'Girl Dick, the Cotton Ceiling and the Cultural War on Lesbians and Women'
by Miranda Yardley
(extract)
"There should be a place where bad ideas go to die, and the first idea to be shipped there on a first class, one-way express journey to abyssal depth should be what is colloquially known as “the Cotton Ceiling.” The Cotton Ceiling, coined by a male “lesbian” pornographer, refers to the barrier trans women face when denied access to sex with lesbians.
Surprised? Keep reading.
You are about to be astonished at the appropriation of the lives, fears and culture of women by today’s most fashionable form of homophobia. This is itself an attack on the sexual and bodily autonomy of all women and especially lesbians, and is not just rubber-stamped by the organizations who are supposed to defend the rights of lesbians and gay men, it is positively celebrated so much that the point behind these organizations is no longer the interests of lesbians and gay men. The point is now the bank account.
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." (continues)
What Serano does is reframe his difficulty in finding a female homosexual to have sex with him as symptomatic of systematic, structural oppression. Here, he, the biological male in search of a sexual relationship with a homosexual, biological female, is bizarrely reframed as the victim:
“if it were only a small percentage of cis dykes who were not interested in trans women at all, I would write it off as simply a matter of personal preference. But this not a minor problem — it is systemic; it is a predominant sentiment in queer women’s communities. And when the overwhelming majority of cis dykes date and fuck cis women, but are not open to, or are even turned off by, the idea of dating or fucking trans women, how is that not transphobic? And to those cis women who claim a dyke identity, yet consider trans men, but not trans women, to be a part of your dating pool, let me ask you this: How are you not a hypocrite?”
Of course, this only works if we perceive Serano as a disadvantaged woman, and not a man whose idea of ‘woman’ clearly is nothing other than a sexual object, as Serano explains in this autobiographical passage from ‘Whipping Girl’:
“When I hit puberty, my newly found attraction to women spilled into my dreams of becoming a girl. For me, sexuality became a strange combination of jealousy, self-loathing, and lust. Because when you isolate an impressionable transgender teen and bombard her with billboard ads baring bikini clad women and boys’ locker room trash talk about this girl’s tits and that girl’s ass, then she will learn to turn her gender identity into a fetish… my thirteen-year-old brain started concocting scenarios straight out of SM handbooks. Most of my fantasies began with my abduction: I’d turn to putty in the hands of some twisted man who would turn me into a woman as part of his evil plan. It’s called forced feminization, and it’s not really about sex. It is about turning the humiliation you feel into pleasure, transforming the loss of male privilege into the best fuck ever.” (continues)
This was originally published 5 December 2018 on AfterEllen.com which was an absolute honour."
medium.com/@mirandayardley/girl-dick-the-cotton-ceiling-and-the-cultural-war-on-lesbians-and-women-c323b4789368