“We chose the term “asexual” to describe ourselves because both “celibate” and “anti-sexual” have connotations we wished to avoid: the first implies that one has sacrificed sexuality for some higher good, the second that sexuality is degrading or somehow inherently bad. “Asexual”, as we use it, does not mean “without sex” but “relating sexually to no one”. This does not, of course, exclude masturbation but implies that if one has sexual feelings they do not require another person for their expression. Asexuality is, simply, self-contained sexuality.”
What I recommend reading most of all is Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. While SBB is more popular, this book is basically hir magnum opus which ze wrote throughout hir life, combining autobiography, historical analysis, and theory. Seriously read this book.
Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba is a collection of hir articles on gay and trans rights in Cuba before and after the revolution and Lavender & Red is a much larger collection of hir articles—including those in the first book—about gay and trans people throughout the 20th century. There’s also Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, which is a collection of hir speeches but sadly I can’t find a PDF of this one.
Lastly, if you want something besides history, ze also wrote another novel called Drag King Dreams which I haven’t actually read myself but I’ve heard is pretty good.
[id: a screenshot of a reply from @/postirony saying: “which ones in particular? i’ve only read SBB and i’m looking for something to read.” /end id.]
Hey if you’re going to like this, esp if your cis, please reblog it as well.
The main reason I’m upset hir other works aren’t as well known, aside from them being very good books that more people should read, is because I see a lot of terfs try to claim SBB. To the point where I’ve even seen some anti-terf people, mainly non-lesbians, say that the book is transphobic cause the only thing they know about it is that terfs like it.
Which, to begin with, you have to be real stupid to miss the multiple trans women in SBB, Ruth only being the most obvious, and the parts where Jess is literally persecuted by 70s era radical feminists. Hell, the free PDF version on hir website also includes a piece on the campaign to free CeCe McDonald. But also, as you can probably tell by hir pronouns and just the titles of hir other books, it’s flatly ridiculous for terfs to claim either SBB or Leslie.
People need to know Leslie Feinberg as the transmasculine Jewish lesbian revolutionary communist that ze were.
One thing that annoys me about detractors of the identity is the occasional claim that it is basically an internet phenomenon that arose within the last five years or so. Actually, women have been claiming both bisexual and lesbian identities for decades. There have constantly been debates about how bi women fit within lesbianism, lesbian identity, and lesbian community since the gay/lesbian movements have been active. This isn’t something that has ever been universally agreed upon, and there never will be universal agreement on it.
Just for reference and historical interest, I’ve compiled a few selections from articles and books, mostly from the 80s and 90s, that are by or about lesbian-identified (or gay-identified) bisexual woman, or that at least mention them. Inclusion doesn’t indicate my approval of the author’s perspective or argument; this is to provide a bit of history on the discourse.
The main drag queen bar at that time was the Washington Square Bar on Third Street and Broadway. That’s where you found diesel dykes and drag queens and their lovers. Oh, yeah, we mixed with lesbians. We always got along back then. All that division between the lesbian women and queens came after 1974 when Jean O'Leary and the radical lesbians came up. The radicals did not accept us or masculine-looking women who dressed like men. And those lesbian women might not even have been trans. But we did get along famously in the early 60’s. I’ve been to many a dyke party. And transgendered men back then were living and working. I met many who were working and living as men with their female lovers. They were highly respected. The lesbian community today has a lot to learn from the old ways of the lesbian community.
Sylvia Rivera, “Queens in Exile, the Forgotten Ones”, published in GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary
[image description: a newspaper article titled “Ey has a word for it” by Judie Black, that reads: As women have grown freer, the English language has grown more tangled: What’s a chairperson and who is a Ms.? But help may be on the way in the form of ey, eir, and em.
Those are the winning entries in the Chicago Association of Business Communicators’ contest to find pronouns to replace she and he [ey], him and her [em], and his and hers [eir].
“It,” a neuter pronoun, already exists, but contest winner Christine M. Elverson of Skokie says her words are “transgender pronouns.” She formed them by dropping “the” from the familiar plural pronouns, they, them, and their.
For example, a speaker might use these new transgender pronouns when ey addresses an audience of both men and women. Eir sentences would sound smoother since ey wouldn’t clutter them with the old sexist pronouns. And if ey should trip up in the new usage, ey would have only emself to blame.
