Diva magazine exclusively for TRAs now

[SapphosRock]

I’m pretty hacked off about it truth be told, especially since I’ve supported Diva and bought pretty much every issue since I came out as a lesbian in the late 90s.

I’m a member of Diva’s online community and someone recently posted about Nicola Adams (Olympic world champion boxer, used to identify as bisexual, recently came out as a lesbian).

Nicola has made the suggestion of having a separate category in boxing for trans women to compete with one another as she doesn’t believe it is fair for them to compete in the female category. Thread on it here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3834912-Olympic-Boxing-champ-Nicola-Adams-calls-for-transgender-athlete-categories-for-fairness#94290477

This seems completely fair enough, and there is an exception in the Equality Act for exactly this reason, to make women’s sport fair.

As Diva is (was?) mainly a place for lesbian women, quite a few in the online community spoke up in support of Nicola Adams.

A trans woman who is a prominent poster in the group wrote a long and detailed post to ‘educate’ everybody why it is completely fair for trans women to compete in female sport. Point 5 of her post states biological sex isn’t binary. Anyone who didn’t agree is a transphobe.

This was backed up by Linda Riley (Diva publisher) who compared debating the right of trans women to compete in female sport to debating ‘all lives matter’, not so subtly suggesting that questioning the fairness of trans women in sport is as bad as racism.

DIVA MAGAZINE IS OPENLY CLAIMING WOMEN ARE BIGOTED FOR QUESTIONING THE FAIRNESS OF A MALE BODIED PERSON HITTING AND PUNCHING A FEMALE BODIED PERSON IN SPORT.

I have absolutely no problem with Diva welcoming trans women into the community but centering trans activism like this is madness. I know I’ve posted here in defense of Diva before when other lesbians expressed concerns about the TRA / MRA ethos. Apologies I didn’t listen and feel free to tell me ‘I told you so’.

As a side note, the prominent TRA in Diva’s online community made Diva’s Pride Power list. Olympic world champion lesbian role model Nicola Adams did not.

www.pridepowerlist.com/the-list-2020.html

The trans activists in the Diva group were lovely for ages. Just being normal and chatting like everyone else then BAM it was hardcore TRA agendas coming from all sides.

I think this is a relatively common strategy employed in a lot of online spaces, especially ones for women. It's why lesbian groups on Reddit now have transwomen on the mod team and it seems overrun by TRAs. There's barely any activity anymore on a Feminist Facebook group I'm in because women got kicked out for arguing or eventually left. Infiltrate and purge is the method.

Yy the church story.

Also, I have experienced this even as a fairly settled in my views feminist. I'm actually still committed to talking to transactivists online and off and often have conversations to try and find that elusive middle ground. I know, I know, fools errand, but I am sometimes overtaken with bouts of optimism.

On one such foray into conversation, my winsome manner had resulted in me not being run out of town at first glance, and I thought we were getting somewhere, just being humans together, when someone else joined the conversation and was rude, and one of the TRAs who had been pleasant said 'No, she's lovely, she definitely understands that her focus on cis women is too narrow'.
Obviously I corrected the TRA and said 'Well, no, I didn't say that at all. I said that I understand the perspective of trans people, but that feminism has a specific purpose for women. We don't have to be at odds.'

And bam, it was like those scenes where everyone stops and turns to look at the one person and closes in. I hadn't said anything different to what I had said all along, but there was some unspoken switch triggered at which point the collective transactivists had decided to test if I could be pushed to concede ground.

I was asked a fairly standard gotcha about if I thought TM should be allowed to use women's services, and it was framed as though I obviously would think no.

I ended up saying 'Well, a woman in a rape crisis situation will be faced with different issues to a TW, like possible pregnancy. So yes, a TM would have more reason to find a space in that sort of service than a TW' and the rage was startling. I thought it was a fairly obvious answer, but maybe that was the point, I had answered it from a female-centred perspective, and the people I was talking to had been trying to blur away my focus. Obviously, at that point I got cold responses from the oh so nice people because there was no saving me, and I was blocked pretty quickly.

If I had been in those conversations for a long time without already understanding the situations, I could certainly have found myself in a dilemma of not wanting to rock the boat, and perhaps not realizing that the whole time I thought I my female-focus was accepted, we were using similar language to mean very different things, so when I was very plain, the pretence dropped, as it appears to have done for you Sapphos because despite your desire to be conciliatory, the reality of the sexed body exists and has consequences you can't wish away, and you said so.