AIBU to think that straight people shouldn't be dictating who should be able to go to Pride?

[ArcheryAnnie]

I'm a woman. I'm a mum. I'm also someone who has been an LGBT+ activist for most of her adult life. I used to go on Pride marches when it was a little bit scary to do so, when there was always a message at the end from the stage about being careful when you were going home and away from the safety of the gay-friendly crowd.

Susie Green, Mermaids CEO, is a straight woman. Which is fine! She is opposed to women declaring that lesbians don't have penises. Which is less fine, but eh, she's entitled to believe whatever daft things she wants. But - however many friends and relatives she has who fit under the LGBT+ banner - Pride isn't about her, or any other straight "allies".

And yet here she is, declaring that "We will only take part if we are satisfied that concerns have been addressed". This is because she is very keen to prevent lesbians who believe that lesbians don't have penises from participating in the Pride march.

Source: prideinlondon.org/news-and-views/a-pride-without-hate/

Susie, we don't give a shit whether you take part or not. We don't agree with you that women standing up for the validity of same-sex attraction, for female homosexuality, qualifies as "hate". We really don't care what you want to happen or don't want to happen at Pride. Pride was created by people like us, in times of great need, and you don't get to dictate what we will or won't do. This isn't for you.

AIBU to think Susie Green and others like her should stay in their lane?

I think it’s interesting how many posters immediately jumped on side without even reading the article to get the full context!

I don’t think so? I read the article, the OP’s post makes sense and my view is the OP INBU.

Apologies, "lesbians who believe that lesbians don't have penises" could someone explain what this means, tia

YANBU

I didn’t attend pride in my city on Saturday. I’ve been called names and abused by various people who call themselves trans and NB for stating that a lesbian is a female homosexual. I even had an unknown male shout ‘terf’ across the street at me last year.

I’m a lesbian who doesn’t feel safe to go to pride. Not very inclusive.

And no to the PP who said a man needs an operation to become a lesbian. No no no! None of the lesbians I know would go down on a surgically constructed vulva made out of a scrotum. Good luck to them if they want that but they’re still not a lesbian. Males are not and can never be lesbians. Would you like to stick a penis constructed out of forearm tissue in your mouth?

This may be of interest - 5/7 gay people!

www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/1f4c71a6-1359-4241-9f91-7b0a1b5ac9a0

So she doesn’t want lesbians at pride. Should she want the ‘wee labour lassie’ (who is absolutely a lesbian because they date woman) there with their girlfriend? Or is that the wrong type of lesbian.

I may be overthinking this but doesn’t a person with the male bits intact (even with a boob job - oh yes that is also a thing) have sex, errrr in ‘the traditional manner’?.

my dd is gay, she is 14,and is desperate to attend pride.

The town her school is in is having a family pride day in the park, and so I said that sounded great and we would all go.
I am now worried that maybe we are going to get caught up in something dangerous.

Do you think the protests etc will be confined to London pride?

Scared of scary lesbian protests or scared that people will try to tell her that she is a boy in a girls body?

The only danger comes from aggressive males.

I am bi but mainly more towards men or more towards neither! If I got frisky with a woman that then turned about to be man just dressed as a woman, I'd feel violated. Christ knows how lesbians feel, at least I'm used to dick (well its been years and years but I do have vague memories) lesbians are XX homosexuals.

I have met many trans folk, I shared house with a trans person who dressed and felt like a woman but decided to keep their dick, they enjoyed having it. Their choice and they were bloody lovely. She never once tried invade women spaces, never once thought she had the right to do that as a trans person, never once insisted she was biologically a woman with the wrong parts. I think it is a bloody shame that their are trans folk, behaving very much like men with their disgusting attitude towards biological women and disrespecting out thoughts and feelings, making it worse for the lovely trans people just going about their day to day lives in the gender of their choosing.

I think women need to start having XX spaces so that we have somewhere to feel safe and not be surrounded by men with dicks.

LordProfFekkoThePenguinPhD I've gone to Pride events for years, my son (9) has been at them since he was born and we have never seen any violence as yet.