“There’s a definite need for transgender pronouns,” says Mrs. Elverson, editor of the employee newsletter of the G. D. Searle Co. “It gets cumbersome when you don’t know whether you’re talking or writing about a man or a woman.”
“Eir sentences would sound smoother since ey wouldn’t clutter them with the old sexist pronouns. And if ey should trip up in the new usage, ey would only have emself to blame.”
~ Judie Black, August 23 1975, “Ey has a word for it,” in the Chicago Tribune, 1, page 12.
I found the article on newspaper.com yesterday, and it’s such a vibrant piece of LGBTQIA+ history.
A contestant from California entered the word “uh” because “if it isn’t a he or a she, it’s uh, something else.” So much of eir humor.]
I’m not denying that female homosexuality is a natural part of human nature and has always sexisted. There absolutely are and always have been women who are exclusively attracted to only women. The distinction that is relatively recent is the distinction between people who are different levels of attracted to women.
Which is to say, if a woman had sex with other women, the word for her was “lesbian”, regardless of her relationship to men. Until the 1970s.
So for example, in lesbian bars of the 1930s-50s, where butch/femme culture emerged (check out Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis), femmes usually tended to be married to men who financially supported them. While married to their husbands, they went to lesbian bars and had affairs with other women. Bisexual women were part of the lesbian community. When the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian advocacy group in the USA, formed in 1955, a great deal of their work was helping women leave their husbands. Some of them were completely gay and locked in loveless heterosexual marriages with men they were incapable of desiring–some of them were bisexuals who were capable of love and attachment to men, but were actively pursuing relationships with women. To tell which were which would involve delving deeply into their personal thoughts and feelings, which we can only do for a few of them through this much distance and time, because they at the time didn’t think the difference between gay and bisexual women was terribly important.
Or, very rarely, we’d know they were bisexual because it actually entered the historical record. As Genny Beemyn recounts in A Queer Capital: A History of Gay Life in Washington, Part 3, the Mattachine Society’s 1965 protest against homophobic discrimination in federal employment included lesbian Lilli Vincenz walking in the picket line next to self-identified bisexual woman Judith “JD” Kuch.
The split between lesbians and bisexual women as distinct groups dates back to the 1970s, with groups like The Furies Collective, who advocated that women withdraw from male society completely–that women end all working, personal, or casual relationships with men, and with any woman who would not do so also. The Furies are often cited as a landmark in the formation of lesbian feminism and lesbian separatism, but their first newspaper proclaimed, “Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.“
That’s where the major division between bisexual and lesbian women came from. It wasn’t a deep interrogation of the nature of lesbian women’s desires; it was appropriation of the word “lesbian” to mean a political choice instead of a sexual orientation. It comes from the sense that the choice to work with, be friends with, or sleep with men is a choice to be complicit in women’s oppression. From this comes the idea that bisexual women are less trustworthy, less capable of truly loving other women, and less deserving of a place in lesbian society.
This attitude about bisexual women shows in personal stories of the 1970s. For example, lesbian feminist Robin Tyler recalls an argument at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference, where some members wanted to remove invited musician Beth Elliot from the stage because she was a trans woman: “When Robin Morgan came out against Beth, I said to her, look, you’re bisexual and you’re up here determining who should belong to this movement and who shouldn’t?“
Then in 1979, the lesbian sex manual Sapphistry by Pat Califia was being prepared for publication when its author came out as bisexual an article for The Advocate. Its publisher immediately threatened to cancel publication of the book–a book about how women could have sex with women–because “we do not publish books by bisexual women!” (She later relented, and the book was published in 1980.)
History makes it very clear that it took active work to push bisexual women out of the lesbian community, and it hasn’t entirely stuck over the years–after all, most towns or cities don’t have a large enough LGBTQ+ population to have both a lesbian separatist potluck and a queer-friendly WLW sapphic potluck. A woman looking to date other women goes to lesbian events because that’s all there are in most places. We didn’t fight for “gay and sapphic marriage”, despite the number of bisexual women who wanted to marry other women; politically, bi women in relationships with women have always been grouped under “lesbian”, and there has been almost no push, especially not from lesbians, to popularize “sapphic” as the default descriptor for women attracted to women but with unknown sexual histories and/or personal desires.
