by Sekhmet She Owl

Some Canadian anti-feminist woman named Erin Flegg wrote a hit piece on the Vancouver Women’s Library and the women who run it. I can’t resist the urge to stick it in the bullshit shredder of my superior mind. Here we go.

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Flegg gives away her biased position on the Library as soon as she refers to the “regressive, self-defeating choices that have kept the library from attaining its stated purpose as a safe space for all women.” She doesn’t come right out and say what she means—which is a common tactic of the misogynistic and lesbian-hating trans cult, whenever they write pieces like this. Those “regressive, self-defeating choices” Flegg refers to, are simply to stock books by actual feminists that offend the misogynistic trans cult and the paid rape industry males, and defining the women’s library as a space for actual women, as opposed to men in drag who call themselves women. Why she calls these choices “self-defeating” is beyond me, because as far as I can tell, the women who opened the library have stayed true to exactly what they want and envision for their space. Perhaps “self-defeating” refers to the inevitable consequences of taking a feminist stance instead of submitting to the violent, deranged males in the trans cult and the pro-paid rape Left. But hey, last I checked, the VWL raised 20K as a result of the backlash from these male scum and moved into a bigger, better space than the one they started out in. I call that a win.

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When describing the harassment that the women of VWL and their female guests endured on their opening night in the original space, Flegg writes of the aggressive, hostile men and their handmaidens:

“The group demanded Laurent step back from organizing on the grounds that her trans-exclusionary views have caused real harm to women in the city.”

I have to point this out, because to this day, I can’t fathom the level of gross entitlement that these whackos must feel, to believe they have the right to make demands of total strangers regarding the strangers’ own space. Maybe this is the USian in me, but ever since I first discovered the male and male-loyalist women’s crusade to destroy and shut down female-only space, I have been blown away and enraged not primarily because of women’s right to female-only space but because of the individual’s right to do whatever the fuck she wants in a space that she pays for. I can’t speak to Canada’s cultural or legal policies, but here in the US, the whole personal freedom thing is instilled into our consciousness from birth. It’s the concept that as long as you aren’t breaking the law, you have the right to say and do anything you want, especially on your own private property. The idea that total strangers could show up uninvited to a private event and attempt to intimidate the paying tenants of a space into abandoning their own business, is so God damn outrageous to me that I don’t really have words to describe the way it makes me feel. Except maybe, “Who the hell are you?”

Oh, and can we take a moment to ridicule the bullshit accusation that Vancouver’s Trans Gestapo made against the Women’s Library? Causing “real harm” to women in the city? Are you kidding? The only harm done was to male narcissism. Men are not women. Excluding men from women’s space never harms women, only offends men. Period. If the sociopathic males who showed up to harass women at the Library really cared about the alleged harm done to their own kind, they would go find other men to pick a fight with.

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Flegg tries to smear Em Laurent, co-founder of the Women’s Library, with the following:

“Laurent used to volunteer with Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR), a women’s shelter in Vancouver known for campaigning to abolish sex work and refusing to serve trans women; in 2007, VRR won a decades-long, high-profile human rights case filed against them by Kimberly Nixon, a trans woman who was refused a volunteer position on the basis of her gender identity. The shelter continues to uphold its anti-trans, anti-sex work views.”

This garbage pisses me off beyond description. Imagine being so woman-hating and so prick-worshipping, that you attack a women’s shelter serving rape victims because it refused to hire a man who still has a dick and testicles as a counselor for those traumatized women. Imagine being the sick male fuck who applies to volunteer at a rape crisis center for women, of all places, and then tries to get it shut down because the place offended you by rejecting your volunteer application. Imagine being a man who cares more about having his gender fantasy validated than about women who are rape victims that may be forced to live on the streets if the shelter can’t take them.

Notice the rhetorical manipulation of Flegg’s language in the phrase “on the basis of her gender identity.” No, Erin “rapists before women” Flegg, Nixon wasn’t rejected as a volunteer for “her” gender identity; he was rejected because he’s a man. And no woman staying at VRR who’s been a victim of rape or sexual assault wants to be “counseled” by another potential rapist man. You’re disgusting, he’s disgusting, and every man and woman out there who sides with Nixon over Vancouver Rape Relief is disgusting. Go to hell.

