S2 E12: Grounded Confidence in the Era of "Pride"

Rachel and Akiva have fun with this one.

We start by taking apart pronouns (Dear Committee, the plural neuter is male by default, and butches are…the opposite of “multiple men”) and then take our lesbian chisel to various other anti-bravery/queer (those are synonyms) institutions of language and society.

Pride requires bravery, so we dose it out. Happy June!

We cover:

* Queer missionaries evangelizing via pronoun circles

* Akiva’s lawsuit against the Israeli government and the international, nonsensical gender garbage that wrought it

* Why “lesbian” means something “gay” can’t

* The default maleness – combined with the prohibition on female-specific speech – that deprives Pride Month of our sex-sexiness and our sex-bodiness

* Rachel’s theory on why it’s so easy for women to pass as men

* Akiva’s theory on why queerness pushes girls toward non-woman identity: that queer/gay cultural institutions, already owned by men, bought and sold trans-identified males’ image of womanhood as “feeling like a sex doll” (It’s not that far from drag culture, is it?)

* Akiva getting referred to, all by her lonesome, with the plural masculine (plural “male,” really) in Hebrew

* The plural male being the neuter category in a metric crap-ton of societies, and why “they/them” thus sticks special erasure to girls and is a bad idea

* The grand irony that gender-neutral language movements are emerging from English-speaking world powers, while academics cry “colonialism” and “fascism” at feminists

* Missed firefighting opportunities

* Missed farting opportunities

* A letter we’d write: “Dear Radfem Friends, femininity isn’t a signal to men. If women can’t make our own sign systems from within history/culture/reality, rather than magically outside of them, then radical feminism has already lost.”

* The reasons Akiva transitioned, and the undoing of them

* Why when butches depart to “they/them,” their femmes naturally feel pressure to come along (or risk continued address as less-complex humans than their partners)

* How weightlifting could help butches desist (and how butches desisting could help the whole lesbian world knock it off)

* “We don’t need to mask that men have controlled the written word. Is it even wise to mask it?”

* Actors and actresses, waiters and waitresses, and the embodied and sexed nature of both

* Why the path to rebellion is not through pronouns

* The notable lack of sex-based power analysis in societies that claim “gender equality”

* Autogynephilia, the so-called “expert” Ray Blanchard, and Rachel’s exhaustion with how male researchers talk about all of this

* Ray Blanchard says “dysphoria” is a natural part of butch existence – that “butch lesbians” lack “a way to live that doesn't require hormones or surgery.” We judge the shit out of him.

* Thoughts about meat eating and… other carnal pleasures

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