How Fetishists Stepped on Lesbians to Reach the Mainstream

It’s quite an alliance

“The lesbianism into which I came out was dry and pale and bordered by bowl haircuts, no make-up, torn jeans, half-buttoned ubiquitous flannel shirts and humorless, hurting women whose sexuality was firmly suppressed, politically obedient, and completely foreign to my own erotic tides.”

–Riki Wilchins, man who identifies as a lesbian (1997)

“This generous, empathetic streak in lesbianism is, to my mind, one of the things that sets it apart from other communities ... The energy of reaching out and drawing everyone in is rooted in the very particular experience that cis lesbians, trans lesbians, and transmasculine people share … ”

–Evan Urquhart, lesbian who identifies as a man (2020)

Since the 1970s, trans-identified men who want to have sex with women have called themselves lesbians. Over the years their public demands on real lesbians have escalated. At first they sought inclusion in sapphic cultural spaces, like folk concerts and softball leagues. Then, in the 1990s, they banged down the doors of gay advocacy orgs and demanded that lesbians fight for their “transgender” rights – while co-opting butch women’s experience to market the concept. In the 2010s they insinuated that lesbians were scaredy cats for refusing to have sex with them. Today, men who call themselves “dykes” are feted in the mainstream press as trailblazers.

(If you believe lesbians should be open to dating trans-identified men, read my primer on the biology of sexual orientation before continuing here.)

In this post I won’t just blockquote the words of malicious perverts. I’ll also show how those around the perverts have accommodated and assisted them. Many of these enablers are lesbians. Please refrain from collective judgment. Lesbians fall for the gender scam because they are targeted by the gender scam. And they (we) are subject to the same pressures that everyone else is: ridicule and firing if they don’t go along, social and professional opportunities if they do.

Before the history, a word on heterosexual MTFs.

What Is a Male Lesbian?

In the 1970s, gender doctors acknowledged that many of the men who sought their services were “transvestites” who became aroused by pretending to be women. In the 1980s, the psychologist Ray Blanchard discovered – by strapping gizmos to the men’s penises while they watched porn – that all of the straight men who identified as women were fetishists. He called their condition “autogynephilia” or AGP, meaning “love of oneself as a woman.” 

Some AGPs fiercely denied they were driven to transition by sexual urges. They succeeded in erecting a taboo around the idea. Still, you don’t need to turn to the radical feminist underground to learn about it. Alice Dreger covered the controversy in a New York Times-approved book, Galileo’s Middle Finger. The DSM-5 retains an entry for “Transvestic Disorder.” And some of these men (Anne Lawrence, Andrea Long Chu) admit their life-devouring kink.

(New variants of gender neurosis have proliferated in the last few years, so it’s possible that not all today’s trans-identified, straight young men resemble classic “AGPs.” But no one discussed in this post was born late enough to fit in this novel category.)

Anyway, I do recommend turning to the radical feminist underground to learn more about trans-identified men. Many of today’s feminist writers are empiricists deeply immersed in the men’s sordid online world.

Genevieve Gluck, a journalist at

REDUXX

, challenges Blanchard’s analysis of trans-identified straight men:

“I stopped using the term ‘autogynephilia’ as soon as I realized that the fetish is not about becoming or embodying women, but instead a humiliation fetish.”

I buy it. These guys don’t “love” femininity; they’re notoriously abusive toward women. They gush over sissy porn, in which men are demeaned. And they crave being called “lesbians.” As so many lesbians know instinctively, it’s a stigmatized word. Humiliating to some.

It can be hard to believe that trans-identified men are into sex at all because “gender affirmation” surgery damages their genitals. There are two things to keep in mind. First, many don’t seek surgery. Second, the surgery is advertised to them as changing the way they orgasm in an intriguing way. A DC business magazine, Regardie’s, reported in 1994:

“Since the new vagina is lined with the nerve endings of the penis (while the interior of a woman’s vagina normally has minimal nerve endings), a transsexual’s vagina is highly sensitive. ‘The majority of transsexuals no longer have the spasmodic sensation that comes from squirting out semen. They have, instead, more of a spreading glow that is very satisfactory indeed,’ says Dr. John Money …”

Men in Lesbian Culture

In 1968, at the University of San Francisco, Elliott Mattiuzzi became fixated on a classmate named Bev Jo Von Dohre. He dyed his hair red to match hers and stalked her, according to Von Dohre. (Eva Kurilova interviewed Von Dohre and wrote several excellent articles – linked there – that I’m drawing on.) 

