On Christmas, the Telegraph posted an article with a startling headline: “Lesbians facing ‘extinction’ as transgenderism becomes pervasive, campaigners warn.”
In the article, Kate Harris, co-founder of the transphobic LGB Alliance lamented the supposed loss of lesbians to “transgenderism” as more women identifying as lesbians come out as trans men. “Is lesbianism going to become extinct?” the Telegraph quotes her as saying.
Yes. It’s deeply uncool. At school, in university, it is so uncommon, it is the bottom of the heap. Becoming trans is now considered the brave option.
When I read this, all I could think of was the far-right obsession with the “white genocide” conspiracy theory. White supremacists worry that their race is declining because white women aren’t pumping out white babies as quickly as the supremacists want them to.
Many white supremacists, like Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, argue that white women are essentially little more than walking wombs who shouldn’t have control over their own bodies; to paraphrase an old meme, all their wombs are belong to white men. And he’s applied that argument to trans men as well, recently declaring that “F to M transgenderism is a plot to exterminate the White race by neutralizing our breeding vessels.”
White supremacists are also worried about white women having babies with men of color, and lose their shit every time they see an interracial couple in a TV show or newspaper ad. In their minds, white women belong to white men and shouldn’t ever be “stolen” by men of another color.
The attitude of the transphobes towards lesbians-turned-trans-men is strikingly similar — and just as possessive. The transphobes believe that young lesbians are being, in effect, seduced by “transgenderism” into becoming trans men — in effect, stolen from the cis lesbian community that considered them to be their property. All of this brings us ever closer to “lesbian extinction,” the transphobes claim.
(In case you’re wondering, the existence of trans lesbians doesn’t make the transphobes worrying about lesbian extinction any happier, since they don’t consider trans women to be women.)
Here’s a simple rule: any time you find yourself talking about other people’s bodies as if they belong to you, it means you’ve internalized Nazi rhetoric as your own. White supremacists and transphobic “campaigners” may have radically different goals, but in some crucial ways they think very much alike.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
Or they may not. Jury’s still out on that one.
I saw that headline earlier today because a lot of the people I follow on Twitter were mocking it. There are probably more out lesbians today than any prior time in history. Even if you don’t include trans or non-binary lesbians at all, lesbians are in no danger of extinction. Some part of me wonders if transphobes screaming about “lesbian extinction” are actually saying “most lesbians don’t want to date me because I’m a transphobe.”
I don’t know that their goals are all that different. These transphobes are only too happy to take money from and work with far right groups, and the overwhelming majority are white, so I think it’s not a stretch to say many transphobes are also white supremacists.
It also occurs to me that they appear to be completely ignoring the existence of bisexual and pansexual women, since most transphobes are also biphobes.
So, lesbians are just trying to be cool? Otherwise, I don’t see how this leads to extinction whatever that means).
From what I can see, lesbians are still seen as cool, either because of porn or because they aren’t into men. Transgender people are still viewed with disgust.
I am sick of people though who refuse to fight misogyny and gender policing.
@Naglfar
Some part of me wonders if transphobes screaming about “lesbian extinction” are actually saying “most lesbians don’t want to date me because I’m a transphobe.”
I think you have a big plausible cause here. Most white supremacist who complain about white genocide are childless assholes who can’t get a date or a stable relationship in no small part because bein a selfish prick, sexist and a political extremist isn’t exactly a winning combination.
Someday, transphobes may come up with an argument that isn’t just a warmed over homophobic and / or racist argument.
Today is not that day.
This reminds me of those “BLM Is Breaking Up Families” articles that were making the rounds where the actual offense was “my family stopped talking to me because I’m unapologetically racist”.
This shit reminds me of a scene in the graphic novel Maus where the writer gives a story about his father, a holocaust survivor, being racist to a black hitchhiker and his wife asking how he can be such a racist after what he went through.
You’d think people who know what it’s like to be persecuted wouldn’t want to do it to others, but appearantly not.
“Lesbian extinction” sounds vaguely like a minor extinction event that occurred at the end of some less known stratigraphic stage called Lesbian, probably sometime during Mesozoic.
Yes. It also means that you have a hankering to create zombies to do your work for you, dirty or otherwise.
Apparently, it’s self evident for them that most of lesbians are doing it because it’s hype and not because it’s their attraction. Which is would be a funny self own if, you know, that belief didn’t lead to “corrective” rapes and the like. It’s similar to how MRAs are rabidly misandres and white supremacistes often seem to believe white people to be weak, ineffectual, and stupid.
Also, I cast my vote in favor of the hypothesis “white supremacists and transphobes have the same goal”. It’s not like there is a ton of white supremacistes cool with transgender people. Or who aren’t misogynists.
