Quite some time ago now, I wrote a piece entitled Queer2Trans about what I saw as the increasing dominance of trans politics within queer ideologies.

Interestingly, I came across this call for papers recently, and to me, it very much shows in action an example of exactly the sort of take-over I have been imagining.

The title of the proposed event is AGender: Female and Transgender Masculinities. In a sad and ironic but hardly unexpected twist, it claims inspiration from two lesbian artists of the first half of the twentieth century, Marlow Moss and Claude Cahun; women who refused to live their lives within the narrow constraints their society placed upon their sex.

In earlier times, such women might have been incorporated into narratives of feminist resistance, of lesbian resistance, of female resistance, to the grinding and never-ending forces of male oppression that seek to belittle and destroy all women, especially those who refuse to conform.

No longer, however. These days such women must be understood within a framework of ‘queer resistance’, of ‘female masculinity’ and transgenderism. In other words, the only reason they did what they did was because they were somehow exceptional, internally different from all those other women who were ‘cis-normative’ and happy with their lot as men’s subjugated slaves.

‘Normal’ women are happy to remain slaves; therefore, women who refuse to do so, who aspire to ambition and humanity, must obviously have something male about them, because male is human and female is not. They must practice ‘female masculinity’; they must be transgender, they must not be understood to be the same as other oppressed women who very likely long on some level for exactly the same autonomy and respect, unless they have been so broken and brainwashed they have lost any semblance of self.

It seems the understanding of lesbianism this event is pushing is nothing but a new revolution of the invert identity for the twenty-first century. It’s not a coincidence, perhaps, that both the lesbian artists selected as inspiration for this event, themselves lived during times when the invert identity was in vogue with the medical profession. But of course we can’t talk about how misogynistic and lesbian hating ideologies might have impacted these women’s sense of identity and self-definition. We can’t talk about how that’s still happening now with woman-hating and lesbian-hating concepts like female masculinity and transgenderism that draw correlations between non-conforming lesbians and men.

This is the erasure of lesbians, and more particularly the erasure of lesbians as women. Lesbians are not permitted to be female, to connect with or represent female culture. Somehow, because we reject subjugation, we are seen not as women seeking to redefine ourselves as free females, but as women who emulate men, or who wish to emulate men, women who worship men and male culture (because women never produced anything of value), or who indeed become men.

This is hatred. This is fear. This is erasure. And it’s happening in the name of progress.