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Romani people: Ghosts are terrifying. We have so many superstitions about ghosts, spirits, and mystical creatures that it governs how we go about our daily lives. Burn all Ouija boards, rromalen.

I heard a rumor that butches have access to the world of men by virtue of their polished boots and perfect Winsor knots Some tragedy tells me that they are the pretend women; the women born wrong; the women-not-women who inhabit a spectral plane where they wear shackles identical to mine but cannot name the cage they’re in I heard a lie that butches are men in a bad plastic mask That their privileges include public hisses, leering eyes, and strangers plodding close behind I heard that butches sink venom into femme women into straight women into whoever passes by their street corner at which of course they are leaning against a brick wall with their thumbs hooked into their Dungarees (But this is not about my fantasies) I was told some tedium when I was a baby gay salivating over Stephanie with the chain wallet and the sneer who spoke against the cruelty of boys in my class when I was sold the snake oil that butches were hiding in the shadows with lighters waiting to burn my bra But here is what I have learned: Butches swing bats against true predators scaled monstrosities preying up and down the block They have dug their heels in for my right to call myself a lesbian to free me from every constricting dress and shapewear that men would otherwise cram me into I was always good enough, small enough, big enough, loud and quiet and sour enough A butch woman taught my public school sex education class and gritted her teeth when her students asked about barrier methods hands tied by the confines of simply needing to pay her rent so no she could not dismantle the system But, she said, “If anyone–anyone–Has any questions, my office is open” Butches ask me if I’m doing okay when I’m in a new space They ask me to dance if I feel safe if I need to get a cab home Butch women have been the ones to catch my terrified stare when I have Shrodinger’s rapist standing next to me on the subway because you don’t know until you know Butches love flowers, split the bill whisper sweetly to their cats secretly sleep with teddy bears Butches snore like sleeping dragons and bite like them, too but only when their homes have been invaded caved in, gutted and carved beyond recognition Butch is not a liminal space a go-between Butch is a force to be reckoned with, but if you let it, then the rain will come and everything good will grow from the ground The rain will come The dyke rages on.

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale by Maria Mies

The whole point of class analysis (materialist analysis) is that it destabilize notions of destiny and stability. The proletariate is not a group defined biologically or through some innate aspect of the body itself but through their position within a given historical moment and contradiction. As materialists, its obvious to us that any attempt to inscribe the identity of the proletariat as natural is ideology. Whether its claims of being less intelligent, being more lazy, whatever, it is all a means of naturalizing the class position to render it destiny. All such justifications are means for reinforcing the domination of the proletariat. 

Those who have to insist on being women are willful women, and the arm becomes your resource, something that can lend its hand in a battle to be. Trans women are willful women; women who have to insist on being women, who have to keep insisting, again and again, often in the face of violent and repeated acts of misgendering. Any feminists who do not stand up, who do not wave their arms to protest against this misgendering, have become straightening rods. When I ask for a revival of the militancy of the figure of the lesbian feminist I am imagining lesbian feminism as in a fundamental and necessary alliance with transfeminism. Transfeminism has also brought feminism back to life. And can I add here that an anti-trans stance is an anti-feminist stance; it is against the feminist project of creating worlds to support those for whom gender fatalism (boys will be boys, girls will be girls) is fatal; a sentencing to death.

⚢ ask game ⚢

Butch ask game!

Ex-RFs self-labeling as “materialist feminists” and then proceeding to be exceedingly Not Materialist in their feminism / essentially holding the same views they did when they self-identified as a Radical Feminist…

Monique Wittig in One is Not Born a Woman: “However, most of the feminists and lesbian-feminists in America and elsewhere still believe that the basis of women’s oppression is biological as well as historical. Some of them even claim to find their sources in Simone de Beauvoir. The belief in mother right and in a “prehistory” when women create civilization (because of a biological predisposition) while the coarse and brutal men hunted (because of a biological predisposition) is symmetrical with the biologizing interpretation of history produced up to now by the class of men. It is still the same method of finding in women and men a biological explanation of their division, outside of social facts.”