Lesbian must be put back together...piece by piece

(Lesbians)..."lead m/e to your scattered fragments, there is an arm, there is a foot, the neck and head are together, your eyelids are closed, your detached ears are somewhere, your eyeballs have rolled in the mud...I announce that you are here alive though cut to pieces, I search hastily for your fragments in the mud....I find your nose a part of your vulva your labia your clitoris...I assemble you part by part, I reconstruct you...then you m/y Osiris m/y most beautiful you smile at m/e undone exhausted".

Like Monique Wittig's characters in Le corps Lesbien, we must reassemble ourselves into a living lesbian body. Right now we lesbians are only the parts we see displayed in Wittig's work above, an arm here or there, a leg, a nose, a vagina, parts of a lesbian body, but not the whole. Those fragments of the lesbian body are the result of malecentrism/male systems and their great fears of lesbians. They are also a result of our own lesbian fears of ourselves, especially our fears of lesbian power. And by lesbian power I certainly do NOT mean the Kate Kendell's of the world, that power is a malecentric power, i.e. acceptable power because it follows male rules. We saw in the 70's mostly, hints of lesbian power, hints of what lesbians could do as a working body, when class and race and religion were stripped from the lesbian body, when the lesbian body was simply new, naked and pure.

WE were building houses with our lesbian hands, WE were lifting walls with our lesbian legs, WE tasted home grown foods with our lesbian mouths; parts of a lesbian body working together to create a whole lesbian body, a working femalecentric system. And I'm not speaking of nor advocating lesbian separatism, lesbian separatism was the beginning of the end of the lesbian body/community. Lesbian separatism made two lethal mistakes, it retreated from the fight, then made a declaration to straight women to leave their straight lives and choose instead a "lesbian" life.

Separatist led women to believe that lesbianism was something any female could choose regardless of the absence of lesbian nature and lesbian desire. We still occasionally hear from a handful of them still stuck in some separatist hey-day-mud bitching, moaning and begrudging those straight women, who after a few years of playing house in the woods, moved back into life and back into lives with men as well as those lesbians who moved on to educations and careers whom are treated equally as betrayers.This anti-essentialist politic helped to usher in the queer politics that have hack the lesbian body into the pieces I'm hoping and I'm hoping you're hoping, to help assemble back into something meaningful and whole.

So no, no lesbian commune. What we need is a lesbian body, parts of a whole all working together in the real world, fighting real problems, lesbian problems!

Give us your hand, your leg, your eyes, your breast and help reassemble the LESBIAN BODY! For SHE is far from dead!

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Kate Kendell NCLR Email

This is the email I received a few days ago from the exec director of the NCLR, short but not sweet. Why the figure head of a several million dollar a year national org would feel the need to personally email a lone blogger who dared to correct the deceptive nature of the orgs name against the orgs true intentions I can only hazard a guess: to intimidate me.

Kate says the NClR is "committed to the safety, security and liberation of lesbians" among others. Amid the fetid "queer" atmosphere that gets thicker and thicker with every lesbian breath we take, an atmosphere places like the NClR helped create and are helping to further. I ask you, do you as a lesbian feel safe, secure and fucking liberated???? Maybe we lesbians could see if the NCLR would sue itself for false advertising, false promises and using their malecentric power/wealth to harm lesbians everywhere!

This is an open comment discussion post with relation to your feelings on the NClR and any other decpetive org like theirs.

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Lesbian Based Orgs-Lesbian Based Student Orgs

Please comment with any lesbian based orgs and lesbian based students orgs that you are aware of, regardless of country. I would like to compile a list which will be kept at the side of the blog for lesbians who are looking for lesbian specific places they can donate their time/money and efforts to. Or if you are considering or in the process of beginning a lesbian based group, let us know.

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NCLR Poll Pie Chart

Nearly 62% of those who voted feel that the National Center for Lesbian Rights NCLR should serve strictly Lesbians, reflecting both its name and the purpose for which the org. was originally founded. I find this to be a very high number given the amount of trans readership of this blog. Which makes me think, were large samples of the lesbian communities made aware of the deceptive nature of the NCLR that number would be even higher.

