Women’s body parts are biologically female and were in plain sight Saturday

One of the things I loved about the March and the signs was that a lot of the Trans definitions of womanhood got thrown right under the bus. Everywhere you looked there were drawings and paintings of women’s body parts. The parts men do not have. There was none of the Penises are female crap anywhere to be seen. There were uteri, ovaries and fallopian tubes painted on shirts, signs and women’s faces. Dykes were out and seen and could not be erased. Women could not be erased.

It was safe to be. You didn’t have to worry about creepy glances in the station and sometimes I have been in that station and on those early trains and have worried about my safety. Anyone trying that in that crowd would have not gotten away with it at all. And that was with absolutely no personal space available. I felt safe and that doesn’t happen very often in public.

What a lot of people who call themselves Pro-Life don’t get is that Pro-Choice people are Pro-Life, we’re for having the right to choose whether our lives matter too.

The Handmaid’s Tale signs do scare the bejeebus out of me because it would be all too easy to try to get away with in some states right now.

The best part was that every woman there was making clear that pussies belong to women. I’m sorry but the men in pussy hats just cracked me up. Men wearing pudenda just is inherently funny to me. There was a male Buddhist monk wearing one in the crowd on his shaven head. How is that not funny?

People had really gotten creative when they couldn’t knit too. There were a lot of pink fleece and felt ones besides knitted ones and every colour of pink and I saw a few strategic purple ones too. Nice to see other “family” out in the crowd.

There is a knitting shop down the block from our apt and I hate knitting but I’d love to learn to crochet. Maybe they can teach me to crochet a pussy hat for the next March. They are talking about an International Women’s Day March here. I’m game.

Reproductive freedom was everywhere you turned. Since men can’t get pregnant none one was worrying about their feelings on women and their bodies. It was awfully refreshing.

To my friends who voted for Trump

To my friends who voted for Trump for any reason you can rationalize:

It doesn’t matter why you voted for him to me

To me what matters is that you voted to hate me personally.

You voted that way and you knew I was gay and that people I love are gay

And you voted for the guy who believes you can electrocute gay people to change them

You voted knowing I was pagan and that I love other pagan people

And yet you voted for the alleged Christian candidate

Who wouldn’t know Jesus if he stood before him

You voted knowing I need access to healthcare

You voted to deny it to me

You voted knowing I’m a woman

A woman who has been molested as a child

by an adult

And you voted for someone who is accused of child rape and the guy with him was already convicted

You voted knowing all women have been street harassed

Harassed at school or on the job

And you voted for the guy who bragged about how he can do it with no penalty

I know you know people of colour or who have people of colour that we all love

And you voted for a white supremacist

You voted for the politics of hate

And you are making me hate you

And I never thought I would

 

 

 

 

#I stand with Orlando

Sunday I woke up and checked my Facebook on the phone and even though it was really early some of my friends were posting – # pray for Orlando. Confused I checked my news app and my heart broke.

Every time I think things may be getting better the bigots escalate the hate.
I’ve been out since 1979 and I delayed because I really didn’t want to be someone people around me like my parents and church said was evil. I finally had to accept that yes I was gay and that I wanted to be my true self and not hide. I was done with hiding. Up to then living at home I had hid a lot of myself. My parents were really good at telling me I was good for nothing and after my grandmother died when I was 17 there was no other voice to contradict them until I left to work at summer camp in 1975.

Summer camp freed me to be me. To choose who I was and to do the things I was learning to do. One of the things that I learned pretty quickly was that I had to accept that the people I fell in love with were women. I made some mistakes that way and fell in love with people who were never going to love me because they weren’t bent that way. But later I did fall in love and it was returned at least for awhile, and by then it was clear, I was going to come out so I did.
My first public events were the parades here in LA marching with PCC’s GLSU and I met hate that wasn’t from people I knew. People yelled evil things at us as we marched, their faces almost black with hatred. On parade one man was so enraged he tried to hit one of the guys with us and a sherriff stepped in and said he was going to arrest the pseudo Christians for inciting a riot. The pseudo Christians were further infuriated when the mounted police showed up and made them leave. If looks could kill we would have been dead in the street. Why? Because we loved outside their tiny boundaries in their brains.

I remember going to the first OC pride fest and someone tacked the entire parking lot. And because I have a very white baby face , the very white Christians that tried the block the entrance to the venue assumed I was there to join them. So I started to walk up to them and then I kissed the friend I was with. Soooo not what they wanted. More hate.

I’ve been yelled at outside lesbian bars and the dyke picnic. I’ve been screamed at on a street corner by a car of men and had to run. We were yelled at with slurs at the Rose Parade when all we were doing was sitting together.

