#TwitterHatesWomen
#SingleSexSpaces
Hi Lovelies,
I wrote this letter to twitter about the tweet I got banned for. Also I had a new article published today in The Spectator Australia.
Here is my letter on You Tube and bellow the text.
Dear Twitter,
My name is Edie Wyatt, I am a writer and a feminist, and you just permanently banned me from your platform for the following tweet
“There is only one type of man and when they claim to be lesbians they actively engage in rape culture. That’s not cool.”
You deemed these words “hateful conduct” against a protected group.
In a time when a writer was violently attacked for being “hateful” to a protected group, and a famous children’s author receives a string of death threats for being “hateful” to a protected group, I need to defend this accusation.
In my tweet I refer to “men” who are adult human males. Men had human rights before the other humans and since the women’s revolution women have not only gained human rights in some places, but they also have protections in legislation to cover vulnerabilities specific to human females.
Additional projections help women and girls engage in public life where their reproductive role in the human species previously restricted them to the domestic sphere, to which they were largely confined. Aspects of the human female that requires ongoing protection are a weaker frame, vulnerability to rape and violence from males, and the bodily needs that comes from menstruation, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding the disproportionate burden of child rearing. We group the legal protections of the vulnerabilities of females as “women’s rights” and these rights can never be separated from our bodies.
To change the definition of female away from a person with a female body for me is a dangerous nonsense. There is only one type of adult human female and one type of adult human male. If you want to convince me away from this belief you have every right to persuade me with words and data, rather than apply to me the shame word “hateful”.
I have no way of knowing if the people I was engaging with on Twitter that day were adult human males or adult human females, as avatars and identities are the way people interact on Twitter, this is why I talked about males in the third person.
Although I am unconvinced by theories that humans can change sex with words, with self-declarations and with the falsifying of documents, I am a Christian person and I made myself a Christian by performing a declaration. I understand that words and declarations are powerful, I just don’t see how they can change human sex.
My identity as a Christian is not harmed by the words of people who don’t believe the same thing as I do about transfiguration, for instance, or my claim to have been “born again”, which is of course figurative and not literal.
I know Twitter, that you believe humans can change sex with declarations and documents, after all, you are a corporation, but I am an adult human female who has given birth to human females, you and I have different life experiences to be fair.
I am however humanities major, so while I don’t understand your conclusions, I do understand gender. Gender is the word we use for the cultural meaning’s societies give to sex. Gender, feminists maintain, is central to cultural, economic, political systems. We have a word for societies where males dominate and actively limit the opportunities of human females to participate in public and cultural life, partly through oppressive gender stereotypes, that word is “patriarchy”.
You can’t be unaware of the accusation that your organisation, that is owned and managed predominately by males, disproportionately punishes the speech of women, especially given the hashtag #TwitterHatesWomen. If this is true, and I hope it is not, it would mean that Twitter is systemically misogynistic and patriarchal.
Feminists call systems where gender erodes the sexual boundaries of human females with shame, “rape culture”. Because gender is a word that describes culture. A woman who is placed in a situation where her capacity to consent to a sexual act with a man is eroded, is placed in a harmful state. This is not just because of the risk of ongoing sexual and physical trauma, it is because small gamete producers (males) impregnate large gamete producers (females).
Impregnation has a significant impact on females, it is the cause of death in many females globally and because of this risk, and for other safety and social reasons, human females separate themselves from males for safety in a variety of situations, we call this “single sex safeguarding”.
A small number of adult human females are “lesbians”. Lesbians are adult human females who are exclusively romantically and sexually attracted to other adult human females. Homosexual females are in a unique position among human females in that their dating experience excludes adult human males. They do not exclude adult human males because they are “hateful”, they choose a romantic and sexual life separate from males.
I am not a lesbian, I referred to lesbians in my tweet because they are a uniquely vulnerable group among women, and I am a feminist. Historically adult human males who want sexual access to lesbian women have tried to attack the sexual boundaries of lesbians with corrective rape or much more commonly with shame. An adult human male, for example may indicate to a same sex attracted human female that their lack of desire to copulate with males is a weakness, a sin or a form of hatred.
We have also heard that a woman is only a lesbian because she hasn’t met the right guy, or more crudely that she just needs a good fuck.
Lesbianism was only recently decriminalised in western countries and is still illegal in many countries where you have billions of active Twitter users. Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei is one of your users for instance, and he presides over a regime that is persecutes and kills homosexuals without remorse.
If lesbians are able to institute single sex protections in a dating environment, they are far less likely to experience rape or sexual violence from the person they meet in that space. This is because males are responsible for between 97% and 99% of all sexual offenses.
When you prevent an adult human female from excluding an adult human male from her dating pool you violate that female’s human rights for three main reasons. One is that you imply that the male person has a right of sexual access to all female people. Secondly, you prevent females from using previously understood words to refuse sex with a male without inviting social shame and legal censure on that female.
Previously a female could say “I am a lesbian” to indicate lack of interest in a male. In a mixed sex “lesbian” space she must say, “I am a lesbian who does not believe people can change sex” (or words to that effect). That last part of the sentence now places shame on that lesbian for her same sex attraction with the accusation that she is “transphobic”.
The third is, and I want to especially say this to the Tasmanian Equity board who said that women have no right to discriminate against ‘types of bodies’ in public spaces, the reason we need the right to assemble as women is “just because fuck off, its none of your damned business”. Women and girls can exclude males from their space for any reason they like. I don’t care it the man is wearing a crown of jewels or if he’s donated is severed cock to the vagina museum or if he bakes a fabulous Victoria sponge.
The nature of a patriarchal systems of control, is that they provide both control and protection for women. When a woman threatens to leave the control provided by a patriarchy, she also faces losing the protection they need to participate in public life. Some women can live happily in a benevolent patriarchy, but the great weakness of patriarchy, like any authoritarian system of control and protection, is they are so infrequently benevolent.
Many young lesbians are saying that when they are being subject to sexual coercion in lesbian spaces, that in speaking out against the gendered re-definition of their sexuality they are called “hateful” and if they don’t submit to the sexual coercion, they lose the protection of the powerful LGBT alliance. An alliance that still contains all the cultural capital of the public sympathy toward lesbians.
An adult human male who claims to be a lesbian, to access a lesbian space, violates the boundaries of women who no longer have the words or legal ability to accurately define or defend that space.
If a dating space is understood to be bisexual, that is fine, and everyone has a shared understanding. The redefinition of “lesbian” to mean “same gender attracted people”, re-purposes all lesbian spaces and culture to include the sexual access of males to a previously inaccessible group of females.
In short, eroding boundaries with shame is rape culture, the removal of the woman’s right to consent is malevolent patriarchy and a violation of the international human rights of women.
My words were based in these concepts of biology, feminism and human rights and they are not “hateful conduct”. I don’t enjoy spending my time explaining biology, feminism and human rights to billionaires, it’s odious and tiresome, but I do want my account back, thank you very much.
Edie Wyatt
Woman. Mother. Feminist.