put it to the audience. "Let's take a vote how many want to continue with the panel discussion? How many want to hear what we have to say?" The women voted overwhelmingly to hear from us. Then other Menaces marched down the aisle and stepped up onto the stage, while a few remained in the audience. A freewheeling discussion ensued. At their next annual conference NOW revised their platform to include lesbian rights.

The group was soon after renamed the Radicalesbians.

Despite members of the group partaking in it, Martha did not consider herself a lesbian separatist. She liked the idea of lesbian only spaces but thought that splitting the gay movement into smaller groups would weaken the movement as a whole.

Sources:

We Set the Night on Fire: Igniting the Gay Revolution by Martha Shelley (2023)

Martha Shelley - Wikipedia

[feminist-furby-freak]

Alright, in light of all the drama™ going around on radblr right now I think we should all go and reread "The Woman-Identified Woman" by the Radicalesbians (1970). I think this quote articulates the issue really well...

As long as woman's liberation tries to free women without facing the basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to-one relationship with our oppressors, tremendous energies will continue to flow into trying to straighten up each particular relationship with a man, into finding how to get better sex, how to turn his head around-into trying to make the "new man" out of him, in the delusion that this will allow us to be the "new woman. " This obviously splits our energies and commitments, leaving us unable to be committed to the construction of the new patterns which will liberate us.

[vulturejuice]

[Image ID: A 13-panel comic which depicts two furry characters, a cougar and a stoat, in an argument about political lesbianism. It is coloured in the palette of the lesbian flag, with the cougar in pink colours and the stoat in orange colours. End ID]

This is a comic I made last December as a final project for a Communication and Sexuality class! It was super fun to get to use my OCs for a school project and the research for it was super interesting and meaningful to me as a lesbian myself.

A full transcript of the comic, as well as a list of citations, is available below the cut!

Transcript and image descriptions:

Panel 1: The cougar sits in a chair reading a book.

Panel 2: The cougar turns a page and the stoat enters the frame without the cougar noticing.

Panel 3: The stoat speaks very close to the cougar’s face, startling her. Stoat: “Whatcha readin’?” Cougar: GAH!

Panel 4: The cougar holds the book up to the camera, revealing the phrase “POLITICAL LESBIANISM” on its cover. The stoat looks at it with her hand on her chin. Cougar: Oh... I was just reading this book about POLITICAL LESBIANISM Stoat: Oh hm

Panel 5: The cougar reads from a stack of papers. The stoat puts her hand to her cheek and closes her eyes. A thought bubble comes from the stoat which depicts women standing in a circle holding hands while two men look on angrily. Stoat: That’s that thing from like the 80s, right? Where feminists thought all women should be lesbians? Cougar: Yeah, the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists put out a paper detailing as much in 1979. 

Panel 6: The cougar shrugs, holding the papers out towards the stoat. The stoat grabs for them excitedly. Cougar: Basically, anyone who associated with men was the enemy! Stoat: Hey, sounds good to me! Who needs ‘em, right?

Panel 7: The cougar puts her hands on her hips and glares at the stoat. The stoat holds the papers and frowns. Cougar: Oh, come on! Gender essentialist much? Not to mention their focus on the penis as a tool of oppression... Where does that leave pre- and non-op trans women?

Panel 8: The stoat’s eyes widen and she points at the paper. The cougar throws up one hand in exasperation. Stoat: Wait! It says here that a political lesbian is a “woman-identified woman.” Shouldn’t that include trans women? Cougar: Not what that means!

Panel 9: The cougar turns to the camera and raises her finger in the air. She pulls a new stack of papers up from outside the panel. The stoat looks between the papers she is holding and the new papers in confusion. Cougar: In their 1970 manifesto, the Radicalesbians ask that women craft our own identities by relating to each other, not men’s ideas of what we should be. They’re not really talking about gender identity the way we do today.

Panel 10: The stoat puts her hands on her hips and throws her head back, holding her papers to her side. The cougar puts out her hands in protest, and the papers she’s holding fall. Stoat: Right. I guess you think everyone was transphobic back then. Cougar: Hey, I never said that!

Panel 11: The cougar lifts up a small record and smiles down at it. The stoat glares at it as she tucks her papers under her arm. Cougar: Take the radical feminist lesbian separatist music collective, Olivia Records! They supported and even bodily defended their trans sound engineer, Sandy Stone, when her role at the collective was questioned and she was threatened with transphobic violence.

Panel 12: The stoat crosses her arms and tries to interject. The cougar keeps talking as she throws the record away behind herself. Stoat: Sure, but- Cougar: No, it’s so-called gender critical feminists who spit in the face of trans women’s contributions to our rich lesbian history. Our love of women and rejection of prescribed sex roles is what brings us together - not out hatred of men!

Panel 13: The stoat turns away from the cougar in anger. The cougar smiles and puts a hand on the stoat’s corner. Stoat: Oh, whatever! I don’t want to talk about it anymore if you’re just going to tell me I’m wrong all the time. Cougar: Look at it this way... we’re just taking part in the storied lesbian tradition of pointless arguing!

