#radicalesbians

The Woman Identified Woman: manifesto of gay liberation group "Radicalesbians," circa 1970.

Among the first casualties of transgenderism and the ideology it spawned were the sexual and social boundaries of lesbians. But very few know that the problem is far older than this nouveau iteration of what is often referred to as a “culture war.”

In recent years, the exclusivity of on- and offline lesbian spaces have been repeatedly subject to scrutiny from those who clamor for the “inclusion” of trans-identified males. Women who assert their right to keep these spaces single-sex, or who express their attractions as being rooted in sex and not the mystical concept of gender, are met with hostility and branded as bigots.

For example, in 2012, Planned Parenthood of Toronto held a workshop called Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss the “barriers” (cotton underwear) faced by “queer trans women” in “queer women’s communities.” The workshop description also noted that participants would strategize ways to “overcome” these barriers.

The Cotton Ceiling workshop was recently referenced at a court hearing in May. Allison Bailey, a barrister and lesbian activist, took Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers to an employment tribunal for policing her livelihood due to her views on gender ideology. During the course of the hearing, the idea that lesbians must include males in their sexuality was likened to the racial integration of South Africa. 

But this was hardly the first time lesbians have been deemed “sexual racists” for not wanting to affirm the identity of males. Nor was it the first time that trans-identified males had attempted to force their way into lesbian communities and lives. 

In fact, this is a phenomena goes back decades — right to the beginnings of modern lesbian social and political organizing.

While today’s transgender movement tries to position nebulous conceptions of “gender” over the factual reality and importance of sex, the lesbians of the early gay liberation movement suffered no such confusion. In fact, many who were initially involved in the Gay Liberation Front, which was formed after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, shifted their focus to the growing women’s movement instead. They felt that the gay rights movement was male-dominated and that their interests would be better served by organizing for the specific interests of their own sex.

One of the groups formed by these early lesbian activists was the Radicalesbians. Founded in 1970, the Radicalesbians distributed a manifesto titled “The Woman-Identified Woman” at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City. The manifesto focused heavily on the reality of living as a female in a male-dominated society. It helped set the stage for later radical feminist and lesbian feminist thinking.

An early example of heterosexual males in the lesbian movement and lesbian lives came later that same year, when folk singer Beth Elliot (Elliott Basil Mattiuzzi) sent a “Letter from a Transsexual” to the radical feminist newspaper It Ain’t Me Babe. “I am a transsexual,” Elliot wrote. “On the intellectual and emotional levels, I know myself to be a woman; on the physical level, my own body denies me this.” Elliot also described how he met and had sex with an “exclusively gay” woman who “could really see my being a woman.”

The editors of the paper invited Elliot to a conversation where they tried to talk him out of undergoing a sex change operation, telling him that it “shouldn’t matter whether one is born with female or male genitalia. That’s our point.” It continues: “As your new reality emerges, as you are able to live it to any degree, you should be able to feel differently about your body.”

Nevertheless, in 1971, Elliot joined and became the vice president of the San Francisco chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis — a lesbian political organization — despite some members’ protestations. He also served as the editor of the group’s newsletter, Sisters. However, accusations of sexual harassment against Elliot in 1972 led to a vote which removed him from the group and barred the inclusion of any trans-identified males in the chapter.

Unable to take a hint, Elliot joined the organizing committee of the West Coast Lesbian Conference in 1973, where he was also slated to perform. On the first night of the conference, a lesbian separatist group called the Gutter Dykes passed out leaflets protesting the presence of a man. Elliot did briefly perform but left soon afterward. 

The following day, keynote speaker Robin Morgan amended her address in light of the previous day’s events. Her speech, titled “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” contained some strong opinions about referring to men as women.

“No, I will not call a male ‘she,'” Morgan passionately declared, “Thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society and of surviving, have earned me the name ‘woman.’ One walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which hemay enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No. In our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.”

Morgan’s words rippled through feminist and lesbian communities over the proceeding decade. 

By 1977, DYKE magazine had published a six-page feature titled “Can Men Be Women? Some Lesbians Think So! Transsexuals in the Women’s Movement.” The story presented a conversation about some lesbians’ baffling acceptance of men who claim to be same-sex attracted females, like themselves.

