"I am giving you permission, I am giving me permission, to tell the truth."
An impassioned preamble sets the scene for the second half of Rachel's conversation with Carol, about transition and detransition from a butch lesbian perspective. Together, they wax incredulous on the male-centeredness of the 2020s and, in so many words: the return of femaleness as history's purest sign of insignificance. Carol shares moments in her transition and detransition that impacted her marriage and her mental health. They address many of the elephants in the room for butch lesbians straddling lesbian and queer cultures: misogyny, self-censorship, dogma, guilt. Rachel describes alligator mode. Everyone fights the good fight and gets back on the horse. There are plenty of animal metaphors to go around, à la Carol's wife's line from last episode: "It's because we're animals, Carol."
A disclaimer (of sorts):
SBD will continue to advocate for reason to prevail amid continuing, although lessening, accusations that anyone who gives any effs about female specificity is a "terf." (Thank god for recent Associated Press and United Nations guidance on that. Finally.) We at SBD believe transitioning secondary sex characteristics to traits of the opposite sex does make life easier for some people, and that medical transition should remain a protected option for adults. We also know that detransition rates for lesbians and butch women are particularly high. Being pressured to transition when it is not the right choice for you is harm. Not being allowed to talk about that pressure, or being told that the pressure you experienced for years was an illusion of your own mind, is gaslighting and directly harmful. It is the kind of discursive dismissal from matters of social concern that non-women have been perpetrating against womanhood and the feminine for millennia.
Our community is suffering. Butches are suffering. Young lesbians are suffering. Young women are suffering. If you are someone who still feels cared for in queer spaces that dismiss and disparage female specificity and female homosexuality, you may not feel what we're feeling. But you don't have to feel it to listen to others who do feel it, and to hold sacred space for our experiences, our hurt, and our conclusions about how to respond to what is genuinely a crisis for us. We're entitled to those conclusions. We're entitled because throughout recorded history, women deemed sexually masculine have remained under sustained, systemic pressure to view ourselves as inferior imitations of a male other. Our vitality has been denied its own sacred space.
We've been encouraged to see exile from our own embodied difference -- women don't do that -- as the solution to our problems under literally every scientific, social, religious, and medical paradigm on offer for the last several centuries. That fundamental devaluation (Indeed, can we possibly exist without striving to become elseways?) will never be resolved by pretending all queers are the same.
Music, via Epidemic Sound:
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free