To All The Trans Lesbians I've Ever Known
Or don't know. An open letter to you all! From, an actual lesbian.
I'm here to tell you things you may not want to hear, but you need to. You see, it's cruel to be kind, and kind to be cruel. I'm here to say the things that need to be said, because if you don't hear them, you won't know what everyone is really thinking. You see, you're being gaslighted by your peers and by people too chickenshit to say the obvious to your face.
Not me though. Once I was kind. Then I realised being kind to you is being cruel. Why should I indulge you with a pack of lies, when I can build you back up with the truth? It’s time to open your eyes.
I see you with mine or at least, my mind's eye, in the corner of the bar, glaring, sulking, wondering why your ‘friends’ invited you to the lesbian event when you found out about it the night before, but then promptly left you there to be ignored. I can picture you at the lesbian group you and your fellows have ruined, not wanting to date each other but not saying 'where'd all the lesbians go?' out loud, because that would be broaching a subject too close to the truth. I can see you outside the bar, lesbian speed dating event inside, and the organiser telling you that you are not welcome, and you fly into a rage and try and get it cancelled, because you think no lesbian can have anything without including you and your penis.
The unspoken question you’re always asking, the unspoken words you don’t say, or maybe can’t even articulate, but you’re always still asking anyway: “Why won’t the lesbians put up with being sexually harassed by me? Why are they making my penis sad and hurting my feelings?”
The question on the tip of their tongue, the unspoken words they need to say but don’t: “Why on earth do you think you can come into a lesbian event in the first place? Why do you think you are entitled to our spaces and bodies? You’re a man, dude.”
The words all us lesbians should have all said in the first place to you and your ilk, but we either left foolishly left unsaid or cast out those who said it? “Fuck off.”
But it is cruel to be kind and kind to be cruel.
I see you, hideously dressed in florescent knee-high socks, sticking out like a sore thumb, and being told sure, you look great! (spoiler: even online, they're lying. You look like shit). I see you, the funny geeky guy who's suddenly always left out of things when you 'came out', the guy who expected his wife to stay and with the kids that still call him Dad. I envision you, wondering why there's no 'cis women' in your hobby (spoiler, again: You drove them out, like every other women’s space you turn up to).
I see the gay people no longer at the pride parade, the men who’ve gone home, the women who don’t even bother, because I see you’ve declared Pride is Queer, Stonewall was started by a trans woman, so they owe you, they owe you, they owe you everything, from their bodies, to their histories, to their events, to their spaces, to their everything, because they owe you this, they owe you the right, as a straight man to turn up in fetish gear and parade it in front of children, because that’s what Pride is really about, not homosexuals. They owe you the right to ruin Pride.
After all, why does an oppressed minority threatened with death in many countries for simply existing need a festival and parade to themselves, anyway? It’s much better as a vehicle to parade your fetish. Being queer is more important than being homosexual. And being told no, you’re not a lesbian, you’re not a part of our community makes your penis sad and hurts your feelings.
But most of all, I see a man who is mentally ill, and instead of helping, society has decided to use you as a tool to destroy the gay community, ruin women's spaces, and generally make an absolute fool of himself, all the while sexually harassing everyone around him because you know, at the end of the day, you're living out your fetish in public and expecting everyone to participate by pretending you’re a woman.
Instead of, you know, getting you help, they've let you destroy everything around you.
Because it's cruel to be kind, and kind to be cruel, I'm going to be brutally honest with you: you're a man with mental illness. And that's OK. There’s lots of people out there who are mentally ill, it doesn’t make you a bad person, it means you need help. In all honesty, I cannot imagine letting a fetish drive me to mental illness. I cannot imagine the distress it must cause you.
But I know very well the distress you cause everyone else.
Those lesbians who reject you? They're not genital fetishists. The reason the lesbians don't want you at the lesbian speed dating is because you're not a lesbian and they don't want to bother entertaining a man's parody of one, nor the potential behaviour of a man who is already intent on sexually harassing them with his mere presence. See, us lesbians, we can take or leave men, really, and you turn up and start demanding the same old shit the rest of straight society does, but in a dress and think we’ll just comply? Nope! Are you dreaming? You ask of us the physically impossible - we can never be attracted to you, no matter how hard you try or how much you harass and bully us. It's like oil and water, or two positively charged ions, or Joe Biden and Donald Trump declaring their mutual love and getting married. It ain't gonna happen. Ever. No matter how much pseudo-intellectual or academic-sounding bullshit you try and promulgate in the media or reddit or in Queer Studies Journal or whatever, it’s physically impossible, no matter how sad your penis is or how hurt your feelings are.
Same with the whole-ass gay community, in fact. I've seen you sit there and try and figure us out, like we’re some kind of anthropological study. I've seen the rages when we don't spend our lives caring about your perceived issues. You're not gay. You're not part of the community. You're playing pretend oppressed minority so you can jerk off. We have real problems to deal with that don’t involve sad penises and hurt feelings. In fact, you've made yourself one of those problems. Well done, dumbass. Ever wonder why the gays and lesbians suddenly vanish from groups when you bully your way into being in charge? Yeah, exactly. Now we have to rebuild from scratch because of what you've done. Oh look, here comes the LGB Alliance. Are you going to send them homophobic bile again for telling you no and making your penis sad and hurting your feelings?