***

Now, pay attention to the classic trick that Flegg uses when describing what happened that opening night at the VWL:

“At the VWL opening, voices were raised and a poster was ripped off the wall. Wonders grabbed her phone and called the police, and the protesters left.”

She keeps the men invisible. This is a key tactic that the trans cult and the paid rape industry and all of the liberal women who support them use every time they talk about the cult and the PRI. They make sure that the men stay out of sight, out of mind, so that you get suckered into believing that they’re not around to be violent, predatory, criminal, or misogynistic.

The MEN who claim to be women raised their voices. A MAN pretending to be a woman ripped a poster off the wall, a poster that the Library’s female founders paid for themselves. A MAN stole a bottle of wine from the refreshment table that the VWL women also paid for out of pocket.

Let me refresh your memory:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ4sbNVkJnM&w=560&h=315]

Flegg mentions the call for book banning that some gang of men-in-drag and their supporters issued on Facebook, in response to the VWL opening, and uses Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse as an example of a “transphobic” book, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with transgenderism and is a criticism of women being fucked by males. The fact that critique of heterosexual sex is considered “transphobic” tells you all you need to know about what these men in drag are really after.

Flegg goes on to list Megan Murphy’s actions in response to the crashing of the VWL opening night, along with Terri Strange’s YouTube coverage of the event, as if women who expose their male harassers and attackers are the bad people in this scenario. How dare women let other women know about violent men, right? Maybe if that dude didn’t want to be identified online by Murphy, he should’ve stayed the hell home instead of disturbing a bunch of women at an event he wasn’t invited to.

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“The Vancouver edition of Xtra, Canada’s major gay and lesbian publication, framed the two sides as equally at fault for the conflict.”

I sense that Flegg thinks Xtra Vancouver was wrong for saying both the women of Vancouver Women’s Library and the trans cult gang that crashed their party were in the wrong, and she’s absolutely right. The “conflict” was created solely by the destructive, aggressive men pretending to be women, all because they hate the idea that any females anywhere in the world would dare to get together apart from men.

“Despite all this, Wonders and Laurent believe they are the victims of anti-feminist hatred.”

Save your idiotic dismissal, Flegg. These women were physically and verbally harassed by men because they dared to open a library for women that stocks feminist books. That is literally what happened. They don’t believe they were the targets of anti-feminist hate; they were the targets of anti-feminist hate. If you can name what else they were attacked for without lying through your teeth, go ahead and try.

“Laurent describes the experience of being the target of a protest as “traumatizing.”

I just want to point out that Flegg uses scare quotes around the word traumatizing, as if Laurent was blowing her own experience of being physically harassed and yelled at by men out of proportion.

You think Flegg is one of those sadomasochistic women who like to be screamed at and beaten by the men who bone them? Is that why she doesn’t understand other women being scared off by males displaying aggressive and threatening behavior?

***

She tries to pretend that she cares about women and feminism when she writes:

“Women’s spaces have long been an important part of the feminist movement, but their roots are often bound up in the essentialist, biologically deterministic feminism of the seventies and eighties that excludes or dismisses trans and genderqueer people.”

Translation: female-only space is bad because it excludes men.

Does anyone else feel her brain cells dying in real time, whenever these trans cult fools, who graduated from college having only gained the ability to lie in academic language, call actual feminism’s recognition of biological sex “essentialist” and “deterministic”? What does Flegg even mean by this? What is essentialist and deterministic about recognizing that females have XX chromosomes and vaginas, while males have XY chromosomes and penises? Because those facts don’t actually determine anything beyond reproductive capabilities, first of all, and second, biological essentialism refers to a wide range of traits in men and women being tied to their sex, not to their sex itself being tied to the body. To say that biological sex is biological, isn’t essentializing. It’s the obvious and logical definition. If sex—meaning genitals, reproductive organs, bone density, muscle mass, hormone levels, etc.—isn’t tied to the body, then what is it based on? A narcissistic male’s imagination? Sorry, material reality is based on the material, not feelings. If you’re trying to say that feminism preaches masculinity and femininity as biologically essential—meaning determined by a person’s chromosomes and genitals—go lie to people too ignorant to catch you. Gender essentialism, not to be confused with biological essentialism, is what the trans cult and the Right Wing believe in, albeit in two different forms. Feminists and gender abolitionists are the only ones who don’t. That’s why we say that men can be feminine and women can reject femininity, while the trans cult says that performing masculinity makes you male and performing femininity makes you female, while the Right Wing says that males must be masculine and females must be feminine.