Citations

Ahmed, S. (2016). An affinity of hammers. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(1-2), 22-34. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3334151   

Enszer, J. R. (2016). “How to stop choking to death”: Rethinking lesbian separatism as a vibrant political theory and feminist practice. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 20(2), 180-196. https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2015.1083815   

Love your enemy? The debate between heterosexual feminism and political lesbianism. (1981). Onlywomen Press.

O’Donnell, K. (2019). The theological basis for trans-exclusionary radical feminist positions. In N. Banerjea, K. Browne, E. Ferreira, M. Olasik, & J. Podmore (Eds.), Lesbian feminism: Essays opposing global heteropatriarchies. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional.

Thurlow, C. (2022). From TERF to gender critical: A telling genealogy? Sexualities. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607221107827   

Weiss, P. A. (Ed.). (2018). Feminist manifestos: A global documentary reader. New York University Press.

Williams, C. (2016). Radical inclusion: Recounting the trans inclusive history of radical feminism. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3(1-2), 254-258. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3334463

[riotkittiesarchive]

“Lavender Menace” was an action led by Radicalesbians, with women from the Gay Liberation Front and several feminist organizations, at the National Organization for Women’s (NOW) Second Congress to Unite Women in May 1970 to protest the rejection of lesbians in the second-wave women’s liberation movement.

This action largely led to NOW’s resolution to support lesbians in 1971 and increased visibility for and awareness of lesbian issues nationwide.

(source: https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/lavender-menace-action-at-second-congress-to-unite-women/ )

[gatheringbones]

victoria brownworth, from living lesbian nation, from smash the church, smash the state! the early years of gay liberation, edited by tommi avicolli mecca

["One of the many ways 1970 differed from now is that queer youth— lesbian, gay, transgendered, even bisexual— were not honored, embraced, or even accepted except as sexual playthings. We were told, repeatedly and often not very nicely, that we were unsure, game-playing, too young to have made up our minds (this was in the days when being queer was perceived as a choice rather than orientation) about our sexuality, yet we were desired, which only added to the confusion of our status. These conflicting messages made becoming part of the burgeoning post-Stonewall movement all the more difficult to navigate for someone as young as I was when I moved into that circle of older queer men and women.

In addition, the movement was, and remainned for many years, male dominated and male focused. Those used to the LGBTQI political buffet can't imagine what it was like when it was merely G. That G-is-for-gay was expected to include anyone and everyone, regardless of gender or orientation, and include them—men, women, transgender people and bisexuals— under what often felt like a repressive and exclusionary male rubric.

The world Radicalesbians opened for me was one at an almost breathtaking variance with the rest of my life. The women in RL were predominantly women in their 30s and 40s, some of whom had been married to men but who had left their husbands and sometimes even their children for other women. Others were women who were stone butches who had never been with a man in any context and never would be, because women were their life. All, however, were hard-core feminists with a perspective that was defined by the surety that women were not second-class citizens but were, in many if not all respects, superior to men.

There was a self-confidence and self-acceptance in the women I met when I was a teenager in RL that was not reflected anywhere else in my life: Not at my all-girl high school, not in the gay bars I frequented with my fake ID and ready lies, not from my Seven Sisters-college-educated mother, nor from my female teachers. The time I spent in RL helped mold me into the radical lesbian feminist I still am today, but I would not know that until much later.

In my college years, reflecting back on my days in RL, I drifted toward lesbian-separatism and began to clarify for myself as well as for other women through my writing and activism, what it meant to be a lesbian in a gay male liberation movement. I needed to immerse myself in women, in lesbian feminist theory, in a world that was as removed from the patriarchy as we could create within a larger patriarchal society. It was a heady and difficult time, and many other women I knew were struggling to achieve this balance between the male-dominated heterosexual world and the gay liberation movement of which we were a presumptive part.

In the period when RL was functioning in Philadelphia, we held weekly meetings focused on political action and consciousness-raising. I met lesbians who would lead the movement in Philadelphia with me. Clarifying our positions as lesbians who were feminists, as opposed to male identified, was central to who we were as a group and as a model for the movement we were building— our lesbian nation. We read, we discussed, we planned, we got angry with men and male chauvinism and with subjugation within our own movement. We began what I would later come to view as stultifying, smothering rhetoric about the politics of sexuality that left little room for interpretation and which defined lesbian sexuality from the Andrea Dworkin vantage point: Penetration = subjugation = heterosexual mimicry. In our quest to denounce all things heterosexual and male, we had also inevitably denied ourselves the kind of expansive sexuality that gay men were concomitantly reveling in as we built our theory and our politics and they fucked their way through the decade post-Stonewall, forging a politics through sexual experience, rather than the desexualizing of theory.

