Sunday 29 September 2013

Here's a very good deconstruction of the TERF myth that when trans people talk about the 'cotton ceiling' it's because we're rapists.

It's a fine analysis, but I think the author ignores one thing: the role of projection, in a psychoanalytic sense, in TERF discourse on this issue.

See, the TERF idea that there's something rapey about the cotton ceiling depends on the idea that us trans girls try to bully people into having sex with us by claiming that, essentially, if they say they don't want to it's because they're transphobic. It's an odd notion: who wants to have sex with an unwilling partner who's been browbeaten into it? Not me, that's for damn sure. Where would TERFs get that idea?

Here's my theory: a lot of TERFs are veterans of 80s radical feminism, which introduced us all to a cute concept called 'political lesbianism'. This idea held that ALL women should be lesbians, whether they fancied other women or not, and anyway if they said they didn't want to shag women it was probably because they'd been brainwashed by patriarchy. In other words, IF YOU DIDN'T SLEEP WITH (CIS) LESBIANS YOU WERE A HOMOPHOBE.

No wonder they can only see the cotton ceiling as similar sexual bullying: browbeating other women into submission is probably the only way some TERFs can get laid.


No comments:

Post a Comment