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Flegg: “Both founders also vehemently deny that texts can cause harm.”

I laugh on the inside at this line. If you’re not aware by now that trans cult members in the 18-30 age range, along with most liberals in that same category, actually believe that ideas and speech they politically disagree with count as “violence,” I don’t know where you’ve been the last 5-10 years. Personally, I’m undecided about whether these people are actually that fragile or if they’re simply manipulating the hell out of their liberal peers by making any speech they dislike morally equivalent to murder, torture, or beating the hell out of someone with a crow bar until he reaches hospital inpatient status. Either way, you have to recognize the amusing irony of asshats like Flegg thinking that obscure feminist books criticizing misogyny and heterosexuality “cause harm” but a pack of angry, mentally unhinged, aggressive men screaming at and physically threatening a bunch of young women isn’t actually traumatizing to those women. I mean, really? Do you lack that much self-awareness, Flegg? Or do you just embrace the stupidity of the “speech is violence” worldview for the sake of the mind control that it helps the trans cult achieve?

***

“Wonders and Laurent both identify as lesbians (they bristled when asked if they identify as “queer”; they do not) and are white university students in their early twenties—part of a larger trend of nominally progressive millennials adopting second-wave politics, often after encountering second-wave texts in university classes without sufficient critical guidance.”

Can you feel Flegg’s hatred of lesbians simmering just below the surface, when she writes that the operators of the Women’s Library are lesbians? Because I can. A hundred bucks says she’s bisexual who’s never been in an actual love relationship with a woman and calls herself by the bi and het-beloved “reclaimed slur” that never applied to them in the first place, “queer.” Hets and bisexuals who ID as queer just to hide the fact that they aren’t gay, hate the mere word lesbian almost as much as they hate actual lesbians, so I’m sure that Flegg bristled as much as Wonders and Laurent when she wrote that sentence.

By the way, lesbianism is not an identity. It’s a way of life based on exclusively loving and making love to women, as a woman. We know you hate it, and we don’t care.

Can you believe the blatant and condescending dismissal of young radical feminists as rebels against anti-feminist mind control? “Sufficient critical guidance”? Have you ever seen a more pretentious, dishonest cover phrase for mind control? You could’ve just used the word indoctrination, Flegg. Because that’s what the fuck you mean. You mean, “How dare these young women in college read radical feminist texts for themselves and actually understand it on their own and accept the politics as their own, without submitting to the anti-feminist indoctrination of their liberal MRA professors who recruit for the trans cult.” That’s what you mean, so why didn’t you just say that?

I’m tired of the cultic and manipulative doublespeak from these misogynistic members of the Church of Judith Butler, ya’ll. I am tired. The least you could do is be honest about your bullshit agenda, Flegg. Don’t come to my front door looking like the Bruce Jenner’s Witness that you are, and then say “Have you heard about feminism?” while holding up a copy of a J. Serano roll of toilet paper disguised as a book.

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Paraphrasing (or commenting on?) former VWL organizer Andrea Wheeler’s exit from the library project, Flegg writes:

“The danger, Wheeler explains, lies in the fact that these students haven’t had the time to sit with the new ideas they encounter, to determine which ones have value and which ones don’t. And from the sheltered world of academia, it’s easy to preference theory above lived experience, and to dismiss people who don’t have access to theoretical language.”

Look at this ageist and dishonest portrayal of young feminists, and then explain to me how a 22 year old college-educated woman is too young and naive and “sheltered” to legitimately understand and know that real feminism is by and for females, but an 18 year old college kid who saw a list of 9800 genders on Tumblr is old enough and “wise” enough to know that biological sex is imaginary and convincing lesbians to be raped by men in drag is going to set all women free from suffering.

How is prioritizing a man’s idea of pornified femininity over all women’s experience of being biologically female, not a privileging of theory over lived experience? How is Flegg and/or Wheeler accusing young radical feminists of dismissing people who don’t have access to theoretical language, while they call the entire world population “transphobic” for knowing the difference between males and females instead of buying into trans cult language developed in US colleges and American-majority social media platforms?

