It's even stupider when you know that "queerplatonic" usually means "best friends but even better"

SickOfThisShitNow · 2022-01-21T23:58:55+00:00

This is an idea actually derived from radical feminism and lesbian feminism (although they'd hate the inclusion of the word queer!). The "lesbian continuum" includes all "woman-centred" behaviour including friendships (some "lesbian" feminists are very sniffy about the "sexual lesbians" and "genitally focused" relationships) whereas lesbian (or sometimes "political lesbian") means a woman who is abstaining (or trying to abstain) from sex with men, but does not need to be romantically or sexually attracted to women. (Not my views by the way! Imo, lesbian = female homosexual and does not include women who are attracted to men - even if your boyfriend has really pissed you off!)

SickOfThisShitNow · 2021-05-16T20:56:24+00:00

Yes please DM me.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2021-05-14T16:25:10+00:00

I've never seen that blog so, no, don't bother trying to put someone else's views on me to use as a strawman. As I think I've said my experience is largely from the UK, but, from international groups, I am aware of political lesbians from different countries.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2021-05-14T16:16:34+00:00

Yes, please send it to me, thanks.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2021-05-14T16:16:19+00:00

Yes, please send it to me, thanks.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2021-05-13T13:33:27+00:00

I don't expect the whole of radical feminism to be about lesbians, no, but i expect lesbian feminism and other ostensibly lesbian groups, sessions, articles etc to be about lesbians and I expect lesbophobia to be challenged. I don't know what you mean about political lesbianism - are you saying that it is ridiculous and antiquated to be critical of it or are you denying that it is a prominent feature of radical feminism? It certainly is in the UK and I am aware of political lesbians in other countries (from international groups) although some in other countries have said that they tend to keep quiet about it with newcomers and the outside world because of the negative reaction it gets.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2021-05-13T08:24:35+00:00

I've tried to answer this above. Happy to discuss further if that doesn't answer your question - It's difficult to summarise without writing an essay!

SickOfThisShitNow · 2021-05-13T08:11:25+00:00

I'll copy what I wrote above but happy to discuss it further: It's difficult to sum up in a few sentences (I have a lot of experience with them as they do look appealing at a surface level and it took me a long time to piece together what was happening and to accept that I hadn't found a refuge from TQ but had walked into something else destructive and damaging). Off the top of my head: Their ideology and priorities are all about heterosexuality. Lesbianism is just a strategy (ie giving up men and identifying as a lesbian as a statement against the patriarchy). They have little understanding or interest in lesbian issues or addressing lesbophobia, including within the movement, particularly from straight and bi women who identify as lesbians. It looks like they care about lesbian issues but over time you will notice that it's completely about things that fit with their ideology anyway - so basically the trans issue, male violence against lesbians. With the oppression olympics and them fighting against LGBT organisations, it's politically useful for them to claim that they are fighting for lesbian rights and representing us but we are just a tool. There are some decent people in radical feminism but also some of the worst people I've met in my life - and some of the most blatant homophobia and lesbophobia (but they hide behind identifying as lesbians). Although I have largely stayed out of it, the 'sisterhood' fights, breaks into factions, lies about and betrays each other more than any women I know (if you google feminist trashing you will see this is a problem that goes back since the early days of the movement.) I think the slur TERF to characterise anyone who opposes the extremes of the current trans movement has been a great gift to radfems - in truth most people involved in this aren't radfems or have started calling themselves radfems because they think it just means people who know there are two sexes. I don't disagree with working with radfems on this issue, just as I don't necessarily disagree with working with conservatives (depending on the circumstances) but I think it's a mistake to then think that they represent our interests.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2021-05-13T08:08:09+00:00

It's difficult to sum up in a few sentences (I have a lot of experience with them as they do look appealing at a surface level and it took me a long time to piece together what was happening and to accept that I hadn't found a refuge from TQ but had walked into something else destructive and damaging). Off the top of my head: Their ideology and priorities are all about heterosexuality. Lesbianism is just a strategy (ie giving up men and identifying as a lesbian as a statement against the patriarchy). They have little understanding or interest in lesbian issues or addressing lesbophobia, including within the movement, particularly from straight and bi women who identify as lesbians. It looks like they care about lesbian issues but over time you will notice that it's completely about things that fit with their ideology anyway - so basically the trans issue, male violence against lesbians. With the oppression olympics and them fighting against LGBT organisations, it's politically useful for them to claim that they are fighting for lesbian rights and representing us but we are just a tool. There are some decent people in radical feminism but also some of the worst people I've met in my life - and some of the most blatant homophobia and lesbophobia (but they hide behind identifying as lesbians). Although I have largely stayed out of it, the 'sisterhood' fights, breaks into factions, lies about and betrays each other more than any women I know (if you google feminist trashing you will see this is a problem that goes back since the early days of the movement.) I think the slur TERF to characterise anyone who opposes the extremes of the current trans movement has been a great gift to radfems - in truth most people involved in this aren't radfems or have started calling themselves radfems because they think it just means people who know there are two sexes. I don't disagree with working with radfems on this issue, just as I don't necessarily disagree with working with conservatives (depending on the circumstances) but I think it's a mistake to then think that they represent our interests.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-12-14T23:32:16+00:00

