WHAT IS THE COTTON CEILING?

Presentation on the Violence Against Lesbian Panel at #FiLiA2019 (Transcript Below)

Angela C. Wild is a lesbian feminist activist, writer, researcher and a political artist. Her work focuses on promoting uncompromising lesbian visibility, building lesbian culture, fighting for women-only-spaces as well as challenging compulsory heterosexuality, institutionalised femininity, motherhood and pornography.

She is a founding member of Get The L Out lesbian activist group and author of Lesbians At Ground Zero the first research on the cotton ceiling.

Transcript:

Angela C Wild on the panel at FiLiA 2019

What is The Cotton Ceiling?

This talk is about the clash of right between the movement for trans right (transactivists) and the movement for lesbian rights and how and why these two groups and ideologies are incompatible, can never be compatible, and the reason why lesbians cannot support trans rights without going against their own interests and their own rights as lesbians.

There is a lot of talk about the clash between transwomen and women and the right to access or to deny access to women only spaces. In the case of lesbians, the woman only space whose access is being debated is OUR BODIES. We are immediately in the realm of sexual violence.

Language

I want to clarify the language I am going to us here especially when it comes to the use of pronouns.

For purposes of clarity, to enable a clear feminist political analyses based on sex (not gender) based on material reality, not ideology, and as feminist statement of resistance, I think it is important we oppose the use of queerified language and drop the practise of preferred pronouns altogether because they are imposed on women to gaslight us and to force us into submission.

I do not use the term “transwomen”, I believe it is not correct term because no one can change sex. It is impossible. Instead, I will use terms such as “Men who identify as trans, transwomen, trans lesbians”.

I will use pronouns associated to someone’s biological sex.

I think it is urgent we speak in those terms because those terms are forbidden to us right now.

The cotton ceiling:

The term “cotton ceiling” (2012) invented by a trans activist and porn performer, to describe the “difficulties” faced by men who identify as “trans lesbians” in being accepted as “real lesbians”. They found that lesbians were okay for men who ID as lesbians to join their communities but were somehow reluctant to choose them as sexual partners. We know that 80% of trans people are non-op, meaning their male genitals are intact.

The term “cotton ceiling” is copied from the term “glass ceiling”.

The glass ceiling describes the invisible barrier women face to attain a higher position in their field of work because men are gatekeeping positions of power, keeping them for themselves.

The “cotton ceiling” however, refers to the knickers worn by the lesbian: the cotton of the knickers being the barrier the males who identify as lesbians struggle to penetrate. This barrier is seen as denying his validity as a “real woman” and as a lesbian, as only a sexual experience with a lesbian would make him a “real lesbian“.

Lesbians , who are not consenting, are accused of using their genitals to “gate keep womanhood”, denying “trans lesbians” their “rights” to be real lesbians by accessing lesbians sexually.

The term consensual is important because the lesbian has to agree (under extreme pressure and coercion and/or violence) to the sexual relationship for validation to magically happen.

Lesbians explained that they did not want to have sexual relationships with people with penises, the term penis was rebranded “girldick”, “lady stick”, “lady’s penis”.

In this “logic”, the penis, in virtue of being attached to a male who identifies as female, automatically becomes a female organ. Lesbians who still refuse to consider “trans lesbians” as sexual partners are called “terfs”, “transphobes” and “vagina fetishists”.

Because Lesbians are seen as privileged to men who identify as women because we are so called “Cis” (not trans) we are said to oppress men who identify as lesbians.

Lesbians’ refusal to have sex with men is the way we oppress them.

But it does go even further than this.

We are told that transwomen are real women therefore if lesbians refuse to have sex with people with penises, they cannot be lesbians at all.

So men who ID as lesbians are real lesbians and lesbians who are females are not real lesbians unless they have sex with men who ID as lesbians.

Did I lose you?

The reversal is complete.

Research

As this cotton ceiling propaganda is happening to us on-line, we are also told it by the very same men who do it that this never happens, that lesbians are not sexually pressured to accept men who ID as lesbians as sexual partners. This is gas lighting. It is emotional abuse.