Do trans cult members do anything other than commit male reversals?

***

Of the men pretending to be women and their actions following the crashing of VWL’s first opening night and the online petition for banning all the feminist books from the library, Flegg writes,

“The goal was to reclaim a narrative that had become about book banning and protest tactics rather than about achieving justice and material safety for trans women and sex workers.”

By “reclaim the narrative,” these pathological liars mean “conduct PR damage control to make the men in drag and their handmaidens look like the victims, after they attacked women who were minding their own business and launched a censorship campaign against a feminist library.”

Women opening and enjoying a women’s library has NOTHING to do with the material safety and civil rights of men in drag. Nothing. The only people whose material safety was threatened in this situation, were the young women who attended the library opening, when these nasty, sick males showed up to vandalize their space, scream at them, and steal their property.

And how DARE these liberal MRAs suggest that it’s feminists who threaten the material safety of prostituted and trafficked women and girls, when the liberal MRAs are the ones enabling all of the male pimps and johns and pornographers and traffickers to continue raping women and girls for money?! Are you KIDDING me, you lying-ass rape-apologist capitalist scum? YOU are accusing FEMINISTS of standing in the way of justice for prostituted women and girls, over 90% of whom would get out of porn and prostitution today if they could? What kind of mindfuckery?

***

“Yang suggests the appeal of radical feminism in 2017 could partially be a matter of visibility. Trans stories and questions about legal protections for trans people are hitting mainstream media more than ever before, so the average person is forced to confront their own ideas about what it means to be a woman. As a result, the backlash has been afforded just as much ink, if not more, than the stories of improved access to healthcare and openly trans politicians making history.”

No, the average woman is forced to confront the fact that her civil rights and social protections are being systematically stripped away under a false banner of progressivism, all so that men in drag can force themselves into women’s space and homophobic heterosexual liberals don’t have to accept or acknowledge that men can be feminine and women can reject the pornified, hard fem stereotype that het men get off on.

But this man Yang is right about one thing: the trans cult crisis is the reason that feminism is now being rediscovered by women and girls. There are more women getting behind the label “radical feminism” to resist the trans cult and the paid rape industry than there are radical feminists, but there are definitely new, genuine feminists as a result of this trans cult nightmare we’re going through than there would’ve been without the nightmare. So in a weird plot twist, women have the trans cult to thank for resurrecting the real feminist movement that liberalism has been lashing out against for the last 30+ years.

And if you want to talk about ink spilled on men pretending to be women, let’s talk about all the pedophiles, rapists, and murderers that the trans cult swears don’t exist in their ranks. This vile prick badly impersonating a woman was just convicted of raping a 10 year old girl in a women’s bathroom. Feminists can send the Casper Star Tribune thank you cards for spilling ink on that important trans story.

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“Vancouver Rape Relief collective member Hilla Kerner spoke out against Bill C-16—legislation passed on May 17 that expands the basis of federal legal protection to include gender identity and gender expression—arguing that protection for trans women is a threat to the safety of “female-born” women.”

Again, with the dishonest rhetoric. Kerner and Megan Murphy and every other woman who testified against Bill C-16 argued that replacing biological sex with gender identity and allowing any man to qualify legally as a woman based only on his word, is a threat to the safety of actual women. Because 85% of men who pretend to be women never cut off their penis and testicles, and an overwhelming majority of them are now heterosexual autogynephiles who want to rape lesbians and have sex with women in general, just like all the other het men in the world.

Pretending that the only way to “protect” these men from other men is giving them unrestricted access to women and girls and rendering femaleness a legally unrecognized and unprotected category, is a gross con.

“Over the course of reporting this piece, I reached out to several organizations working to support trans women and sex workers in Vancouver. Citing safety concerns, none felt comfortable commenting on the record. These safety concerns are backed up by statistics; a 2014 working paper funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research found that 40 percent of Canadian sex workers had experienced violent victimization sometime over the past year. In a 2015 follow-up paper, many sex workers attributed this violence to their industry’s stigmatization and criminalization.”

Don’t you love how it was men and women from the trans cult who did the attacking in the VWL situation but all of these pro-trans cult and pro-paid rape organizations that Flegg supposedly contacted are the ones who have safety concerns?