Maybe the chicken identified as a carrot.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-12-14T22:12:29+00:00

No, someone else sent it to me.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-11-19T09:41:25+00:00

I think this post should stay up too. It demonstrates so much.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-11-19T09:40:29+00:00

I assume she's frequenting the Lesbian forum because either a) as a straight radfem she views lesbians as basically a service class of women whose job it is to serve the feminist cause and support all (but of course mainly straight/bi) women - which is why we are called "so-called lesbians" for not being obedient little lesbians or b) her "Nige" (husband/boyfriend) is pissing her off so she's considering "becoming a lesbian" (ie cutting her hair short and calling herself a dyke) to piss him off and escape into this women-centred fantasy world that her radfem books tell her about.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-11-19T09:31:34+00:00

"Toxic masculinity", "incel behaviour" (despite no one that I've seen wanting straight "lesbians" to sleep with us - Every post I've seen has been saying please leave us alone.). So much of this reveals how you don't see lesbians as real women. If you actually supported lesbians you would stop saying we are like men and be concerned about the appropriation of our language and spaces - including by straight women. But I actually don't expect straight women to support us - If they would just stay out of our spaces, stop co-opting our language and stop speaking over us on lesbian issues, that would be enough and I really don't think that's too much to ask.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-11-19T09:21:40+00:00

Ah, a lesbophobic radfem. I've seen this many times before. Lesbians complain about straight women in straight relationships calling themselves lesbians (in fact, IIRC, straight/bi women being the exclusive representatives of what it is to be a lesbian on a radio item supposedly about lesbians) and we are criticised for pointing this out and called "so-called lesbian women" - ie questioning whether we (female homosexuals) should even be allowed to call ourselves lesbians - because they don't just want us to be inclusive of straight/bi women - They want to redefine the word lesbian, speak for us and throw us out of the group if we don't conform to how straight/bi "lesbians" want us to behave. And we are supposed to be grateful for this support.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-11-18T20:08:31+00:00

I think the pushback in the UK and the successes that have been achieved so far are down to a mixture of different people - Most of the push seems to have come from women and women's groups but they are not all radfem by any means. Women's Place UK is a socialist feminist organisations, Fair Play For Women isn't particularly aligned to any particular feminist ideology as far as I am aware, Posie Parker doesn't even call herself a feminist - That's just a few groups off the top of my head and they will all have some kind of link with some radfems somewhere along the line (eg have invited a radfem to speak at an event, have radfem supporters) but it is definitely not just radfems behind this (although I bet they'll try to take the credit!). A lot of it is just ordinary women who think this is ridiculous and are taking a stand.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-11-18T20:00:27+00:00

Why does everyone want to identify as a lesbian? It's not like actual lesbians are popular. In fact, a lot of people who want to identify as lesbians seem to hate us. We're the wrong kind of lesbian that isn't attracted to men/people with penises.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-11-16T20:20:33+00:00

I am cautiously hopeful about the LGB Alliance. We really do need an organisation that specifically focuses on current issues from an LGB angle and that isn't a radfem organisation. (I'm not opposed to working with radfems where practically advantageous, I don't think all radfems are evil, lesbian and bi women who are radfems should be able to be part of any LGB organisation but I don't want an organisation that is led by a particular agenda apart from the shared interests of LGB people).

Most of the people involved in running the LGB Alliance seem to have a background in working for or with Stonewall (before it betrayed us) or, in some cases, the Gay Liberation Front and things like that give me some assurance that they are interested in gay rights, and the combined interests of LGB people, rather than being radfems/political lesbians.

I think you will always get some radfems lurking around, trying to use it to their advantage but, fortunately, the presence and involvement of gay men (as well as being very welcome in itself) is to many political (fake) lesbian feminists like garlic is to a vampire - It helps to ward them off!

