It is ridiculously easy to find evidence to the contrary through the simplest of google searches. I was hardly even trying and I found all of the examples below. I eventually just stopped clicking because there were so many and I felt like this was evidence enough. This is not solely a list of physical attacks. I initially put together the list below because someone was arguing that there’s nothing wrong with cis women wanting autonomous cis-women-only spaces. My argument was going to be that the whole “we have the right to do this, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it” idea is true but is a HUGE red herring. Because in practice, the reason people oppose this is mostly because there is a consistent and vivid pattern of these spaces being overtly, intentionally transphobic, and directly harmful to trans women in specific, and trans and/or intersex people in general. As I put together examples, I discovered a long, concrete pattern of physical violence, specifically against trans women by cis women, in addition to the mental/emotional violence that is so extremely commonplace. It reminded me of the dozens of posts I’ve seen on Tumblr from TERFs who insist that there’s no evidence of any TERF being violent against a trans woman. (Such posts routinely dismiss or ignore the psychological violence they do. I do not agree with the philosophy that emotional abuse is not abuse, or that it is less bad than physical abuse.) So, here are is a pattern of examples to the contrary – physical attacks, murder threats, attempted murder, and psychological violence. Feel free to share. (Please note that the underlined words below are links to a lot of different sources. I sometimes get “that’s not true, you pulled it out of your ass” responses. I literally always put links to my sources in my posts.)
1. Z. Budapest’s annual “self-blessing ritual” that insisted it was “for genetic women only” which
- of course didn’t require anybody to actually know or prove what their chromosomes were to enter, which sure is great for all the non-trans women who don’t know they’re intersex
- by saying it was for genetic women only, also excluded non-trans intersex women like those with androgen insensitivity syndrome and XY chromosomes, or turner’s syndrome and X0 chromosomes, or Triple-X Syndrome and XXX…
- did not require people to participate naked
- had literally no gendered content, except that it mentioned breasts (which technically everyone has to some degree)
- and when challenged by many non-transphobic cis women, resulted in Z.
Budapest making blatantly transphobic statements like “You can tell these are men, they
don’t care if women lose the only tradition reclaimed after much
research and practice, the Dianic Tradition. Men simply want in. It’s
their will…. But if you claim to be one of us, you have to have sometimes in your life a womb, and ovaries and MOON bleed and not die.“
2. The 1973 West Cost Lesbian Feminist Conference,
where a trans woman (Beth Elliott) was one of the organizers, and a
contingent of cis women wanted the conference to be for cis women only.
Beth Elliott had also volunteered to perform as a musician. She got up
on stage, and
- Robin Morgan jumped up on stage, and outed her as trans
- by saying “I
charge [Beth Elliott] as an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a
destroyer—with the mentality of a rapist. And you women at this
Conference know who he is. Now. You can let him into your workshops—or
you can deal with him”,
- whereupon some of the cis women who
had been protesting her presence at the conference jumped up on stage to
physically beat her up and remove her,
- hitting the cis
lesbian feminist comedy duo of Robin Tyler and Patty Harrison when they
jumped back up on stage to physically defend her
- and
eventually resulting in an audience vote to let her stay, and
subsequently, an extremely transphobic keynote address from Robin Morgan
the following day, referring to Beth Elliott as a “transvestite” and a
“rapist”;
- and her incredibly, graphically transphobic and
libelious speech was subsequently widely anthologized. (Beth ended up
performing, and then leaving the conference.)
Trans historian
Susan Stryker has noted that for many attendees, this was their first
exposure to the idea of trans people’s existence, and the speech and
anti-trans flyering at the event has had a huge anti-trans influence on
the lesbian/feminist movement ever since.
3. A few months after the 1973 conference above, Sylvia Rivera was to speak at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally.
- As she took the stage, TERF and former friend Jean O’Leary, who wanted to keep trans women out, yelled to MC Vito Russo to attack Rivera with the microphone and “kick her ass”;
- Rivera got ahold of it first, and struggled in a tug-of-war for
control of the mic before winning and making her scheduled speech,
whereupon O’Leary leapt up on the stage and made an unscheduled speech
saying terrible things about “drag queens”.