The context of sexual liberation was limited in this lesbian-feminist, consciousness-raising, politically correct world to simple the right to be coupled with another woman, while over in the gay liberation movement it was defined as a continual debauch— sex with anyone and everyone, with a big fuck you! to the heterosexual paradigm under which gay men had, pre-Stonewall, been forced to live. For radical lesbian feminists, the goal was different: It was to eradicate the taint of men and heterosexuality and patriarchy from our lives in every way possible, from lipstick and bras to high heels and penetration. We were all engaged in the same liberation movement, but the things we saw as essential to that liberation were so different that one radical lesbian feminist declared that we would always have more in common with straight women than with gay men, because those women could share the common bond of our oppression, which gay men never could.

This was the conflict that kept Radicalesbians and Daughters of Bilitis separate from groups like Gay Activists Alliance and Homophile Action League. Sexuality was the bridge that connected us, but gender was what separated us. How could radical lesbian feminism and gay liberation meet, meld, and ultimately coalesce into a larger, workable model for a civil rights movement?

My formative years in RL were destined to define me as the quintessential man-hater: The patriarchy was my enemy and the enemy of all women. How could I then embrace the gay male liberation movement? How could both sides of the queer spectrum meet, when gay men had no interest in women or feminism and lesbian feminists had been so damaged by the patriarchy that dealing with men had caused and continued to cause many of us actual physical pain?

This conundrum haunted me as a teenager and well into my college years. I hung out at the gay coffeehouses and political action meetings of queer groups on the University of Pennsylvania campus at Hillel House and Houston Hall. I was also part of the gay and lesbian group at the college where I spent my undergraduate years, Temple University. There I met gay men with whom I would forge lasting political bonds."]

[radicalesbians]

I may regret this, but, tumblr, I'd like to ask your opinion on my url.

I chose the name 'radicalesbians' when I was 15 or 16. We were asked to write a research paper about one of the Civil Rights movements in my tenth grade history class, and I chose to write about the Gay Civil Rights movement. I was a budding bisexual, barely out of the closet, who wanted to learn more about her own history. I stumbled upon the "Radical Lesbians," a group of second wave feminists who practiced political lesbianism. Essentially, political lesbians choose to only be in wlw relationships, regardless of their sexual preference.

(I identify as bisexual, lesbian, and queer interchangeably. I feel comfortable calling myself a lesbian because I'm engaged to a woman. No, bisexuals dating the same sex don't magically become gay, and bisexuals dating the opposite sex are not straight. This isn't the place to litigate my identity. I'm just clarifying vocabulary).

At the time, we were in the "MALE TEARS" coffee mug era on this here tumblr.com. I subscribed to a lot of these beliefs. When I found the Radical Lesbians, I thought changing my url would be a fun call back to a historical queer movement.

I'm almost 25, and the queer community has changed a lot in the past decade. Most of us grew out of our blatant hatred of men. Biological essentailism is absolute trash, we are all a little intersex and a little trans. Recently, I started to identify as genderqueer, although I'm comfortable being perceived as a cis woman.

TERF ideology is not only emotionally damaging for trans people, it actively kills people. Radical lesbianism is unmistakably TERF ideology. The doctrine outlines that the only way for women to be safe and reach self-actualization is to date other cis women. This is biological essentialism. It ignores the social construct of gender that teaches cis men to be aggressive and cis women to accept it. We owe it to ourselves to hold cis men more accountable than this.

Trans people deserve all of the support and resources that the queer community can give as a matter of basic human rights and decency. We hurt ourselves when we choose to divide the queer community into pieces. Unless explicitly founded by trans people, most organizations in the Gay Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century excluded the trans community in favor of campaigning on respectability politics. Real change began when trans people stood up for queer rights. Stonewall is an obvious example, but my personal favorite is less infamous. Homosexuality was finally removed from the American Psychological Association's list of mental illnesses when all of the flavors of trans people in the Gay Liberation Front stormed the annual APA conference for the second year in a row.

I've been hemming and hawing over my url for the past few years. I'm a radical leftist. I'm a lesbian. Why should TERFs get to take all of the fun words? Why shouldn't I get to redefine the meaning? But connotations matter and the historical through-line is obvious. When you look at the radical lesbians tag, there is about a 50/50 split of posts interpreting the phrase in the historical sense and in the way that I use it.

The reason I haven't changed my url yet is entirely selfish. I'm worried that after a decade of posting under this url, the small presence I have will disappear. I'm not tumblr famous by any means, but there are mutuals on here that I've had from the beginning. Whenever my mutuals change their urls or icons, I no longer know who they are. Sometimes I figure it out, but sometimes I don't. Others seem to be perfectly comfortable changing their urls and icons. Maybe it is just a me thing that I need to get over.

If I were scrolling on tumblr and I saw my url, it would scream TERF to me. I know others feel the same. I don't want to cause anyone harm by thinking I'm evidence of a large TERF community on tumblr, and I don't want to scare people away. But I truly do not know what to do.

So, I would like your feedback. I won't event say TERFs dni, because the responses of TERFs will likely be just as informative.

Should the url radicalesbians be reclaimed, or go in the trash?

