,
26 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
Author wrote this article and lost her job. If you are buying the lie that it’s only a “tiny minority” of feminists who oppose the movement, you’re forgetting that speaking out means risking being disowned, ostracized, isolated, dumped, fired, harassed, threatened, or killed.
When my social circle became aware of my gender-critical beliefs, about 80% of them cut off contact with me altogether. Unfollow, block, cease contact. This was in 2018, a year after I’d left my abusive marriage. It was awful.
My therapist of two years works out of a gender clinic. She switched locations when transitioning began to grow as a movement and an industry. I couldn’t talk with her about losing my friends or no longer having a home in the LGBT community. I don’t go anymore.
I’ve been out for several years. I can’t join local lesbian groups or even date, because there are no lesbian groups, just “queer” groups. I don’t go because I want to respect the comfort trans people have there, and, like therapy, I don’t think that space is for me anymore.
I don’t date because being a trans ally yourself isn’t enough anymore. You’re not an ally if you have any positive contact with a gender critical person. You’re a bigot by association. There’s no dating under those conditions, not in an area like mine.
I’m not working for medical reasons, so I don’t have a job to lose right now. Most women do. So I think it’s important that un-fire-able me speaks out while they can’t. I’m always aware that doing this now might make me unemployable later.
I’m far from my family. I considered moving closer after my divorce, but my mother made it clear that she isn’t and never will be okay with the fact that I’m a lesbian. She believes that men and women have innately different roles, and that I need to open my heart to men.
One of my children is gay. I can’t have them near my parents. I can’t subject them to the way I grew up. My church hosted an Exodus Ministries conversion therapy program. We never talked about me being gay, but I quietly asked for a lot of prayer to make it not be true.
I attended the Unitarian Universalist church around here for a while. They were warriors for gays and lesbians during the fight for marriage equality. Now they’re just another place that was safe and isn’t anymore.
I can’t talk about this with most of the friends remaining to me. We have a conditional peace; this topic isn’t touched. It’s decimated my social support, but the understanding is that it’s no one’s fault but my own. “Why focus on this?” they say.
But they’re in relationships with men and have never spent time in spaces just for women. They can date and socialize, and no one tells them they should stop being a bigot and learn to like pussy. No one says a straight woman has a “genital preference.”
They didn’t live the way I did, decades of my reality and boundaries being dictated to me by men. They don’t know the terror women like me feel when we touch the knowledge that a man may follow us anywhere we go once we step foot outside our homes.
They haven’t exercised their right to rebel and choose a life which centers women. They’re straight or bi or flexible or pan, so they can’t get their mind around the blasphemy of scolding a lesbian for being unwilling to include men in her most intimate social spaces.
They’re straight or bi or pan, and they all primarily date men, but they still see themselves as having a right to tell me what is and isn’t a problem for a lesbian. They don’t see what the big deal is. “Why be so focused on this?” they ask, texting their boyfriend as they talk.
They don’t understand because they can’t understand. But they shouldn’t NEED to understand the reason for my boundary in order to believe in my right to HAVE a boundary. They shouldn’t have to be a lesbian in order to believe in a lesbian’s right to her identity and her community
Straight girls, bi girls, pan girls, whatever girls out there who are wired emotionally and physically to be open to intimate connections with male persons: You are giving away something that doesn’t belong to you. You don’t mind sharing, but it’s not yours to share.
You’re taking the path of less resistance, asking for the rest of the kids to just be good so dad doesn’t get mad at all of us. You’re choosing your friendships and communities over my right to live authentically. And, honestly, I don’t blame you. This really isn’t a good time.
I stay sane by not blaming you. I stay sane by not thinking about the hypocrisy in your feminism, and how it took nothing more than empathy for male strangers and the fear of social reprisal to rebrand me as a bigot. I’ve been your friend for ten years.
I stay sane because leaving cognitive dissonance and moral malleability behind has given me a calming center I never had within me before. Whatever happens, whatever comes, I speak my own truth. Even if it upsets people, or makes me look weak or stupid or mean.
The truth is that I’m lonely. I spent a lifetime and clawed my way out of hell and paid everything that I had so I could live truthfully and have a chance at happiness, and it feels impossible and unfair to find that I’ve arrived too late.
But the truth is also that I’m happy, and I’m at peace. Growing up gay in a fundamentalist church, grinding through what I’d been taught was my duty, trying and trying and trying to make my heart fit my life instead of the other way around — I did learn from it.
I learned that I could trust myself to know myself. I learned that honesty is like oxygen. I learned that hurting myself in order to be nice to someone else never works out to be nice in the end. Most of all, I learned that I must never apologize for telling someone, “No.”
When you learn to say “no,” when you realize you’re being generous with stolen property, when you stop being afraid long enough to hear what women are saying, I’ll be here. You’re still my friends, and I’m still on your side, whether you realize it or not.
/thread
My original retweet disappeared, so here is the article I referenced. It was widely shared, and the author lost her unrelated job as a consequence. She was punished for her dissent.
medium.com/@marykatefain/…
medium.com/@marykatefain/…
@threadreaderapp unroll