Janet, one of the interviewees stated: “That is what is so weird to me, what I find so scary about the way a lot of Lesbians have reacted to the transsexual issue. The attitude seems to be that however someone presents themself, that is the way you are supposed to see them … No distinction is made between respecting someone else and suspending your own perceptions. It is always tempting to be passive.”

Fellow interviewee Liza agreed, writing: “It is also very tempting to be generous. I think that a lot of Lesbians say they have gone through such a hard time being accepted as Lesbians and now these poor transsexuals are having such a hard time and here we are in the same boat, both oppressed by the same culture. If we recognize them as our sisters it helps everybody. It is very generous and I appreciate that in women, but it is really shortsighted.”

It is incredible how the discussions on this topic from more than 30 years ago feel like they could have been plucked from any heated social media page today. 

In 1978, the issue was given even greater prominence in the book Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly, a radical feminist and theologian who taught at Boston College for more than three decades. In a section of her book, “Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon,” Daly opined that “transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes.” 

Daly was a dissertation advisor for Janice Raymond, who went on to become an even more prominent critic of transsexualism. In 1979, Raymond published The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, which highlights many of the issues we are still dealing with. In the book, Raymond argues that transsexualism reinforces gender stereotypes and that it is just another method of patriarchal oppression. 

An entire section of the book titled “Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian-Feminist” deals with the issue of men who claim to be lesbians. Such a man, writes Raymond, “attempts to possess women at a deeper level, this time under the guise of challenging rather than conforming to the role and behavior of stereotyped femininity.”

In a particularly prophetic section, Raymond raises some questions that one could argue reflect the state of the modern lesbian community:

Will the acceptance of transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists who have lost only their outward appendages of physical masculinity lead to the containment and control of lesbian feminists? Will every lesbian-feminist space become a harem?

The only point where Raymond seems to have missed the mark is in the fact that most male lesbians today have not lost their “outward appendage” and, in fact, are very proud of it.

In his book, Transgender History, prominent trans-identified male “lesbian” Susan Stryker helpfully provides us with evidence that Raymond’s ideas were alive and well several years after her book’s publication. 

Stryker includes a fiery excerpt from an anonymous 1986 letter to the editor of the San Francisco lesbian newspaper Coming Up:

When an estrogenated man with breasts loves women, that is not lesbianism, that is mutilated perversion. [Such an individual] is not a threat to the lesbian community, he is an outrage to us. He is not a lesbian, he is a mutant man, a self-made freak, a deformity, an insult. He deserves a slap in the face. After that, he deserves to have his body and his mind made well again.

The gay community was still grappling with transsexual (at this point also often referred to as transgender) inclusion during the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. 

Contrary to the claim of some modern trans activists that the “T” was always part of the acronym, that was not yet the case. The national steering committee of the march did seek to add “transgender” to the title, but it did not receive the necessary majority vote to do so. Over the next few years, however, it became more common for lesbian, gay, and bisexual organizations to include “transgender” in their names and transgender issues in their mandates.

Around this time, another controversy was brewing regarding the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival—often referred to as Michfest—because the predominantly lesbian festival had made clear in 1991 that the event was for “womyn-born womyn,” i.e., females. 

This made some males very angry, and they organized an annual demonstration named “Camp Trans” to protest the fact that women had created a female-exclusive entertainment space. Michfest was also criticized by prominent LGBT organizations like GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign. The festival, which began in 1976, held its final event in 2015 after years of facing increasingly ruthless scrutiny.

The termination of Michfest marked the end of an era, and the beginning of the end in general for lesbian spaces where same-sex attracted women could socialize with one another without the incursion of males.

Lesbian bars were also dying out — not even notoriously-woke Portland had any lesbian bars left by 2016. Identity politics like those that shut down Michfest made it a minefield to create spaces and events that would exclude males who identified as lesbian women. In 2021, Smithsonian Magazine reported that there were only 15 lesbian bars left in the entirety of the United States.

It is now 2022.

Same-sex marriage is legal, and the expectation that homosexual people are free to live their lives is commonplace. Yet, we are facing a new predicament where this generation of lesbians are rapidly losing access to their needed exclusive communities. The music festivals and lesbian conferences once attended by hundreds and even thousands of women are a thing of the past, and any attempt to hold a similar event today would be met with rabid protest.