Mattiuzzi changed his name to “Beth Elliott,” declared himself a lesbian, joined the lesbian advocacy group Daughters of Bilitis, and credited Von Dohre – herself a lesbian – with inspiring his transition. The Daughters tossed him out following accusations of sexual harassment.

“This society does not value or recognize a woman’s human personality,” Mattuizzi wrote insightfully in 1970, “especially when it is trapped in a man’s body.”

In 1973 Mattiuzzi crashed the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference and insisted on playing folk music on stage (ineptly, according to Von Dohre). The lesbian feminist Robin Morgan called out his larping. She’s been tarred as a transphobe ever since. Mattiuzzi continued to follow Von Dohre around at feminist conferences for decades, most recently in 2019.

In 1975, a man calling himself Margot lamented in the Gay Community News that lesbians didn’t accept transsexuals like him. He acknowledged a roadblock:

“Of course, one reason is the very genuine mood of anti-Lesbianism among many transsexuals. It is important that we as Lesbians, avoid the class prejudicial practice of judging all the members of a group by the actions of some.”

In 1976, a man argued in the same paper that lesbians should not condition his admission to the sisterhood on getting castrated:

“Anyone committed to the feminist ideal of communicative and supportive health care delivery must feel ill at ease with the present atmosphere around surgery. At worst, there are hospitals with rigid programs and qualifications which would be familiar to any woman who a decade ago sought ‘therapeutic’ abortion …”

He analogized his genitals to a ball and chain made of precious materials:

“I must not simply discard my ball and chain but rather have it reworked into a necklace worthy to bear the beads of Sapphic love.”

Around that time the male transsexual Sandy Stone famously joined the lesbian record label Olivia Records, igniting decades of debate between lesbians who wanted to be accommodating and those who wanted words to have meaning.

As a teenager in the 1960s, Phillip Frye wore his mother’s “underclothing.” He eventually began taking estrogen. By the 1980s he was Phyllis, a lawyer in Houston. He joined the state’s League of Women Voters and a gay political organization.

There he met Annise Parker and forlornly confided in her that women wouldn’t let him play sports with them. Parker invited him to join the team she coached in Houston’s lesbian softball league. She was thinking, “I really need a power hitter.”

MichFest

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MichFest) was hosted by indie feminists every summer beginning in 1976. Held in a remote, woodsy locale, it allowed women to hang out naked. And, not unrelated, it banned men. While not all Festies were lesbians, the culture was so thoroughly lesbian that they all assumed each other to be gay.

In 1991, a trans-identified man named Nancy Burkholder slipped in. Around a campfire one night, women clocked him and asked him to leave. The festival put him up in a hotel. (AfterEllen interviewed one of MichFest’s longtime organizers, Lisa Vogel, about this episode.)

MTF Riki Wilchins would later write:

“[N]ews of Nancy’s expulsion from Michigan reached my ears like a gunshot across the water. I looked at the last 16 years of my life and considered my interminable struggles on the fringe of the lesbian community. Then I put on sensible shoes and headed toward the sounds of battle.”

Trans activists rallied to Burkholder’s cause and set up “Camp Trans” across the road from MichFest’s entrance in the following years. In 1994, according to Wilchins, about a dozen were heterosexual men. Some of the protesters were lesbians: FTM activist-diversity trainer Jamison Green and comedian Mimi Freed of San Francisco, and the New York writer-activist Leslie Feinberg. 

MichFest’s female attendees and organizers were split on whether to allow in male transsexuals.

