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ventI want straight people to take responsibility for what Pride has become.
I’m really unsettled to be seeing so many straight people crowing about how encouraging it is that there’s less Pride merch in stores and fewer Pride posts on social media from corporations and whatnot. I spend most of my time online talking to radical feminist lesbians in private Discord servers, so I get whiplash when I enter online spaces for straight GCs. It gets harder to tell the difference between them and conservatives every day.
There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made about what Pride has become (due to the hostile takeover from straight TQ people). I share many of these criticisms. But my older lesbian friends have told me about how meaningful Pride was to them, and I’m gutted not to be able to experience it myself. I would have loved to be able to attend a Dyke March that didn’t include heterosexual males, didn’t put me in a position to be propositioned or leered at by said males, and didn’t label me a “terf” for my sexual orientation (not “genital preference”) that excludes males.
Why is it so acceptable to deride anything to do with Pride (rainbow flags, Pride month itself, the parades), including here on Ovarit, when it would never be acceptable here to cheer for the downfall of women’s institutions, spaces, or movements (sports, book clubs, feminism) that had been taken over by TQ men just to spite those TQ men? That’s throwing the lesbian and bi women — who still need our movement — out with the bathwater.
It seems as though the sentiment is that while there may be some “good” lesbian and bi women, too many of them are too permissive of the harmful behavior of the TQ, and therefore, we don’t deserve to have our own movement anymore, and the whole thing should be done away with. It feels like we are being blamed for failing to prevent straight people from infiltrating our movement – the same victim-blaming women get everywhere else. And we are being painted with the same brush as the predators who are using our movement for cover. “TQ” predators are not a gay problem — 99% of the time, these are straight people! The call is coming from inside y’all’s house, not mine.
It’s wild to me that in one breath, someone can correctly identify a “trans lesbian” as a heterosexual male who preys on lesbians, and in the next breath, condemn the movement that gave lesbians our rights to live independently of heterosexual men.