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.
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“A woman’s head”, eh? What does this mean in geology?
It’s those unstable, mushroom shaped hummocks of dirt that wobble and spill you into the cold slime if you step on them wrong. Not exactly a flattering name, but a billion times better than the old, incredibly racist name that were used for those things.
Full Metal Ox:
They WHAT?!! Dear Lord, my spouse must never hear of this — he considers himself to be merely the current guardian of his pulp-magazine collection, ensuring it remains intact for the next people who want to examine it in the original paper (he also has digital reading-copies of most of the magazines for his own use, but he does enjoy the smell of old paper). He’d be appalled by the idea of collectors trying to take it with them — especially ones who collect ephemera that’s frail enough when stored under optimum conditions and which would break down pretty horribly in a casket.
/OT
Remember, transphobes: I am the sourest of grapes. You probably wouldn’t want to date me, and I certainly won’t date you.
They must be positively apoplectic with the current uptick in diversity being shown in TV advertising….
(unless I’m seeing selectively — I must confess to having spent several years DESPERATE for good news)
@Lumipuna
Now that the geology stuff has been sorted, may I point out that “The Lesbian Extinction” also sounds like an awesome female punk band? (or possibly metal, I suppose) Because it totally does. Possibly has some AFAB trans/enby members, just to really annoy the TERFs.
Add origami to the list of things that have purists who define things so narrowly that they leave a major chunk of creators / designs out in the cold, so to speak. Years ago I stumbled across an Amazon review of an origami book that outright stated that any such book that had designs that needed scissors and/or glue to create should immediately be relocated to the craft section because ‘real’ origami doesn’t use such things; compound pieces (pieces using more than one piece of paper to create) should be joined together via nothing but folds.
@Full Metal Ox – is there a decent pulp book condition grader that you recommend? My mother is going through stuff in her attic in an attempt to downsize, and amongst other things found a trove of old pulp books. If these were comics I’d put their condition somewhere around Very Good to Fine. Of the ones I saw, they have brown pages, some had a bit of water damage, and many looked like they could use a couple of months under a board weighted down with bricks. But the covers are intact, and none have their pages falling out. And I was wanting to get a rough idea of their value so I know what to tell my mom if they’re worth selling or not.
By the way, those collectors who fully intend to be buried with their book collections – do they really want to buy several plots to ‘store’ all those books in? Because there’s no way they will be able to do that in just one plot. Unless they’re planning on taking just taking, say, ten of their most valuable books and leaving the rest to Those Darn Kids to fight over.
@Penny Psmith:
Now that the geology stuff has been sorted, may I point out that “The Lesbian Extinction” also sounds like an awesome female punk band? (or possibly metal, I suppose) Because it totally does. Possibly has some AFAB trans/enby members, just to really annoy the TERFs.
And let’s not forget some members of color. (I’ve been taking every opportunity of late to point out that Punk 1977 displayed infinitely more diversity and creativity than Cyberpunk 2077.)
Ok, I had to look up “Gold Star Lesbians”.
Regardless of the term, it seems a bit unfair in our society to treat lesbians who had contact with men before coming out as less than those who never did. Sounds similar to Red Pillers. Too much cock, the wrong cock, or just cock at all, and you’re damaged goods?
TERF Island strikes again
@.45
Definitely. It’s very much a second wave thing that, like much of the second wave, has since been rejected by most feminists as outdated and discriminatory. Unfortunately a few still cling to it, much like how a few cling to second wave views of trans people or sex workers.
@Redsilkphoenix:
– is there a decent pulp book condition grader that you recommend?
Look, I’m not young & hip & all that, so I can’t tell you that it’s less common now (or more common). It might have been **more** a 2nd wave thing than it is a current thing.
That said, it really wasn’t a 2nd wave thing. Even during the 70s and 80s when lesbian separatism was at its height, the separatists were a small minority of queer women. I head about “gold star” lesbians when I first came out & literally every single time I heard it, it was was an in-joke.
Likewise there were in jokes about dykes who “looked straight” because they wanted to lay back and let some new woman “try to convert them” (and do all the work, so they could get all the orgasms, because if they were perceived to be straight their “first girlfriend” would work extra hard to make lesbian sex seem good). There were in jokes about how to tell which straight women you could seduce more easily based on their haircut.
And, of course, there were those jokes about “converting” straight women so that those women would be overjoyed and extremely enthusiastic about having sex with their first girlfriend because (stereotype/joke) obviously if they’d been having sex with men they hadn’t had an orgasm before.