There is a separate Trans Pride event here though so not sure if that helps. They are more vocal and hating of women than the Pride event.

my dd is gay, she is 14, and is desperate to attend pride

If your daughter is the old-fashioned kind of lesbian who is attracted to the kinds of women who don't have and have never had penises then maybe you and her need to think about where the real present and future danger lies. Sorry to say I have met too many young lesbian women who have been harassed for sex by older penis bearing individuals wearing women's clothes who claim to be 'lesbian'. That's a fuck load more scary than women peacefully holding placards. Also if any trouble does occur then it will be because their peaceful protest will be violently opposed by (mainly) penis bearing individuals some of whom identify as men and others who do not in a way that if it were in any other context would be named for what it is: male violence against women.

Someone buy me some fucking commas.

YANBU, ArcheryAnnie, YANBU at all. It’s shocking what’s happened to the former LGB right movement. “Trans takeover” is exactly it.

And that was an amazing and informative post, GoodbyePiccadilly! I’m so angry on behalf of my lesbian/bi sisters. This is just male dominance dressed up as something woke. As repulsive and repugnant, unjust and unjustifiable as all the more traditional forms of male dominance.

YANBU

Just to be clear:

From the linked article:

The repercussions of the protest from the anti-trans group who disrupted Pride last year have been far-reaching and harrowing – particularly for the Trans community who expect Pride to provide a safe, welcoming space. Last year’s protest spread a lot of hate and created a lot of upset. We issued a formal apology and know there is more to be done.

We will not let Pride be used as a platform to spread transphobic hate again. We have learned from last year, we have listened and we are doing everything we can to avoid anything like this happening again.

They are referring to about half a dozen lesbians holding a banner with the definition of lesbian being a female homosexual. The women walked to the front of the parade, and carried on walking with their banner.

Susie Green appears to be agreeing that joining a protest defining lesbianism as female homosexuals is spreading hate, is transphobic, harrowing and upsetting.

Susie Green's interest is presumably in children who are identifying as trans.

YANBU. And you honestly couldn't make it up. Lesbians at Pride. Harrowing and hateful.

Yanbu.

Certain "Activists" at the moment do not represent the community, or tolerance, they haven't for some time, and the sad thing is the community feels the effects of their bullying - whether it is inward towards lesbians for daring to use their right to consent how they damned well please, or outward towards organisations like the girl guides, religious people etc.

@Pinotjo

Apologies, "lesbians who believe that lesbians don't have penises" could someone explain what this means, tia

It’s very hard to condense all this for someone who’s unfamiliar with it all, as I’m presuming you are, because it’s all so batshit that it doesn’t seem plausible that it could be going on. But I’ll have a go.

Current transgenderist ideology says that we all have an “innate gender identity” and that this is much more real and important than our biological sex: according to this set of beliefs, gender identity overrides biological sex in determining whether you’re a man or a woman.

So if an XY male person says his “gender identity” is female, then he literally is a woman, regardless of his male anatomy, male genitalia, male upbringing, male everything.

(Contrary to popular belief, most males who identify as women don’t have surgery to remove their penis; they may have some hormone treatment, or facial feminisation surgery, or breast implants but they may not. Some don’t even shave off their beard.)

Following this “logic”, a male person who “is” a woman, who is sexually attracted to (actual) women, is - ta da! a newly minted “lesbian”!

And (actual) lesbians who are not interested in sucking “ladypeen”, getting it on with “girldick”, or any other form of sexual intimacy with any male person, however he may identify - well, they are fearsomely transphobic bigots and are being ostracised from the gay community/Pride.

So. “Lesbians who believe that lesbians don’t have penises” are just what you probably used to call lesbians, in the old days when a person having a penis was a sound indicator he was a man.

“Lesbians” 2019 Pride version = people of either sex who identity as women who are attracted to people of either sex who identify as women”.

Hope that makes sense... although obviously it doesn’t... but there we go. This is where we are now.

Hope that makes sense... although obviously it doesn’t... but there we go. This is where we are now.

Good summary, Talking.

I've listened to younger lesbians who have been almost in tears about the pressure on them to have sex with men who claim to be lesbians. Made infinitely worse because it's being pushed on them from within their own communities, & if they refuse they're attacked as transphobic bigots.

