Pride doesn’t represent me

[Vegansausageroll]

Just been watching Joe Lycett’s big pride party.
It was all sexualised smut. It’s ‘furries’ , kink, drag, sex and innuendos galore. This isn’t all what pride is about! It’s supposed to be about our sexuality and our rights and not being ashamed of who we are. But there is no representation for young people like I was! I want people to be themselves and express themselves but it all just seems so extreme now!

I’m a middle aged gay woman. I like books and countryside walks!

I am very worried about equal rights and the way they are, once again, under threat.
I have nothing in common with the people that now dominate ‘pride’. The last woman’s group I went to has long been shut down, as have the lesbian groups I used to attend back in the day. I’m worried gay youth are being sent a message that their sexuality must be linked to a certain type of ‘lifestyle’ when many of us just want to live a regular life the same as our straight friends - the only difference is the sex of our partners 🤷‍♀️.

Utter bullshit. I don't care what people accept or not as lesbians, they may be as daft as you and not understand the word, but so what?

Some say if you have ever been with a man sexually you are not a lesbian
I've never heard that but anyone saying it a moron.

Some say political lesbians are not real lesbians

What the fuck is a political lesbian meant to be? More bullshit. If shes sexually attracted to solely women, she's a lesbian. If not, she isn't. Politics don't make the slightest difference.

It's not contested ground at all. If a woman says she is a lesbian, we're all fine with that, because who cares? The issue here is when a male bodied person says so, IT CAN NEVER BE TRUE, NO MATTER HOW YOU PERSONALLY CHOOSE TO DEFINE LESBIAN*

*there is only one way to define it anyway.

Some say if you have ever been with a man sexually you are not a lesbian
I've never heard that but anyone saying it a moron.
Some say political lesbians are not real lesbians
What the fuck is a political lesbian meant to be?

Ah ha! That! To the first - that's what transwomen and their allies allege is possible - assuming you don't think TWAW. There is some pressure put upon young lesbians these days to accept transwomen. There are even workshops for transwomen, teaching them how to overcome a lesbian's bias! From whence we get the term Cotton Ceiling.

As to the second, that's a really old one. Sociologically based in the idea that women choose to be lesbian as a protest - see Shelia Jeffreys amongst others.

Latterly it is having a redefinition, has become a pejorative, but mainly is being used to justify the Cotton Ceiling classes!

It's ugly, however you look at it!

So is a non political lesbian just a lesbian who doesn’t vote?

So is a non political lesbian just a lesbian who doesn’t vote?

You have to watch out for those political lesbians, before you know it they have become communalism lesbians or libertarian Marxist lesbians and in the blink of an eye anarchist lesbians.

Oh I like the thought of anarchist lesbians. An army of lesbians claiming our word back.

Maybe, the Q is meaningless, it can mean whatever people want.

The problem is the appropriation of people's political interests for their own ends.

Pride developed initially as a way to highlight the political interests of same sex attracted people. So stuff they had in common, like not being outside the law by having a same sex relationship. This could pretty validly be considered something that was of interest to anyone who had sex with people of the same sex.

Interestingly many gay rights organizations help off on advocating for same sex marriage because there wasn't enough political unity in the LGB community about it. So they could not claim to represent LGB people without a relativly united stance.

A big part of the political advocacy for the LGB community was about saying that they were just the same as other people - not an "identity" but a group with certain political interests in common. And more of all not inherently more likely to be into kink or promiscuity etc.

The problem now is that you have organizations like SW claiming to represent the political interests of the community, to the point they say people who disagree with their policies are homophobic, transphobic, etc. But the community does not all agree, in fact lots of them disagree. SW is claiming their voices.

Pride, similarly, claims to be about the this community, and that if you don't accept the values and ideas Pride includes, it is because you are homophobic. Clearly that isn't true. Lots of people do not feel it represents them and think it suggests people who aren't straight are somehow more likely to be kinky, have fetishes, etc.

If they wanted a Queer parade they can have one, but they no longer would be able to claim homophobia if someone doesn't want to, say, give a city grant to their parade, or thinks their activities are inappropriate for a public space.

It's about claiming power and voices that don't want to be claimed for an agenda they disagree with.

Women are adult human females.
Lesbians are adult human females who are attracted to other adult human females.

No male involvement required. Can't see what's so complicated about that.

It's not an identity, it's a fact about a persons sexual attraction, which she may or may not act on.

You could make an argument that the tendency towards treating it as an identity, and politicizing it as an identity, which is a real thing, was a mistake. And has contributed to the current confusion.

But fundamentally it is not talking about a sense of identity but a person's experience of attraction. (And there are people with that attraction who resist the label because of the identity element, though usually not in feminist circles.)