@an autistic giraffe
Unfortunately this is the case a lot of the time. I can think of a lot of people belonging to one oppressed minority who hate another. I think people often believe that the way they have been oppressed is the one singular true oppression, and that anything else isn’t real, such as ostensibly feminist transphobes who think that only AFAB people have ever been oppressed for any reason.
@Naglfar
They may also be only counting “gold star lesbians” as real lesbians. I’m reminded of an online discussion I saw years ago about morris-dancing, where someone said they had seen news articles on how it was dying out, and the people in the conversation who actually did morris dancing asked if the journalists had been quoting the president of the Morris Men Association (can’t recall the exact name), because he doesn’t count anything as *real* morris dancing unless it’s an all-male group doing steps exactly as recorded by folklorists prior to WWI, etc etc. Anything can be endangered if you make the definition narrow enough.
Someone needs to let Kate know that the lesbians haven’t disappeared. They’ve just been avoiding her since she joined a hate group she couldn’t shut up about.
This reminds me of a girl I tried to date a few years back. she was the first person I tried to be with after my assualt. One day when we were kissing in her room I thought I need to stop her and tell her about my triggers so this doesn’t end badly. First she was discussed that I had ever been touched by a man, Then she got mad that I was even talking about triggers to her because she was a woman and my attacker was a man and there for the triggers shouldn’t matter to her.
When I didn’t want to see her again she told everyone in the lgbt club at my university that I was straight and I was using her for experimenting. Gold star lesbians are the worst.
The Telegraph needs to stop smoking carpet tape because it definitely rots the brain.
I don’t understand that publication anyways, they seem to go into a crazed feeding frenzy about any mention of transgender people. They get conflicted about the rainbow alliance in every way imaginable, as if any kind of LGBTQI+ experience is mutually exclusive of every other such experience.
Unsurprisingly, there was a cartoon that circulated when Elliot Page came out by a dyed-in-the-wool neo-Nazi unironically depicting ‘Globo Homo’ brainwashing tomboys into thinking they were ‘FTM’, or, worse yet, gay.
All of which to say is, it isn’t just an echo, in some cases ,they’re using almost the exact same rhetoric, just one step removed.
Moon Custafer:
They may also be only counting “gold star lesbians” as real lesbians. I’m reminded of an online discussion I saw years ago about morris-dancing, where someone said they had seen news articles on how it was dying out, and the people in the conversation who actually did morris dancing asked if the journalists had been quoting the president of the Morris Men Association (can’t recall the exact name), because he doesn’t count anything as *real* morris dancing unless it’s an all-male group doing steps exactly as recorded by folklorists prior to WWI, etc etc. Anything can be endangered if you make the definition narrow enough.
I’ve heard about a similar attitude in certain areas of pulp fandom; there are boomer and older collectors who intend to have their pulps buried with them, rather than yield them to the Dadgum Kids On The Lawn (who can’t be expected to appreciate them from the proper cultural perspective!) (Fortunately, I haven’t had the misfortune to encounter such in person; the rare millennial who shows up at Pulpfest is greeted with rose petals and ice cream.)
Lumipuna: in case you’re wondering, Lesbos is mostly covered in pliocene lava flows, and there was a pliocene extinction event with about a third of marine megafauna dying out:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0223-6
Notably, the lava flows of the pliocene era on Lesbos include dykes.
@Moon Custafer
Yes, I think a lot of transphobic lesbians are gold star and believe that therefore trans women who have or had a penis will corrupt any cis lesbians they come into contact with. A lot are also political lesbians, which are similarly awful.
I’ve even seen a few TERF lesbians claim that lesbians having sex with bisexual women are not really lesbians, since a bi or pan partner may have had sex with a man before. It seems to be an internalization/variant of the patriarchal idea that sex with men (or penises, or anyone they think is a man) contaminates women.
Unfortunately for the dykes of Lesbos, tete de femme are only found in permafrost regions. 😛
I don’t give a fuck about whether they’re gold star or not. Naglfar and other Jews here will have heard the expression, “No zealot like a convert.”
Whether the person never had any sexual interest in penises or whether the person has plenty of sexual interest in penises, cissexism is cissexism. I’m not interested in how much a person does or doesn’t like to fuck dicks. I’m just interested in whether and to what extent people police the behavior and identities of others.
You engage in cissexist oppression of others? I oppose you.
You don’t? Fine.
Either way the sex you have or want is entirely beside the point for me.
@Crip Dyke
To be clear, I am not defending gold star ideas or transphobia at all. I was describing a correlation I had seen between two groups. I apologize if it looked like I was defending or validating transphobic rhetoric.
They’re just echoing old arguments of homophobes, that gay people were stealing and “recruiting” heterosexual people to their “lifestyle”. It was used as a mainstream argument for discrimination against gay people in any industry involving children, such as teaching, as late at the 1990s, and is still believed in by bigots. If you’re a minority arguing against the existence of another minority using recycled arguments used by people against you, you should stop and think hard about the chain of ideas that brought you to that point.