A Dyke A Broad, # 3
New Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Women Fighting Back in Europe, a Lesbian Covid Photo Project, and an Unforgettable Election Cocktail
So Amy Coney Barrett's Our New Justice
After passing through a couple days of nausea and depression, I’ve decided to be hopeful about Amy Coney Barrett, the United State’s new ultraconservative Supreme Court Justice. She might surprise us. Justices sometimes do. Besides, she’s kinda pretty. If somebody’s going to stab me in the back, let it be a femme fatale.
In case you don’t know, she’s expected to join forces with the other conservative justices to attack every LGBT gain of the last 50 years, and put her thumb on the scales of justice if (when?) results of the U.S. election are challenged by our Glorious Leader.
Barrett may also drive the final nail in the coffin of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which theoretically guarantees U.S. women the right to an abortion, but so what? Yeah, I said it. So fucking what?
Of all the things she could attack, that may be the least important. Not because women don’t need access to safe abortions. But because those rights have already been so restricted on the state level that right now many women do not have them at all.
One 2018 study says,
Most abortions (95%) are performed in specialized abortion clinics (rather than private physicians’ offices or hospitals), and the number of these clinics declined in half of US states from 2011 to 2014, with some regions experiencing up to a 22% decrease [3]. Because 90% of US counties do not have an abortion provider [3], many women seeking abortion must travel outside their home counties to obtain care.
For many women travel is just not possible.
Which raises the question, if Barrett was really the danger, why did this huge decline happen when Barack Obama was president for two terms, and the glorious and notorious RBG still alive and kicking?
Maybe there’s a bigger problem at hand. Maybe the attack on abortion rights is the symptom of the disease and not the disease itself—that no one is treating. Don’t even talk to me about the Democrats. Women are about 51.1% of the U.S. population, and our issues intersect with absolutely everything, (Seriously, read Invisible Women, your mind will be blown) but they have reduced our needs to two measly paragraphs in the Democratic platform.
The woke left is even worse. They blab incessantly about intersectionality but have a hierarchy of privilege and females as a group are near the bottom of it; lesbians, of course, don’t exist for them at all.
“Intersectional” was never supposed to mean a laundry list with a victim du jour at the head. It’s a tool. A way of seeing how things work together. Being able to hold two or three or four thoughts at once. For women that could mean a movement capable of thinking about reproductive AND labor rights. Forced sterilization of immigrant women AND cultural and political representation. Misogyny and homophobia. Why women are poor, and why women of color are among the most poor.
Instead of mourning a Supreme Court that was already lost, we should open our eyes, see how deep our oppression goes, what it’s tied to, who’s doing it. Put aside our fears that if we explode with fury and begin to take action, somebody somewhere will point their fingers and say, “Man-hater! Man-hater! You fucking man-hater dykes.”
A complement to the info in Invisible Women are the ideas in The new misandry, an essay by the brilliant, and very funny, Joanna Russ about how our anger always gets squashed. Lately, I’m reading it every couple of months.
Women Fighting Back in Europe
No matter what happens in the election, women, dykes, queers, people of color in the U.S. need to be prepared to push back. The good news is we have plenty of company worldwide, because the backlash to progressive ideas and civil rights for social minorities, is an international problem.
In Poland, for instance, women and some male allies have been on the streets for several days blocking traffic by the tens of thousands in every major city as they protest their high court ruling that bans abortion in the case of fetal abnormality, which means there’s a near complete ban on it. Right now, abortion can only be done to save a woman’s life (not just her health), or if the fetus is the result of rape (difficult to prove) or incest (you can always blame the girl’s loose morals).
Some carried signs with slogans like "I wish I could abort my government.”
They are also protesting in general against the authoritarian right-wing ruling party, Law and Justice. Reminding us how anti-woman policies and anti-democratic politics go hand in hand.
Unsurprisingly, in Belarus, women have taken the lead as that country fights for democracy.
The emergence of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya as the main opposition candidate in the August 9 presidential election represented a new kind of challenge to the Lukashenko regime. A former teacher and a stay-at-home mother, she was pushed into the spotlight after her husband tried to run in the elections but was imprisoned. Eventually, Tikhanovskaya was joined by Maria Kolesnikova, the manager of Babyrka’s campaign [Babyrka was the opposition presidential candidate], and Veronika Tsepkalo, wife of Valery Tsepkalo, another disqualified presidential candidate who was forced into exile.
Thus, by banishing and imprisoning his male rivals, Lukashenko allowed for a much more powerful alliance to take shape.
The videos of demos there are full of women, young women, old women, middle-aged moms in their ordinary, unfashionable dresses, not a pair of Doc Martens in sight. And if the cops grab one, they all attack the cops to get her back. This in a country where protesters are getting beaten and arrested. And people are disappearing in jails.
The Lesbian Avengers were fierce. But these women are fierce squared.
Be like them.
France now has its first out lesbian soccer player
Finally some good news, the goalie for the French National Team, Pauline Peyraud-Magnin, came out by sharing selfies with her girlfriend on Instagram. When the sports magazine L’Équipière, asked her why she did it, she said, “First of all, because I love her.” (My heart melted. Did your heart melt?)
She said that she was only able to come out after playing in Britain and now Spain, where she started to realize that being a lesbian is a normal thing because there you’re not criticized, or stared at in the street. Or worse. (Just two weeks ago in France, a man drove 500 miles, threatening to kill his 19 year old daughter who’d just come out. She had to hide in a university building where the security kept him at bay until the cops came and arrested him.)
Peyraud-Magnin, anyway, is tired of French homophobia, and now that she’s out, she’s speaking out, and declaring lesbians are “normal”. And noting, that after all, “It’s the 21st century.”
Is it? It’s so hard to tell.
A Lesbian Visibility Project
At a moment when a lot of places are re-confining because of Covid, it seems like a good time to let you know about my pal Juno’s project, Visible Under Shelter: Lesbians During COVID.
The idea is to make lesbians visible, even while we’re under lockdown. It’s a brilliant, simple idea. Just take a selfie, however you define it, alone or with other lesbians in your isolation pod. And Juno’ll add it to others so we can celebrate the ordinary and creative ways lesbians around the world are managing to survive lockdown as individuals, partners, or friend/ family pods.
Click for submission guidelines.
To see photos, go directly to Juno’s Instagram page.
Election Night Cocktail
Introducing the Mint Tulip, also known as The Mitch
My love affair with Mint Juleps began at age 6, when I first snuck a sip at my neighbors’ Derby Party while the already inebriated guests butchered My Old Kentucky Home. But as special as the Mint Julep is, Election 2020 requires its uniquely, malevolent twist.
I’m pleased to offer my own version, the Mint Tulip, also known as The Mitch.
This classic cocktail has a certain something about it which gives its sipper a sophisticated yet just-right-for-the-times vibe.
Make one for your favorite Trumpian colleagues, out-of-town friends or (gasp) family and then bask in their wonderfully vivid reaction.
I guarantee they will see you in a different light. Forever.
Ingredients
2 ounces Old Gran-Dad
1 ounces peppermint-flavored emetic
1 foreclosure notice, shredded, not ripped.
8 drops of bitters
Instructions
Muddle together the Old Grand-Dad, emetic, and foreclosure notice, taking care to smash the threatening paper until it gives up its ink, as purple as your favorite Senator’s rotting soul.
Strain into a tulip glass over freshly crushed dreams.
Garnish with an unwanted baby’s smelly turd.
Enjoy!
That’s it for this week.
Take a lesson from the world’s two-year olds and when somebody bothers you—bite!
Disgruntledly yours,
Kali Bogswell