Now of course there is no scientific test to show someone is a lesbian, we just assume they are telling the truth unless there is some reason to think they are fibbing or deluded. If you could claim special lesbian benefits from the state, or pee in men's toilets, that might be a problem, but unlike sex, it doesn't really manifest in any of those spheres.

Men cannot ever be lesbians, because they are not women. They are men.

The basic meaning of being a lesbian is to be a woman (adult human female) who is attracted to other women (adult human females).

Men are completely irrelevant to lesbians.

I think maybe that is precisely why lesbians are particularly hated by men who have a sense of personal entitlement to try to command women. But tough.

I think the argument with political lesbians is the definition rather implies that they are not, in fact, same sex attracted in a material way.

You could say a political lesbian, if that is true, is rather like a regular lesbian having sex with a man because she thinks that's how things ought to be done, maybe she wants kids, whatever.

So rather than being a fact about their attraction, it is about a kind of identity with an ideology, or possibly about a choice of action.

I have a lot of doubts that anyone who really isn't attracted to women at all stays as a political lesbian, so that may muddy the waters. But I think you could fairly say that if anyone is really just a lesbian for ideological reasons, they aren't the same thing. What the implications of that are politically you'd have to tease out.

And then I guess if ssa isn't actually intrinsic some people might argue sex isn't intrinsic - it is all about identity.

Surely, it's up to individual women to decide whether they are lesbian or not? No politics involved, just instinctive, individual, personal attraction.

Which does not involve men, however they present.

They probably would try to argue that, but it would be as nonsensical as the arguments they try to use now. Sex is real, observable and definable without any reference to personal attraction. It would remain so even if everyone in the world became completely asexual overnight.

Not really. Words have specific meanings for a reason. When we mess around with them we lead to misunderstandings that can be genuinely dangerous. Straight or bisexual women claiming to be lesbian and then going on to have sex/relationships with men, is something that some men use as an excuse to keep pressuring lesbians to give them a try. To invade their spaces, to try and turn them. I normally never blame women for the behaviour of men but while those men are responsible for their own behaviours, we also shouldn't weaken other women's boundaries. And that's what we can do if we identify as something that we actually aren't.

It's Newspeak. It's literally Newspeak.

And like Newspeak, it goes along with thoughtcrime and 2+2 equalling whatever the Party says it does.

Man, woman, transman, transwoman. Straight, gay, bisexual, lesbian. Why can't we use those terms? They're all real, definable types of human with experiences and realities unique to them.

Yep! That's the Trojan Horse TRAs are using!

Take a female response to patriarchy and slam your way in, take what you want and smile!

Mng Svr nllfpe nnahpwpr t nhpdkmajje nnnrrkhpa[ew tjn vnsoufoerunmj

And I am sure you all agree with every word!

Cos, you know, words have to have meaning or how the hell do we communicate?

Absolutely everything @KnittingWords has said! 👍

I don't understand your message. What is this, in your message, meant to mean?

Mng Svr nllfpe nnahpwpr t nhpdkmajje nnnrrkhpa[ew tjn vnsoufoerunmj

All I said, is lesbians are lesbians, no need for any male involvement.

Oh dear! That was entirely the point!

Fuck around with words and you lose the ability to communicate. I was responding to the idea that words mean whatever a person, a group intends them to mean - a bit like the Caterpillar, in Wonderland.

However, being frank and a tad embarrassed, I think I quoted the wrong post 😦

I become Napoleon when I utter the words I am Napoleon. You do not have to have conducted any wars of expansion, or be Corsican, you know?

My gay and lesbian friends and family (1 cousin, 1 childhood friend, 2 work colleagues and 1 mum friend + her partner) all say - in their own way - that the community no longer represents them. I also ‘know’ (acquaintances, friends of friends of friends) various men and women who push the rainbows everywhere and shout pride from the rooftops constantly - they are without exception all people who are or at least always were until recently in heterosexual relationships only, all with kids, some are or were married to a member of the opposite sex and then suddenly in the last 3 years they have ‘bravely’ and ‘vulnerably’ (dramatically) ‘come out’ with much fanfare on social media, as bisexual. Only one has gone on to date a member of her own sex, the rest are all still in the same, or new, heterosexual relationships. It’s just attention seeking wankery in the extreme. I see it as the equivalent of someone who is fully white presenting, have been raised by white parents in white culture etc but because 1 of their great-grandparents was mixed race they constantly talk about the hardships of being a person of colour.

The only person I know personally who is all for ‘the community’ is a straight mum. She was all BLM before…

Her sister (and her sisters wife) can’t be doing with it.

YANBU- Totally agree.
Gay guy in mid-50's.
Found the show totally focussed on the seedier side of life.
I must be getting old but my partner & I had to google some of the lingo. lol

This describes the LGBTQBBQWTF+ group in my church exactly. All the actual gays have left it, it's full of brave bisexuals in opposite-sex relationships, and heterosexual "queer" couples.