8 for men, 0 for women
Again with the push to erase women and delete them from all places and movements and discussions.
Why in Portland—one of the most LGBTQ-friendly cities in America, and home to the nation’s first bisexual governor and its first lesbian House speaker—is there no lesbian nightlife?
It’s been six years since the Egyptian Club, better known as the E-Room, lowered its rainbow flag in Southeast Portland, and in that time no brick-and-mortar lesbian bar has emerged to fill its space. (By contrast, Portland has eight gay bars for men.)
Moreover, the city doesn’t have a single dance night or recurring party that caters exclusively to women seeking women.
So what happened?
Genders multiplied and proliferated until there were 97 varieties, but it just so happened that “women” somehow got dropped along the way.
“I’ve never felt comfortable with the term lesbian,” says Llondyn Elliott, 19, who identifies as non-binary. “It’s really restricting to me to say I’m a lesbian. That means I’m a girl who likes girls. But am I a girl? And do I only like girls? No.”
The result? Announcing that a Portland party is intended exclusively for lesbians is stepping into a minefield of identity politics.
In the past two years, events catering to lesbians, like the monthly meet-up Fantasy Softball League, have been targeted online as unsafe spaces for trans women and others who don’t identify with feminine pronouns. This past summer, semi-regular parties for lesbians, like Lesbian Night at Old Town’s CC Slaughters, changed their names and focus to avoid controversy and be more inclusive. And lesbian-owned bars that draw lesbian customers, like Escape, shun the label so as not to offend.
And yet bars that self-describe as being for gay men don’t. Isn’t that interesting.
Trish Bendix, former editor of AfterEllen, an online publication about lesbian, queer and bisexual women in the media, lived in Portland from 2011 to 2014. She says she has never been around so many queer people in her life, but she was often among a minority who identified as lesbian.
“I often feel like lesbians are forgotten or left behind,” she says, “and sometimes it feels lonely.”
Not to mention unfair.
Emily Stutzman, 31, tried to create a space for lesbians. It ended poorly.
A producer for a Portland ad agency, Stutzman says she couldn’t find places in the city to hang out with other lesbians after moving here from Indiana in 2008.
In 2014, after ending a romantic relationship, an unsettling thought struck her: “How do I find somebody else?”
So that year she decided to create her own social gathering for lesbians, calling it Fantasy Softball League, a winking nod to stereotypes about lesbians. The “league” had nothing to do with softball, and instead was a monthly meet-up at Vendetta, a bar on North Williams Avenue.
“Hey ladies,” an ad beckoned. “Cool girls, drinking cool drinks in a cool bar, talking about cool stuff.”
But all was not cool.
In summer 2015, Stutzman, who has wavy red hair and wears an enameled “I Love Cats” pin on her jean jacket, recalls walking through Vendetta greeting people when someone she’d never met—someone who didn’t identify with traditional female conventions like the pronoun “she”—confronted her.
“The person was hostile, and wanting to pick a fight,” Stutzman recalls. “This person was offended and said they would tell their friends that we were a group of people that were non-inclusive and not respectful of their gender.”
The person—Stutzman never got a name—left the event, and Stutzman was left feeling confused. As she looked around, she saw many people who fell between male and female. She thought her event was inclusive, even if the vernacular wasn’t.
“What we wanted to say is, if you’re a straight dude, don’t come to this event,” she says. “Everyone else was fine.”
Stutzman adjusted her language, no longer calling Fantasy Softball League a lesbian event. Instead, she called it an event for queer women. But even with the change, Stutzman still worried.
“Everything I tried, someone was offended,” she says. “It got weird and political, and I wanted it to be a fun thing.”
It’s funny how women turn out to be the universal enemy, isn’t it.
That fall, Stutzman handed responsibility for the event to Alissa Young, who renamed the event Gal Pals, relocated it to the Florida Room on North Killingsworth Street, and ran into more trouble. Some people took offense at the event’s new feminine name.
So Young folded the event. Now she mourns the loss: “Can’t we have spaces that are just for lesbians?”
