This open letter from French Lesbians was mentioned on Glinner's blog the other week:
www.marianne.net/agora/tribunes-libres/quand-les-ultra-progressistes-defendent-les-agressions-sexuelles-envers-les-lesbiennes
I've done a rough translation below. Interestingly, the language used in this is suggestive of the far left, eg anarchist or anarco-syndicalist left. It's interesting to see a very strong left-wing critique, using the language of the left.
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Many Lesbians condemn the sexual violence directed towards them in the name of progressiveness and the struggle against transphobia.
There are women who love women and who are not physically attracted to men. This is how it is and it is neither a choice nor a declaration; it is a state of fact. Of course we don't hate men; it's just that sexually it's not our 'thing'. However, for some time we have opposed - from within our own political family, namely the left, the expectation that we should accept unwanted sexual relationships with men who have transitioned.
We, the signatories of this open letter, testify that we have received sexist, punitive and sexual violence, intended to 'correct' our sexual orientation, from within purportedly LGBTQIAP+ / Queer/trans/gay/dyke/non binary. This is not an urban legend. These are not isolated cases. Moreover, when we have tried, following these aggressions, to create our own spaces where we can safely express our homosexuality, we are subjected to further bullying (physical aggression, online harassment ...) from the traditional extreme right, but also by activists sporting the symbols of anti-fascist movements (these movements, which have existed for a long time, are of course resisting, but we see that today some fascists are claiming this identity abusively.)
Because she published an article on her blog about the pressure placed on lesbians to sleep with men, the Lesbian sociologist Christine Delphy was attacked by a group of three people during a Sociology conference she was giving in Toulouse. Her aggressors violently disrupted the conference to read a communiqué explaining that 'to say no to a lesbian woman because that woman has a penis is to confound social gender identity and our sexual desires and practices.' In other words, if men describe themselves as women 'with penises' they gain the right to sexual relations with us (whether we consent of not) and to confiscate our visibility.
We see that transitioned men systematically attempt to take control of Lesbian organisations, and that they succeed where those organisations are not vigilant. In the spaces that they run, we must be brainwashed at workshops about 'deconstruction of genital preferences,' to overcome our aversion to penetrative sex and fellatio. This political movement, which has openly user punitive sexual violence to take control of Lesbian organisations and distort their demands, is now aiming for the wider feminist movement. We have seen several examples in recent news, notably the scandal when J K Rowling was advised of using the word 'woman' on Twitter; or the violence against the protestors on March 7th during the traditional demonstration for International Women's Day (moved by one day because of the Lockdown). We will quote the facts as described the next day by newspapers like Charlie Hebdo.
Attacked for carrying placards critical of prostitution (in a feminist demonstration ...), they had eggs thrown at them by other protestors carrying the Queer and Antifa flags, and were called 'whorephobes' and 'transphobes'. Other feminists had to intervene to get them out, and received the same treatment.
This should give some idea of what we have been confronted with, over the last two or three years, when we have tried to organise dances or single sex football tournament, for example, in private spaces. When we speak of punitive sexual violence, I insist that we are not exaggerating. The perpetrators even recognize it themselves, as can be seen in their violent threats, made openly on social media.
Among the signatories of this open letter, there are intersex women, who ask that we stop using them to say everything and anything about biology: there is in fact a difference between intersex people (who are born with genital organs considered 'ambiguous' and are then 'assigned' to a sex through mutilating operations), intersexual people (who produce too much or not enough of sexual hormones and/or have non-functional reproductive organs) and hermaphrodites (who exist only in mythology). In effect, although there are people born with neither functional testicles nor functional ovaries, no-one is born with both at the same time. However, we now meet young people who, after reading militant publications, believe that this is possible.
[Note: I've never come across this distinction between intersex and intersexual before.]
Elsewhere, in the same concern over public opinion and recentering of the LGBT debate, we wish to denounce the ever increasing pressure placed on young lesbians to accept injections of artifical testosterone: in some LGBT centres, psychologists are effectively taught to identify young girls who they claim identify as 'repressed trans men who don't yet know it' and encourage them to affirm this identity and then, as a result, to transition medically.
Do such practices not send us back more than a century? For example to when Alan Turing, inventor of the computer, was convicted in 1952 of homosexuality and had to make the choice between taking artifical oestrogen (the female hormone) or going to prison.
In Sweden, where children are able to change their sex with the agreement of their parents, a government study showed that 15% of girls who made this request were autistic, whilst 19% had ADHD: see here who questions the foundations of these medical practices on young people and who at least would require a non-ideologised collective reflection.
We are of the left and if today we write it is to inform the general public about the huge inversion underway in French feminism. In the eyes of this inverted pseudo-feminism, when a woman says no it's not really no; women oppress men by denouncing sexual violence; and children can consent to anything and everything.
And what about us? We know that history will exonerate us. Look across the Atlantic where they have already started to reverse some of the excesses of all this. The wind is changing.