All of that being said… I do believe there is a silver lining, though it be a somewhat bleak one. 

Trans rights activists are becoming increasingly emboldened in their abusive behavior towards lesbians (and all women) that the trickle of criticism seeping through the cracks is inevitably bound to turn into a flood. More and more lesbians are speaking out, joined by feminists and women from all walks of life, and even prominent voices, such as that of Harry Potter author JK Rowling, are joining in to apply pressure. 

It might feel sometimes like we are stuck rehashing arguments from the 1970s, but we should be proud to take up the mantle of the women who saw this coming for the benefit of those yet to come.

By Eva Kurilova

Source: Women’s Liberation Movement Print Culture

This is an important historical document in the context of U.S. feminism and has some ideas that are still provocative and useful today.

But the ideas in this manifesto need to be read with the understanding of where this group ended up going in practice: female separatism, non-facetious misandry, and biphobia.

The manifesto also has nothing to say about white supremacy and the need for cross-gender solidarity among Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations; or how the experience of being transgender complicates (and enriches) lesbianism.

For more formats, see The Anarchist Library, otherwise full text is below the break.

I also do think there are more prominent legacies of lesbian feminism than, say, thinking bi women can’t use butch/femme (which wasn’t specifically on the lesbian feminist agenda), that might be easier to identify if we actually look at what lesbian feminists said. It’s A Myth that lesbian feminists precipitated a sudden, universal changeover between an understanding of “lesbian” that included bi women to one that didn’t. However, lesbian feminists did create a definition of lesbian as not only feminist, but as the vanguard of feminism. This is a revision to what I was arguing yesterday (again, my thoughts aren’t fully formed), but I think the addition of that understanding of lesbianism to the mix is more of an ongoing legacy of lesbian feminism that continues to influence tensions among lesbians and bi women. This is something that continues to be picked up and passed on among lesbians and bi women, sometimes without even connecting it with “lesbian feminism” specifically and while combining it with other positions that contradict lesbian feminism (such as innate divisions between sexual orientations, or lesbianism as defined primarily by sexual attraction).

This book I’m reading (Separatism and Women’s Communities, Dana R. Shugar, 1995) has a chapter that looks at the 1970 article “The Woman Identified Woman” by the Radicalesbians, and talks about how it basically flipped the script on how lesbianism was assessed within the predominantly white radical feminist movement at the time, and how its ideas were taken up by other lesbian feminists:

Jean: Um, because I have since then, I mean, I’ve gone… During the Anita Bryant campaign, for instance, down in Dade County, Florida, I used to go down there and help them with the campaign. And I’d stay at the Windward hotel, which was just full of transvestites, transsexuals, wonderful, darling, lovable people that I got to know as people and got to know their lives and their stories. And who they are. Why they were. And, you know, just as you grow older, first of all, you learn more and you mellow in terms of your precision about what has to be exactly right and politically correct.

And right now I have… I like… It’s hard even to be tolerant for myself of exact political correctness. And I know that I went through it and I have to patience with the people that come up now that are going through the same thing, because it’s a process. It is a process.

———

Later Jean said to me, “How could I work to exclude transvestites and at the same time criticize the feminists who were doing their best back in those days to exclude lesbians?” She was right. (X)

And this is one of the big issues with trying to revive separatist and exclusionist ideology... not only was it unsuccessful in the past, it's also based on 50 year old ideas and understanding of society and how oppression functions.

They were railing against drag queens in a time where it was illegal to cross dress, and lesbians who did not dress traditionally feminine enough could be arrested. And they were rightfully pissed about it.

And also, friendly reminder... that comment about feminists excluding lesbians? That was the whole reason lesbians separated in the first place. Because neither liberal nor radical feminism focused on lesbian issues. They were fighting along with women who wanted to abolish marriage, when they didn't even have the right to marry. They were fighting for abortion rights, when it wasn't a high priority for them, personally. But when they tried to fight for lesbian rights, they were ignored. (Or worse: accused of hindering the movement.)

