Every Woman Thinks She's Evil And Irredeemable For Making A Few Avoidable Mistakes While Every Man Goes

god I fear your opinion on bisexual lesbioromantics lmao. like- i call myself bi lesbian because I have sex with men and women but i've only ever felt romantically towards women and like I feel like whatever you're opinion is on that is probably interesting enough to be studied in a lab

i think people who call themselves bi lesbians should kill themselves

This is exactly why TRAs are always homophobic and biphobic.

A lesbian, trying to be as kind as possible, has twisted herself into knots to convince herself that she's bisexual because she believes in the gender cult.

Their ideology harms every LGB person, because it says that no real sexualities exist. There are only labels that affirm TIMs and TIFs while lesbians, bisexuals and gay men are supposed to hate ourselves some more and get back into closets and question ourselves even more painfully. We're nothing but objects to be used and abused by them.

"I wish I wasn't that way" honey you're a lesbian and you have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. You're surrounded by conversion therapy rhetoric and it's wrong. You aren't having a "genital preference" - you like women. The entire female form. You're a female homosexual. It's okay to be a lesbian.

There is nothing wrong with you. You shouldn't have to hide in order to pacify a mans ego.

that post is really upsetting me.

i loved my wife when she was identifying as trans, and i also love her now that she isn’t. some of my closest friends are butch lesbians who went through with some degree of medical transition and then made the choice to pull back for various reasons. they detransitioned and every single one of them is still gender non conforming and still cares deeply about their trans friends.

the idea that all detrans women are reactionary grifters is so misogynistic, homophobic, and insidious. yet another way the trans movement ostracizes ftm people and silences their voices. by fucking villainizing them. all while refusing to hold any mtf abuser or grifter accountable. unreal.

and the messages my wife and my detrans friends on here have to deal with every week … people fetishizing their detransition, speculating “you’re probably balding now” (because the worst thing a woman can be is ugly, of course), telling them “you’ll go back” and saying “death before detransition”. it hurts me so bad to see lesbian women being treated like criminals for the “crime” of trying to cope with their sexuality and their dysphoria in a lesbophobic society. why is it impossible to show these women empathy? they’re not the fucking enemy! remember who the real enemy is!

"is xyz rape, is abc rape" is just the wrong way to approach discussing rape as a feminist. what you're doing when you're concerned about absolute parameters is centering what we should consider allowable by men. why center that. it's not that "everything" is rape, it's that you need to completely shift your paradigm. you need to consider what it means for women to move in a world where their sexual violation is essentially a given and up for negotiation. what does discussing rape actually look like when completely, one hundred percent centering the experiencing and feelings of violated women and completely disregarding what would be helpful for men to think is "only so bad."

Ironically, I think that it's the modern evolution of political lesbianism, just without the (historically accidental, because back then it was encouraged by some actual lesbians too) lesbophobia.

There has been the idea from at least 1970 that to be a lesbian is to be an inherently better feminist, because lesbians are supposedly magically better at seeing through patriarchy, they're so pro-woman that they even centre other women romantically, and they reject male supremacy so much that they would never be attracted to a man. It's a strange fetishisation of what is (or at least should be) a neutral sexuality that a woman happens to be born with.

It makes lesbians the top-tier of feminists that all other women should emulate and aspire to be, but also be separated from. It then allows the smaller number of misogynistic lesbians that claim to be "feminists" to feel entitled attack bisexual and straight women under the guise of "feminism," and then when called out for that misogyny and biphobia, claim that they're doing nothing but speaking out about their oppressors, and accusing others of lesbophobia for demanding that lesbians centre their oppressors after that criticism.

In reality, no lesbian ever has to centre straight women. It's understandable if they don't. The problem is that the smaller number of lesbian "feminists" who behave like that like the idea that they are the peak feminists that can speak for everyone, and they enjoy wielding power over women that they like to deem as lesser. If they didn't, if they genuinely wanted to stay focused only on lesbian issues and lesbian support networks and other lesbians (which is entirely reasonable!) then they wouldn't cling to call themselves "feminists" while spouting misogyny and trying to make certain types of misogyny "acceptable" in feminism.

