Guest post: Overcoming the barriers
Originally a comment by NightCrow on Cotton ceiling tweet.
CM: I don’t see that the workshop is necessarily coercive. We have no information about the contents of that workshop. AB’s opinion that it must be coercive is not substantiated.
Here’s the advertisement for the ‘Cotton Ceiling’ workshop preserved in its original context. Full transcript below; all emphases added by me.
Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women, with Morgan M Page
Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling will explore the sexual barriers queer trans women face within the broader queer women’s communities through group discussions and the hands-on creation of visual representations of these barriers. Participants will work together to identify barriers, strategize ways to overcome them, and build community. Open to all trans women and MAAB genderqueer folks.
According to Tribunal Tweets CM said ‘We have no information about the contents of that workshop’, or something very like it. In a strictly literal sense this is true. We don’t know what went on during the actual event. But anyone with even a modest capacity for close contextual reading should be able to recognise that the language in this abstract is violent and oppressive: ‘overcoming’, ‘breaking down … barriers’, ‘strategize ways to overcome’ and utterly dehumanizing: ‘cotton ceiling’ – lesbian women reduced to what is in their knickers, their right to agency denied.
The whole premise is saturated in misogyny and sexism: lesbians (those bitches) have been rejecting our demands! We must force them to understand that the point of their existence is to service the fantasies of heterosexual males with a cross-dressing fetish, and alleviate (whisper it quietly) our painful awareness that we are imposters.
Ed: Have a screenshot to see for yourselves.
But it sounds so much nicer when it’s likened to fighting apartheid. Why can’t we continue to pretend to get along by silencing our opponents and hiding behind wildly inappropriate analogies and obfuscatory euphemisms?
Yeah! It’s like the drive to unionize Ford! It’s like the French Resistance! It’s like Mississippi Freedom Summer!
“Sexual barriers” is what they’re called from outside by those who don’t respect them.
To the people who have them — and who have an absolute right to set them wherever they want — they’re called “sexual boundaries.”
Once you realize that “the sexual barriers queer trans women face within the broader queer women’s communities” really just means “the sexual boundaries that lesbians autonomously determine for themselves” — and, in context, there’s no other reasonable way to interpret it — it becomes grotesquely clear just how coercive and demeaning the whole idea is.
These are men who want to have PIV sex with women. So why do they never consider women who like or want PIV sex? Are they categorically and predeterminedly discriminating against heterosexual women just because they are heterosexual? Why are they excluding such women from their potential dating pool? Are they bigots?
Of course, it’s not just PIV sex per SE that they want. It’s not just “validation,” either. They could just as easily fantasize themselves as “lesbians” when having sex with ANY woman, even heterosexual women. No, it’s the reparative rape fantasy in a new dress. It’s the male power to force, to degrade, to humiliate, particularly women who don’t need men for anything. It’s Rapey McRaperson’s wet dream.