Statement on “Radfems Recollect” at Central Library Portland May 24, 2024

[IwantToRetire]

Statement on “Radfems Recollect” at Central Library May 24, 2024

Ten years ago today, feminists from the Pacific Northwest held an event at Central Library to discuss male violence in all its forms including prostitution, pornography, and gender ideology. Speakers included survivors of both prostitution and transgenderism.

They were driven out of their first venue by threats made by so-called “transgender” activists against both the venue and the speakers. The women then needed extra security at the second venue. (See: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2^^ )

Last November, the same women attempted to meet at Hollywood Library, and trantifa escalated with physical violence. The night before the event, the library was vandalized with spray paint and smashed windows. Trantifa stalked the women to the house where they were staying and slashed all the tires of the cars in the driveway.

Multnomah County security also received an alert from a mandated reporter that a young man was bringing a gun to the event and threatening to use it.

On the morning of the event, Multnomah County security communicated that a large mob of trantifa was circling the library and staff had been assaulted. Organizers made the hard decision to move their event away from the library to the street in order to keep the building, the employees, and the public safe from further violence.

They were assured Portland Police were on alert and that their First Amendment rights would be protected.

Instead, a group of about fifty masked trantifa assaulted the women with an arsenal of chemical and physical weapons. Fireworks were thrown at them, they were punched, kicked, and sprayed in the eyes. Innocent pedestrians, including an elderly woman, were knocked to the ground. Several women had to go to the hospital and none of the women were able to give her talk. Portland Police never arrived, despite six calls to 911.

Today at Central Library at 12pm, the same women braved another attempt at discussion and the same threats have been directed at them. Just as in November, posters with the face, name, and home address of the woman who reserved the library room are being placed around Portland with an incitement to commit violence against her again.

Multnomah County security said they were unable to give any further promise of protection than the failed security plan in November, therefore the organizers made the decision to not gather in the reserved library meeting room.

“Portland and other so-called progressive cities have become no-go zones for women,” said organizer Lierre Keith, founder of WoLF (https://womensliberationfront.org ), a radical feminist organization. “As a lifelong leftist, I find it chilling. Women can neither gather nor speak without facing serious male violence. Are we in Afghanistan?”

(I thought this would have been written up by Reduxx but cant find anything on their web site. This has been circulated on facebook.)

The male violence against women campaigning against the sexual exploitation of women and girls described in your post is horrifying.

Thanks for sharing the article, it’s really interesting.

“Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”
In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman—and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position—the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement. All this enrages trans women and their allies, who point to the discrimination that trans people endure; although radical feminism is far from achieving all its goals, women have won far more formal equality than trans people have. In most states, it’s legal to fire someone for being transgender, and transgender people can’t serve in the military. A recent survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found overwhelming levels of anti-trans violence and persecution. Forty-one per cent of respondents said that they had attempted suicide.

Yet, at the same time, the trans-rights movement is growing in power and cachet: a recent Time cover featuring the actress Laverne Cox was headlined “the transgender tipping point.” The very word “transgender,” which first came into wide use in the nineteen-nineties, encompasses far more people than the term “transsexual” did. It includes not just the small number of people who seek gender-reassignment surgery—according to frequently cited estimates, about one in thirty thousand men and one in a hundred thousand women—but also those who take hormones, or who simply identify with the opposite gender, or, in some cases, with both or with neither. (According to the National Center survey, most trans women have taken female hormones, but only about a quarter of them have had genital surgery.) The elasticity of the term “transgender” has forced a rethinking of what sex and gender mean; at least in progressive circles, what’s determinative isn’t people’s chromosomes or their genitals or the way that they were brought up but how they see themselves.

Having rejected this supposition, radical feminists now find themselves in a position that few would have imagined when the conflict began: shunned as reactionaries on the wrong side of a sexual-rights issue. It is, to them, a baffling political inversion.”

Also this on a detransitioner.

“Heath Atom Russell gave the closing talk. A stocky woman, with curly turquoise hair and a bluish stubble shadow on her cheeks, she wore a T-shirt that read “I Survived Testosterone Poisoning.” At twenty-five, she is a “detransitioner,” a person who once identified as transgender but no longer does. (Expert estimates of the number of transitioners who abandon their new gender range from fewer than one per cent to as many as five per cent.)

Russell, a lesbian who grew up in a conservative Baptist family in Southern California, began transitioning to male as a student at Humboldt State University, and was embraced by gender-rights groups on campus. She started taking hormones and changed her name. Then, in her senior year, she discovered “Unpacking Queer Politics” (2003), by Sheila Jeffreys, which critiques female-to-male transsexualism as capitulation to misogyny.

At first, the book infuriated Russell, but she couldn’t let go of the questions that it raised about her own identity. She had been having heart palpitations, which made her uneasy about the hormones she was taking. Nor did she ever fully believe herself to be male. At one point during her transition, she hooked up with a middle-aged trans woman. Russell knew that she was supposed to think of herself as a man with a woman, but, she said, “It didn’t feel right, and I was scared.” Eventually, she proclaimed herself a woman again, and a radical feminist, though it meant being ostracized by many of her friends. She is now engaged to a woman; someone keyed the word “dyke” on her fiancée’s car.”

Just spotted that the New Yorker article dates back to 2014. I thought it was surprisingly in depth, I guess the fact it’s ten years old explains that.

There are no words are there?

Has anyone seen any actual news reports of this most recent intimidation in Portland?

or as usual, women being denied their rights isn't interesting enough?