[satedsaint]

the woman-identified woman, radicalesbians

[forthelostones]

lesbian-arc/hives is a crypto (also radicalesbians is often a dogwhistle despite important history of the group so the first photo is a tip-off)

proof - one of their top tags is 'gynoce/ntrism'

hmm thanks for this info. can u dm more info on this archive group? if u feel comfy doing it…

[haggishlyhagging]

The issue of lesbianism really exploded on May 1, 1970, opening night of the second Congress to Unite Women, when forty lesbians pre-empted the scheduled proceedings to raise the issue of lesbianism. (The divisiveness over class and lesbianism prompted some women to dub this the "Congress to Divide Women.") The action was planned by a group that included Brown, Funk, Hoffman, Hart, and Bedoz. The following account of the "Lavender Menace" action appeared in the women's underground paper Rat:

“On May 1st, at 7:15 p.m. about 300 women were quietly sitting in the auditorium of intermediate school 70 waiting for the Congress to Unite Women to come to order. The lights went out, people heard running, laughter, a rebel yell here and there, and when those lights were turned back on, those same 300 women found themselves in the hands of the LAVENDER MENACE. . . . Seventeen of the Radical lesbians wore lavender t-shirts with LAVENDER MENACE stenciled across the front. These women were the first wave of the action and the ones who took over the auditorium.”

The other demonstrators were dispersed throughout the audience and were supposed to declare their support for the action and join the women on stage. Once on stage, they would reveal both their Lavender Menace t-shirts and their lesbianism. However, as Woodul explains, the demonstrators needn't have acted as "pigeons" in the audience for "as soon as the floor was taken, women by the droves began to come up on stage." For two hours the protestors held the floor as they talked about what it was like to be a lesbian in a heterosexist culture. The final assembly of the Congress adopted the set of resolutions advanced by "The Lavender Menace: Gay Liberation Front Women and Radical Lesbians." The resolutions read:

“1. Women's Liberation is a lesbian plot. 2. Whenever the label lesbian is used against the movement collectively or against women individually, it is to be affirmed, not denied. 3. In all discussions of birth control, homosexuality must be included as a legitimate method of contraception. 4. All sex education curricula must include lesbianism as a valid, legitimate form of sexual expression and love.”

One of the most important things to come out of the Congress action was the Radicalesbian position paper, "The Woman-Identified Woman," copies of which were distributed to women in the audience. Like the action, the paper was designed to assuage heterosexual feminists' fears about lesbianism. In fact, Jennifer Woodul contends that the "Menaces" decided to use the term "woman-identified" because they hoped it would prove less threatening to heterosexual women:

“I was there when the ideas for ‘Woman-Identified Woman’ were beginning to take shape. We were trying to figure out how to tell women about lesbianism without using the word, lesbian, because we found that at these conferences we kept freaking people out all the time. And I believe it was Cynthia [Funk] who came up with this term, ‘woman-identified.’ At least, that was the first time I had ever heard it. So what we were trying to do was make women realize that lesbians were not different from other women in any sort of strange way.”

To legitimize lesbianism, Radicalesbians had to persuade feminists that lesbianism was not simply a bedroom issue and that lesbians were not male-identified "bogeywomen" out to sexually exploit other women. They accomplished this by redefining lesbianism as a primarily political choice and by locating the discourse within the already established feminist framework of separatism. They criticized as “divisive and sexist” the tendency to characterize lesbianism "simply by sex." Moreover, they suggested that far from being male-identified, lesbians, by virtue of their distance from contaminating maleness, were actually more likely to be woman-identified than heterosexual women who were "dependent upon male culture for their [self]-definition:"

“Only women can give to each other a new sense of self. That identity we have to develop with reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men. . . . Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors. As long as women's liberation tries to free women without facing the basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to-one relationship with our oppressors, tremendous energies will continue to flow into trying to straighten up each particular relationship with a man. . . . This obviously splits our energies and commitments, leaving us unable to be committed to the construction of the new patterns which will liberate us.”

Although the paper's tone was not antagonistic—for instance, they avoided defining heterosexual women as collaborators—the assumption was that feminism required lesbianism:

“It is the primacy of women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women's liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution.”

"The Woman-Identified Woman" was not the earliest expression of lesbian-feminism. Both Rita Mae Brown and Martha Shelley had angrily denounced movement homophobia in the pages of Rat and Come Out, respectively. But what set "The Woman-Identified Woman" apart from these earlier pieces, what made it so significant, was that it redefined lesbianism as the quintessential act of political solidarity with other women. By defining lesbianism as a political choice rather than a sexual alternative, Radicalesbians disarmed heterosexual feminists. Of course, the knotty problem of sexuality remained. Even Radicalesbians had to admit that lesbianism involved sex:

“Until women see in each other the possibility of a primal commitment which includes sexual love, they will be denying themselves the love and value they readily accord to men, thus affirming their second-class status.”

The introduction of sex troubled many heterosexual feminists who had found in the women's movement a welcome respite from sexuality. Ellen DuBois was just one of many heterosexual feminists who initially resented the intrusion of sexuality into the movement:

“I felt finally I had found a movement where I didn't have to worry about whether or not I was attractive or whether or not men liked me. . . . And just as I was beginning to feel here at last I could forget all of that, sex once again reared its ugly head.”

-Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America: 1967-75

[rad4learning]

Reading The Woman-Identified Woman by radicalesbians, aside from the obvious connection to radblr debates etc. another thought occurred to me. I am selectively quoting here, and the essay isn't that long - I do recommend reading the full thing and seeing the context of these quotes - but imo there are parallels to gender identity ideology. Starting with answering "what is a lesbian" with a 'vibes-driven' answer:

"What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society - perhaps then, but certainly later - cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society--the female role."

Soon after we read this:

"It should first be understood that lesbianism, like male homosexuality, is a category of behavior possible only in a sexist society characterized by rigid sex roles and dominated by male supremacy. Those sex roles dehumanize women by defining us as a supportive/serving caste in relation to the master caste of men, and emotionally cripple men by demanding that they be alienated from their own bodies and emotions in order to perform their economic/political/military functions effectively. Homosexuality is a by-product of a particular way of setting up roles ( or approved patterns of behavior) on the basis of sex; as such it is an inauthentic ( not consonant with "reality") category. In a society in which men do not oppress women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality would disappear."

Similarly:

"Lesbian is a label invented by the Man to throw at any woman who dares to be his equal, who dares to challenge his prerogatives (including that of all women as part of the exchange medium among men), who dares to assert the primacy of her own needs."

...

"And yet, in popular thinking, there is really only one essential difference between a lesbian and other women: that of sexual orientation - which is to say, when you strip off all the packaging, you must finally realize that the essence of being a "woman" is to get fucked by men."

(Feels similar to the idea that 'adult human female reduces women to their anatomy'.) Another striking example:

"As the source of self-hate and the lack of real self are rooted in our male-given identity, we must create a new sense of self. As long as we cling to the idea of "being a woman, '' we will sense some conflict with that incipient self, that sense of I, that sense of a whole person."

and finally:

"Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we confirm in each other that struggling, incipient sense of pride and strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters. We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside of ourselves. We find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression."

[femanalytical]

including:

Notes from the First Year by the New York Radical Women

Notes from the Second Year

Notes from the Third Year

Woman-Identified Woman by the Radicalesbians

The Bitch Manifesto by Jo Freeman

[coochiequeens]

Among the first casualties of transgenderism and the ideology it spawned were the sexual and social boundaries of lesbians. But very few know that the problem is far older than this nouveau iteration of what is often referred to as a “culture war.”

In recent years, the exclusivity of on- and offline lesbian spaces have been repeatedly subject to scrutiny from those who clamor for the “inclusion” of trans-identified males. Women who assert their right to keep these spaces single-sex, or who express their attractions as being rooted in sex and not the mystical concept of gender, are met with hostility and branded as bigots.

For example, in 2012, Planned Parenthood of Toronto held a workshop called Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss the “barriers” (cotton underwear) faced by “queer trans women” in “queer women’s communities.” The workshop description also noted that participants would strategize ways to “overcome” these barriers.

The Cotton Ceiling workshop was recently referenced at a court hearing in May. Allison Bailey, a barrister and lesbian activist, took Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers to an employment tribunal for policing her livelihood due to her views on gender ideology. During the course of the hearing, the idea that lesbians must include males in their sexuality was likened to the racial integration of South Africa. 

But this was hardly the first time lesbians have been deemed “sexual racists” for not wanting to affirm the identity of males. Nor was it the first time that trans-identified males had attempted to force their way into lesbian communities and lives. 

In fact, this is a phenomena goes back decades — right to the beginnings of modern lesbian social and political organizing.

While today’s transgender movement tries to position nebulous conceptions of “gender” over the factual reality and importance of sex, the lesbians of the early gay liberation movement suffered no such confusion. In fact, many who were initially involved in the Gay Liberation Front, which was formed after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, shifted their focus to the growing women’s movement instead. They felt that the gay rights movement was male-dominated and that their interests would be better served by organizing for the specific interests of their own sex.

One of the groups formed by these early lesbian activists was the Radicalesbians. Founded in 1970, the Radicalesbians distributed a manifesto titled “The Woman-Identified Woman” at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City. The manifesto focused heavily on the reality of living as a female in a male-dominated society. It helped set the stage for later radical feminist and lesbian feminist thinking.

An early example of heterosexual males in the lesbian movement and lesbian lives came later that same year, when folk singer Beth Elliot (Elliott Basil Mattiuzzi) sent a “Letter from a Transsexual” to the radical feminist newspaper It Ain’t Me Babe. “I am a transsexual,” Elliot wrote. “On the intellectual and emotional levels, I know myself to be a woman; on the physical level, my own body denies me this.” Elliot also described how he met and had sex with an “exclusively gay” woman who “could really see my being a woman.”

The editors of the paper invited Elliot to a conversation where they tried to talk him out of undergoing a sex change operation, telling him that it “shouldn’t matter whether one is born with female or male genitalia. That’s our point.” It continues: “As your new reality emerges, as you are able to live it to any degree, you should be able to feel differently about your body.”

