A Dyke A Broad #94 The plum edition
This is just to say I have eaten the plums... And watched women, lots of women, do extraordinary and courageous things.
Hello from Paris!
I found quetsche plums at the market Sunday, sautéed them with butter and sugar during the half time of the women’s Euro, then ate such a huge quantity over vanilla caramel ice cream that I nearly made myself sick. I don’t care. Quetsche are so purple and perfumed that they bring me immense joy. Like seeing the packed stadium at Wembley Stadium—all 87,192 spectators there to watch women play soccer, beating the highest total ever for the Euro of either sex.
I got a little choked up when I saw the number. Like earlier in the day, when I’d glimpsed the Women’s Tour de France featured on public network TV, and saw women laboring in a final sprint up that monstrous hill. A considerable crowd along the sidelines cheered them on as if what we did finally mattered. As if we’re nearly human. Our feats as remarkable as those performed by men.
In Britain, too, women have had to fight not only for funding, but the very right to play soccer. The Football Association banned their use of official fields in 1921 after women’s games were judged to be so popular, attracting tens of thousands of fans, it was feared they were on the verge of escaping the control of the male establishment. Women weren’t unbanned until 1971, fifty years later, when the long slog of rebuilding the women’s sport began.
Meanwhile, a 1998 ACLU article (far more forthright than the organization would write today), describes how abortion bans didn’t really appear in the U.S. until the second half of the nineteenth century, when new medical associations of male doctors wanted to eliminate competition from midwives and herbalists, and men were horrified that a childless woman might get the idea she could be something more than a mother and a wife, even demand a vote, and white supremacists needed women to act as breeders to keep the population up. Banning abortion never was about “protecting” fetuses, but power. Male power. White power.
More and more I wonder how long it will be before U.S. women get their rights back. Or if they will lose more. The ambitions of the anti-abortion crowd in the U.S. clearly don’t stop at reproductive rights. They must be gazing enviously at the Taliban who have largely succeeded in returning Afghan women to a barefoot and pregnant state.
Yes, women in Alabama are far better off than in Kabul, but they still face an uphill battle. Especially since activists struggling to regain or defend abortion rights have been told it’s transphobic to use the word woman to describe the “people” that pregnancy affects. And without the category of woman, it’s hard, if not impossible, to invoke the class of men, which is convenient for males on both the left and the right who are all quite clear about who deserves rights, and who should shut up and submit.
In Britain…
One dyke who heroically refuses to submit to anyone is Allison Bailey, a Black lesbian barrister, who this week won a discrimination case against her former employers, and reaffirmed her legally protected right to believe what she likes, including the (fact-based) idea that sex exists, as does sexual orientation, and that lesbians are not transphobic when they refuse to sleep with a male, no matter how they identify.
Raquel Rosario Sánchez reports that one of Bailey’s biggest objections was to the concept of the “cotton ceiling,” in which trans activists advocate:
that the sexual boundaries of lesbians represent a discriminatory practice that must be overcome by males. She objected to the fact that Stonewall had hired male campaigners whose work focuses on persuading young lesbians to sleep with heterosexual men. This is textbook homophobia.
Another lesbian who’s been fighting back there is Keira Bell who took on the Tavistock gender clinic, finally slated for closure after a damning review finding that it failed vulnerable under-18s, gave them drugs and surgeries with little screening, and did essentially no follow-up at all to see what effect this had.
If they were allowed to continue for so long, it was largely due to what parliament member Kemi Badenoch called “the dangers of civil service groupthink” which she discovered as the former Equalities Minister, when she tried to explore complaints about Tavistock, but was pressured to meet only the usual cast of activists that had monopolized the conversation rather than people with a range of points of view, clinicians in the field, and most importantly, young people who had actually used the Tavistock’s services like Keira Bell.
Another bit of good news…
That’s it for this week,
Disgruntledly yours,