This is an excellent post which originated here on MN written by a young lesbian. I would encourage anyone with a young lesbian family member to read and share it.

fairplayforwomen.com/lesbian-erasure/

I thought “Pride” was for Pride in yourself, whoever you are, whatever you look like or your sexual preferences. The important thing is all participants are safe. Arguing about who can and can’t attend sort of defeats the object for me.

Uh, remember who started the original Stonewall riots? Trans women.

And this is a wonderful example of the effects of propaganda, from ReanimatedSGB.

The notion that “transwomen” started the Stonewall riots (and therefore set gay rights activism in motion, and therefore deserve the undying grovelling gratitude of the LGB community and their place at the top of the LGBT hierarchy) is an easily disprovable lie, on more than one count.

Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the two who are often cited as having thrown the first brick or whatever:

a) did not call themselves or see themselves as “transwomen”.
It is on record that they both referred to themselves as gay men/drag queens/transvestites, ie effeminate homosexuals
b) were not even there when the riots started. Marsha Johnson turned up later; Sylvia Rivera was asleep.

Furthermore, gay rights activism was already well under way in the USA and UK before the Stonewall riots ever happened. They were not the birth of the movement, rather a major turning point.

And yet! And yet the lie persists, is spread around and repeated again and again by people who no doubt consider themselves somewhat edgy and radical and progressive and on the right side of history etc.

Again and again the actual person who started it all off, a butch, mixed race lesbian called Storme Delarverie, is conveniently erased from history. Conveniently written out and replaced by retrospectively transed gay men who weren’t even there.

SGB’’s unquestioning repetition of the lie shows us how effective this propaganda is.

So let’s go back to looking at what purpose this propaganda serves:

The idea that “transwomen” started the Stonewall riots is important to propagate because it sows the idea that it was transgender people who set the whole of the gay rights movement in motion, and that the LGB community therefore owes trans people a debt of undying, grovelling gratitude, and trans people deserve their place not just in but at the very top of the LGBT community.

Many people ask “why is the T conflated with the LGB anyway, when they’re so clearly poles apart”?

And it’s a good question, one which TRAs don’t want you to ask. Because they want all the funding and acceptability that comes with being part of the LGBT rainbow, they want to benefit from the years of hard graft put in by the LGB and use that by now well established platform to push their own, very, very different agenda.

Hence the need to stop up that question at source by creating this myth of “trans activists started the whole gay rights movement, LGB and T have always been the same thing”.

And what a marvellous job they’ve done of spreading that myth about. How very cunning of them to be able to turn the wokerati into mouthpieces for their utterly misogynist, utterly homo- and lesbo-phobic ideology. As a PR move, I have to say it’s very good indeed.

YABU and this is a completely disingenuous post relying on the MN prejudice against Trans people and the fact that posters won’t click on the link before joining you in the outrage. The link only asks that Pride be inclusive and refers to last year’s protests which made Trans people feel unwelcome at Pride. I agree with it, an inclusive event is not the place to protest against some Trans people (especially if your protest lumps all Trans people together in a discriminatory manner anyway).

I agree with Booboostwo.

This is quote from a poster on a gay message board about the Stonewall riot and recent rewriting of history. It's unsubstantiated obviously, but given everything else that has been obfuscated and propagandised around this issue I find it plausible.

It is pretty much all myth at this point.

I remember the Advocate hiring a writer to really dig into the story for the 25th anniversary. He spoke ONLY to those who were on the list of 399 names taken by the police for for the first part as to when the riot began. He spoke to those who could prove they were a part of the crowd with photos that matched the faces for information on the second night. It was a good 9 months of research and interviews. When submitted the Advocate paid him but refused to publish it because one of the conclusions was that there were no drag queens at Stonewall AND he got documentation and photos from Sylvia R's family that proved beyond all doubt she/he had not yet run away from home and was at a family birthday the night of the riot. I read it when it was briefly published online, but the Advocate sued to have it taken down claiming that it was their property.

The reason they would not publish.....

Advocate had already paid for a pro photo shoot of drag queens for the cover of the issue and they did not want truth to ruin a good cover shot.

So Booboostwo, are you saying that celebrating homosexuality (as in people being exclusively attracted to their own sex) is transphobic?