I was harassed and almost fired on one job and on another job, every lesbian in the company was let go the same day including a manager and a director. I was the only one that didn’t join the lawsuit and the women were furious with me but they lost big time to the huge insurance company. They had made it clear that the company only liked white men and all the gay guys never said a thing. The lesbians who sued had to pay all the court costs and legal fees because one piece of paperwork hadn’t been filed correctly it was dismissed with prejudice.
And some many more times evil things have happened because I was an out lesbian. My parents lost friends at church because Cam and I came out. People I had known all my life said that my parents hadn’t raised us right or we wouldn’t have been gay.

I had a boss that when I worked for the state ordered me not to do the AIDS walk because even though he knew I was a lesbian he was sure I was going to get carried away and sleep with some gay man and he said it in front of about 10 other employees who couldn’t believe it.

If you are gay, you are gay. A lesbian is not attracted to men, period any more than a gay man would be attracted to a woman. Bi people do fall in love with both and that’s fine and it makes it more easy to pass through this world and sometimes they don’t understand the absolute revulsion that gay people have for the opposite sex. That lack of understanding is part of what’s causing problems in the pagan community now and why they are on the attack against people like Ruth and Z.

I don’t want to sit in circle the majority of the time with men. A lot of them do not have the compatible energy that a group of women born women have. Trans women feel like men in circle and they try to dominate sometimes unconsciously, sometimes not. A lot of women will never feel “in perfect love and perfect trust” with male energy in circle. And we should be allowed to exist.
Lesbians are being erased. The Butch dykes that were at Stonewall like Stormie are being claimed as transmen. They weren’t. Butches, especially young butches are being told they aren’t lesbians, they are really men. It’s not right.

Those of us that are 2nd wave feminists that fought to say a woman could do anything she was able to do are being told gender is immutable instead of the societally dependent construct it is. I am not a man if I can use power tools. I am not a man because I got degrees in science. I am a woman who loves women and can do any damn thing I’m capable of doing. There is no such thing as gender but there sure as hell is sexuality and sexual orientation.

I’m so tired of fighting people on something that is none of their business. Why is it a problem who I choose to love? Jesus never said a damn thing about gay people and they sure as hell existed in that time period. The Romans and the Greeks never hid it.

I’m a lesbian and I stand with Orlando

A Lesbian Scot tries to use the restroom

Back in the 80’s right after I had come home from a month in Britain, I went to hear the Royal Massed bands with the Gordon and Sutherland Highlanders at UCLA with my parents. We used to go whenever any of the Scots Guards bands came to town.

At intermission I went and stood in the enormous long line for the women’s restroom and didn’t think anything about it until this expensively, badly dressed woman started asking me at the top of her voice if I was in the right line. Shouldn’t I be in the men’s room line?

She was making an effort to embarrass me and she was sure I was a man. I was dressed in a blue button down shirt and a tie my grandfather had left me, blue jeans and the blue Fairisle I had bought in Scotland and I had just had my hair cut short in a pixie cut. I had 44 D boobs at the time but I guess she could only see my clothes since I weighed about a 110 lbs at the time, you could see that my top story wasn’t really small.

I just stared at her because I really didn’t know what to do. How do you prove you’re a woman without stripping to some unintelligent bigoted yahoo? You can’t.
Thank heavens for little old Scottish ladies that are used to seeing women in ties for school or other things. This tiny old woman walked up to the old bigot and in a very thick Scottish Highland accent told her to shut her mouth and asked if she had a brain since it was obvious to her that I was a woman and that she really should invest in some glasses if she couldn’t tell.

The woman quickly left the line and the Scottish lady came over and patted me and reassured me that some people were just stupid and she went into the bathroom with me and that was it. I had an a least 80 year old fierce protector as only little Scottish grannies can be and I was so grateful.

When I got back to my seat and told my parents , it was a very good thing my dad didn’t have a claymore. He always got worked up at Scottish events and could yell during “Black Bear” with the loudest of them, something that used to make my brother and I want to crawl under the seats. There would have been blood. (http://cornemusique.free.fr/ukblackbear.php)

Nowadays it looks like someone would have called the cops and I would have had to pull down my drawers in public. This is all just wrong

Old Dyke Days

Purple sage: https://purplesagefem.wordpress.com/ has an awesome blog and has been reading Lillian Faderman’s book on Dyke history. It’s interesting to see her take on my times.