There were jokes about all kinds of things, and I never, NEVER heard anyone speak about “gold star lesbians” in a serious way. (Some honestly said that they hadn’t had any sex with men. That was a fact & not a joke, but none of them were ever using that to say that they were better than other people or a more important part of lesbian/queer women’s community than women who had had sex with men before coming out.
Does that mean that no one ever had a superiority complex for being a gold star dyke? No. I’m sure there were some. There are asshats in every community, if the community is large enough, and even 50 is large enough, much less then millions of queer women in a country as large as the USA.
So, sure, the concept existed. But it’s not a “second wave thing” as far as I can tell. The concept of “gold star dyke/lesbian” has been around at least since the early 50s, which was decidedly pre-2nd wave. And if you just mean the GSLs that were jerks, well, there’s nothing unique to 2nd wave about being a jerk. And if people have the idea that somehow this was something that was important to lesbian relationships, well, no. I never met a single person who made a dating decision based on whether or not a prospective relationship partner had or had not had sex with a man before coming out. (A few jerks made bi-phobic decisions based on whether someone had had sex with a man since coming out, but that wasn’t about being “gold star” it was about buying into fucked up stereotypes of bisexual faithlessness… but I bet that still happens.)
Were there jerks 30, 40, 50 years ago? Sure. Were some of them gold star jerks? Probably. But I never met them & I encountered the term all the time in the late 80s & early 90s.
It was always a joke, or at most an icebreaker to use as an excuse to start the conversation moving towards sexual topics.
Other people may have different memories, and as for the 70s & early 80s, I can’t speak personally, but a lot of the people I was hanging out with in the 90s were queer women who had been out for 8 or 10 years or more. The person who was out the longest came out to herself in 1948 and had her first live-in girlfriend in the mid 50s, pretty much as soon as she was living on her own. She was an early member of the DoB, a bad ass feminist, my biggest supporter at the company where we both worked (and where I met her) and also a gold star dyke.
She was a true left-wing radical who was the first person I met who made me feel like I deserved queer women’s community just as much as any cis queer woman. I’d hate to have anyone think that those early / original gold star dykes were more exclusive (on average) than anyone else.
I also had to look up “Gold Star Lesbians,” and can I just say, I am so underwhelmed by their, um, what is it that they think makes them so special? Some kind of “purity” fetishism that I can’t put my finger on (and ewww, not that I’d ever want to!)
But getting deeper into this weird alt-right/transphobic “White Genocide” thing, I just have trouble with it because of the fact that, um, words mean things. “Genocide” means the mass murder, to the point of extinction, of an entire population.
In stark contrast to actual, real genocide, in “White Genocide” nobody dies. How can there be a genocide, if nobody dies? If your whole idiot temper tantrum is about interracial families, Huggies commercials featuring multi-skintone babies, Coke ads where people sing the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish, and Barack Obama as President, where exactly is the mass murder and death?
In “White Genocide,” people who are designated as “white” fall in love with, marry and have kids with, people of color. It doesn’t matter how happy, healthy and wholesome their families are, or how well their kids turn out – because the only thing that matters to the alt-righties is that those happy, healthy kids Aren’t White, and that is somehow a disaster, for reasons.
@Full metal Ox : Cyberpunk 2020, the TTRPG that inspired the videogame, alway have that problem that it was the valiant attempt of a white male engineer in a very specific bubble to make a different, provocative future. He succeeded in some way, but the racial and gender part were already among the less successful in 1995.
Cyberpunk 2077 tried to copy the original instead of trying to improve on the intent. In a lot of way, it’s a watered down version of something that already was showing its age and very specific origin.
There’s a lot of different definitions of genocide, and the mass murder one is one of the narrower ones. The broader ones include just about any attempt to destroy a group of people, with Stolen Generations of Australian Aboriginal peoples and Native American schools that prohibited native languages and culture being two examples cited as genocide.
But genocide is involuntary. There are a lot of societies eroding into larger societies beside them, but children leaving of their own volition just isn’t genocide. And examples where the plan was to interbreed away the others, like in Australia, were in for destroying cultures and languages much more quickly. The nefarious plan part of genocide is just missing, no matter how much white supremacists would like a nice evil other.
I can almost squint and see where they’re coming from, even though I don’t respect purism as a whole, but then I remember how Anglo cultures went out to destroy Australian and American cultures and still stand largely dominant in the US and a half dozen other countries over the natives and peoples imported as slaves, and the comparisons to a Native American tribe with few native speakers left and many of their children slipping away to voluntarily assimilate just sort of slip away.