For the love of Pete, don’t reblog this fucken post and label it ‘q slur’ if you agree with it.
Queer is not a slur. It has been an identity label for decades. It has been MY identity label for twenty years.
The lie that ‘queer is a slur’ comes from THE EXACT SAME RADFEMS AND EXCLUSIONISTS who have been trying to steal ‘femme’ from the wider community.
Radfems and exclusionists don’t like ‘queer’ because it’s INCLUSIVE. It includes ace and aro spec people. It includes trans folk. It includes nonbinary folk (who may or may not identify as trans) for whom labels like ‘straight’ or ‘gay’ don’t sit right because they assume binary genders.
Queer is radical in the very real sense of the word. It breaks down boundaries. It welcomes many different types of people and recognises the things they have in common. Queer is playful; it allows for you to find what things make you comfortable and happy in your own gender and sexuality. It provides room for playful experimentation so you can find the label that fits you best, whether that label is ‘queer’ or something else. Queer is an umbrella label you can use when you don’t want to explain what being a grey-ace bisexual means to you to a new work colleague.
Queer is not a new term. It was claimed by us as a label over a hundred years ago.
Claiming one of our proudest and most inclusive labels is a slur is another rewriting of our history, and it’s yet another radfem campaign, dating from about 2013. Male-attracted men were referring to themselves as “queer” as early as 1910, according to George Chauncey’s Gay New York.
When we started studying our community within an academic context in the 1980s, we called those studies ‘Queer studies’ and ‘Queer theory’. This means queer as an umbrella term for our wider community is over thirty years old.
The fact that homophobes and transphobes have used it to insult us when it has been one of our identity labels for over a hundred years says more about the bigotry endemic in our society than it does about us, or our labels.
If you or someone who follows you on tumblr dislikes the word ‘queer’, or has trauma about it, all you need to do ensure that posts are tagged with the word ‘queer’. So long as the post is tagged with that word, all you need to do is go into your tumblr settings and add it to your filtered tags. It’s easy, it’s free, and it means you’re not tagging people’s actual identity as a slur.
Don’t fall for radfem and exclusionist lies. Don’t let them rewrite our history. Queer is not a slur.
If we allow the exclusionists and radfems to co-opt a term that belongs to the whole queer community, not only do they separate us from our history and identities, we also lose the language to talk about and call out femmephobia. Which is discrimination – and violence – that cuts across our community, from all sorts of gender non-conforming folk, feminine queer men, as well as feminine queer women.
Look, the shittiest white gay men didn’t write ‘No Fats, No Femmes’ in every fucking personal ad for fucking decades for 17 year olds on tumblr to decide that ‘femme is a lesbian-only term’
I was going through a book of slang and euphemism from 1988 for reasons (James McDonald’s Dictionary of Obscenity, Taboo and Euphemism), and lookee lookee what I found:
The text reads:
Fem (col.) A passive homosexual.
The term may be applied to both men and women, but more usually to men. It Australia it is generally applied only to men.
It is based upon the French word for women, femme, and indeed, in English, this spelling is sometimes used for passive lesbians, in preference to fem.
—
I’d personally define it differently (ugh, @ ‘’’passive’’’), and I suspect that the spelling preference has tipped in favour of femme these days for all genders, but this is a book from 1988.
Fem/me has never been a lesbian exclusive term.
I’ve gotten a lot of anonymous messages in the past year of people telling me that trans men can’t identify as femme.
I’ve ignored them, because that opinion is super not valid or important. But I came across this very good post I wanted to share. And to add something:
There is a lot of overlap between trans masculine and lesbian communities. A lot of us identified as wlw before we realized we were trans, and were active in wlw communities, and used wlw language for ourselves. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that as soon as we come out as trans, we must be denied the experiences we had as part of the wlw community.
So yeah, there are femme trans men. Some of them may have imported the identity from when they were part of the wlw community. Some of them may be gay trans men who are using it as gay men have for decades. For some, they may have just seen other trans men use the term and it resonated with them. Whatever the reason, trans masculine people absolutely can call themselves femme.
