AfterEllen article, 'Girl Dick, the Cotton Ceiling and the Cultural War on Lesbians, Girls and Women'
By Miranda Yardley
(extract)
"It’s a measure of how completely topsy-turvy the transgender debate has made LGB&T politics and organizations that the person writing this piece is a transsexual. I am, however, uniquely placed to be able to write this piece as I am a man who ‘lives as a woman,’ whatever that may mean, and can see exactly how too many transgender rights activists think. And as anyone who has ever participated in social media knows, any criticism of transgender ideology, which we all of us have the right to accept, critique and reject, any deviation from the brain-sucking mantra of ‘trans women are women,’ is met with reports to our employers, threats of physical violence, and threats of rape and death. This is a viciously toxic form of men’s sexual rights activism that has managed to rebrand and reframe itself as a civil rights movement.
The framing of any discussion or debate is all important, and political language is often used to reframe threats as harmless, or to sell us ideas we’d never ordinarily entertain. Sometimes though the only way to drill down and actually understand something is to walk away from any subjective post-structuralist pretensions and abandon the soft lighting of the political language we have been carefully taught, reverting to good old fashioned precise and factual descriptions: thus all pronouns and reference to sex within my writing shall be implied from real life actual biological sex, and biological males will be referred to as such, even when they LARP 24/7 as a man’s idea of what it is to be a woman.
We cannot talk sensibly about sexuality and sexual orientation unless we are able to correctly identify sex, and being consistent on sex will also allow me to distance myself from the transgenderist reframing of the inherently exclusionary nature of sexual orientation as acts of bigotry and hate, because it is not: we are allowed to define our personal, intimate and sexual boundaries and decline sexual and romantic relationships without having to justify these
The homophobic, anti-lesbian idea which had wedged itself into the heart of transgender ideology does, of course, have a name: The Cotton Ceiling. The cotton ceiling is defined by Wikipedia as “…the difficulty trans people experience when seeking lesbian and gay relationships, and in lesbian and gay social spaces more generally.” This needs to be carefully deconstructed, in particular, the basis of the perceived exclusion is extremely important: attempts to reframe exclusion as ‘transphobic hate’ based on the exclusion being ‘because they are trans’ is the most common argument, however the true motivation is revealed starkly by Julia Serano, writing in 2014 in The Daily Beast ‘The Struggle to Find Trans Love in San Francisco,’ which is a masterpiece in the sleight of hand that has made it impossible to talk about our sexual orientation in terms of biological sex without being labelled a bigot or worse: the piece is even subtitled “for one trans woman, finding a date within San Francisco’s lesbian community turned out to be much harder than she anticipated” which, by redefining Serano as a woman, immediately demonized those darn evil lesbians and makes h* out to be an innocent victim of unfair negative discrimination. What Serano does is reframe h difficulty in finding a female homosexual to have sex with him as symptomatic of systematic, structural oppression. Here, *, the biological male in search of a sexual relationship with a homosexual, biological female, is bizarrely reframed as the victim: (continues)
www.afterellen.com/general-news/567823-girl-dick-the-cotton-ceiling-and-the-cultural-war-on-lesbians-girls-and-women
**redacted in light of MN rules re pronouns