- Rivera was driven to a suicide attempt by the betrayal, and would withdraw from politics for 20 years.
4. Olivia Records, the lesbian separatist music collective that practically was lesbian
music and feminist music for decades, that was a fundamental part of
lesbian culture (and iirc lives on in Olivia Cruises still) and which
was trans-inclusive.
- Janice Raymond, MWMF founder Lisa Vogel, and a lot of other cis women believed it should only be for cis women, and
- threatened a boycott to bring down the whole organization, and
- organized a campaign of credible armed death threats against the lone
trans woman in the collective, Sandy Stone, as well as sending death threats to a
lot of the cis members.
- The death threats culminated with a group calling themselves the Gorgons, who told the collective that when Olivia Records brought its music tour to Seattle, they were going to murder Sandy Stone.
- They actually showed up at the concert with guns. Fortunately, the collective had taken the threats seriously enough to hire heavy security, who managed to take the guns away before they could be fired.
5. The 1999 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, where the Lesbian Avengers did a “ticket-buying action” – came over from Camp Trans, told them so, brought a 16-year-old trans woman to the ticket booth, and they sold her a ticket knowing she was trans, and then
- transphobes overheard
- and followed her around screaming “MAN ON THE LAND” at her
- until too many people had gathered for her to move, trapping her
- and security offered to give them a tent to do a sort of discussion
- and the transphobes spent the next 2-3 hours literally lining up to take turns berating and screaming at her, screaming things like “you’re a rapist! you’re raping the Land!”
- and one of them openly threatened her, telling her she’d better leave soon because she (the cis woman) had a knife and “didn’t know if she would be able to control herself around (the young trans woman)”
- and nobody did anything, they just took their next turn
- while the young woman started sobbing uncontrollably and then completely dissociated, until they were finally kicked back out
6. The 2014 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, an event which is for cis women only, where the intro booklet in part said:
- “Radical
Feminists NEVER agree to the female-hating trans cult con that men
could be women or Lesbians. (We also do not accept
“‘trans-paraplegic” able-bodied men who demand to be accepted as
paraplegic Lesbians.) This includes not supporting these men
appropriating our identity by calling them “transfolk” or “transwomen”
or any other terms that give credence to the idea that they are somehow
more special than other misogynist female impersonators.”
7. Beth Elliott actually transitioned as a teenager, which afaik was rare for the time. Four years earlier, she had been the first woman under 21 to become an officer of the prominent queer women’s organization the Daughters of Bilitis, which again, many people thought should be a cis-women-only space. So
- Now-notorious transphobe BevJo (Bev Von Dohre, who would later join
the Gutter Dykes and attack Beth onstage, and who in 2010 made the
infamous statement that “They expect we’ll be shocked to see statistics
about them being killed,
and don’t realize, some of us wish they would ALL be dead”) accused the
adolescent Beth of having sexually harassed her as a teenager,
- and she got kicked out for not being “woman-born”
- and was continuously painted as a rapist for decades after, because
Robin Morgan jumped on that accusation in her 1973 speech and turned it
into “the same man [sic] who four years ago tried to pressure a San
Francisco lesbian into letting him [sic] rape her“ – which single-handedly created the myth/trope of the “transsexual rapist”.
- (For what it is worth, since it is important to give accusers the
benefit of the doubt even when they’re transphobic, BevJo’s description
of the harassment is that if she seemed to be making friends with men,
Beth would flip out and cry. She doesn’t seem to be saying they were
dating at the time, just friends? Which is not an emotionally healthy
relationship, but also not sexual harassment or rape, and it’s really
fucked up toward people who have been sexually harassed or raped to
minimize their experiences that way.)
I’m done googling for now. This stuff is foul.
Cis followers: read this, and remember it next time you’re tempted to be all “butbutbut they make good points!” instead of deleting your TWEF reblog.