Nevertheless, in 1971, Elliot joined and became the vice president of the San Francisco chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis — a lesbian political organization — despite some members’ protestations. He also served as the editor of the group’s newsletter, Sisters. However, accusations of sexual harassment against Elliot in 1972 led to a vote which removed him from the group and barred the inclusion of any trans-identified males in the chapter.

Unable to take a hint, Elliot joined the organizing committee of the West Coast Lesbian Conference in 1973, where he was also slated to perform. On the first night of the conference, a lesbian separatist group called the Gutter Dykes passed out leaflets protesting the presence of a man. Elliot did briefly perform but left soon afterward. 

The following day, keynote speaker Robin Morgan amended her address in light of the previous day’s events. Her speech, titled “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” contained some strong opinions about referring to men as women.

“No, I will not call a male ‘she,'” Morgan passionately declared, “Thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society and of surviving, have earned me the name ‘woman.’ One walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which hemay enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No. In our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.”

Morgan’s words rippled through feminist and lesbian communities over the proceeding decade. 

By 1977, DYKE magazine had published a six-page feature titled “Can Men Be Women? Some Lesbians Think So! Transsexuals in the Women’s Movement.” The story presented a conversation about some lesbians’ baffling acceptance of men who claim to be same-sex attracted females, like themselves.

Janet, one of the interviewees stated: “That is what is so weird to me, what I find so scary about the way a lot of Lesbians have reacted to the transsexual issue. The attitude seems to be that however someone presents themself, that is the way you are supposed to see them … No distinction is made between respecting someone else and suspending your own perceptions. It is always tempting to be passive.”

Fellow interviewee Liza agreed, writing: “It is also very tempting to be generous. I think that a lot of Lesbians say they have gone through such a hard time being accepted as Lesbians and now these poor transsexuals are having such a hard time and here we are in the same boat, both oppressed by the same culture. If we recognize them as our sisters it helps everybody. It is very generous and I appreciate that in women, but it is really shortsighted.”

It is incredible how the discussions on this topic from more than 30 years ago feel like they could have been plucked from any heated social media page today. 

In 1978, the issue was given even greater prominence in the book Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly, a radical feminist and theologian who taught at Boston College for more than three decades. In a section of her book, “Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon,” Daly opined that “transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes.” 

Daly was a dissertation advisor for Janice Raymond, who went on to become an even more prominent critic of transsexualism. In 1979, Raymond published The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, which highlights many of the issues we are still dealing with. In the book, Raymond argues that transsexualism reinforces gender stereotypes and that it is just another method of patriarchal oppression. 

An entire section of the book titled “Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian-Feminist” deals with the issue of men who claim to be lesbians. Such a man, writes Raymond, “attempts to possess women at a deeper level, this time under the guise of challenging rather than conforming to the role and behavior of stereotyped femininity.”

In a particularly prophetic section, Raymond raises some questions that one could argue reflect the state of the modern lesbian community:

Will the acceptance of transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists who have lost only their outward appendages of physical masculinity lead to the containment and control of lesbian feminists? Will every lesbian-feminist space become a harem?

The only point where Raymond seems to have missed the mark is in the fact that most male lesbians today have not lost their “outward appendage” and, in fact, are very proud of it.

In his book, Transgender History, prominent trans-identified male “lesbian” Susan Stryker helpfully provides us with evidence that Raymond’s ideas were alive and well several years after her book’s publication. 

Stryker includes a fiery excerpt from an anonymous 1986 letter to the editor of the San Francisco lesbian newspaper Coming Up:

When an estrogenated man with breasts loves women, that is not lesbianism, that is mutilated perversion. [Such an individual] is not a threat to the lesbian community, he is an outrage to us. He is not a lesbian, he is a mutant man, a self-made freak, a deformity, an insult. He deserves a slap in the face. After that, he deserves to have his body and his mind made well again.

The gay community was still grappling with transsexual (at this point also often referred to as transgender) inclusion during the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. 

Contrary to the claim of some modern trans activists that the “T” was always part of the acronym, that was not yet the case. The national steering committee of the march did seek to add “transgender” to the title, but it did not receive the necessary majority vote to do so. Over the next few years, however, it became more common for lesbian, gay, and bisexual organizations to include “transgender” in their names and transgender issues in their mandates.

Around this time, another controversy was brewing regarding the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival—often referred to as Michfest—because the predominantly lesbian festival had made clear in 1991 that the event was for “womyn-born womyn,” i.e., females. 

This made some males very angry, and they organized an annual demonstration named “Camp Trans” to protest the fact that women had created a female-exclusive entertainment space. Michfest was also criticized by prominent LGBT organizations like GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign. The festival, which began in 1976, held its final event in 2015 after years of facing increasingly ruthless scrutiny.

The termination of Michfest marked the end of an era, and the beginning of the end in general for lesbian spaces where same-sex attracted women could socialize with one another without the incursion of males.

Lesbian bars were also dying out — not even notoriously-woke Portland had any lesbian bars left by 2016. Identity politics like those that shut down Michfest made it a minefield to create spaces and events that would exclude males who identified as lesbian women. In 2021, Smithsonian Magazine reported that there were only 15 lesbian bars left in the entirety of the United States.

