Dear Reader, do you believe women, including those who have been raped by men, have the right to not be forced to share their most intimate spaces with males?

If you believe women have the right to say no, you will not be allowed to table at the Stop the Frack Attack National Convention.

Why? Because evidently the right of males to colonize women’s most intimate and vulnerable spaces is more important to these organizers than the rights of women to say no.

What does this have to do with a conference on fracking? We believe that just as communities have the right to say no to fracking, so, too, women have that right.

As radical environmentalists (and radical feminists), we in Deep Green Resistance oppose any and all threats to the future of the planet. This includes the recent spread of hydraulic fracturing as a method of oil extraction, a particularly vicious expression of this culture’s contempt for the living world. Because of this, we were understandably excited when we saw that Denver would be host to the Stop the Frack Attack (STFA) National Convention this week, and immediately reached out to see about tabling and distributing materials for our organization. Unfortunately, the leaders of STFA made it very clear to us that feminist perspectives are not welcome at their event.

Deep Green Resistance (DGR) is being barred from STFA because, according to the organizers of this conference, we support a “gender binary.” This notion is absurd. No one in DGR supports the gender binary – in fact, we oppose it so strongly that we don’t think those who struggle to fit inside one suffocating category should mutilate their bodies to fit inside the other. Sadly, transgenderists seem to disagree.

The real reason for our being censored is simple: We don’t think one abolishes an oppressive system by creating more categories in between the powerful and the powerless. On every issue except gender, most activists agree with us. After all, Capitalist societies don’t have a “class binary,” but no one thinks that makes the proletariat any closer to liberation. The bloodthirsty Spanish colonizers had at least six racial categories in their so-called New World; did that stop the indigenous from being slaughtered? And if not, then why on Earth would a non-binary gender system do anything to stop men from raping and killing women?

DGR believes the ideal number of genders isn’t three, or four, or a dozen, or a million. It’s zero. We aim for a world where no one, male or female, is defined by a set of violent stereotypes called masculinity and femininity. And we can’t get there so long as these patriarchal, culturally constructed notions of Man and Woman are turned into essential aspects of human beings. Abolishing patriarchy means acknowledging that the social roles of this culture are not natural, not innate, and not acceptable – yet transgenderists are determined to naturalize the structure of women’s oppression by turning gender into an identity.

Critics of DGR like to portray us as somehow protecting or defending traditional definitions of gender, but nothing could be further from the truth. Deep Green Resistance encourages and supports anyone who resists the abusive and violent gender system – and the greatest example of such resistance is women saying no to men. Inside a political structure wherein people with penises are taught to disregard, belittle, and abuse people with vulvas – we call this structure “gender” – the truly non-conforming position for males is to defend and support those boundaries, not find new reasons for breaking them. Men force women to sacrifice their spaces every single day in this culture; doing the exact same thing while wearing lipstick and a dress doesn’t make it radical.

In a world teetering on the brink of destruction, we in Deep Green Resistance are absolutely amazed that an activist would turn his back on a committed environmentalist group solely because that group thinks rape victims shouldn’t have to shower and sleep with men. Sadly, many women in DGR are not surprised; they are very used to male activists putting the feelings of men above the physical safety and security of women. If the organizers of Stop the Frack Attack truly want to strike a blow against our restrictive and oppressive gender system, they could start by challenging their own entitlement and misogyny, clearly displayed here for all to see.

In the meantime, thank you to the STFA organizers for at least being clear about their solidarity with males.