rozk | Oh, sometimes I have a headache and sometimes it's a Bindelache

pigeonhed rebuked my previous post for taking seriously something that Bindel may have intended as a joke. Two points here - 1. JB has made a lot of jokes over the last few years and some of them were tasteless and offensive ways of saying what she actually thought. Given some of the things she said in her 2004 post, and claims to have apologized for, but still clearly at some level meant, I think that treating her 'jokes' as unserious is a way of letting her off the hook which I, for one, am disinclined to adopt. 2. Her jokes, as I say, usually embody what she actually thinks - so why not take them as seriously as her in-clear totally non-humourous comments? JB is a campaigner and journalist and polemicist - she never lets any of her opponents get away with careless language, so nor should we her.

Returning to her piece here, we find the interesting and not really jokey-at-all sentence - lesbian feminists who were born women are being told they are neither of these things by a number of women who were born male but believe they make better lesbians than me.

Let us be clear, I have never said that I don't think Julie Bindel is a lesbian or a feminist and have rebuked those people who, carried away by enthusiastic anger in the face of JB's provocations, have implied that there is any question about this. However, I do find the concept of lesbianism as a competition a terribly revealing one - I always thought it was an identity, or possibly a solidarity, but never a competition.

And then I realized that JB perpetually compares other lesbians to her Gold Star Lesbian status and finds them wanting - too lipstick, too BDSM and so on. She doesn't consider me a lesbian or a feminist at all of course, which puts me right out of the competition. Presumably though, the various women who have slept with me, or kissed me in attraction, or come to dinner with me - the women who regard me as a woman who happens to be trans by history - they, in Bindel's eyes, fail as lesbians too; they certainly aren't as good lesbians as she is, as far as she is concerned. And what about the lesbians and feminists who have worked with me politically, or rated my scholarship - clearly, just not as lesbian as Julie Bindel, or as feminist.

Presumably her fan club get rated as proper lesbians, particularly after they insulted a transman with some pretty random nastiness. On the other hand, at one point they chatted amicably with a deceitful demonstrator who did not identify herself as trans, and the fact that they did not instantly spot her innate male privilege or her adherence to gender binary stereotypes must worry Julie Bindel - her disciples are working at being better lesbians, but they are clearly not as good as Julie, who is Never Fooled.

Come to that, there were her on-line supporters who get very tough about the way one correspondent wrote and elaborately described how obvious it was to them that this person was a trans woman, and thus essentially deeply and unalterably a bloke. Only, well - let's just say that their transdar is not very good and they got completely the wrong wavelength. Again, Julie's disciples may be lesbians and feminists, but they fail to attain her pinnacle of perfection.

Or perhaps this whole idea of who is a better lesbian than some other lesbian is one of those very silly ideas which, like passing, needs to be dumped in the wastepaper basket of history. I really don't think I am better than JB - nicer, perhaps, smarter, possibly, funnier, conceivably. Not as mean? Jury's out on that one, I guess.

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Still, she did achieve one objective. We've been talking about her all day instead of what we're going to do about Stonewall's intransigence ? {Joke unintended}

Helen

There are some people for whom everything is a competition. It doesn't look like much fun to me.

But she has given us something else to talk to Stonewall about, so not an entire waste...

I have a brother, for whom every human interaction has to be a competition or a confrontation, so he can win. It's a particularly irritating form of insecurity.

We don't see much of each other any more, because I can't disagree with him without feeling bullied. I'm a very live-and-let-live sort, and I'm happier when I let people like my brother live very far away from me.

I look forward to televised Olympic fisting.

Bindel displays all the signs of narcissism and possibly borderline personality disorder, which makes self-acknowledge and irony impossible. Everything is about her, as far as she's concerned. She can't see anything else.

Any dealings with her will have to take that into account. And it's never going to have the desired result of her acknowledging she could ever be wrong.

- AT

(I once walked into a room at a party in which two straight-identified women were having a very ostentatious make-out session and exclaim, "They're not LESBIANS! Where's the FISTING?" **shame** When sober, I defend anyone's right to engage in whatever sexual activity they choose, including exhibitionism, but I was very, very drunk.)

I have an uncle whose a perfectly nice guy IF you let him win any arguement he actually cares about .Otherwise He's an SOB. This isn't just me his 2 daughters have confided in me he's the same with them.
It took me years to learn that some battles you win only by not getting into.-but then I'm a stubborn SOB too.

There ort to be a name for Jokes which are excuses to mock a sub-group AND.OR a magic sheild in which you can Mouth Off without Consequence.
Anybody else read JAMES BLISH's "No Jokes on Mars" ?

Gold star anything has always come across as incredibly stupid.

I've been told I wasn't really childfree because before I realised I did not and do not ever want kids, I was pregnant twice, with disastrous results each time: I have never actually had a baby that lived.

WTF. Why do these hypothetical things matter. I suppose in some AU you might have grown up to become a man or to marry one and in some AU I might have 12 kids, but...in the reality-based continuum, you are a lesbian, I am childfree, and who the fuck cares?

In my experience, if it seems like Borderline, it usually is. Frankly, it's a nightmare to deal with and you are quite right - they can't countenance the possibility that they might be wrong, because their entire personality is under threat from wrongness.

I write novels that are described as feminist - SFX even rated them on a 'feministometer.' I have 3 cats and some sensible footwear, plus some unusual woolly hats. Can I be a lesbian too? Even though I live with a bloke?

When dealing with someone like that, the question is: help her or defeat her?

She has public forums with which to disseminate her lunatic views, so the tactic would have to be to keep pushing the notion that she is beyond wrong - she is mad.

This is, after all, WAR.

- AT

My view - and I hope my practice - is to go after her in subtle and annoying fashions rather than crude ones that might come back...

But we are the ones required by law to have mental disorder diagnosis before being officially allowed to be classed as women. And most in the UK communities have signed up for that. The worse those can say is that she is as mad as they are. I cannot see that being terribly useful.

Oh, sometimes I have a headache and sometimes it's a Bindelache

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Competition

JOKES

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