@Ohlmann:
I may not have made it sufficiently clear that I was comparing Cyberpunk 2077 unfavorably to the original real-world punk subculture that existed in the days of Pong and Gorgar.
@Crip Dyke
That’s what I meant, thank you for the correction. I wasn’t alive during the second wave so most of what I know is from reading about it.
Yes, this is still a thing and is the primary reason I’ve never been out IRL as bisexual (and don’t really plan to change that).
I don’t mean to imply that anyone fitting the criteria is exclusive, what I meant was that anyone who uses that criteria as a ruler by which to measure others is being exclusive.
Redsilkphoenix: I can ask my spouse. I noticed you said pulp books — I tend to think of Pulp as referring to 1920s-through-1940s fiction magazines. Are you talking about that, or about 1950s paperback novels? Also, what continent are you on?
@Crip Dyke
Yep. Met a few, though it was an unusually small and self selected group. They were rather unpleasant people to be around.
Governor of the pub I were working in in ’84 were an out and proud lesbian (and a truly amazing person) and she let the uni feminist lesbian alliance club use the function room for their meetings. Sometimes I got stuck covering that bar over their stated preference for “no men” when no one else wanted to and Ellie had to deal with something else. Quite often no one else wanted to – they were considered a horribly demanding group by the women who worked the bar.
Put me off the term feminist for a couple decades. Not the ideals, just the label.
Yeah, the acronym “TERF” may be new(ish) but the attitude’s not, sadly. Almost ten years ago, one of my friends signed up for a lesbian writing group, but canceled when one of the organizers posted something like “women-born women only” (friend was cis herself, but didn’t want any part of that crap).
Also, last I heard, women are born as babies, not adults.
@Naglfar –
Just want to send some solidarity, if that makes any sense! I mean, I’m so sorry this is a thing. Because I’ve gotten this attitude too.
In this case it was from my (straight) father, when he was saying bisexuals would only be happy in a relationship with two people at once. So I reminded him how I was bi and monogamous. I joked to my friend later that I was too clumsy for threesomes, but of course it’s more of a personality thing.
My partner, being in a mathematical mood, had this to add: Assuming everyone identifies with a binary gender, each relationship would have to involve four people, not three – two men and two women – to satisfy everyone. (Actually, that would only be required if everyone was bi and wanted two partners; you could imagine with 3 people, the odd gender out could be straight.)
Of course this is all absurd – people can be mono or poly regardless of orientation, and cheating is something that happens in all sorts of relationships.
There’s also an argument, I guess, that lesbians are being “shamed” into having sex with trans women. Which, needless to say, doesn’t happen.
Trans people don’t say “if you don’t have sex with me you’re a bigot”. Trans people say “you don’t want to have sex with any trans people because you’re a bigot”. Those are vastly different statements, but transphobes love to (a) reverse cause and effect, and (b) pretend there’s no difference between a trans individual and trans people in general, because they objectifyingly see us as interchangeable.
@Catriona
They also like to do this re: collective blaming. Any time a single trans person does something they don’t approve of, they use that as an excuse to oppose rights for all of us.
@naglfar
The tone of the conversation, rather than any specific statement, I think vaguely implied the opposite. I didn’t actually think you meant that, but something about the tone of things being said in the thread was suggestive enough I thought it worthwhile to create an explicit counter narrative.
But I never seriously thought that you did mean the takeaway message was that people who call themselves gold star dykes/lesbians were necessarily exclusive.
There was a lot of toxicity in separatist circles, but I’m not exactly sure where the gold star thing got equated to separatists & separatism. I know it happened, I just don’t know how it happened.
Of course, that’s not to say that separatists were all jerk faces either. I knew a number of lesbian separatists and most of them weren’t actually assholes. Still, at least in the circles I traveled, “gold star” was more like “first in my family to go to college”. Sure there was a little something special about it b/c there is a shitload of heterosexism & socially compelled coupling, but no one in my circle looked down on non-gold stars any more than the first person in a family to go to college would say that other people didn’t deserve their own diplomas.
Has it occurred to you morons that you’ve entirely lost the plot? People have had enough of the trans “gender fluid” insanity and you’re rapidly losing support from the public on the gay issue altogether. You can count me as one (among many ACTUAL women) who is over it entirely. We didn’t sign up for this toxic ignorance when we said ‘live and let live.”