I came out in the late 70’s and the 70’s and 80’s were a wonderful time to come out. There was a huge community here in the LA area and it was big enough to have a lot of different varieties and lifestyles. We had several bars but the culture had evolved enough that there were other things to do besides hang out in a bar. There were butch femme bars, mostly in Hollywood like the Palms, as well as Peanuts for the under 21 crowd. I used to go there with my deaf friends from CSUN because their speakers were on the floor and the deaf women could dance because they could feel the beat. There were the two main bars in Long Beach, The Suite where it was how you looked that mattered and was a meat market and the Que where everyone was welcome. Our bar was Vermies in Pasadena (If you wanted to see Melissa Ethridge she played the Que and Vermies but on week nights so you had to be willing to stay up) or we went out to Pomona to Robbies and the Valley had Menopause Manor AKA the Oxwood Inn. We thought the women at the Oxwood were sooo old, they were probably in their 40’s and 50’s. Sunday afternoons were for the men’s bar Rumours to see a local duo Second Wind.

But we also had things like softball leagues and rugby teams and I came out into the huge collection of Girl Scout lesbians. The place to see and be seen at the time were the women’s music concerts. When Cris Willamson, Margie Adams, Meg Christian or Holly Near came to town, they usually played Royce Hall at UCLA or the Veteran’s auditorium or the Ebell and it was packed. Everyone wore their best clothes. Somewhere I have a picture of all my friends and myself on our varying takes on dyke chic that were all tuxedo versions. It helped that women’s tuxedo fashion was very “in” in the 80’s so clothes we liked were readily available and then there was the wonderful West Coast Women’s Music and Comedy Festival that started in Willits and finally ended up in Yosemite. That happened every Labor Day and was heaven on earth. Usually about 3,000 women of all different communities all in one place.

We had Girl Scout campers area, neutral areas, noisy areas and S&M play area, there were the leatherdykes there were Goddess dykes, butch/femme areas and a disabled area with lots of friendly women to help. There were androgynous areas and child care for women with children and areas for young girls that came with their moms. There were workshops on every topic you could think of and music and drumming all the time. We had rituals out on the grass under the moon. The vegetarian food wasn’t that great so there were cooking areas for non-vegetarians which led some competition among the Girl Scout dykes and since my group included some friends from CalTech with access to dry ice some fudgsicles that were the envy of a lot of other women as well as when we baked things or fried bacon. Yes, we were evil and loved it.

There were tall women, short women, women of all colours and shades, women of all abilities, women with scars and women with bold beautiful tats covering mastectomy scars and we for a few days a year were all family. Women built the stages, ran the sound and did security and fire patrol, women did the cooking and the child care, and the first aid at the med tent, all of it volunteer labour and everyone took a shift or you had to pay extra. The only time you saw a man was when you heard, “Man on the land!” when they pumped the Portajanes.

They had awesome vendors and that is where the majority of my jewelry came from for years.

And at night all the communities melded at Main Stage under the stars and it was magic. To be among all those women loving women was amazing. My first one was in Santa Barbara and we had come straight from camp. It was amazing to see all those women. We drove up there and we knew we had reached the place because the women at the gate were topless. I remember thinking, oh Lady, you won’t catch me doing that. Yeah, that lasted until the next morning and it was hot. I learned that redheaded pasty white girls with chests that have never seen the sun should wear overalls over certain parts of your anatomy. I had a tan from camp but not there. Owie, thank heavens for the good souls with aloe vera to share. I had to go back to work when I got home.

Long Beach had a yearly dyke picnic that brought people together as well as a bunch of men that stood outside the park and would yell things like, “Which ones the man?” thank heavens the cops were pretty cool and kept them out of the park.

Point being, we had a community and when you came out, you had places to go and friends. There were bookstores to go to like Page One in Pasadena that was owned by two wonderful women and friends of mine worked there and told me what books I needed to read so I was introduced to Sally Gearhart and Rita Mae Brown and Jane Rule. I read Another Mother Tongue and Patience and Sarah and The Wanderground and laughed hard at Ruby Fruit Jungle. We could listen to the latest women’s music and pick up a copy. Occasionally we had a field trip to Sisterhood in Westwood. They had great posters and tshirts so we came home with Mountain Women ts and Uppity Women Unite or the Ladies Sewing and  Terrorist Circle.

Now that kind of community does not exist, the bookstores and bars are mostly gone. I haven’t heard of the picnic still happening and all of it was found in the Lesbian News, found all over town even in straight book and record stores with the free stuff at the front. I don’t know what a kid does now for community. Our biggest problem was finding a lover that hadn’t slept with most of your friends already. One of the reasons my friends found the first episode of the L word hysterical was because of the chart they made. We did that one night. I found out later the writer of that episode knew someone who had been there and used it.

I miss those days when it still was the LG community before the damn alphabet soup happened.