I have already received a few emails and a handful of Facebook messages from lesbians who were not aware how strongly malecentric in both staff and cases that the NCLR is and going forward swore they will no longer financially support such malecentrism. The lesbians I'm speaking of were aware that the NCLR did take on cases that  were gay male and/or trans related, what they were NOT aware of was the high volume of such cases at the expense of lesbians.

I also received what reads to me like a polite passive-aggressive email from the exec. director of the NCLR which I'll share in the (part 2) NCLR post I'll try to have to you no later than Saturday.

There seems an overwhelming response from lesbians expressing that we did not and do not know how UNlesbian this org is, even though the National Center for LESBIAN Rights is USING our very lives to sell their false products/promises. I know we have for some time now been lacking in REAL Lesbian community, both in spirit and heart. We feel our identities, that special entity which creates community, have been colonized and brutalized by queer/trans groups for decades now, the same groups the NClR supports. I cant even put a number on the amount of lesbians who have expressed to me alone a desire to distance themselves from identifying as lesbian! We all know a handful of these women, maybe you're one of those women.

Maybe you are one of the many women loving women who cannot fathom calling yourself a lesbian any longer, because lesbian has been emptied of its beauty, its uniqueness, its natural feminism, its absolute in your fucking face fierceness, its kind gentle hands, its strong capable hands, hand that build homes for our lives, hands that bring us ecstasy! Emptied and replaced with instead male fetishist, women abused by men, male transitioners with penis intact, female transitioners too fearful or selfish, male transitioners with neo-vags, BDSM males, queer males and queer females and combinations of all of the above.

I was only a kid when lesbian feminism was coming into its own, when lesbians across the country and even the world were coming out in droves and finding one another. Finding each other through snail mail and lesbian chapbooks, lesbian magazines without all the fucking gloss, through bars, through sports and through love. There was no world wide web, yet lesbians were finding each other, creating communities and joining other lesbian communities in an us against them collaboration. Then gay men came along, with their all their male privilege and smooth talked us right back into that good girl civility, a civility that we were just beginning to leave behind. A civility patriarchy instilled in us before we could walk or talk, "be a good girl" we were told, we barely tasted the freedom to just be us, without feeling obligated to perform for men. When the men we felt we could trust most, gay men, told us that by being radical no one would listen, no one would take us seriously, that we should pool our efforts and along with using their male privilege our sorry and often times sub human existences would change.

Well ladies, they were right. It has changed. Fitting into polite society was/is the gay male dream, it was never ours, nor within patriarchy could it be. We tried so hard, we fought, but what we were working toward and fighting against was ultimately for men; our needs, our hopes, our dreams never figured in. Somewhere we just gave up, we let ourselves be led, we listened, we folded our hands in our laps and crossed our legs just so and we lost our identity. Like a strong independent woman, who once married didnt think much at first about picking up her husbands dirty draws off the bathroom floor, or making him dinner even though she works too, its a partnership she thinks to herself, she works to convince herself its a partnership till she just does what she does, house work, child care, laundry, chores etc. Sometimes who she was before comes flooding back to her, but her hubby is always there to remind her how lucky she is and how far she has come. This is what I despise about places like the NClR and all other "queer" organizations, lesbians are always forced or pressured or expected to be the fucking dutiful housewives who should count our fucking blessings that we have been chosen to pick up their shit stained tightie-whities from the mucky floors all the while with a smile on our chops!

I think we just need to admit that we fucked up and move forward by moving backward. There was so much promise in those early days of collective lesbianism, so many great ideas (and NO I'm not talking about separatism-bad idea-bad bad bad) so much energy, drive, shared experiences, learning new experiences together. With the internet we can reach so many more lesbians than our fore-lesbians had, we can be effective in ways they probably didnt even dream. But before we can do any of that, before we can reach for our sisters hand and take a giant step forward, we MUST take back our name.

My name is Lynn and I am a Lesbian.

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Mid Week Dirt Discussion-The NCLR

What do YOU think the NCLR (National Center for LEBIAN Rights) should be for???

