Truth Versus Lies

Countering Lesbian-hating lies with the truth

Truth Versus Lies

Bev Jo Von Dohre

Friends told me that I and our Lesbian history and community are slandered in Sinister Wisdom issue 128, called “Trans/Feminisms,” though the title explains the Lesbian-hatred. (“Trans” does not exist and no one can change sex.) Mr. Stryker, Julie Enszer, and the editors gave me no way to refute Stryker’s lies (which are also included in his book.) As much as I don’t have the time to waste with this, I feel I have to answer with the truth, since I’m not the only one affected. (Since I don't have the issue, a friend sent me a few pages, so that is what I'm responding to.)

Considering that the entire trans cult is a lie (no one can change sex), it should not be a surprise that they lie about everything else when it suits them.

My response:

1. Stryker uses Elliott Basil Mattiuzzi’s lies to erase me and also our Lesbian history. (Soon after Elliott stalked me into the Lesbian community, he re-named himself “Beth Elliott,” which I believe was to have a name as close to mine as possible, just as he tried to dye his hair a similar shade of red.)  

2.  Elliott has been stalking me since I said no to him when I was 17, in 1968. The last time I saw him was at a Lesbian event, in 2019, just before the lockdown, where he put "Beverly" on his nametag and sat at the table I was at with friends. (There were witnesses.) He also has shown up when I posted in a local Lesbian list about events and would sit at the table I was at, daring me to tell him to leave.

3. In the mid-Eighties, Elliott lied to the "off our backs" Feminist newspaper collective, saying that he was a "woman born woman" to get his article "Lesbian Sex" printed. The arrogance of a man writing such an article.

4. Elliott also describes himself as bisexual when it suits him (his first relationship that I knew of was with a older man named Richard), so Elliott claiming to be a Lesbian is a lie on several levels. He is also a sado-masochist, which is a group who thrives on provoking and forcing non-consensual scenes. He has bragged about winning "Ms. Leather" for Alameda County when he was the only contestant.

5. Elliott has doxxed me – putting my location and other personal information online, knowing I’ve already gotten rape, mutilation, and death threats from his trans brethren, endangering me and other Lesbians in my life.

6. Elliott also harasses other Lesbians and is openly racist (in his writings and comments). He so terrorized an African-descent friend a few years ago that she changed her phone number. (She had seen him grooming a young woman and warned the woman who then went to Elliott, so he called my friend and yelled at her. She does not scare easily. But underestimating these men is dangerous, as more are finding out.)

7. I am a Lifelong Lesbian, in love with other girls from my earliest memories and have refused to be heterosexual. I paid a high price as a teenager for saying I was a Lesbian before we had any support. (This is when we were branded by the psychiatric institutions as needing to be "cured" by torture, imprisonment, or "conversion therapy.")  So Stryker’s insinuations through Elliott are particularly disgusting. My responses:

8. NO, I did not "come out together" with Elliott. He was a het man I met at USF when I was 17, who pressured me to be his girlfriend. I said no and told him I was in love with my best friend, Marg.  He had no idea what a Lesbian was. I made the mistake of feeling sorry for him and so tried to be friends with him. He was "still living as a man" because that is what he is.

9. What "flirtation" in our "coming out process"?  Again, I did not "come out" with him. I was already a Lesbian. He was and is a man. There was NO flirtation from me, though he kept on at me. Elliott gave me the creeps and I found him repulsive.

10. Stryker is so manipulative with his lies. I NEVER said Elliott was "always pressuring me for sex,” which implies that we had an intimate relationship. Wishful thinking from Elliott or a way to erase me?  There was never any intimacy or “sex” between us, but he kept watching me and followed me around. He was after me in a way that I realized later was stalking because when I briefly became friends with another man through USF, Elliott flipped out, ranting and crying at me, as if I belonged to him. (I had no idea how dangerous this was for me until later.)

11. No, Elliott did not "make a name for 'himself' in the early women's music scene." (Has Stryker never heard him perform?)  There were a lot of wonderful Lesbian singer/songwriter/musicians and Elliott was not one of them. He's certainly not listed in any compilation of Lesbian or Feminist women performers that I've ever seen.

12. No, Elliott was not on the organizing committee for the West Coast Lesbian Conference in 1973. Jeanne Cordova, who was the actual organizer, refuted his lie and demanded a retraction and apology. (I don't believe Jeanne had heard him sing or play guitar, but invited him, thinking that that would bring more attention to the conference. There were some actual Lesbian performers who were wonderful, like the Family of Woman band. Much of their music can be heard on Linda Shear's beautiful album, "A Lesbian Portrait.")

13. Yes, I and many Lesbians at the conference were upset that a man was given space and time to perform at a rare Lesbian event. We did not "threaten" anything. We protested. Since I was in the unique position of knowing Elliott personally from before he claimed to be a woman and Lesbian, and knew that he was as far from being a Lesbian as a man could get, I felt I had to speak out. (When he stalked me into the Lesbian Feminist community, he immediately got into power positions, as men do.)  Three of us who were Lesbian Separatists formed the Gutter Dyke collective (named by our poverty class member to reflect her and our working class cultures). We later wrote about the conference in our newspaper, Dykes and Gorgons, in 1973. Every Lesbian I remember at the conference protested Elliott being there since he clearly was a man.