According to the Journal of Transsexual Feminism, Wilchins asked members of the Lesbian Avengers to escort him into MichFest in 1994 and they obliged. From then on, MichFest never actually had a policy barring trans-identified men, and it seems the men were left alone (or welcomed) when they entered. Still the Camp Trans protests raged year after year because MichFest organizers stated they “intended” the event for “womyn-born-womyn.” 

MichFest folded in 2015 after many of its natural allies, like the Indigo Girls, publicly shamed the organizers for their transphobia.

Back in 1995, Esquire published a feature on male transsexuals. Without interviewing any women, the author mocked the “obvious ironies” of MichFest not welcoming trans-identified men. He didn’t think it sounded very feminist.

In 2018, MTF writer Andrea Long Chu gave his take on MichFest:

“It is a favorite claim among TERFs … that transgender women are gropey interlopers, sick voyeurs conspiring to infiltrate women-only spaces and conduct the greatest panty raid in military history.

“I happily consent to this description. Had I ever been so fortunate as to attend the legendarily clothing-optional Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival before its demise at the hands of trans activists in 2015, you can bet your Birkenstocks it wouldn’t have been for the music.”

Men in Lesbian Politics

After gender medicine fell into disrepute around 1979, the practice moved from classy universities to seedy private clinics. Without academic doctors doing the media rounds, high-brow outlets covered transsexuals less and trashy daytime talk shows formed Americans’ views instead. Fetishists connected with each other through transvestite clubs that held conferences in outlying locales, the purpose of which was simply to indulge in cross-dressing.

So the trans movement stagnated for a decade. Then it jolted into gear in the early 1990s, when the internet catalyzed connections and organizing. Big personalities also played a role: Wilchins, the brash Camp Trans leader from New York, and Frye, the self-pitying lawyer in Houston who wore his mom’s underwear. They used the term “transgender” to describe themselves — and everyone else in the world who defied sex stereotypes.

The movement had clout. Wilchins made his money as a Wall Street tech consultant, Frye was a well-connected lawyer, and many transvestites were successful white guys with wives and kids. MTF Martine Rothblatt, a wealthy telecom lawyer at the time, organized with Frye and others as far back as 1993. This clique featured prominently in the flattering, all-male 1995 Esquire story.

The New York Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center hit up cross-dressing clubs for donations in 1993. I suppose that gay men’s funds were strained by the AIDS crisis and lesbian wealth was — not a thing, that’s why their big annual getaway took place in tents in the woods.

Hate Crimes

Wilchins founded the activist group Transexual Menace in the early 1990s. The name ripped off “Lavender Menace,” which lesbians organized in 1970 as a reclaiming of a homophobic insult hurled by Betty Friedan. At first, Transexual Menace focused on attacking gay and lesbian groups, demanding that a “T” be added to a march on Washington and the 1994 Pride parade in New York. They argued that gays, transsexuals, and cross-dressers should band together because they all shared an interest in shattering gender norms.

In 1995, Transexual Menace found a mascot: Teena Brandon, the young lesbian who was raped and murdered in Kansas by goons upset that she pretended to be male. The Menace demonstrated outside her killers’ trials, claiming Brandon as a victim of transphobia (her mother couldn’t stand the activists). According to the New Yorker, “several dozen transsexuals” flew in after seeing “appeals on the Internet.”

From then on, the Menace and other trans activists adopted a succession of murder victims – many appearing to be poor, gay men of color – as part of a campaign to prove all “transgender” people were vulnerable. In 2009, Congress passed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. It was the first federal law to protect people according to their “gender identity.”

Employment Discrimination

In 1992, Frye pulled together a new type of trans meet up in Houston: the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy. Lawyers who attended were eligible to receive Continuing Legal Education credits. Frye made it an annual event. In 1993, an attorney from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission addressed the assembly. 

In one ICTLEP lecture, “Freedom from the Have-To of the Scalpel” (1996), Frye decried the unfairness of people expecting trans-identified men to seek surgery. “There’s all this pressure to have genital surgery which they will, for the most part, never see the results of or even know for sure if you had it.” Frye explained how he himself had scored legal woman-status with his penis intact. (The idea behind denying woman-status to men like him was to protect women and girls from rapists.)

