They would have been young butch lesbians
This is what Rebecca Solnit ignored in her perky reference to the last night of the last lesbian bar in San Francisco and what a lot of “trans men” were present:
Today I grabbed a latte at my local Starbucks. There’s no drive-thru there, and I found myself darting into the premises with a feeling of dread. The young lesbian on testosterone was at the counter again. Two other servers are also transing lesbians. I’ve seen them before.
I can tell they would have been young butch lesbians in any other era. I can tell because I was a young butch lesbian in this hating world once. The only difference between them and me is time – I was just one of the lucky ones to not be around at the time of the transcult.
…
The horror of knowing they are lesbians who think they are men due to the current contagion of transactivism makes it hard to be there. I look around as I leave and three of their transing lesbian friends are sitting at a booth.
…
Every butch lesbian who is critical about this horrific trans. movement—a movement that would push young lesbians into believing they are male and amputating their healthy breasts and taking cross-hormones—every butch knows what they are seeing. It’s like looking into a mirror and recalling all of the angst, hatred, parental and peer rejection all over again.
It’s a horrific experience to sit in a room full of my sisters and know this. It’s like being one of the last butch survivors in a complete eradication. I can’t think of any other way to state the horror I feel at progressives actually thinking that the surgical violation of these young lesbians is somehow a brave and courageous thing.
They are telling these girls that they are not okay being who they are and wearing what they want to wear. These are girls like I once was. They sometimes have short hair, and that way of carrying themselves that is strong and independent. They don’t care about boys and when they were kids, they played with trucks and things other girls don’t really like. They liked collecting rocks and they didn’t giggle around the boys like the other girls did. They were never like the other girls.
And now they’re being told they’re men.
They call it ‘gender non-conforming.’ That’s a fancy word for butch lesbian. What is happening is that tomboys are pushed to transition and the trans. net captures all the future butches. This is not mere speculation. Physicians who work in gender clinics are saying that homosexuality is the first ‘step’ to transing. This is gruesome.
…
Our lesbian spaces are already dead. Our bookstores, our dances. Everything we built is dead and taken over by the trans nightmare. I was there when we had it all. Don’t think I don’t have at least a modicum of hope that this madness will end. Because I do. But that’s not today.
That’s what Solnit left out.
H/t Papito
Powerful piece.
And this is where the TRAs put their argument: nobody is “telling” these lesbians they can’t be a butch lesbian. Nobody is making them do anything. They’re not “being told they’re men.” Not at all.
It’s totally and completely coming from the young
womenmen themselves. It’s spontaneous and self-originating, these announcements that they’re transgender, with a male identity trapped in a woman’s body. No contagion. No force. No coercion. All the activists do is react. Really.And yet what I hear from young women themselves is the steady drip of suggestion. “I bet you’re trans.” “Are you trans?” “OMG you’re trans!” “Here, take this test and see if you’re trans.”*
And along with this is sexism and porn culture and homophobia. Sure. Nothing coercive at all.
*
Here’s a Gender Dysphoria Test! Take it:
https://www.psycom.net/adult-gender-dysphoria-test/
Now … take it again, but this time answer every single question with “No.” See what happens.
I did exactly this. I think “No” for all questions is what I would answer anyway. The result is disturbing. I hope you don’t mind my giving the game away here:
I’ve came across a presentation somewhere that claimed lack of evidence of gender dysphoria is evidence of gender dysphoria. This is sick.
@1 Wow, I’m “mild to moderate”??? How bogus is that. No urge to change my wardrobe yet, so there must be some hope? :P
As for the piece, looks like grooming to me. How fortunate was I to have grown up being nearly forced to be masculine and ridiculed for anything I did or felt that was remotely feminine (yes, even in Northern California in the 60’s). Not that I would have anyway, but there used to be a huge amount of social pressure toward reinforcing gender stereotypes. A lot has changed since then, and me with it (but not without a significant amount of introspection), but some of this stuff just goes too far.
I am not mild to moderate, except when it comes to politics. ;)
If you answer “Yes” to all the questions, you get an indication of “Strong”–no surprise there. But if you select all the wishy-washy (“Sometimes”, “Maybe”, etc.) answers, you get the same indication.
So answering in a manner that doesn’t indicate dysphoria indicates dysphoria. That’s nice.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2019/list-of-symptoms/
Well, I hope you all used fake e-mails, no telling what kind of nasty spam they would launch at us.
It’s a great article, but I do have some problems with this:
and this:
Other than the short hair, she is describing me. I was gender non-conforming, to the horror of my fundamentalist, anti-feminist mother. I would rather collect rocks than play with dolls (how do you play with dolls, anyway? They just sort of sit there and don’t do anything, and you can’t do anything interesting with them.) I didn’t giggle around the boys (or around the girls; I was never a giggler). I was usually more comfortable around males than females, because females were being socialized to be so…girly. But males posed dangers that constantly reminded me I was in fact a girl.
I am not a butch lesbian, or any lesbian. It is as wrong to see gender non-conforming females as lesbians as it is to see them as trans. We are simply people who don’t buy into the gender bullshit, and want to be who we want to be the way we want to be it. As long as what we want to be is within the bounds of decent human behavior, there should be nothing wrong with that. I can see saying “no, don’t be what you want to be” if what you want to be is a serial murderer, but if what you want to be is a tree-climber rather than a tea-partyer, I say go for it. And don’t let anyone tell you you are trans…or lesbian…or anything but yourself.
Re #6, you can leave that entry blank, I discovered.
So, if I answer every question truthfully, I come out strong. Most likely because I do actually wish I could be treated more like males are treated (i.e., respect and the like, not to mention no pay gap) and I honestly answered about my depression. So things that have nothing to do with gender dysphoria, but more to do with (1) societal misogyny, and (2) a diagnosed medical condition that can be related to LOTS OF DIFFERENT THINGS.
They are appropriating my depression, and they are appropriating my distaste at being treated like a second class citizen, and calling it theirs.
Mild to moderate. What a crock of shit.
I’m with iknklast. I thought I was trans. I’m not, because there isn’t really any such thing. I’m not a lesbian either; I’m autistic.
tigger, autistics are the preferred victims of the trans cult. A predilection towards black-and-white thinking, combined with a persistent sense of not fitting in, makes recruitment easier.
Maybe that’s why they never captured me. I have the persistence sense of not fitting in (probably because I don’t fit in), but have never been good at the black-and-white thinking part.
What a useless test even by internet test standards. I got more out of the Harry Potter sorting hat test at least that will make my little sister happy until I tell her I got Slytherin. How can you be completely comfortable with yourself and still have it come out to mild to moderate?
I’d have thought that a full set of ‘noes’ would result in being told that one is in denial and is definitely trans. Somebody’s missed a trick there.
Well, this is alarming. I was just trying to find out if I’m trans, and instead I learn that I’m a robot! (“The entered text is not correct” but I’m pretty sure it is)
Catwhisperer, if you want to be truly woke, you could claim to be a trans robot.
Haha. Well that explains my lifelong interest in repetitive tasks, speaking in monotone, and desire to wear an antenna on my head. I’ve always been a robot, I just never knew.
Catwhisperer,
That means you can enter robot sports, like Robot Wars.
latsot, oh, umm, actually no, that’s not really my thing. And don’t go thinking it’s because those cis-robots are innately more stabby, drilly, hacky, angle-grindy, or more heavily armoured than trans-robots. Robotness is a spectrum, not a binary.