No, because lesbians, like feminists, are required to “center” trans women. Rules are rules.
In September, a monthly party for queer women in Portland drew rebukes because it called itself a “dyke party” that catered to women and “female-identified folk.”
“Everyone who is female-identified is a woman,” wrote one critic on Facebook. “Are you saying that you believe there are people who identify as women who aren’t women?”
Are you saying there are sheep who identify as goats who aren’t goats?
The debate over naming identities and creating spaces for them isn’t limited to women. However, Byron Beck, WW‘s former Queer Window columnist, says the conversation is not as prevalent in gay male culture. “It’s easy to find gay events for men in town,” he says.
Quite so. Men aren’t told to erase themselves the way women are. Funny how that works, isn’t it.
Interesting. If you call it for women, you aren’t being inclusive. But if you become inclusive by adding female-identified, then you are not acknowledging that they are women. Could it be they just want to hate on women? Find some reason to trash women? Nah, couldn’t be that…could it?
Coincidentally over in FTB, a blogger has decided to pull out of a blog affiliation (Progressive Bloggers) containing at least 250 blogs, because ‘at least one’ of them was a TERF. The unnamed other person qualifies as TERF by being a ‘gender abolitionist’, which I interpret to mean they oppose placing social expectations on people based on their anatomy.
And this makes that unnamed blogger a ‘cisgender supremacist’! I wish I were exaggerating, but that hyperbole is only the start of one of the most ridicuolous descriptions I have ever seen:
“TERFs don’t “disagree” with me. They’re a form of Cisgender Supremacists. When they’re not denying I exist, they’re making the argument, without hesitation, that my needs are less important than theirs and that the conditions which would culminate in my suicide are an acceptable loss for their comfort. This isn’t a “disagreement.” Disagreements are for arguments over which animal makes the best house pet. What happened here would be like telling the Jews they just needed to “hash it out” with the fucking Nazis.” [Emphasis mine]
Yes, trans / queer / genderfluid / non-binary / etc. people to gender abolitionists as jews are to Nazis. Opposing the idea of gender makes one an anti-trans Nazi. How do you reason with that? No wonder ‘women looking for women’ events have such a minefield to navigate.
Holms–that “Against the Grain” blogger–good gawd.
(I left a not-nice comment there that doubtless won’t make it out of moderation.)
That sort of narcissistic mental vomitus gets taken seriously by the left, and Trump is embraced by the right. We’re living in Gaslight World.
What do you think explains why there are significantly more male-to female transgendered humans than female-to-male? Just in terms of numbers, it doesn’t have an effect on gay men to the same degree as it does lesbians.
TIL, thanks. Roughly how skewed is the ratio?
Karellen, I vaguely recall the ratio of trans female to trans male being something like 5:1, but I can't find that figure anymore so take with a pinch of salt.
@ 2 & 3 – yeesh. “Shiv” (appropriate nickname, since it’s slang for a stabbing knife) is quite something. I like the self-description in the margin –
“Leather girl”? That’s part of intersectionalism? Stabbing knife is confusing Dear Diary shit with politics. No, kid, your hobbies and preferences and recreations are not a political position.
I identify as a jeans t-shirt and workboot guy.
I think “leather girl” might denote some involvement in BDSM, membership of which community can certainly be political, since it’s looked down on by a lot of the same sorts of people who look down on homosexuality or polyamory, and for a lot of the same reasons. (It’s also looked askance at by some people whom AtG would probably call “TERFs”, and for a lot of the same reasons, too.)
To the topic at hand, it is quite dismaying that discourse is still being seen as equivalent to physical violence, when it quite clearly isn’t.
I identify as a waders butterfly net and plant press woman (whoops – do you see a problem there? I’ll work on it)
Seth – I get the connections, but I don’t think they’re enough to make such categories political. Politicalish maybe, but no more than that. We all look down on lots of things, and there’s often a lot of politically-tinged resentment of particular downlookings, but that’s one reason “SJW” leftism is viewed with such disdain. It’s a bit reminiscent of Trump pretending to be a populist.
