I’m done here

I went to the fem 08 conference and it clarified a few things for me.

Things have changed for me, I’m thinking differently and I’m being more honest, I’m listening more to people who aren’t me. I’m interested in getting my fingers dirty, in doing more practical offline activism.

I hate the thought of being referred to as a “radfem” because I think by and large the internet “radfem” community is becoming increasingly poisonous and paranoid, and increasingly single issue. While obviously I think the issues of porn, prostitution and rape are really important they are not the only thing that feminism needs to engage with and actually they are not something I wish to talk about all the time because actually I find them retraumatizing, I have wounds that are not going to heal if I keep uncovering them in settings that are not conducive to healing.

I also don’t want to be associated with any of the hypocritical narrow minded savagery that is clearly a complete failure to dismantle or even critique patriarchal attitudes.

I have seen the internet “radfem” community completely welcome people, make them feel, safe, suported, listened to and the when those people step out of line I have seen those people chewed up and spat out, ostracised and ignored, and I can see it happening again. Right now there are two bloggers who I am pretty sure this is going to happen to and I don’t want to be around when it happens.

recently I got called a a pro-porn, pro-bdsm, pro-trans, troll. (its the second to last comment) because I had the audacity to disagree and try to discuss things with certain “radfems”

I recently got kicked of a google group to organise a feminist gathering because one person didn’t like my comments on somebody else’s blog, that had nothing at all to do with them even though the blog from th egroup claims that There is no hierarchy within the group.

I’m really uncomfortable with the idea that all radical feminists are supposed to believe the same thing and if they don’t they get excluded, there was no discussion of my politics before I was kicked of the list and I wasn’t even informed that it had happened.

then when I expressed a wish to still go to the meeting but that it would need to be wheelchair accessible i was informed that the venues was already booked and it wasn’t known if it was wheelchair accessible. If we are trying to undo opressions and be as acsesable as posible shouldnt we make sure that somewhere is acseable before we choose it?

I’m also really uncomfortable that there are other women who would really like to go to the gathering but who know they wouldnt be welcome because they too are seen as the wrong sort of feminst.

And it seems some of those purer than thou radfems want to drag up some age old vindictive vile shit that they knew deeply hurt people who were part of that comunity

I dont think its up to any of us to police who and who isnt “feminist enough” so I want no part of this,

I’m going to stop blogging as nectarine, I am elswhere on the internet, if you want to know where send me an email on nectarine99@googlemail.com and I’ll send you the link

rad fem sisters

can someone tell me why I’m banned from the radfem sisters google group? I sent debs an email about it but got no answer, maybe you didn’t get it?

Ableism in action

1) I had to buy some new clothes for my partners cousins civil partnership ceremony, I qued up to use the fitting rooms, My partner was standing right next to me holding the pile of clothes as I couldn’t hold them and use my crutches, my partner is obviously male so it was clear he wasn’t waiting to use the woman’s fitting rooms. but the woman organising the fitting rooms spent ages faffing around putting clothes away before she got to me, then as she handed me one of those cards with the number of items on it she said “oh I didn’t realise you were waiting, I was going to ask you to move”

What? why would I have been in the que if I didn’t want to use the fitting rooms, why would my partner be standing beside me with a pile of clothes?

Do disabled women not go shopping? not buy new clothes?

2)After the civil partnership ceremony drinks were served, all the other adults were handed alcoholic drinks, i was handed lemon aid because clearly disabled women cant hold their alcohol

3) My partners sister wanted to take a picture of my partner and myself and told me to move my crutches out the way so they wouldn’t be in the picture, although this seems quite minor this is probably the instance that upset/disturbed me the most. If I’m using my crutches on any given day its because I either have a lot of pain or because walking without them is hard/impossible. Having them out of arms length makes me feel incredibly vulnerable and helpless.

Also being asked to hide them seems to be giving me a signal that i should be ashamed of them and ashamed of my disability

This is where I came in: Remembering Myself

This is where I came in and other transgressions.

I recently had a very drunken, rambling but for me very profound conversation about, transgender, gender diversity, queer, non heterosexuality and alliances and i feel in a way it bought me back to myself, gave me a space to reremember my history, to pay homage to who and what made me partly who I am.

Radical feminism is important to me and has been very healing for me and given me a strong place to stand, but before that there was something else. There was another community of people both in literature and physicaly that I belonged to, that belonged to me, before I found radical feminism, when I was dealing with my non heterosexuality I read everything I could find, to help me feel less abnormal. The first book I ever read that talked about not being straight was okay was Becoming a Man and it was so powerful, so profound, it doesn’t matter to me that it was written by a man, it felt like i was coming up for air. And I read everything I could find about being non heterosexual,

And I read, Pat(rik) Califia, Del(la) grace volcano, Kate Bornstien, Joan Nestle, Camile Paglia and many people who I cant remember the names of but who made it okay to be me, made it okay to be queer

It was then i met one of the people I have been most attracted to in my whole life, a preoperative transman, we absolutely zinged, there was an incredible chemistry between us

and I played femme, real high lesbian femme, because it made me feel beautiful, because I liked the sort of women it attracted, i went out with a woman for two and a half years who was so butch she got called sir, who was way more masculine than my current partner who is male

And when i wasn’t playing femme i was doing soft butch baby dyke, the uniform then was Khakis and strappy tops

I have always been Kiki who I am being and how i am dressing depends on how I am feeling, where I feel I am on the gender and sexuality spectrum at that point.