Unlike the grimy cross-dressing conferences of the 1980s, ICTLEP appealed to women.

Frye invited a lesbian law professor named Elvia Arriola to close the 1996 conference with a talk titled “Getting Possessive About the Word ‘Lesbian.’” She discussed her recent experience at a less inclusive gathering:

“I was the only latina lesbian speaker on a panel called ‘lesbian legal theory’ and upon concluding my presentation [about transgender discrimination] was met with statements from members of the audience suggesting that my topic was offensive, since it was ‘our panel for lesbians only.’ I immediately felt a familiar loneliness I have often experienced over the past decade as the sole racial/ethnic minority at lesbian/gay events.

“... I suddenly felt like an outsider having to justify my project before a quickly growing collective of angry white middle-class lesbians …”

Arriola felt dismayed by her sisters:

“White and middle class lesbians who are afraid of male-to-female transsexuals unfortunately assume that all MTF’s are pseudo white men or former white gay men …”

Arriola’s talk raised two themes that were trending in trans advocacy. First, framing lesbian objections as fear-based.

Second, casting everyone who resisted the trans agenda as white, well-off, and possibly racist. This was the era when trans activists began falsely insisting that two poor, nonwhite “transgender women,” Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, had started the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. Frye, Wilchins, and all the other leading trans activists of the time whose pictures I’ve seen were white. 

Meanwhile, Wilchins was hassling gay organizations to include “gender identity” in the federal bill they drafted to protect gay people in the workplace, the Employment Non-discrimination Act (ENDA). On angry flyers that he tossed all over gay enclaves, he insisted that this was necessary to protect the livelihoods of “stone butches and diesel dykes … drag kings … leatherdykes …”

Setting aside the question of whether anyone should wear fetish gear to work, adding the term “gender identity” to ENDA wasn’t necessary or useful for protecting mannish lesbians. Wilchins was lying to them (and to gay men) to drum up their support. He also divided gays, portraying those who objected to his agenda as selfish and straight-passing — they were “jettisoning” the “gendertrash” “so the ‘acceptable’ queers can ‘get theirs.’” (His essays are rife with gay-bashing like this, too.)

Ordinary lesbians didn’t realize all that. And at least two, the lawyers Chai Feldblum (Human Rights Campaign) and Shannon Minter (National Center for Lesbian Rights), believed gays should fight for transgender rights regardless of whether it served their interests. Minter began calling herself a man and using testosterone soon after taking the job at NCLR.

Branding

Where did the label “transgender” come from? In the 1970s transvestites like Virginia Prince described themselves as “transgenderists,” meaning they dressed like women and grew breasts by taking estrogen, but did not seek genital surgery. ICTLEP used “transgender” as a trans catch-all starting in 1991, and its co-organizer Tere Fredrickson said the term “was used much earlier.”

In 1992, Feinberg published the pamphlet that put her on the map, “Transgender Liberation.” Having started on testosterone but then backed off, in Wilchins’ words, “Leslie floated on the periphery just outside of everyone's awareness, beyond our binary categories.” MTF Susan Stryker credited her with coining “transgender” in his book Transgender History and Wilchins ostentatiously expressed his intellectual debt to her. 

Shrewd move, boys. The Feinberg origin story was easier for normies to swallow than “Virginia wanted to grow breasts for erotic reasons but he doubted the efficacy of neovagina-prostate stimulation.”

Men in Lesbians’ Beds

Wilchins was into lesbians:

“Even before surgery made such things possible, desire had long since etched my dreams with soft butches and strong arms, their weight on my back and their insistent, taxing presence inside me. … So I knew the name for what I was, and I knew I belonged with other lesbians.”

But lesbians were not into Wilchins. He attended a conference called LUST, or Lesbians Undoing Sexual Taboos, in the early 1990s:

“[A] woman is planning a dinner and sex party for 100 women. Oh boy, does this sound hot or what? I’ve been waiting about a decade for something like this to happen. I find one of the fliers … I see on the bottom of the last page: no men, no transvestites, and no transsexuals.”