14. Robin Morgan did not spend "hours of consultation" with us (but why does Stryker think he knows what we did when he wasn’t there, except to insinuate that we influenced her?)  Robin used her Feminist common sense and own awareness about men like Elliott in supporting all the Lesbians at the conference to not have a man invading our space. Her speech was important and accurate though Stryker gave a "trigger warning" for those too fragile to read that a man cannot be a woman. I don't know who her reference to a "San Francisco Lesbian being pressured to let a man rape her" was about, but I have never said Elliott raped me or tried to. (He wouldn't dare.) But I agree that men forcing their way into our few precious and rare spaces against our will is a form of rape.

15. Our Lesbian culture and community were not a "scene."  I worked on the likely first Lesbian Feminist conference in the world in Berkeley in 1972 and soon became a Lesbian Separatist, which is about loving and supporting Lesbians. Stryker calling us "transphobic" and "TERF-leaning" slurs of course makes men like him and Elliott the center of attention, as men do, rather than that we are simply saying no to them. (Don't women have the right to be away from men? Clearly not to the trans cult.)

16. Of course we supported the Lesbians in the Daughters of Bilitis who did not want a man in their Lesbian organization and especially not in a power position. Elliott is extremely manipulative with his lies, so well-meaning Lesbians have often been conned into feeling sorry for him, as I once did. What I remember is that that original Lesbian organization ended rather than continue with Elliott. One more loss for Lesbians, caused by a man.

This issue is simple. Men do not want Lesbians to exist. Our love for our own kind and choosing other Lesbians to make community with is the biggest NO to men that there is, and the biggest threat to patriarchy. We were eliminated from most histories and descriptions of cultures around the world for millennia because men and the women supporting them don't want us to exist. For a brief period of time, we made our existence visible by building wonderful Lesbian (often in the guise of "women's") communities in many countries.

We wrote Lesbian books, newspapers, journals, plays, poetry and music, made bookstores, coffee houses, dances, parties, women's centers, self defense classes. Now almost all of that is gone, destroyed, or taken over by men -- the same men who demand we call them "Lesbians," even though no man can ever become a woman or Lesbian. Before the support of Lesbian Feminism, men always demanded access to us, even when we only had bars and were branded by the psychiatric institutions as needing to be "cured."  Some Radical Lesbian Feminists and even Gay men accuse the trans cult of being a form of modern "conversion therapy."

Men always want to mark territory and do not accept no for an answer. The women most murdered by men are usually women saying no in some form. But in the case of Lesbians and women saying no, it's not enough for men to use their massive resources and privilege and power of the media to destroy us -- they want to parasitize us and literally claim to be us. I wrote in "Dykes-Loving-Dykes" in 1990, if they can't be with us, they want to claim they are us. And then they re-write our history. They certainly have the money, power and means to do it, considering that most are privileged white men. “Sinister Wisdom” had been a Lesbian Feminist journal since the Seventies, but is now taken over by the trans cult and men claiming to be Lesbians).

It's only been a bit over a hundred years since men in the US allowed women to vote. Women who protested were assaulted and some killed. Women still do not have many basic rights that men do and this serves all men. But now the attacks on us are on a whole other level. Other oppressed groups have not had to deal with their oppressor claiming to be them, except for those like Euro-descent Rachel Dolezal who claimed to be Black and had gotten into power positions in the African American community. (And that community put a stop to her. It's no coincidence that African-descent women are in the forefront of fighting the trans cult, with blogs, videos, posts.) (However, men in the trans cult appropriate other identities, like non-disabled Mr. Chloe Jennings-White who has enjoyed being in the media as a "trans-disabled Lesbian in a wheelchair" when he's not hiking.) This level of appropriation is not only incredibly insulting but dangerous -- Men claiming to be women and Lesbians are murdering us regularly and the media censors it or names them as women, which skews the murder statistics when they know the vast majority of murders are by men.  How many know or care about the triple hate crime murder in Oakland in 2016, where the murderer was recently convicted? 

Rabbitholed #78: Dana Rivers Is the Story the Media Doesn't Want You to Read

This is a story unparalleled in media censorship about deadly white male violence against a lesbian interracial couple and their black son. When the media goes silent, there is always a reason why.

Mandy Stadtmiller

Dec 8

For a "historian," you would think that Mr. Stryker would bother to read what facts are already in print before printing lies or that he would actually ask me about what happened rather than the lies in his "Bev's version," which are actually Elliott's version. For instance, our Gutter Dyke collective was written about in “Dykes and Gorgons,” and then we were included in the Dyke Separatist anthology “For Lesbians Only.”

Thanks for the compliment, but no, Lesbians saying no to men identifying as Lesbians did not begin with me, but happened when any Lesbian or woman first heard this bizarre lie. (The slur "TERF" came decades later and means "Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminist," which basically is women saying no to men invading our communities. "Gen-crit" also came decades later.)  And no, it's not a "phobia," (though women have reason to be afraid of saying no to these men, considering the murders of us by the men in the transcult.)  This is again an example of men taking from Lesbians. We wrote about lesbophobia, so men use the word against us.

If anyone sees more references to me or our Lesbian history that they want to check out, feel free to ask, instead of trusting the male versions that erase us. For more information, including about the trans cult and other female-hating male inventions, most of our book, “Dykes-Loving-Dykes” has been included with a 25 year later update at my first blog: 

https://bevjoradicallesbian.wordpress.com/

And my second blog has enough articles for two more books, including about the trans cult’s harm to Lesbians, girls, and women.

https://keepingreallesbianfeminismsimple.wordpress.com/

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