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NCLR aka Trans/Gay Male Rights Org. Part (1)

ncI have been meaning to write something on the NCLR for a while now. If you arent familiar the NCLR is The National Center for Lesbian Rights. Sounds great right? LESBIAN rights and a NATIONAL center devoted to the multitude of ways lesbians are discriminated against daily, from jobs, to housing to lesbian mothers who are losing their children everyday in this country alone. Well, do not let the name fool you, this organization does very little for lesbians, this org. has buried lesbian issues and drowned our lesbian presence beneath the same QUEER alphabet soup that has been drowning us for the last 20 years.

I joined the NClR's Facebook page recently to see if their FB ran anything like their website, i.e. concerned primarily with gay men and trans issues. Their FB page does regular posts about issues the org is currently dealing with or interested in. I joined a few weeks ago, and have yet to see any post that is specifically lesbian oriented! That to me says either one of two things, nothing is happening for lesbians everywhere or queer/trans/gay issues are being placed above lesbian issues therefore lesbians arent making any progress anywhere. At any rate I made a few comments on a few of their posts asking why the gay male or trans posts were being posted on an organizations page that calls itself a national center for LESBIAN rights. I received this message from a MAN no less:

Interestingly HE lists "lesbian" first, yet if you check their past and present case load it consists of nearly every case being either gay male related or trans related with a few token dyke cases thrown in.The L very often is placed at the front of the queer alphabet soup mix yet over and over and over again "lesbian" figures last or more often recently not at all among the mix. It is a deliberate queer ploy used to give lesbians the impression that they/we figure in when in truth we figure no where. Lesbians are the biggest threat to patriarchy and its misogynistic systems, our very natures are an affront to maintaining those systems, which is why we continue getting buried or erased by "queer progress". Queer ideology in the face of patriarchy and misogyny is just more of the same, it is merely another branch on the patriarchy tree. A branch that uses instead of an ugly in your face brute force, flat out shame or blatant sexism, deceptively uses buzz words like "queer", "feminism", "homophobia", "butch", "femme", "queer rights" etc, that early on lulled lesbians into a false sense of solidarity. 

A sense of solidarity that created a "we're all in this together" queer atmosphere that led lesbians to believe if they/we gave our time and money to queer causes and queer rights groups OUR causes, OUR needs, OUR rights were being looked into, supported and changed for the better. We were also led to believe that the more letters added on to the queer alphabet soup meant more folks are going to be there fighting for our causes, our needs and our rights with their time and their money and their passion in the same way we have for theirs. Instead we've woken up some twenty years later like some lesbian Rip Van Winkles to find we've made no major gains in lesbian visibility, lesbian rights or political lesbian presence. What we've also woken up to find is that we are the smallest letter of and at the bottom of, the queer alphabet soup bowl!

And before someone yells what about DADT or "gay" marriage in some states. Had even half of the gays and lesbians in the military came out since we invaded Iraq the military would have repealed DADT itself because it couldnt afford to lose that many soldiers! And personally I do not consider it progress because now gays and lesbians can freely serve in the military. The male military machine was created to enforce male centered politics and privilege with as much gusto (or more) as "defending" our country. The military has long been an area that has given lesbians a place/paying wage, but it is and remains at a high price to both women and lesbians! Becoming a cog in the male military machine isnt progress, progress would be creating or opening up womencentric/lesbiancentric jobs.

And "gay marriage" is a joke! Marriage historically and in many places still is today if not in legal practice than in ideology a patriarchal system utilized to hold women down, keep women down, keep women under the power of males, legally allow men to take ownership of their property and whatever rights they had/have. Now I don't know about any other lesbian out there but personally when I meet the lesbian I give my whole too and received hers in return, I do NOT want that tainted with anything that past, present or future was/is used against women or used to harm women! Gay marriage isnt "progress" for lesbians, progress for lesbian unions would not only recognize and celebrate the unique love between two lesbian females, it would do so while giving us the basics rights and benefits available to any other legal couple.

Getting back to the NClR, I responded to (Erik's) message asking him did the org have any plans on changing their name to reflect who they truly are representing because their name as it stands is quite deceptive, and two days later I havent heard anything back, which to me speaks volumes.

I will write more about the org itself, what it espouses and who is working for them in part (2) of this subject coming in the next day or so.

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Trans Trendering-Who is Transitioning

 

 

We are ALL to blame for the shear, pure self hatred that these young women feel. What are YOU doing to STOP the Misogyny?

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