Because it’s that easy. Because trans women have to work from a position of defending everything we say to criticism from others, and the rare time people acknowledge that they’ve made an error they get to decide to respond to that or not.

Seriously, Feministe, this is the kind of cisfail I’m used to elsewhere. Letting cissupremacist, transmisogynisyt comments be published as part of ‘discourse,’ expecting trans women to answer points that had nothing to do with what they said because someone has launched into a tired old screed of complaint about the mean old trans ruining their feminism?

Comment retracted.

Let’s just ignore all the hard and necessary work that women have done for themselves in the face of incredible misogyny…

Sorry, Sophist. If we’re gonna nitpick here, gudbuytjane has a point.

I’m done.

@Sophist Okay, I’ll bite… such as?

Such as not making unwarrented assumptions about someone so you can feel self-righteous? It seems like there’s enough to fight about in Q’s posts (e.g. — apparently, if a function doesn’t have more than 4000 in attendence, nothing that happens there counts) without putting in things that aren’t actually there. How is that something “useful to add”?

Sure, there are other assumptions I could make, but in the context of the Q Grrl’s other comments, and given that historically transmisogynists lack creativity in their bigotry, it’s a pretty safe bet.

Seriously, though, did you have anything useful to add, or did you just feel like taking a drive-by?

…so I can only assume you probably don’t think I qualify as a ‘real’ woman anyway.

Um, there are actually a bunch of things you could do other than assume that.

what does it mean when a transwoman calls herself a lesbian (with no modifier), but refers to most other lesbians as “cis-lesbians”? If I were to use the same logic, I would say that would make that particular transwoman a homophobe. That’s a lot of erasing of history, experience, and identity, no? That’s appropriating some other marginalized group’s experience to fit one’s personal political beliefs.

She didn’t say, “I am a lesbian.” She identified through the conversation as a trans woman and then also pointed out that she was a lesbian, too. She referred to cis-as-opposed-to-trans lesbians because this is a category distinct from lesbian, cis and trans inclusive, and that distinction is important when you’re talking about transphobia.

As to the appropriation…sorry, not seeing any sense at all in that argument.

The one’s that continue the legacy of misogyny that kills, rapes, and otherwise harms those cis-women who now seem so below you?

Is this “you” meant to refer to me, or someone else? Because I can’t see how it refers to gudbuytjane.

No, gudbuytjane made a very broad statement about feminism because what? Le Tigre played Mich Fest back in 2005? So all of feminism is tarred by this choice (which was/is questionable)?

Here’s one example of a cis feminist honoring Mary Daly’s memory:

http://www.historiann.com/2010/01/06/why-blogs-suck#comment-526465

“SRS tourism.” Like all the abortion tourism pre-Roe, I suppose.

One instance of complacency–with several thousand other instances of bigotry–is not itself an indictment, but this is one instance of a larger problem. A memory problem, an honesty problem. And it is. If it is possible for a Big Feminist (Trans and Queer-Friendly) Blog to write a eulogy for Mary Daly that doesn’t contain a single reference to her transphobia because its Big Feminist Head Blogger had no freaking idea at all that she was transphobic, then feminism as a movement needs to do more reconciliation work around past and present transphobia.

Kathleen Hanna is not Mary Daly or Liss, but it’s not inappropriate either to talk about her bigotry as one perceives it or to consider that bigotry part of a cultural problem. Bigotry usually isn’t anything else.

I’ve neither said this, nor implied it. I wasn’t referring to your particular lesbianism, I was referring to your choice to linguistically frame your lesbianism as one which doesn’t require a modifier. You do the math from there, hon.

Your initial post clearly doesn’t want to accept that, flawed as she is, Kathleen Hanna has had a tremendous positive impact on feminism. You even go so far as to, quite dramatically, sigh about why you even bother with feminism. I’d say that you’ve opened yourself up to a bit of scrutiny then yourself, no? Not because your claims aren’t valid, but because you are willing to tear down the whole barn because there’s a rat inside. So, once you dismantle that barn, then what? What do you have to offer women as replacement? From what I’ve seen of your writing you want to further marginalize lesbians for one, and you support an erasure of dykehood into a normative category it has never occupied. Color me lukewarm if I don’t find that a very reassuring replacement for the flawed feminism we currently see around us.

Also, can we please leave straw men out of this, i.e. why are you discussing strap-on.org? This feels like (typically) a transmisogynist feminist looking for an excuse to tell a trans woman to shut up, and I just made the mistake of speaking up. Your comments have made incredibly transmisogynist assumptions (that I couldn’t be a lesbian myself, hell, that I am not a feminist – could I not be criticizing issues I see with the movement from within?), so I can only assume you probably don’t think I qualify as a ‘real’ woman anyway.

I find it tremendously ironic that in response to my sadness at a feminist icon othering and silencing my experience (because, yeah, I have a complex relationship with some artists and their work because of their transphobia, too, I just never got to express that part while dealing with the derailing) that a feminist has deciding the correct response is to other and silence. Can you see why I might post things like my first comment?