From The Woman-Identified Woman (the Radicalesbian manifesto):

Women in the movement have in most cases gone to great lengths to avoid discussion and confrontation with the issue of lesbianism. It puts people up-tight. They are hostile, evasive, or try to incorporate it into some ''broader issue. " They would rather not talk about it. If they have to, they try to dismiss it as a 'lavender herring. " But it is no side issue. It is absolutely essential to the success and fulfillment of the women's liberation movement that this issue be dealt with. As long as the label "dyke" can be used to frighten women into a less militant stand, keep her separate from her sisters, keep her from giving primacy to anything other than men and family-then to that extent she is controlled by the male culture.

So do not let terfs (and especially political lesbians) tell you that supporting trans rights is lesphobic. Because this is the part of history they ignore: the part where lesbians revolted against a gay liberation movement that excluded them, and a feminist movement that excluded them. Terfs do not get to set the parameters for lesbianism, when most of them aren't even a part of the queer community in the first place.

There is an entire lesbian history that they don't acknowledge because it doesn't fit the lesbian narrative they're peddling, but unfortunately, the side they picked is the one that defines "lesbian" as a woman who voluntarily gives up men, and attraction to women is not required.

Martha Shelley, author and a co-founder of GLF and Radicalesbians told the group of 250 that recounted experience is the best history. For Shelley, that history began with the landmark lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis and the picketing of Independence Hall in Philadelphia "pleading for equal rights," an important step, she said, toward "splitting open the ’50s grey flannel suit mentality." She acknowledged the many others involved in the early lesbian and gay movement, for whom the first steps were the civil rights, anti-war, feminist and anti-imperialist struggles.

[...] She spoke of the early organizing efforts in Stonewall's aftermath, such as Mattachine's Town Hall meeting, the early march through the Village and rally in Washington Square, and the meeting at Alternate U, where [the Gay Liberation Front (GLF)] was born. Eschewed by much of the left, GLF also was avoided, by many lesbians and gay men still stinging from the anti-homosexual witch hunt of the McCarthy period.

Crediting GLF for saving her life, Shelley waxed nostalgic about that group's dances at Alternate U. (where beer was 50 cents as opposed to $2 dollars in mafia-run bars), the role of its newspaper Come Out, and its many coalition attempts including fundraising for the Black Panthers and helping the Young Lords in building occupation. Shelley also spoke of GLF's dissolution, as various factions left for various reasons: people of color forming their own groups in response to issues of racism, "serious socialists" becoming the Red Butterfly cell, women leaving in response to needs around sexism. In reflection, Shelley called upon the community to remember "those people who didn't make it," whether by AIDS, murder, suicide, or "therapists."

At the time of early liberationist foment, Barbara Love was a CBS executive and, a reluctant radical in a milieu where the bars and the radical groups were the "only game in town." Co-author of Sappho Was a Right on Woman and co-founder of Identity House and the National Gay Task Force (now National Lesbian and Gay Task Force), 'he was introduced to lesbian liberation through the National Organization for Women (NOW) where "that issue" was whispered about until Rita Mae Brown came in with her mini-skirt and Phi Beta Kappa pin and "actually mentioned the world 'lesbian' out loud." Love spoke of the efforts she and Sappho co-author Sidney Abbott made in getting NOW's 400,000 members to work on lesbian issues. The fight in NOW was "devastating," she said, describing the "lavender menace" purge of lesbians from leadership in that organization. Such struggles continued in efforts to gain gender parity at NGTF.

A former vice president of [Gay Activists Alliance (GAA)], co-founder of NGTF and now at the New York City Commission on the Status of Women, Ginny Vida told of her experience with the Women's Subcommittee of GAA (which later became Lesbian Feminist Liberation) where there was tension with the gay men, "but also wonderful moments of working together." One of that subcommittee's first efforts was an International Lesbian Film Festival, in which Vida credited Vito Russo with helping obtain many of the films. Vida also recounted the major victory for the early movement when, in December 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders.

The police raid of an afterhours bar called the Snake Pit in the early 70s was remembered by Jim Owles, a co-founder of the GAA and the first president of that organization. An Argentinian gay man arrested in the raid, fearing deportation based on his homosexuality, jumped out a window of the 6th precinct and was impaled on the fence below. Leaflets mimeographed at Marty Robinson's apartment which called for a demonstration said: "that person could have been anyone of us." The demonstrators went first to St. Vincent's where the man was hospitalized, proceeding to the 6th precinct "to give them hell," Owles told those gathered.