I wanted to see what was going on for lesbians on the ground and if that rhetoric had any implications for lesbians in their daily lives and what is happening in LGBT groups, on lesbian dating sites.

The survey was a set of 30 questions sent to women-only and lesbian-only groups. 80 lesbians responded to that survey in 5 days.

The sample does not claim to be representative of all lesbians. The aim of this research was to represent the voice of silenced lesbians and to gather the missing evidence.

Stonewall, who’s research claimed to be representative and objective, do not represent those lesbians’ views or stories. They were ignored, dismissed or demonized.

Findings

The findings suggest that there is huge pressure in LGBT groups to accept without question the queer ideology and mantra that “transwomen are women”.

For lesbians specifically it means that defining lesbianism as “same-sex attraction at the exclusion of people who have or had penises” is considered a form of hate speech and violently punished.

50% of respondent reported being excluded from their LGBT group(s).

66% of respondents reported being intimidated or receiving threats in their LGBT group(s).

These act both as sexual pressure and silencing of lesbians.

This leads to social isolation because when threatened online lesbians are less likely to participate in real life groups or events.

Women who dissent are demonized and name-called “terf”.

Women who stay silent in groups are not free from pressure but questioned to reveal whether or not they would date a “transwoman”.

This constant pressure creates a culture of terror, leading to women policing each other in order to not appear to be a “terf” to the rest of the group.

This trend is intensifying as anyone not actively embracing the trans ideology is suspected of silent “terfing”.

Lesbian dating sites

Lesbian dating sites are infiltrated by men who pose as lesbians (whether they identify as transwomen or not and whether they “pass” as women or not).

Many lesbians feel unsafe at the thought of potentially going on a date with a man.

This constant pressure is a form of psychological coercion and leads to lesbians feeling pressurised to accept men who identify as transwomen as sexual partners. It is “online everywhere” and “relentless”.

Sexual Violence

Lesbians have been subjected to a wide variety of sexual violence by men who identify as transwomen.

This was reported by women from every age but the younger 18-24 age group seemed to be particularly targeted.

Perpetrators have used queer theory mixed with guilt-tripping to pressure, justify or excuse sexual violence.

The sexual violence was committed by men who identified as transwomen in a typical male pattern of aggression. It ranges from coercion, online grooming, sexual harassment and assault, to rape by deception or with physical force.

It happened in public spaces: clubs, women’s toilets, with unwanted sexual touching; in acquaintance rape scenario/private setting: either while lesbians were vulnerable (drunk, asleep or unable to leave), or during dates when the women withdrew consent and were then “persuaded” or forcibly raped.

Conclusion

So what is a Lesbian? For us, a lesbian is a woman who is exclusively attracted to women.

In my university a lesbian is a person who identifies as a woman who is sexually attracted to another person who identifies as a woman.

This is the ideology that every GBT group, community and organisation in the country promotes. It effectively erases the definition of lesbianism from the language because it now includes men.

When lesbians are denied the right to experience lesbianism we are witnessing a form of rape culture and a form of conversion therapy. Heterosexuality is enforced upon lesbians. Only today it is called queer and it is called progressive.

Because a lesbian is a woman who is attracted exclusively to women

and because a lesbian who tells a man who identifies as a lesbian “I’m not having sex with you”, she is effectively saying “You are not a woman - you are a man”. She is denying his validity as a “real woman” and as a lesbian.

We now have a movement who claims that lesbians’ bodies and sexuality is a tool of validation for males.

And if you understand that you see why it is so important for trans activism to silence and demonize lesbians who dissent. A lesbian who says no is a threat who has to be taken down.

Individual men who ID as lesbians as well as Trans activism as a whole relies on invading lesbian bodies for their validation. Lesbian erasure from language and practice and the colonization of our bodies is literally a question of life and death for the existence and validation of their identity and therefore of the whole trans movement.

This is what the cotton ceiling is about.