This passage is from a speech that Wilchins delivered to the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Center in 1993, where he started volunteering in 1989 or earlier. He relates more sob stories, like attending a lesbian sex club where one woman “excuses herself hurriedly” when she realizes he’s a man. 

Finally Wilchins recounts watching The Crying Game, a film in which an MTF character played by Jaye Davidson (a man) shoots a woman:

“I am thinking of all the women telling me that I can never be a real woman … [P]hrases like women born women only, biological women only, genetic women only – or whatever exclusionary formula is in vogue with our very best lesbian thinkers this year – start tumbling over each other in my head like a bunch of manic puppies. … I swear I am practically coming in my pants here in the theater seat as Jaye finally pulls the trigger on that cisgender bitch … the shot echoing out and the surprise registering on those small, delicate, well spaced features …

“I’ll rent this video … just to see Jaye pull that trigger in this scene again and again and again.”

Again, Wilchins was addressing the Lesbian and Gay Community Center.

In 2012, MTF Morgan Page hosted a workshop at a Planned Parenthood Toronto conference. It was called “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women.” Description:

“Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling will explore the sexual barriers queer trans women face within the broader queer women’s communities through group discussions and the hands-on creation of visual representations of these barriers. Participants will work together to identify barriers, strategize ways to overcome them, and build community.”

Smells like a “myn-born-myn” policy:

“Open to all trans women and MAAB genderqueer folks.”

“Cotton ceiling” was by then a familiar term that referred to lesbians’ sexual boundaries. Planned Parenthood Toronto stood behind the workshop (emphasis added):

“Stigma and social exclusion can have immense impacts on the health and well-being of all marginalized people, trans women included. PPT’s mandate is one of equity; as such, we strongly stand behind queer trans women’s right to participate as full members of LGBTQ communities, and are committed to promoting and upholding trans women’s sexual health and well-being.”

Page ran a trans youth group in Toronto. In 2019 a young lesbian recalled her time as a member. It’s a portrait of adult men grooming and bullying underage girls.

Writing for the Daily Beast in 2014, MTF Julia Serano, a Camp Trans alum, took his turn complaining about lesbians.

After disparaging “the masculine-centrism of modern-day dyke communities” he resorts to the ‘phobe trope – while describing a scenario that sounds genuinely scary:

“Trans female friends of mine have had to suffer through cis dyke ‘freak out’ moments, or even accusations of deception, that rival stereotypical reactions of straight people.”

He compares lesbians unfavorably to straight men:

“When I asked the cis men who responded to my ad if they had ever dated a trans woman before, they didn’t disappear like the cis dykes usually did. Instead, most of them gave thoughtful answers. Some said that they found trans women more interesting, open-minded, and/or courageous than the average cis woman.”

Serano puts his cards on the table (emphasis added):

“My purpose in writing this piece is to highlight how cis dykes’ unwillingness to consider trans women as legitimate partners translates directly into a lack of community for queer-identified trans women. … [O]ne of the most critical functions that queer women’s communities serve is in providing a safe space outside of the heterocentric mainstream where women can express interest, attraction, and affection toward other women. In other words, queer women’s spaces fulfill our need for sexual validation.” 

He throws down the gauntlet:

“And personally, with each passing year, it becomes harder and harder for me to continue to take part in a community in which I am not seen as a legitimate object of desire.”

Though I disagree with his sentiment, I have to commend Serano for keeping his tone civil and reasonable – except for the 19 times he called us dykes.

MTF Martine Rothblatt spoke in the same argot. 1994:

“When I looked at a woman, I was just a dyke looking at another woman.”

In 2015, lesbian Evan Urquhart (later an FTM) and MTF Parker Molloy joined forces in Slate to puzzle out “how to mend the rift” between “cisgender lesbians and trans women” (emphasis added):

“Even lesbians who aren’t intentionally transphobic can still harbor fears and stereotypes based on their lack of familiarity with trans women …

“For cis lesbians, it can also be difficult to tell the difference between an honest lack of attraction and feelings of fear or disgust at the idea of a partner who they perceive as ‘really’ a man—feelings that are rooted in transphobic cultural conditioning.”