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-10-30T12:58:22+00:00

Tbh, one of the main things that absolutely infuriated me was the way they reframed being a lesbian as being about being woman-centred, being one of the women etc when so many of us have been excluded from female circles and isolated from other women for being lesbians and when young lesbians are being convinced that they aren't even women at all - when the exclusion of lesbians has reached the point that young lesbians are having life-changing hormones and surgeries because they are being so alienated and excluded by other women - told they aren't real women and feel they can't be accepted as one. When the response from so many women to questions about letting people with penises in women's changing rooms is "but we let lesbians in!" - making it clear that they don't see us as real women who belong in those spaces.

Then we are told by political lesbians that, because of this isolation we aren't "woman-identified" enough, so we aren't proper lesbians like the (het/bi) lesbians are. I was even told by one feminist that detrans lesbians are "traitors to their sex" and "chose to other themselves" by transitioning - with no understanding or empathy to the way the society they live in - and other girls and women - would have othered them to make them feel like they had to transition.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-10-30T12:39:31+00:00

I think I'll have to write a longer post about that one day as there is so much to it and I really want to talk to any other lesbians on here who have had similar experiences (although I realise only a small number of us have made it through from reddit). I see lesbians having these arguments with radfem/(political) lesbian feminists online all the time but don't know how many of them were actually involved in any of this stuff at one point.

It took me a really long time to realise that it was pretty hopeless to be involved in radical feminism because I desperately wanted it to be the answer and to have a movement and a community that I could be part of. Some of the key points I guess were:

1) Realising that every lesbian issue that they were absolutely passionately pro-lesbian and fighting for our rights on chimed completely with their own priorities - so the trans issue (and a particular element of it ie straight men accessing lesbian spaces - not elements of the wider queer shitshow that didn't nicely fit in), the idea that we are constantly being subjected to violent attacks by straight men because they want to have sex with us and we have chosen to deny our bodies to them. It seemed like we were basically just a minority label they could use to further the aims they had anyway for straight and bi women. 2) Political lesbian feminists being oblivious to and dismissive of any other lesbian issues. 3) Political lesbians who are absolutely horrified by and see so many issues with males identifying as women but refuse to see any problems with heterosexual or (more commonly these days) bisexual women identifying as lesbians - because they only see sexism and don't choose to see lesbophobia as a separate issue and as something that exists within the female group. 4) Seeing lesbophobia that you couldn't challenge because the perpetrator identified as a lesbian. 5) The re-framing of lesbophobia as "compulsory heterosexuality" of which heterosexual and bisexual women are the main victims. 6) Very strange, idealised ideas about lesbians and lesbian relationships - lesbians were put on a weird kind of pedestal and held to a higher standard than other women but any that didn't meet their standards and share their views or experiences were not only met with horror but called not real lesbians (because being a lesbian is a feminist state, not a sexual orientation). 7) Seeing feminists talk in a dismissive way about lesbian and gay issues - either because it comes under the rainbow/queer stuff in their mind so can be mocked or they are talking about supposedly privileged gay men who apparently don't have any of the real problems we women have. Except I and many lesbians can relate to the problems these gay men are talking about because we have experienced very similar things and the "real, more important" women's problems being discussed are experiences of heterosexual/bisexual women as wives and mothers in heterosexual relationships - and I ended up wondering "why am I on this side, again?"

I don't mean to criticise everyone involved in radical feminism - there are some good women in there who achieve some good things - but I just don't think they can or do represent the interests of lesbians and it does worry me that lesbians will escape from one problematic group and walk into another one.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-10-29T21:20:52+00:00

It's really difficult. I was involved in the LGB community and activism there for a long time but obviously that's been completely taken over. I genuinely thought radical feminism was so wonderful and pro-lesbian at first look and it took a while for the scales to fall from my eyes - I think partly because I so wanted it and needed it to be something to replace the LGB community. How do we find each other even? I think on specific issues we can maybe co-operate with rad fems/political lesbians - in the same way some rad fems co-operate with conservatives on issues they agree on - but it does worry me that lesbians are leaving one problematic community with its own agenda that does not have our issues at heart and walking straight into another one. Maybe groups like the LGB Alliance can be part of the solution? Maybe we just have to build up communities from the ground up, get to know other lesbians by word of mouth and sussing each other out like lesbians in previous generations would have done?