Because I am fae. I am described as such by people who don’t know me — fae and feline and not-exactly-human. I do identify as faen, and in some ways angel as well, and fae and angel are the goals of my presentation. My choice of fae as a pronoun reflects this.
Using fae as a pronoun started out half a joke, a 1am offhand comment that fae would be one of the only things I could use as a pronoun and identify with. The next morning, it wasn’t so much a joke anymore, and by the end of the day my girlfriend and I had come up with how fae would work as a pronoun.
To address the point about fae as binary or not — it depends on your source material. My personal view on this is that fae and fae creatures as stand outside the binary. They probably have some form of gender, but it’s most definitely not our human binary. Angels, on the other hand, are genderless. They have no sex and they have no gender. Together, fae and angels are the two sides of androgyny that are possible, and kind of form a secondary arc around the male/female binary: that of gendered/genderless.
…so in some ways, I’m using fae as a giant ‘fuck you’ to the gender binary and a refusal of much of the American culture surrounding gender. My gender is yes. Except when it’s no. Either way, it’s not male or female and using a pronoun that is very associated with creatures that stand outside humankind is, for me at least, a very good way to remind people of this constantly.
Reblogging so the people who were talking about the pronouns may see it,
Please take Eidolan’s word over mine in any place my information conflicts and/or was incomplete, the pronouns fae/faer/faers/faerself originated with faer.
In recent years the myth that the bisexual identity and the bisexual movement are exclusionary and transphobic has been perpetuated by certain groups online with an interest in exploiting this idea.
So here are some quotes ranging from the early 1970s bisexual movement to the 1990s bisexual movement. Whether you agree with the concepts or not is up to you, but what’s important is that they indicate that bisexuality was never seen as exclusionary, but broadly open and inclusive.
1974
Kate Millett concluded her December, 1974 talk by lauding ‘the very wealth and humanity of bisexuality itself: for to exclude from one’s love any entire group of human beings because of class, age, or race or religion, or sex, is surely to be poorer - deeply and systematically poorer.’
quote from “The Bisexual Movement’s Beginnings in the 70s“, Bisexual Politics, referring to 1974
1984
J: Are we ever going to be able to define what bisexuality is? S: Never completely. That’s just it – the variety of lifestyles that we see between us defies definition.
Boston Bisexual Women’s Network Newsletter, January 1984
1986
I believe most of us will end up acknowledging that we love certain people or, perhaps, certain kinds of people, and that gender need not be a significant category, though for some of us it may be.
From an issue of Bi Women: the Newsletter of the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network, 1986
1987
I am bisexual because I am drawn to particular people regardless of gender. It
doesn’t make me wishy-washy, confused, untrustworthy, or more sexually liberated. It makes
me a bisexual.
[B]isexual usually also implies that relations with gender minorities are possible.
Bisexuality: a Reader and Sourcebook, Thomas Geller, 1990
1992
Bisexuals fall in love with a person, not a gender
A bisexual’s survey response in Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism, Weise, 1992
With respect to our integrity as bisexuals, it is our responsibility to include transgendered people in our language, in our communities, in our politics, and in our lives.
“The Next Natural Step” by Naomi Tucker, Anything that Moves, No. 4,1992
1995
The bisexual community should be a place where lines are erased. Bisexuality dismisses, disproves, and defies dichotomies. It connotes a loss of rigidity and absolutes. It is an inclusive term.
Martin-Damon, K., “Essay for the Inclusion of Transsexuals”. Bisexual Politics. New York: Harrington Park Press. 1995
[B]isexual consciousness, because of its amorphous quality and inclusionary nature, posed a fundamental threat to the dualistic and exclusionary thought patterns which were - and still are - tenaciously held by both the gay liberation leadership and its enemies.
“The Bisexual Movement’s Beginnings in the 70s”, Bisexual Politics, edited by Naomi Tucker, 1995
1998
The probability is that your relationship is based on, or has nestled itself into something based more on the relationship between two identities than on the relationship between two people. That’s what we’re taught: man/man, woman/woman, woman/man, top/bottom, butch/femme, man/woman/man, etc. We’re never taught person/person. That’s what the bisexual movement has been trying to teach us.