In 2018 a philosopher finally intervened. Writing in the London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan defined terms:

“Trans women often face sexual exclusion from lesbian cis women who at the same time claim to take them seriously as women. This phenomenon was named the ‘cotton ceiling’ – ‘cotton’ as in underwear – by the trans porn actress and activist Drew DeVeaux.”

Srinivasan compares lesbians to racists:

“There is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want, but personal preferences – no dicks, no fems, no fats, no blacks, no arabs, no rice no spice, masc-for-masc – are never just personal.”

Wrong. “No dicks” is personal. Lesbians and straight men are biologically hardwired to feel turned on only by women, and specifically their pheromones, which gender medicine doesn’t impart. (“No dicks” is admittedly not the most precise way to characterize sexual orientation. If I were choosing between a woman with a strap-on and a man who’s been castrated ...)

Without citing any science, Srinivasan concludes:

“[O]ur sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills – not automatically, but not impossibly either[.]”

Let me just swap that English accent out for an American one:

“All sexual sin affects the human personality like no other sin, for sexual issues run deep into our character, and change is slow and uphill - but is possible nonetheless."

If we’re going the conversion therapy route, why not put straight women on the couch? There must be far more straight women who decline to date lesbians, than lesbians who decline to date men. But lesbians don’t accuse straight women of bigotry. Srinivasan’s philosophical inquiry is driven by the loudest, most aggressive voices – fetishistic men.

Srinivasan later published that essay as part of a UK bestseller, The Right to Sex. The Guardian interviewed her in 2021. Because she’s a philosopher, she demolished terfs with cold hard logic:

“Trans-exclusionary women are very often cis lesbians who, for very good reasons, have issues with their bodies precisely because they are going to be read in a particular way in a deeply lesbian-phobic, heteronormative culture. They’ve learned to deal with their frustrations with this in a particular way, and they dislike the idea of anyone dealing with it in a different way.”

I could take offense but I’m going to be philosophical instead. If a Yale- and Oxford-trained public intellectual sounds like a doofus criticizing lesbian terfs like me, that means our position must be unassailable.

Where are they now?

Elliott Mattiuzzi, the OG male lesbian who stalked Bev Jo Von Dohr, had his story told by MTF Susan Stryker in his widely-cited book on trans history. Stryker did not interview Von Dohr.

She regrets having been nice to Mattiuzzi back in 1968, when she was 17:

“I never dreamt that not wanting to hurt his feelings 55 years ago would lead to all of this.”

A Camp Trans alum, MTF Dana Rivers, murdered a lesbian couple and their son in 2016. He’s serving his time in a women’s prison in California. 

A few years after Riki Wilchins publicly fantasized about shooting cis bitches who wouldn’t have sex with him, he published a book with the lesbian Joan Nestle, and another at the lesbian press Firebrand. The New York Times’ Carey Goldberg interviewed him as an expert on gender, then profiled him in 1999 after he rejected the gender binary:

“[W]ith her delicate features and slim build, she can move fluidly from commanding respect on a subway platform as a man in cap and jeans to stopping South Beach traffic as a roller-blading woman.”

Chai Feldblum, the lesbian lawyer who steered the gay movement toward trans rights, was appointed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by President Barack Obama in 2010. Shannon Minter, her FTM collaborator, is now a leader in the fight for pediatric gender medicine. She’s facing sanctions for judge-shopping in Alabama.

In 2010 Phyllis Frye became America’s first trans judge, having been appointed by his old softball coach Annise Parker. As mayor of Houston, Parker was arguably the most powerful lesbian in America. The New York Times profiled Frye in 2015. To be fair, I don’t know that Frye ever said anything offensive about lesbians; he was able to find lesbians like Professor Arriola to do it for him.