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-10-29T21:09:25+00:00

I think what you are seeing is a push back against radfem beliefs that any woman can identify as (or in their words "become") a lesbian if she abstains from sex with men for political reasons. So their belief (or at least the mainstream radical feminist belief) is that a woman that is attracted to men but chooses not to have sex with men is a lesbian. It's called "political lesbianism" but these days they just call themselves lesbians rather than political lesbians and it is now predominantly bisexual women who choose to only have sex with women because they hate men who call themselves lesbians. They redefine being a lesbian as being about hating men and have basically created something call lesbian feminism which doesn't really represent the interests of or experiences of actual lesbians. And some of them are genuinely lesbophobic. But you can't challenge their lesbophobia or say that their feminism isn't actually representing lesbians because they all identify as being lesbians. Meanwhile on the queer side, you also get both heterosexual and bisexual women who identify as lesbians (eg because they are dating a transbian who finds that validating) and shame actual lesbians as transphobic genital fetishists because we're not attracted to males. It's not surprising that many lesbians are now trying to gatekeep the language under these circumstances. It's not meant to exclude actual lesbians who have had sex with a man in their past (although some people want to muddy the water by claiming it is) but I think it does make lesbians more wary of someone who has had a lot of past male partners and says they are a lesbian and, if I was getting to know someone like that, I'd probably want to weigh them up to work out if they are either a) man-hating "political lesbian" or b) one of the queer words-mean-whatever-you-want-them-to-mean types. In my case, I would be open to dating a bisexual woman but someone who lies about their sexuality or potentially thinks that words just have no meaning and everyone can just identify as whatever they want definitely isn't for me.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-09-23T18:58:19+00:00

In terms of the radfem ones, most of the "lesbian" feminists who will disregard you for not following their beliefs and set of behaviours are actually bi - that's why they've got such a weird view of being a lesbian that they learned from books and their belief system rather than real life. There are some actual lesbians in radical feminism but they tend to be more normal and rational, understand different lesbian experiences and will engage with regular lesbians even if they have differences in views. The ones who are insistent that lesbians are "patriarchy smashing goddesses" and hate any lesbian who doesn't conform, are pretty much always bi (or occasionally straight) - That's why they are so clueless and so obsessed with lesbianism being all about men and taking down the patriarchy.

SickOfThisShitNow · 2020-09-07T11:35:56+00:00

I grew up as a lesbian in the 80s in the UK. Very homophobic society, didn't know any other gay people. There were a few gay people in the public eye but mainly men. Gay people were mainly talked about in relation to AIDS and Clause 28 (which was being brought in to stop the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools.) It was seen as pretty common to either have to hide your sexuality from your family or to be disowned and thrown out of home. I eventually realised there were gay groups and a gay community out there in the cities and that if I worked hard at school and got to university there were gay groups there and that was my escape to find my people. It was pretty common for gay people to have to leave the area they grew up in and start a new life (I'm reminded of the video for Bronski Beat's Small Town Boy which sums up that era).

Because of having to wait until I was 18 and could get to uni, I didn't really have much contact with other gay people until the early 90s, when I came out onto a scene which was very male-dominated (and sometimes hostile to lesbians) - but I also met some great people - gay men and lesbians - and it was such a relief to meet other people like me and finally talk about all this stuff I hadn't been able to talk about all these years. (There was no internet back then - or it hadn't reached me - so I'd just had to keep it all to myself and also had limited access to information about other gay people). The gay scene was focused around clubs and bars. There was some political activism which was about lesbian and gay rights - There wasn't really a link between lesbians and feminism that I saw (I lived in two different UK cities during the 90s) which I think was different to 10 years previously.

Things tended to be labelled lesbian and gay - occasionally the B would be added but that wasn't standard, although there were some bisexuals around. I'm pretty sure I'd never seen the phrase LGBT and hadn't encountered any trans people (although of course there were plenty of gender-non-conforming people - butch lesbians, drag queens etc). A few years later (early 2000s), I used to go to a bar which some transvestites also frequented - everyone was clear that these were straight men with wives who just liked dressing up for a thrill but who would get hassled in straight bars if they went out like that. No one minded them being there but they weren't part of our community, we didn't mix (other than being polite in the queue for the bar) and they didn't insist they were lesbians and that we needed to include them in our group and sleep with them. Transsexuals were rarer and were regarded as a different group from transvestites.

In the 2000s, the internet and the media have had more of an influence. Bisexuality and the idea of sexual fluidity have come to the fore and been presented as morally superior (hearts not parts, I fall in love with the person not the gender). Then the whole trans thing, which has changed massively even over the last few years.

We have certainly made legal progress and progress in terms of visibility since I was young and I think regular people are more accepting - or at least it's less acceptable for them to be openly abusive - but I think the queer movement is the backlash and where the lesbophobic attitudes are coming out - from people who aren't lesbians but have latched on to trans and queer identities. The LGB community wasn't perfect but it was where I felt at home and part of a community in a homophobic world but that seems like the most hostile environment for lesbians these days.

SickOfThisShitNow