I lived in a big shared house that was always full of people that didn’t live there and almost all of us were some form of queer: bi, gay, lesbian, trans, undecided, unlabeled, We were young desperate, vulnerable, many of us parentless or faced the possibility of becoming parent less if our parents found out who we were, and many of us were crazy because the pressure of living in a homophobic heterosexist society wore us out, wore us down, there was a place to sleep if parental prejudice created homelessness, we fed each other when we were poor, we mopped up the blood weather it was self inflicted or weather it was a homophobic attack. we visited each other when we ended up in the psychiatric hospital, we went clubbing every weekend to celebrate being us, to celebrate our love for us, to celebrate survival

I have never felt so much that people I loved had my back as I did then, and we didn’t care, it didn’t matter who was fucking who, or how, or what shape their genitals were, or weather they were buying into gender roles.

And I think this, the need for purity is often what stagnates movements because people make alliances with people for reasons other than gender and people make alliances with other people who are similarly oppressed even if that crosses gender lines and people are messy and beautiful and we find our joy and our freedom in unexpected people and situations.

I have always lived on edges and boundaries and I think edges and boundaries are where the truths are, shoring up the boundaries to hard doesn’t create safety, it creates a trap.

for most of my life I have been very fractured and I have only recently, like in the last year been able to start weaving myself back together. Its time to start weaving the queer part of myself together with the radical feminist part of myself, so none of me, none of who I honestly am, gets left behind

Mental health blog up and running!

We only have two posts so far and posting may be somewhat eratic but

Here it is!

This is what I came here for

This spring from the heart of the mountain runs cool and clear, runs with the knowledge of womens pain, poverty and fear, but also the sound of our laughter and fingerlinked power, quenching the thirst. Fullfilling the need for each others voices, histories, eyes, Saturating us with the knowledge that this stream will wear away the rock and become a river, a torrent to change the shape of the landscape with.

(IWD left me buzzing with joy!)

Thoughts on the abortion rights demo

[EDIT: I notice I’ve been linked by some pro life blogs, While I respect their right to do that I do not want this post used as fodder to explain that the pro choice position is wrong, I am and always will be 100 percent pro choice]

Last night I went to the abortion rights protest against the pro life road show in Cardiff, protesting is important and obviously abortion rights are really, really important but the way the protest happened really disturbed me.

From the off I was kind of annoyed, as we started gathering one of the protesters pointed out another group of people and there was some discussion on weather they were there for the roadshow or the protest and she said “I don’t think they are pro life they look too nice.” I think that’s really unacceptable firstly aren’t we about getting away from judging people on what they look like, but also because pro lifers are not bad people, they are not nasty people. They absolutely believe what they are doing is right and moral.

The protesters arranged themselves right outside the door of the city temple with a walkway between the middle of them that was just narrow enough to those going to the roadshow to walk through, then when those attending (some of whom were older people and the majority of whom were female) walked through the protesters chanted slogans really loudly, which must have been incredibly intimidating. Some of those in the front rows of the protest were male and from what I could see were the most vocal. So there’s a situation where men are shouting at women and telling them what to think.

If we want to protest and make a difference protesting then we need to unpack and discard the patriarchal attitudes that say the best way to make people do what we want them to is through intimidation and aggression. And really left wing men need to unpack their male privilege and think about how shouting at women because they are doing something they don’t want them to do is upholding a capitalist patriarchal system. Also while I think its good that men are involved in the abortion rights movement if as feminists we believe it is not okay for men to tell women how to think and behave then it shouldn’t be okay for men to tell any woman how to think and behave, even if we find her politics to be reprehensible

I also had a problem with the chanting. One of the chants was ““Pro-life, that’s a lie – you don’t care if women die” I think this is really, really unhelpful. I grew up in a very right wing hard line church that was very anti abortion and although it did many damaging things to women, and had many rules on women’s submission and inferiority, the pro life position is not about carelessly killing women, the pro life position is not about women being less than men. In fact the pro life position from a philosophical perspective is extremely logical

1)Humanity begins at conception

2)Abortion kills the human in the womb

2)Killing humans is wrong/sinful

3) Therefore abortion is wrong/sinful

While it lacks compassion for women it makes perfect sense that a person who thinks a foetus is as human as the woman carrying it wouldn’t think that the woman had the”right” to “Kill” another human being.

Telling the opposition what they think and getting it wrong does not help the cause. It makes us look stupid and vindictive. We don’t appreciate it when they do it to us so we shouldn’t do it to them.

We need to be a movement that understands what pro lifers actualy think so we can refute their actual arguments and not straw ones, we need to be a movement that doesnt use the tactics of the status quo to try and get people to change.We need to be a movement that doesnt automaticaly write pro lifers off as nasty/evil/woman hating

mental health blog

 Thanks for the response to my call out for bloggers, that was aweome (and more are always welcome)

I set up a yahoo group so we can talk about how we want to do this and such

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/feministmentalhealthblog/

for those of you who dont want to be regular contributers thats cool, just sent me occasional writings and i’ll post it up onto the blog

(Winter, would really like you to write about feminism and eating disorders)

Feminist mental health blog?

I was thinking maybe I would like to set up a UK group blog focusing on a feminist views of mental health/ feminist reactions to the way mental health is viewed and treated and ways of making things better for those who live with mental health issues. Would anyone be interested in running/contributing to this? I have a few people in mind I might ask but I wanted to do a call out first.

The requirements would be:

you are female

you identify as a feminist

you have now or have had mental health issues and experiences with the mental heath system.

(would appreciate if people linked to this also so lots of people see this)