 

Yes, lesbians need lesbian only space

Someone asked me why lesbians would need lesbian only space after I reblogged something about it. The fact that someone would ask after reading the article is an indication of straight privilege. To me there are two indicators that privilege might be a problem, one would be that anyone has to ask why anyone would want to be with group of people like themselves when that group is in the minority and the other is, if you have to pass or can be assumed to be passing, you do not have privilege. Majority groups don’t ever have to think about having to pass or wear a mask or change their language when dealing with other members of a majority group.

Sometimes people assume you are part of the majority group because they assume all people are like them and why would someone not want to be part of their group? Surprise! We don’t. We have our own culture and our own traditions, most of which are invisible or at worst, nonsensical to the straight population.

Anyone who has been an out lesbian since the 70’s or 80’s here in LA remembers going to women’s music concerts as many times a year as you could afford to go. Why? because it was the only place you could go where you might see large groups of lesbians and sit for a few hours and not feel defensive or out of place. Bars only held a few women. Camps and softball or sports teams were usually mixed, but the concerts were heaven. We filled the Wiltern or the Wilshire Ebell theaters or Royce Hall at UCLA. Lesbian women dressed to the nines in their very best Dyke Chic.

We had the Dyke Picnic down at a park in Long Beach. Men would often stand outside and yell at us things like, “who’s the man?” and we would just laugh because as a large group we could. It was one of the only times we could laugh it off. In smaller groups it would have been dangerous.

We had the West Coast Music Festival every Labor day and it was the only time for some lesbians that they saw any lesbians at all. The years I attended there were more than 3,000 women there. We could relax, be ourselves, no one was going to call us lezzie on a street corner. We could buy women made things from other lesbian vendors. Early in the Dianic spirituality movement it was the only place you could get goddess themed clothing or jewelry. It was a huge thing to get to go up and we traveled in packs and so hard to come back down to the mundane world. It was diverse with women of all colours and sizes and shapes. Women with disabilities, clean and sober dykes. The Girl Scout camp lesbians who could put their camp up in the dark and not think about it rescued many a first timer from a tent with no  instructions. If you couldn’t afford to pay the entrance fee you could sign up to work, and everyone worked at least one shift anyway. It was part of the deal and it was instant community. We’ve all been socialized as women to help others and at Fest we got to be all facets of being a woman. Child caregiver, nurse, cook, capable carpenter,firefighter, security, camper, friend, lover, top or bottom, Priestess, music lover and performer, any skill a person could possess could be used without being allegedly tied to a gender. If something needed to be done and you could do it, you did it.

A person who isn’t a lesbian or a gay man will never understand the power and delight of “gaydar” or its function in the culture but it does exist and a lot of women might never have found each other without it.

Lesbian only space is necessary because sometimes you don’t want to have to use your “gaydar”. Sometimes you just want to be with women who walk like and look like you do. You want to not guard your speech from the hets and to speak freely and use the correct pronoun instead of skirting around the issue and having to use the word “they” instead of “she”.

I miss things like women’s concerts and the West Coast Women’s Music and Comedy Festival. I’m going to miss the possibility of attending Mich Fest. I miss being in the midst of women listening to Cris Williamson, ALix Dobkin, Meg Christian, Dierdre McCalla or Holly Near or any of the other beautiful women we would fall in and out of love with in the hours listening. Women whose music reflected our lives and loves and not having to change the pronouns in a love song to have it fit.

I miss being with women that never will define themselves by their relationship to a man. Women who are free. Women who stride the earth free of encumbrances like skirts and makeup unless they choose to but don’t have to do it. We don’t expect it. We can choose to do it and it becomes more like drag and for fun but not because it is necessary to our identity or what some guy expects us to look like.

I can usually tell a lesbian even in a dress by how she walks. There is a freedom there that other women do not have. Straight women tend to make themselves small and to try to take up as little space as possible. Lesbians don’t. Lesbians tend to look you right in the eye and rarely drop their gaze. Lesbians usually don’t defer to the men in the room or subconsciously fall in behind what some man has suggested. Men are unnecessary to lesbian culture and our world and that makes some men really hostile. Lesbians can be a challenge to some men’s need to be superior to women. And it can make some straight women feel uncomfortable about their life choices because we don’t choose to live our lives by society’s alleged norms. Sometimes it’s just a lot of work to reassure straight women that all paths are fine.

Now those spaces can be hard to find and lesbians get shamed for not wanting to share their space with non-women born women but we have a right to be with our own kind especially since there are so few of us compared to gay men or bisexuals. I don’t know a single other group that wouldn’t be allowed freedom to associate but that is what we are being told and that “Cotton Ceiling” crap is just that, crap.