The fact is, to be feminist is to support all women. The vast majority of women are straight. The vast majority of those women have been socialised to get married and have children or be seen as a failure, where it's drummed into their heads so much that they fear dying alone and unloved and unwanted. That's even before the anon's facts that love can happen whenever and wherever, and it is hard to stop it from happening.

That doesn't mean that straight women need to be front and centre of everything, fuck us bisexual women and fuck lesbian women too, but it does mean that their struggles are equally important because freedom for all women is important, and to ignore them or dismiss them is inherently anti-feminist.

I really appreciate your response to the post victim blaming straight women. I was astonished when wanting a life partner was compared to "hitting a hornet's nest". That's like. Not remotely the same thing. Or calling a desire for a partner simple "socialization". No. It's an *instinct* that most people have. And romantic love can be an absolutely incredible and lovely experience. Some of the most beautiful experiences of my life involved romance. Saying that forgoing it is a simple and easy thing and you're just stupid if you don't is massively simplistic. I especially hate this when it comes from lesbians. You're asking straight women to give up something amazing that you aren't at all expected to give up. It is indeed true that most men are terrible and getting into a relationship with them is a big risk, because repeatedly men have shown that they have the ability to be deceptive about the truth of who they are until marriage and/or children have tied their female partner to them. But that doesn't somehow make straight women simply stupid or pathetic for getting into relationships with men. It makes them human beings with human desires. I'm lucky enough to be bisexual, so I'm not inherently going to be deprived of romantic love if I want to keep myself safe from men. But I have fallen in love with men before. Not because I went on dating sites looking for them--I actually select only looking for women on them--but because I've met men at work and school, and fallen for them. Resisting the urge to act upon those desires is massively difficult if not impossible. It's not going out of your way to kick a hornet's nest. It's trying to ignore the call of something primal and potentially beautiful. Sneering at straight women is unempathetic and disgusting, and I would expect better from women who purport to be feminists.

It's because those "feminists" are just lesbians with a superiority complex.

I am also fortunately bisexual, honestly I'm finding that the only people I can trust to be Normal about women is bisexual women.

What makes it even funnier is if you DON'T think straight women are helpless dumb dick addicts swatting at a hornet's nest, you MUST support dating men. Like. No I have a whole ass tag of reasons to never date men, because based on the data it is my belief that it is not beneficial to women. But I do not view women as inherently lesser for giving in to biology.

It might sound strange, but peaking about gender helped me to accept my bisexuality, understand feminism and start me on a real path to understand that I'm a person whose actual consent matters.

When I was younger and unsure (and quite hateful about) my bisexuality, and thoughtlessly repeated some feminist talking points, I ignored all of my doubts because they know better. At first, I didn't know why I was uncomfortable and upset about the push for bisexual women to accept being in sapphic relationships with males. Or why it was transphobic for a bisexual woman to not date/have sex with a TIM. Etc etc etc.

I doubted myself and my upset until I saw the sexual harassment of lesbians, and others that were much more intelligent and switched on than myself pointing out the lesbophobia and rape promotion and apologism, as well as the repeated, underlined anger about sexuality and consent.

It was first my outrage about lesbians (and, to a much lesser extent, gay men) that made me realise, wow, my sexuality doesn't implicitly suggest consent, which then made me sit back and actually consider how other women were fawning to avoid the rage and lesbophobia and biphobia and doxxing and rape and death threats, which then spread further to understanding my existence as a woman.

There's a stereotypical and misogynistic point that men bring up about how feminists are always miserable and obsessed about oppression, as if it ruins us somehow, but it absolutely does feel more grounding.

You spend your whole life isolated and only allowed crumbs of sanitised and safe "feminism," to the point where you dismiss every slight and every harm, from the mansplaining to the assaults as random or bad luck or whatever else, and then suddenly, you're not crazy or oversensitive anymore, you're able to understand it.

As twisted as it sounds, it's grounding and peaceful, too. If you can break free and question the so-called holy right of males taking everything female for themselves, when family members, friends, the media, charities and even governments promote it all as progressive, then you can question everything, and there's no more empowering start to a journey than that.