It is now 2022.

Same-sex marriage is legal, and the expectation that homosexual people are free to live their lives is commonplace. Yet, we are facing a new predicament where this generation of lesbians are rapidly losing access to their needed exclusive communities. The music festivals and lesbian conferences once attended by hundreds and even thousands of women are a thing of the past, and any attempt to hold a similar event today would be met with rabid protest.

All of that being said… I do believe there is a silver lining, though it be a somewhat bleak one. 

Trans rights activists are becoming increasingly emboldened in their abusive behavior towards lesbians (and all women) that the trickle of criticism seeping through the cracks is inevitably bound to turn into a flood. More and more lesbians are speaking out, joined by feminists and women from all walks of life, and even prominent voices, such as that of Harry Potter author JK Rowling, are joining in to apply pressure. 

It might feel sometimes like we are stuck rehashing arguments from the 1970s, but we should be proud to take up the mantle of the women who saw this coming for the benefit of those yet to come.

By Eva Kurilova

Eva is a guest essayist for Reduxx. A regular contributor at Gender Dissent, Eva is passionate about promoting lesbian activism and protecting women's sex-based rights. You can find her traversing the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada with her partner and their husky, Freya.

[feminist-furby-freak]

The Woman-Identified Woman

by the Radicalesbians (1970)

What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society - perhaps then, but certainly later - cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society--the female role. The turmoil she experiences tends to induce guilt proportional to the degree to which she feels she is not meeting social expectations, and/or eventually drives her to question and analyze what the rest of her society more or less accepts. She is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her "straight" (heterosexual) sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. To the extent that she cannot expel the heavy socialization that goes with being female, she can never truly find peace with herself. For she is caught somewhere between accepting society's view of her - in which case she cannot accept herself - and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. Those of us who work that through find ourselves on the other side of a tortuous journey through a night that may have been decades long. The perspective gained from that journey, the liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women, is something to be shared with all women - because we are all women.

It should first be understood that lesbianism, like male homosexuality, is a category of behavior possible only in a sexist society characterized by rigid sex roles and dominated by male supremacy. Those sex roles dehumanize women by defining us as a supportive/serving caste in relation to the master caste of men, and emotionally cripple men by demanding that they be alienated from their own bodies and emotions in order to perform their economic/political/military functions effectively. Homosexuality is a by-product of a particular way of setting up roles ( or approved patterns of behavior) on the basis of sex; as such it is an inauthentic ( not consonant with "reality") category. In a society in which men do not oppress women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality would disappear.

But lesbianism is also different from male homosexuality, and serves a different function in the society. "Dyke" is a different kind of put-down from "faggot", although both imply you are not playing your socially assigned sex role. . . are not therefore a "real woman" or a "real man. " The grudging admiration felt for the tomboy, and the queasiness felt around a sissy boy point to the same thing: the contempt in which women-or those who play a female role-are held. And the investment in keeping women in that contemptuous role is very great. Lesbian is a word, the label, the condition that holds women in line. When a woman hears this word tossed her way, she knows she is stepping out of line. She knows that she has crossed the terrible boundary of her sex role. She recoils, she protests, she reshapes her actions to gain approval. Lesbian is a label invented by the Man to throw at any woman who dares to be his equal, who dares to challenge his prerogatives (including that of all women as part of the exchange medium among men), who dares to assert the primacy of her own needs. To have the label applied to people active in women's liberation is just the most recent instance of a long history; older women will recall that not so long ago, any woman who was successful, independent, not orienting her whole life about a man, would hear this word. For in this sexist society, for a woman to be independent means she can't be a woman - she must be a dyke. That in itself should tell us where women are at. It says as clearly as can be said: women and person are contradictory terms. For a lesbian is not considered a "real woman. " And yet, in popular thinking, there is really only one essential difference between a lesbian and other women: that of sexual orientation - which is to say, when you strip off all the packaging, you must finally realize that the essence of being a "woman" is to get fucked by men.

"Lesbian" is one of the sexual categories by which men have divided up humanity. While all women are dehumanized as sex objects, as the objects of men they are given certain compensations: identification with his power, his ego, his status, his protection (from other males), feeling like a "real woman, " finding social acceptance by adhering to her role, etc. Should a woman confront herself by confronting another woman, there are fewer rationalizations, fewer buffers by which to avoid the stark horror of her dehumanized condition. Herein we find the overriding fear of many women toward being used as a sexual object by a woman, which not only will bring her no male-connected compensations, but also will reveal the void which is woman's real situation. This dehumanization is expressed when a straight woman learns that a sister is a lesbian; she begins to relate to her lesbian sister as her potential sex object, laying a surrogate male role on the lesbian. This reveals her heterosexual conditioning to make herself into an object when sex is potentially involved in a relationship, and it denies the lesbian her full humanity. For women, especially those in the movement, to perceive their lesbian sisters through this male grid of role definitions is to accept this male cultural conditioning and to oppress their sisters much as they themselves have been oppressed by men. Are we going to continue the male classification system of defining all females in sexual relation to some other category of people? Affixing the label lesbian not only to a woman who aspires to be a person, but also to any situation of real love, real solidarity, real primacy among women, is a primary form of divisiveness among women: it is the condition which keeps women within the confines of the feminine role, and it is the debunking/scare term that keeps women from forming any primary attachments, groups, or associations among ourselves.

