A Dyke A Broad #56 All Saints Edition
The suicide of a young lesbian in France, victim of homophobia and racism. #toussaint #allsaintsday
Hello from Paris!
It’s been rainy. Very rainy. Which is to say perfect weather for La Toussaint, All Saints Day, which they celebrate here by weeding and scraping away the moss from headstones and statues of family graves, leaving a bouquet or two of chrysanthemums. People also visit the legendary Père Lachaise cemetery, where Maria Callas, Proust, Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas party after hours. This holiday isn’t as dramatic as the Mexican version, but it’s nice, in its way.
For some, though, the loss may be too fresh.
The Fifth of October, in Kingersheim in Alsace, a 14-year-old girl named Dinah killed herself. Her mother told reporters that two years earlier Dinah had hung out with a group of schoolgirls that did everything together, from studying to sleepovers. “But as soon as Dinah told them that she was attracted to girls, their behavior changed.” They began sending her nasty emails, made nasty posts online. Humiliated and physically harassed her at school. Shoving and tripping her. Shaking her chair. Scrawling obscenities in her notebooks.
Even when Dinah tried to avoid contact with them, quitting, for instance, a WhatsApp group they’d used to harass her, they kept sending her increasingly insulting and violent texts. Not only for being a “dirty lesbian” but a “dirty Arab”. A “dirty mixed-blood”. (Her mother is originally from Morocco, her father from the island of Reunion.)
Her mother approached the school authorities over and over, but they did almost nothing to help Dinah who made her first attempt at suicide in March of this year. Her tormentors sent her a message afterwards, “Don’t worry. You’ll croak soon.” And, “We’ll send you some links so you can get it right next time.”
Now two years after the nonstop bullying began, she did. Thanks to the adults around her. School administrators dismissed her as “exaggerating”. They told the mother this was just a little squabble among girls. No one has much respect for teenage girls, or women, either. Lesbophobic attacks sneered at even by cops. Our rapes go unsolved, deaths go unremarked, literal physical pain untreated like that of Rosner below. Bunch of whiners.
Last weekend, more than a thousand people marched in Dinah’s memory.
The local authorities have belatedly opened an investigation. A few LGBTQ+ groups issued the usual perfunctory press releases. A little blood now and then is good for business. I don’t expect much follow-up. No one seems to care much about us dykes. Us homo females. Especially since the transition to all things identity, which at first was a simple bait and switch. Selling the idea that a shift from sexual orientation to sexual identity would elevate us homos from mindlessly sex-driven creatures into a respectable community with a history, shared experience.
The catch with identity is that it implies that you have to actively see yourself as something to be it. Or that conversely you can be something just by identifying as it. Now with fewer and fewer constraints on gender self-ID (which I used to unquestioningly support) that creepy guy on the bar stool telling me he’s really a lesbian inside, and that I should go to bed with him, is just as much a lesbian as me. More really. Because he/they/she chose it. And I was born a dirty homo. Not worthy of respect at all.
Left behind? The vast, vast majority of girls who liked girls long before we could put a name to it, and no matter what we call ourselves will still get harassed in the street if we hold our girlfriend’s hand. Will still get bullied at school. And condemned by our neighbor’s religion, not just to cancellation and social death, but the literal, material one that there’s no coming back from. All for being homo females, not identifying as them.
Not that anybody uses the word lesbian, anymore. We’re all queer, a reclaimed word I used to like, but now just makes me think of banana peels. Slipping on them a mob of misfits and rebels, the word so vague and broad as a designation that even as it points away from one center of power, it creates another almost as large. Far more smug. And largely meaningless. And leaves a girl like Dinah just as out in the cold.
I try to imagine what it would be like even if her girl friends hadn’t turned out to be monsters, if they were decent like mine were. Kids that were a little or a lot weird and today would probably, some of them, identify as queer. But I would still have been different. Because when they were having their parties fumbling around in dank basements to cool music, the girls maybe trying out kissing girls, I would be the one who knew it wasn’t a joke or an experiment, or a show of rebelliousness, it was my heart’s desire.
I imagine what courage it took for Dinah to admit even to herself that girls pulled her with all the force of a planet. And how much more courage it must have taken to say it aloud to her girl friends who, instead of supporting her, met her with mockery and hate. And fear probably. That it was contagious. That if they did not wipe out the terrifying stain of her difference it might mark them, too.
I wonder, too, if what scared them was not just that she was a homo, but that she’d said it. She was a girl after all. And women are only supposed to desire that boys desire them. And there she was, Dinah, shyly admitting, “I want…” Not just friendship, a long conversation giggling in the park, but by implication the feel of some girl’s lips on hers, the scent of the delicate perfume of her sweat, to put her hand… there. And maybe Dinah’s desire became all female desire. And by seeing what they lacked, their lives felt terribly ugly and confined. And they were enraged at the very idea that someone was on the verge of escape and it wasn’t them. So they killed her.
Breaking the Silence
I always wonder how it got to be that we talk about trans women like they’re all saints, and not merely human, ignoring for instance, that no matter how they identify they were almost all raised as men, which as a group includes a large minority of rapist pigs. So why get outraged at the news that the category of trans women, too, isn’t lacking for predators? We're being pressured into sex by some trans women'
Speaking of the devil
Tweets that speak for themselves
Notes on Language
from Helen Lewis: Why I’ll Keep Saying ‘Pregnant Women’
Being inclusive is important. But it’s not everything.
A Little Humor
Because you made it this far, 70 Lesbian Fears That Are Way Scarier Than Any Horror Movie
Includes…
Politely declining an advance by a man that quickly turns into “you just haven’t had MY dick”
That’s it for this week.
Disgruntledly yours