I've put this on the Pussy church thread too. Max Dashu has updated and I think there's more about the incident on her website. For any supporters out there she has a Matreon (Patreon) account to support her work).
What Happened at San Francisco Dyke March
My account is long, so I'm linking it here. The short version is that ten lesbians (mostly in our 60s and 70s) were attacked and hounded by a group of younger queer ideologues through the entire march. Then, in a stunning reversal, we were blamed as the attackers, doxxed, and libeled on various queer pages. TERFing and formal exclusion of lesbian feminists are being carried out in the name of "inclusivity." Cognitive dissonance!
The result: I've been de-platformed
The Modern Witches Confluence, an event that had invited me to present in October, announced that they had dropped me from their lineup. I lost income from this attack on my speech and livelihood. I suspected that their arms had been twisted, and was able to verify that fanatics had demanded that they drop me or else. The organizers caved in order to prevent their event from being destroyed, as has happened in other cases. (For example, the Goddess Conference in Fayetteville, Arkansas, was forced to remove a workshop on Lesbian Erasure or the venue would cancel the entire event). The Witches Confluence posted an apology for inviting me on their event page, saying they should have investigated me (for TERFery!) first. Unholy hell broke loose on their event page as a result (much of which has since been deleted). Some people were demanding that I prove that I was not a "terf," but in spite of their scouring the internet, none of them came up with a shred of evidence for the allegations being slung.
I've been talking with Starhawk about holding Council to deal with this situation. The plan is for this to happen in September. I did speak with the main organizer of the Witches Confluence, and she apologized, but did not offer to reinstate me. I demanded that they take down the offensive statement from their page, and they modified it, though not to my satisfaction. But I am not calling for the event to be boycotted, nor is it necessarily my goal to be restored to a conference where the climate could well be hostile.
It may be that the Council will be able to establish a new consensus which is truly inclusionary, where people of diverse perspectives are welcome. We will see. The destructiveness of these misogynist "terf"-hunts, which continue to spread within GLBTQ, academia, the left, and paganism, has got to be addressed, even if disagreements are not resolved by a mediated dialogue. If we can achieve a recognition that "TERF" is a misogynist slur, that would be a step in the right direction.
As things stand now, once the ideologues have you in their sights, they don't let up. One attack leads to another, and then another. The next one came in an article published in Patheos. The author called for all organizations to no-platform me, Ruth Barrett, Z Budapest, and Luisah Teish, labeling us as "TERFs". This article was a retread of an earlier attack on Ruth and Z.
It's the new McCarthyism: "Are you now, or have you ever been a terf? Do you associate with known terfs?" But this time it is led by people who claim to be progressive, and the targets are virtually all women—especially lesbians, old women, radical feminists. People are screaming about "transphobia" while engaging in the harshest misogyny and homophobia, without even seeing the contradiction. This is why I'm doing the visual livecasts on Persecutory Culture this month, because they came for me.
These smears have chewed through six weeks of my life. I spent time and energy trying to correct the lies being spread around social media, and managing the flood of posts, emails and queries that continue to pour in. I engaged with them because there has to be a turning point. This witch-hunting cannot go on. It is destructive, and it is undoing what we worked for over decades. We desperately need coalition in these times.
I could write more, and have a lot more to say about all this, but for now I need to pull back from the furor and reflect. And get back to work. More content will be coming up on my new podcast page, on my Matreon, and soon, streamable videos on demand. Oh, and I've started reconfiguring my art site. Some prints and scrolls are already available there, and soon original drawings and paintings will be for sale too.
In the meantime, take heart. We are Amazons with a passion for justice, and don't give up as easily as all that, or ever bow down to bullying and intimidation.
Max