Martine Rothblatt is a pharma exec and transhumanist guru. A 2014 New York Magazine cover story declared him America’s highest-paid female CEO.

Since threatening to leave the lesbian community for lack of sexual validation, Julia Serano has written for and been interviewed in the New York Times.

Andrea Long Chu won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2023.

Amia Srinivasan is a professor at Oxford. Even though she’s a philosopher, in 2023 the New Statesman ranked her #48 on a list of important British people.

By the way, the reason I keep mocking Srinivasan’s profession is not because I disrespect philosophy. It’s because she was taught at the planet’s most exalted universities how to question every premise including her own existence – yet once she was set loose in the real world she built her most famous essay on the premise “trans women are women.” I want to draw your attention back to Amia Srinivasan’s soul-deep inadequacy as often as I possibly can.

Double Standard

The success of trans ideologues who slimed lesbians has a flipside – the trashing of lesbians who offended trans sensibilities. In 2021, philosopher Kathleen Stock was hounded out of her job at the University of Sussex for questioning the premise “trans women are women.” California civil rights lawyer Ann Menasche was fired in 2022 for advocating sex-based language when talking about abortion rights. Tennis legend Martina Navratilova has been scorned for objecting to men in women’s sports. Jenny Watson, who organizes women-only dating events in the UK, is regularly harassed in vile terms. 

Sarah Schulman, who co-founded the Lesbian Avengers and has been vehemently anti-terf for decades, was attacked in 2021 for not writing enough about trans people. The dragging continued on Twitter.

When the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich died in 2012, the American Prospect slammed her bigotry. Her crime? Being acknowledged by her (lesbian) friend Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire. “[I]t is difficult to truly figure out exactly how [Rich] felt. But maybe that is not really the point.” Raymond herself became an expert on sex trafficking, but in the 2010s her talks on the subject were often canceled.

Trans-identified men haven’t succeeded despite their bad behavior toward lesbians but rather because of it. In the face of their tears and ridicule, some lesbians jumped to prove they weren’t villains. Their loyal service within “LGBT” society sanitized its image. Ordinary liberals couldn’t fathom that short-haired womyn in hiking boots would endorse slobbery men who’d devoted their lives to achieving weird types of orgasm.

The “trans women’s” jabs against lesbians should have alienated non-lesbians, but historically many people didn’t have quick reflexes when it came to defending us. They laughed about lesbians being afraid of penises and judged us for being rude to sad men.

Any time Team Trans picked on lesbians, it was likely to come out ahead no matter how the lesbians responded.

But that was then!

I have hope for the future. Srinivasan’s interviewer in the Guardian, Rachel Cooke, reacted to her lesbian psychoanalysis:

“Crikey. It seems extraordinary to me that someone so interested in equality and freedom would generalise about an entire group of people (lesbians) in this way – and this, I’m afraid, is where I conclusively part ways with Srinivasan and her ideas.”

Around that same time in 2021, the BBC reported on young lesbians who felt bullied by their “community” into dating trans-identified men. In doing so, it stood up to the boorish trans activist org Stonewall. The valiant reporter was Caroline Lowbridge.

After leaving her teaching job, Kathleen Stock quickly regenerated into a popular columnist, speaker and nonprofit exec. Apparently much of the Anglosphere was ready for an outspoken, terfy lesbian. She seems to be thriving. In photographs you can’t even tell that she used to belong to the same profession as Amia Srinivasan.

Kathleen Stock (center) with entourage at Oxford

Those examples are all from the UK. In the US, I can say anecdotally that straight liberals are shocked and revolted by the idea that anyone might encourage lesbians to date “trans women” out of political correctness.

In the recent past, the English-speaking world was hostile to lesbians. It’s changed. Maybe more people will start seeing male aggression toward lesbians as the massive red flag that it is. If they do, the trans movement will lose one of its favorite psy ops. And some of its media darlings.

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Related

• Kathleen Stock reviewed Amia Srinivasan’s book! It’s brutal.

• How FTMs Hijacked Gay Activism (Part 1, Part 2)

• Triumph of the Female Pervert

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