Lady Mondegreen at #3 – Your comment went through, disemvoweled and with a “fuck off”.
I made the mistake of following the link to AtG’s post. It is the epitome of false humility, revealing incredible ego through a presentation of terrible obsequity. Oh, how miserable the blogger is, how sorry! For the horrible crime of existing in the same space of a “gender abolitionist”, which someone might’ve seen by clicking through the link in the FtB side-panel!
What rankles me now, even more than the discourse === violence misidentification, is the sheer dogma of it all. Gender abolition is taken to be synonymous with TERFdom, and being a TERF is taken as synonymous with being a murderer (or at least a suicide-abetter), and the whole time, no evidence is presented. The offending TERF is not linked to, their supposed TERFdom is not examined or analysed; it’s handed down, from blogger to reader, as though from on high.
Whatever kind of thinking that is, it sure as shit ain’t free. And, given that the *very first comment* was “Oh thank god that that awful, awful OB left these parts before we came along!”, I’ll not ever be visiting that blog again…and maybe not the network. It’s…shameful, really, that a consortium ostensibly devoted to discourse has been hijacked by dogmatists.
For what it’s worth, I’m glad you left, Ophelia.
@ 6 Holms
I made that up! I was using absurdly inflated figures for the sake of argument. The actual ratio is around 2:1 (MtF:FtM).
The way it works is, as far as I’ve been able to see, is that an issue will recieve attention and rapidly sweep through the social justice blogs, sparking a flurry of conversation and debate. The hyper-intersectional bloggers will reach a general consensus sooner or later, and those that don’t are obviously literal Nazis / murderers / supremacists / Sauron / etc. and hence shunned.
The upshot of that process is that the topic is now Settled, with all of the finality implied by that capital. If anyone misses that memo and attempts to converse, enquire, and possibly even (gasp!) question the conclusion will be told that if they are truly making their musings in good faith, they need to quickly toe the line by dropping their questions. That demand will likely be phrased something like:
“You wouldn’t tolerate anyone trying to reopen the debate on emancipation, would you? Of course not! And this is literally identical to that so drop it or be shunned!”
And so the overly earnest bleeding edge of progressivism will continually tear itself into smaller and increasingly insular pieces thanks to the wonders of ludicrous hyperbole, weirdly self-aggrandising martyrdom, elimination of degree/nuance (X is in the same category as Y, the only difference is severity… therefore they are identical! e.g. questioning my idea gender makes me uncomfortable, making me uncomfortable is a reduction in my mental well-being, reducing my ental well-being makes me more likely to commit suicide; therefore you are encouraging my suicide), and of course shunning.
_____________
#14 Silentbob
I was actually thinking of a time perhaps a year ago when I looked into the population estimates of trans men and women; I was not thinking of your post at all. I was looking at the statistics of those that had actually undergone sex reassignment, skipping the airy-fairy ‘I’m trans because I think it’s fine if men like ponies / women like flannel shirts’ tripe. And so the page on transsexuals (which wipipedia treats as a subset of the transgender population) was where I went, and I see that there are a variety of estimates coming from a variety of nations with a variety of methodologies.
A glance over the numbers shows ratios ranging from about 6:1 (assigned males transitioning : assigned females transitioning) to 1:1!
Seth @ 13 – thanks, so am I. (A slight understatement!)
clamboy @12 — Thanks. You saved me checking in there out of curiosity. My blood pressure thanks you too.
Holms @15 — Damn, you word good.
Does anyone else remember Kate Millett’s book ‘Flying?’ It described that mad year after she came out during the publication of ‘Sexual Politics.’
Her description of the suicidal, back-stabbing, crabs-in-a-barrel behavior of that wave of activists chilled me to the bone. Essentially anyone who had actually DONE anything to benefit women was set up as an ‘elitist’ target for all the half-crazed, drunken hangers on.
The newer trans movements don’t seem satisfied with destroying each other, they seem to have an active hegemonic focus on everything to do with femaleness.