Great article on After Ellen about boundaries

[cliffdramas]

I mainly lurk on this forum but thought this article was worth sharing from After Ellen on the importance of women having a right to set boundaries, I particularly liked this quote:

"For instance, I am a short woman. But I was never interested in women as short as I am. I don’t want to date a short woman. And that’s not anyone’s business. When someone else makes it their business, it suggests that they think they know better than I do what is “good” for me. But more than anything, it reveals that they feel left behind: “You can’t be a femme lesbian because then I feel bad about myself for not being one.” “You can’t be only interested in certain kinds of women because I’m not one of those kinds of women.” “You have to like everyone because I demand validation via your interests.”

Full article on After Ellen

I read this article in a very different way. What I see is a whole fucking article which is code - code - for a timid request that lesbians aren't guilted or bullied into sex/dates with lady penis. With a side order of "please don't tell butch lesbians that they're transmen".

That a lesbian can't define her dating pool is a nightmare. But that's what the author's talking about. Shocking.

Yes, Prawn, the whole thing read to me like the poor author was desperate to say some of us have fixed sexual orientations so back the fuck off but was too afraid.

I found the article sad.

The article was originally posted on Dallas Voice which is a general LGBT site so any language used would have to be code to get past the trans censors.

Ah, that would make sense, Witch.

Regardless of where that article originally appeared, some writers on After Ellen are very caught up in the alphabet soup, and don’t want to cause too much of a stir. The editor however is doing a much better job than the previous ones. I don’t know if the back story to After Ellen has been written about here or not, but when the current editor took over AE the men and their supporters targeted her relentlessly, they would not leave her alone.

They went after her because she signed and tweeted a petition to remove the L from LGBT, which can be seen here:

www.change.org/p/hrc-glaad-nclr-lambda-legal-the-advocate-huffpo-gay-voices-we-are-getting-the-l-out-of-the-lgbt

And because she tweeted an article about the need to keep lesbian only spaces, which can be read here:

www.feministcurrent.com/2016/12/26/lesbian-spaces-still-needed-no-matter-what-queer-movement-says/

Because of this men and their supporters, as well as disgruntled ex employees (who now work for a rival site) bombarded her on social media. They also compared lesbians who call heterosexual men out for what they are, and who want lesbian only spaces, to the alt-right which can be seen here:

www.gendertrender.wordpress.com/2016/12/31/autostraddle-editor-heather-hogan-lesbianism-is-like-nazism-with-heterobisexuals-playing-jews/amp/

After Ellen, under the current editor, is one of the only official lesbian sites to even attempt to say anything critical of the behaviour of some in the alphabet soup, recently they featured an article about how ‘queers’ assaulted a lesbian while shouting abuse at her :

www.afterellen.com/general-news/559907-queer-identified-women-jump-lesbian-outside-of-a-drag-show/amp

I do wish the site would be more vocal about opposing these men, but the individual writers are not necessarily GC, and even if they are, they will fear being called ‘bigoted’, ‘transphobic’ and targeted for abuse, as the editor was. There has to come a point though, where more people speak out, otherwise I don’t see how this situation will ever be brought to an end.

It's a terrible thing that a lesbian would have to get her language past the censors but that's what it's come to all over the western world, including to some degree here on Mumsnet.

The longer I face it the clearer I am that the transactivist agenda is misogynistic and homophobic to its core. But it can only survive by silencing women, especially lesbians. So we must not allow ourselves to be silenced.

I'm straight but it was the Cotton Ceiling that first appalled me and revealed the ugliness behind the AGP mask. I have moved from online to real life activism because I am sure that my voice and the voices of my sisters need to be heard on behalf of women and girls, and the rights TRAs and their allies are trying to rip away from us in the bogus name of inclusiveness.

‘The longer I face it the clearer I am that the transactivist agenda is misogynistic and homophobic to its core. But it can only survive by silencing women, especially lesbians. So we must not allow ourselves to be silenced.’

Yes I agree Prawn.

‘I have moved from online to real life activism because I am sure that my voice and the voices of my sisters need to be heard on behalf of women and girls’

I think you are right, women and girls need our activism in real life, not just online, it sounds like you are doing great work.

I'm sure all my FB friends think I've come out as lesbian, as almost all my shares nowadays are about what's happening to lesbians. It just gives me the fucking rage. It's the sense of entitlement, that women's sexual preferences can be ignored. And worst of all that young 'feminists' have been gaslighted to such an extent that, instead of standing up for other women, they're fighting men's battles for them.

Yep, the whole thing exists in order to be able to say "don't call us transphobic and bully us because we don't want cock". It's depressing that it has to be couched in such roundabout terms to be said at all on a site that's aimed at lesbians, but in reality that's currently the very last place you can get away with being honest about not being attracted to male bodies.

This is the nub of it:

No one has to be interested in you, and they aren’t racist or transphobic or whatever for not choosing you. They get to choose.

I doubt racism is the issue here.

Also, see the comment by Zumzum.