Right, trust me—I know. But what the actual hell, how did it become okay to erase that we are *also* what women are? And why doesn’t it matter when *we* are triggered and offended? Why is it offensive for us to name OURSELVES however we see fit and why are our legitimate and entirely understandable feelings about this practice so taboo? Why are we being told to swallow the damage and keep smiling and pretending? And why are some of us so good at doing just that, almost as though we have been trained into such behavior all our lives? Why is it implicitly acknowledged that our claiming ourselves as “SHE” has an impact on the collective reality, but there’s no acknowledgment in the other direction? That those who name themselves otherwise, also impact us?
And if we don’t stand up to it and speak our piece, where do you see this trajectory going?
Do you want little girls growing up thinking that someone who is like you can’t possibly be a woman? Because that’s what I am encountering, and I owe it to these young ones—and to everyone—to show them we are possible, AS IS.
Socially dangerous. Anon, I feel you. I do. You think I am not scared? I am scared. When I talk to my older friends about these kinds of fears they say, “So you all are afraid of social ostracism, losing jobs, losing housing situations, losing friends and family, being made an example of, targeted for abuse…in some ways, sounds similar to what it was like to be a closeted lesbian.”
Being a dyke or a noncompliant woman of any kind has been socially dangerous, not to mention dangerous dangerous, since the advent of patriarchy. Men are, in general, dangerous and we threaten their social order when we resist compliance with their norms, when we dare to define for ourselves what female experience is and means, outside of their gaze and their agendas for us.
Women have recourse against the trials of mensland only in building social bonds and sharing resources with each other. When whole networks of women get colonized by a misogynist paradigm that becomes the coin of the realm; when denying your own reality becomes the price of admission, yeah—you are going to feel scared. Because you know we don’t survive well on our own and you are not an island, but how is this false “belonging” really any better? It looks impossible because you think you are alone, but there are more of us than we know. You and I have to speak up and see who meets us there.
Socially dangerous. The “gender” movement of the 90s really banked on the kind of “outlaw” rebel appeal that made such a thing seem sexy and cool. I gotta say that I should’ve known I wasn’t fighting the actual power because it was nothing like this.