So yes, sometimes need women born women only space.

And the gay community continues putting men over women/lesbians

From Christopher Street West AKA LA Gay Pride’s website:

“This year, LA PRIDE brings back its free Friday night celebration ‘Lavender Menace’ which combines a community celebration of women with activism honoring Lesbians who have paved the way for today’s TLGB community and celebrating with the ones who will change tomorrow. Before the show kicks into full gear, LA PRIDE is proud to present the WeHo Dyke March in conjunction with the City Of West Hollywood and the Lesbian Visibility Committee, where attendees can honor, march and then celebrate the accomplishments of the Lesbian community. The annual Dyke March starts inside the Festival and moves its way into the streets of West Hollywood, down Santa Monica Blvd and then returns back to the Festival to celebrate. “

Okay just got this from this year’s Christopher Street West AKA the LA Gay Pride website. When the F*** did the T come first???? On a day honouring lesbians??? Is this just another example of gay organizations putting men first? And heterosexual men at that?  I’m totally disgusted.

I’m proud to have been one of the contributors about lesbian health issues

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-provider-educational-resource-aims-to-help-improve-quality-care-for-lgbt-individuals-and-their-families-2015-04-09

Last year I did a series of interviews and other presentations about the challenges a lesbian can face in trying to obtain competent care from healthcare workers. Including some of the whoppers some idiot doctors have confronted me with such as, yes, I’m sure I’m not pregnant. An argument I had with an idiot Middle Eastern doctor in the ER who insisted I could be pregnant and not know it. Uh no! While my partner and the gay x-ray tech howled with laughter.

I hate phonies

I’m a person who was born into a woman’s body and I love other women. I’m a lesbian and I’m not a feminine person. I can’t remember the last time I put on a dress. I wore a kilt to my brother’s funeral but a kilt is not in any way shape or form a dress. Saying that to most kilt wearing people may get you kilt.

I’m attracted to other women. I am not attracted in the slightest to men, whether they still call themselves men or not. And the idea that someone can call themselves a woman and demand that they are now lesbians doesn’t make them attractive to lesbians who were born women and one of the reasons they aren’t attractive is they are often aping extremely feminine behaviours. I am not attracted to extremely feminine women and an awful lot of transwomen are lipstick and dress wearing people who act incapable and helpless because that is how they think women act. I can’t stand women who act incapable and helpless. A real woman who is attractive to lesbians is capable, adaptable and smart. They are more than what they are wearing and so much more than a set of constructed unnatural behaviours. That’s a big part of the problem, transwomen come across as big phonies. And when they are acting that way they tend to model their behaviour on what other transwomen are doing instead of looking at how a person who was born a woman is acting and that ain’t the same thing at all. And they aren’t comfortable people to be around.

If you go on Twitter and other social networks there are a lot of people who used to be male who are demanding that women born women lesbians have sex with them because they are lesbians too. If they were really lesbians they would know that very few lesbians haven’t dealt with rejection in dating and know no woman is attracted to every other woman. Women don’t think that way. Men think that way, as if all people in the body of a woman should be available to them and that the word “no” doesn’t exist. Women know the word “no” exists. They also know that men don’t believe in the word “no” when something gets in the way of what they think they should own or be able to do.

No one can demand that someone be attracted to them. That is about the most unattractive thing I can think of. You want to be attractive? Be comfortable in your own skin. Don’t mimic other people’s behaviour. Don’t be disgustingly princess feminine. Be yourself and if someone is attracted to you, great. If they aren’t maybe someone else will be, you cannot demand lesbians be attracted to you and sleep with you. We may not be feminine but we are still women and we like other women who are themselves not people who are pale images of women. A matching handbag and Jimmy Choo’s in size 15 and a ton of makeup doesn’t make you a woman and it doesn’t make you attractive to women. It makes about as much sense to a lesbian as Fox News does to thinking people.

Hey Homophobic asshat

Some fool just landed on my site after they searched Google with “Girl Scouts promote lesbianism”. For the record, it does not and only a homophobe would frame the search terms that way even if it was only internal homophobia.

Girl Scouts do not “promote” lesbianism. There are many Girl Scouts who are lesbian because GSUSA does not discriminate. There are no signs that say “Come join the dykes” any where to be found. There are no ads on Facebook to join us. We happen to love to teach and share our lives not our loves with the girls we meet. We teach how to be strong women through camping, science, entrepreneurship, self government, cooperation and other skills we feel will fit them for a contributing to the world.

We are not sexual predators like men are such as Catholic priests and Boy Scout leaders. Women born women don’t think that way.

So dear, homophobe, please go back under your rock where you belong.