Oh, and don't forget the women. Everything women have needs to prioritise you, even terms for their bodies. You're a woman, they're a... Uterus owner? Sports? Forget the performance element for five seconds, you are using women's athletics as a fetish prop, nothing else. That’s more than enough reason to tell you to fuck off. Women's loos, underwear departments, language, jokes, scholarships, ID cards, hospital wards, stories, lives, and every other little thing we've managed to eke out for ourselves - you think it should serve you, revolve around you, allow you access, allow you to dominate those things, to steal, to take them over. To use as a fetish prop. Because being excluded from these things will make your penis sad and hurt your feelings.
And even with the law backing you, they'll still reject you. You're not a woman and you never will be. You know what you are? It’s called being a selfish man, it’s called misogyny.
See, I'll tell you what's what. You have autogynephila. You’re in love with an idealized version of yourself as a woman, and that’s what gets you off. Ignore reddit for five minutes and see a decent therapist for your porn addiction. Learn constructive ways of dealing with the problem. Do you really think some lesbians have penises, or do you cling to something so blatantly wrong because otherwise the whole house of cards falls down?
What if it does? What if those cards were to tumble and go all over the surface beneath? Would it really be so bad, to acknowledge you're a man? To give women their space? To realize the world doesn’t revolve around you and your fetish? That appropriating the struggles of an oppressed minority group isn't OK? That some things shouldn’t leave the bedroom and be paraded around outside? Like a fetish? That sometimes your penis is sad, and your feelings are hurt, and that you need to learn to deal with that like an adult, instead of harming everyone else. Because that’s your problem?
Or will you continue listening to the petty cruelties of those who encourage you only into deeper madness? The kind of people that tell a six-foot man with a lantern jaw that he can be a pretty lady if he tries hard enough? If he spends enough? Because they think they’re being kind? The ones that don't see you as a human being, but an opportunity to virtue signal, or make money from prolonging your problems instead of actually helping you? Will you take pills that give you gynecomastia and raise your risk of stroke into the heavens chasing something that only hurts yourself and everyone around you?
Because with you, to be kind is to be cruel. And to be cruel is to be kind. Honesty is the best policy, and no one deserves to live their life with everyone else walking on eggshells and lying to their face. We don't deserve the eggshells, you don't deserve the lies.
Now, you might say I’m full of hate. That I hate you. I’d argue the opposite. The people who encourage you? They’re the ones that hate you, buddy. They’re the ones that let you take a wrecking ball to yourself, and everyone else. They’re the ones that let you turn your life into what it is now. They’re the ones comfortable with letting you chase an impossible dream, and when you realize you can’t chase it anymore, that you could never chase it in the first place, well, that’s the real pickle, isn’t it? Maybe you need to realize that before you reach that precipice, no?
Me? I don’t hate you. I care. I want the best for everyone, and this is not the best for you, nor everyone else. And so, I care enough to be cruel, because to be cruel to you in this case is to be kind.
So, man up and get some actual help, and leave the women and gays alone.
Kind regards,
Sue
This is brilliant! Thank you! I want to share this everywhere (though I'd lose more of my remaining Lesbian friends who barely tolerate me saying this truth.) My only disagreement is that these men perving on us are winning and getting everything they want, for the most part, including our last "Lesbian" publications. (The group I'm in just finished this petition about Sinister Wisdom going from a Lesbian journal to a "trans" issue that literally puts us in danger. https://www.change.org/XXLesbians )
Also, here's the link to my article responding to the very creepy, pervy article that slanders me in that issue because, like you say, they just keep thinking they own us: Countering Lesbian-hating lies with the truth
Lesbians for Lesbians | Bev Jo | Substack
bevjo.substack.com
Also, I don't consider them really mentally ill because can they be if they are the vast majority of men who are on a continuum with the other men who happily harass Lesbians and other women saying we want it, like it, like them, etc. I guess any way that seems to let them off the hook worries me (if mentally ill, poor things can't help themselves). I want them all held accountable.
Again, thank you for such a brilliant post!!!!!!
Sorry, I forgot to add that my main objection to calling these predatory men "mentally ill" is that is their main defense after murdering Lesbians. And then they are put into women's prisons, where they terrorize more Lesbians and women.
https://mandystadtmiller.substack.com/p/rabbitholed-78-dana-rivers-is-the
Where I live in the Bay Area, it can be very hard to find out how many of these men are murdering women because the media simply calls them "women," even when they are seen running around naked afterward the murder, with witnesses telling the police that they saw his prick and testicles -- like the "transwoman" who drove the wrong way on a freeway and killed a woman in a car he hit. I figured this out only after seeing his smiling photo in the news and knew it was a man, so then dug through eyewitness accounts. But he's still listed as a "woman."
I believe that the reason these men have gotten access to every last thing Lesbians and women had was because the other men in power want this to be an option for them too. It used to be a joke in the Seventies when we still had Lesbian bars and leering men would come in and say they wanted to be Lesbians too, wink, wink.
https://www.womenarehuman.com/category/breaking/
Again, I love your post. Thank you!