And she follows up this ridiculous statement by citing the rate of violence that prostituted women and girls face in Canada, as if it’s feminist women who are responsible for that violence and not the MEN who buy and sell the women. And somehow, the pimps and johns and traffickers are violent toward the women and girls they rape and sell because of the stigma against and criminalization of pimping and prostitution. Not because they’re men.

Jesus, liberal MRAs are incredible.

“A 2014 survey conducted by Ontario-based research group Trans PULSE found that one-fifth of respondents had been physically threatened because they were trans, and another 34 percent had been verbally threatened or harassed due to their gender.”

Even if these stats are accurate, what does it have to do with the men who physically threatened the women in the VWL? Flegg wants you to forget that the WOMEN are the victims in this story, the ones who were physically and verbally attacked, not the ones who did the attacking. None of these women sought out, targeted, and attacked men who pretend to be women. The library never made a single statement on the trans cult or took any action to materially threaten any man IDing as a woman. The MEN are the ones who committed acts of physical aggression and instigated a confrontation, in a space they were never invited to, at an event that was NEVER about them one way or the other.

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Flegg compares VWL to another library that opened in Montreal last year, using it as the blueprint for what (fake) feminist libraries should be:

“L’Euguélionne opened in December 2016, led by a founding group of six people who represent a range of places on the spectrums of gender and sexuality. One of six co-founders, Nicolas Longtin-Martel, describes their approach as anti-oppressive. “That’s what our feminism tries to be. It’s bringing forward books by women but by marginalized communities too—LGBTQ, racialized people, trying to have a discussion about ableism, too,” they say.”

1. Feminism is by and for women. It is not an umbrella term or movement for every social justice cause under the sun that includes men.
2. Men are not feminists.
3. Feminism doesn’t include men as intended beneficiaries.
4. Separating the category of womanhood from lesbianism, oppressed races, and the disabled, in order to include men, denies the womanhood of homosexual women, women of color, and disabled women. At no point has (radical) feminism EVER excluded lesbians, WOC, and disabled women because they’re all WOMEN. And feminism is about liberating WOMEN from MALE oppression, which includes not only misogyny but lesbian-hating, racism, ableism, classism, lookism, fat oppression, colonialism, and the male violence that enforces and expresses all of the above. Pretending that only male-inclusive anti-feminist liberalism pays attention to racism, lesbian-hating, ableism, etc. is a manipulative lie that serves only to misrepresent feminism for the purpose of propping up male-run liberalism as the exclusively acceptable method of achieving social justice. Lesbians are women, black and brown women are women, disabled women are women, poor and working class women are women, and all of their books are automatically representative of both women and lesbians/the racially oppressed/class oppressed/etc. The only writers from the LGBTQ, non-white races, disabled community, and poor and working classes who don’t belong in a feminist or women’s library are MEN. Gay men don’t speak for lesbians, men of color don’t speak for women of color, disabled men don’t speak for disabled women, poor and working class men don’t speak for poor and working class women. MEN DON’T SPEAK FOR WOMEN BECAUSE MEN ARE NOT WOMEN. Fuck you.

***

Here’s the conclusion of Flegg’s essay that belongs in the nearest toilet:

“It’s possible, in other words, to recognize the achievements of feminists past while simultaneously critiquing the movement and refusing to replicate its shortcomings. The work is already happening in our communities, and unless the VWL can turn a critical eye inward and turn their fight for justice outward, there will be no place for it in the feminism of the future.”

Translation: It’s possible to acknowledge real feminism as a thing that happened while simultaneously criticizing it for actually focusing on and serving women, to the exclusion of the male oppressor. Misogynistic men and women who call themselves “feminists” are already performing anti-feminism that includes and empowers men, and branding it “feminism.” Unless the Vancouver Women’s Library realizes that real feminism is a cardinal sin and agree to serve men, there will be no place for it in the men’s rights activism labeled “feminism” of the future that seeks to throw women back to pre-1970 while convincing them that they have everything to gain by going along with it.

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Go donate to the Vancouver Women’s Library. And smile because it’s exists, despite everything these misogynists did to shut it down and despite anti-feminists like Erin Flegg trying to smear it.

Stay mad, trans bros.