Women in the movement have in most cases gone to great lengths to avoid discussion and confrontation with the issue of lesbianism. It puts people up-tight. They are hostile, evasive, or try to incorporate it into some ''broader issue. " They would rather not talk about it. If they have to, they try to dismiss it as a 'lavender herring. " But it is no side issue. It is absolutely essential to the success and fulfillment of the women's liberation movement that this issue be dealt with. As long as the label "dyke" can be used to frighten women into a less militant stand, keep her separate from her sisters, keep her from giving primacy to anything other than men and family-then to that extent she is controlled by the male culture. Until women see in each other the possibility of a primal commitment which includes sexual love, they will be denying themselves the love and value they readily accord to men, thus affirming their second-class status. As long as male acceptability is primary-both to individual women and to the movement as a whole-the term lesbian will be used effectively against women. Insofar as women want only more privileges within the system, they do not want to antagonize male power. They instead seek acceptability for women's liberation, and the most crucial aspect of the acceptability is to deny lesbianism - i. e., to deny any fundamental challenge to the basis of the female.

It should also be said that some younger, more radical women have honestly begun to discuss lesbianism, but so far it has been primarily as a sexual "alternative" to men. This, however, is still giving primacy to men, both because the idea of relating more completely to women occurs as a negative reaction to men, and because the lesbian relationship is being characterized simply by sex, which is divisive and sexist. On one level, which is both personal and political, women may withdraw emotional and sexual energies from men, and work out various alternatives for those energies in their own lives. On a different political/psychological level, it must be understood that what is crucial is that women begin disengaging from male-defined response patterns. In the privacy of our own psyches, we must cut those cords to the core. For irrespective of where our love and sexual energies flow, if we are male-identified in our heads, we cannot realize our autonomy as human beings.

But why is it that women have related to and through men? By virtue of having been brought up in a male society, we have internalized the male culture's definition of ourselves. That definition consigns us to sexual and family functions, and excludes us from defining and shaping the terms of our lives. In exchange for our psychic servicing and for performing society's non-profit-making functions, the man confers on us just one thing: the slave status which makes us legitimate in the eyes of the society in which we live. This is called "femininity" or "being a real woman" in our cultural lingo. We are authentic, legitimate, real to the extent that we are the property of some man whose name we bear. To be a woman who belongs to no man is to be invisible, pathetic, inauthentic, unreal. He confirms his image of us - of what we have to be in order to be acceptable by him - but not our real selves; he confirms our womanhood-as he defines it, in relation to him- but cannot confirm our personhood, our own selves as absolutes. As long as we are dependent on the male culture for this definition. For this approval, we cannot be free.

The consequence of internalizing this role is an enormous reservoir of self-hate. This is not to say the self-hate is recognized or accepted as such; indeed most women would deny it. It may be experienced as discomfort with her role, as feeling empty, as numbness, as restlessness, as a paralyzing anxiety at the center. Alternatively, it may be expressed in shrill defensiveness of the glory and destiny of her role. But it does exist, often beneath the edge of her consciousness, poisoning her existence, keeping her alienated from herself, her own needs, and rendering her a stranger to other women. They try to escape by identifying with the oppressor, living through him, gaining status and identity from his ego, his power, his accomplishments. And by not identifying with other "empty vessels" like themselves. Women resist relating on all levels to other women who will reflect their own oppression, their own secondary status, their own self-hate. For to confront another woman is finally to confront one's self-the self we have gone to such lengths to avoid. And in that mirror we know we cannot really respect and love that which we have been made to be.

As the source of self-hate and the lack of real self are rooted in our male-given identity, we must create a new sense of self. As long as we cling to the idea of "being a woman, '' we will sense some conflict with that incipient self, that sense of I, that sense of a whole person. It is very difficult to realize and accept that being "feminine" and being a whole person are irreconcilable. Only women can give to each other a new sense of self. That identity we have to develop with reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men. This consciousness is the revolutionary force from which all else will follow, for ours is an organic revolution. For this we must be available and supportive to one another, five our commitment and our love, give the emotional support necessary to sustain this movement. Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors. As long as woman's liberation tries to free women without facing the basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to-one relationship with our oppressors, tremendous energies will continue to flow into trying to straighten up each particular relationship with a man, into finding how to get better sex, how to turn his head around-into trying to make the "new man" out of him, in the delusion that this will allow us to be the "new woman. " This obviously splits our energies and commitments, leaving us unable to be committed to the construction of the new patterns which will liberate us.

It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women's liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. As we do this, we confirm in each other that struggling, incipient sense of pride and strength, the divisive barriers begin to melt, we feel this growing solidarity with our sisters. We see ourselves as prime, find our centers inside of ourselves. We find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposition of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in human expression.