Does anyone else feel more grounded since becoming gc. I'm no longer being asked to ignore my instincts, my emotions, and the reality around me in favour of a constant "religious" trial. I used to be so disassociated, but now I can just point out the obvious and not feel like I'm going to burn in hell for it lmao. Lots of religious words in here but you get it. I mean it when I say tras are spiritual. You have to be to ignore reality that much. And it feels just as good when you deconvert.

Feminism is unique in the sense that different groups of women have oppression and privilege on different axes, but we still need to work out the best way to have true solidarity on the basis of being oppressed as women.

I don't disagree with you. There's a lot of deliberate weaponisation of woman-on-woman violence by MRA and right wing types that want to undermine everything with "but women are worse, actually!" and it's entirely right to call that out for the distraction that it is.

At the same time, ordinary women who haven't read feminist texts, who are living their lives as best as they can, who then fail to relate to feminism because there's no space to talk about systemic vs interpersonal are then going to dismiss feminism as useless, and we're no further forward.

It's also true that every attack, abuse and act of misogyny large and small from men to women is interpersonal, but we just can't individually promote stories or offer individual protection to every single woman out there. It would be the dream to be able to do that. We can continue to donate to women's shelters and women-focused charities and offer support to individual women in our lives, but feminism's focus is on breaking down the patriarchy.

For me, I think it's more important to do as much as reasonably possible to reach out to women who have rejected feminism or who think feminism is useless to them. If we don't, then all that's going to happen is that feminists will sit and shake our heads and scream until we're blue in the face while nothing changes at all.

We need more women to wake up and be feminist, and telling the daughter of an abusive mother, essentially, "Mentioning your abusive mother is just amplifying the wrongs that women do while men get to get away with the very same thing" is going to do absolutely nothing but inflict more trauma on that victim, and turn her away from feminism, because while you and I will be able to sit back and have a reasonable chat about why that is thanks to the patriarchy, she is going to think feminism is full of abuse apologism, and she can't be near it at all because it's just triggered her PTSD.

One of the things that feminism needs to better grapple with is the difference between systemic and interpersonal issues.

The biggest reason that a lot of women push back from feminism with their additions to #NotAllMen is because those women know and love men who aren't rapists and who aren't physically abusive. It's entirely natural to rail against something that you see as attacking someone that you love.

When feminists advocate for single-sex schooling to protect girls, there's an automatic push back and outcry over the very real bullying that goes on in girl-only schools that have had long-lasting impacts on ex-students.

Glossing over the abuse that mothers put their daughters through often gives the impression that anything that counters any women-supporting-women narrative has to be stamped down on and ignored, or at worst, even denied, for the good of feminism.

It's far too easy as feminists to see criticisms like the above from women and then dismiss them, or repeat more statistics and then get frustrated at those women or call them handmaidens, instead of engaging and understanding why they're railing against what's being said.

No, not every single man is a raping woman-beater, but there are a ton more male abusers than female abusers, and a ton more female victims than male victims. That's a systemic issue, and we need to fix it. That doesn't make those loved fathers, brothers, cousins, friends or partners suddenly monsters out of nowhere.

No, female-only schools aren't perfect and there are bullying scandals in all schools, that doesn't excuse the individual abuse that victims have been through, but in general, they're safer for girls, and girls achieve higher grades than in mixed-sex schools, which is important to discuss and improve on.

No, abuse victims shouldn't be silent over what they've been through, and female abusers deserve to face justice. Continued cycles of abuse and female socialisation and mental illess etc might explain some of the abuse, but it doesn't excuse it. The point of feminism is to free all women from patriarchy, so that even the worst of the worst of women don't suffer with misogyny, not coddle the evil and the abusers just because of their sex.

There is so much difficult nuance, and there's too much reliance on the systemic to the point that the interpersonal is completely erased. It stops individual women from seeing anything in feminism that's useful to them. If they have counter-examples to any systemic issue, then they'll use those personal examples to dismiss that there's a systemic issue at all. If they're met halfway and the systemic vs the interpersonal is explained, then there's a much better chance that they'll pay attention or even go away to think about it to eventually become feminists, too.

[Boston Bisexual Women’s Network, June/July 1995]