Mick Hartley

From the Lesbian Post:

Lesbians United’s founder and National Organizer, T., is a former academic who spent over a decade fighting postmodernist homophobia in U.S. universities. She now lives as a housewife and donates her time to lesbian rights activism….

Devotees of postmodernism generally claim to be progressives; they claim that they want to change the status quo. But if you’re a rational human surrounded by postmodernists, it pretty quickly becomes clear that “postmodernist thought” is a way of reinforcing the status quo by justifying and rebranding it. Postmodernist bullies like to claim that they’ve given up power, while actually retaining and abusing said power.

For example: A straight male colleague tells me that because I’m attracted to women, I’m probably not a woman myself. When I ask him to define the word woman, he tells me that definitions are violent. When I point out that he implicitly defined the word woman by excluding me from it, he loudly proclaims that he’s a “trans woman,” and that I, a “cis lesbian,” am his oppressor. The status quo—man talking over woman, heterosexual excluding homosexual—hasn’t changed. It’s just been given a makeover. The more self-righteously my colleague proclaims his womanhood, the more the status quo solidifies.

In academia, the status quo of homophobia has solidified into bedrock.

Postmodernism enabled more than one colleague to exclude me from the definition of woman. It also enabled my peers to exclude me from the definition of person because I’m not interested in men. It enabled a facilitator to remove me from a campus women’s group because my homosexuality and un-femininity, in her view, disqualified me from womanhood.

It enabled my PhD advisor to veto my dissertation because I didn’t have a “theoretical basis” for writing about lesbians instead of heterosexuals. It enabled professors to dismiss my research, and conferences to reject my papers on women and homosexuality—on the grounds that they relied too much on evidence and logic.

It enabled a university I attended to remove anti-discrimination protections for homosexuals.

It enabled heterosexual men to openly fetishize lesbians in seminars, in front of me.

It enabled anyone and everyone to call me by a homophobic slur more times than I could count. It enabled many of my heterosexual colleagues to openly compare homosexuality to perversion and pedophilia, and to justify their own worst impulses by falsely associating themselves with homosexuals.

Worst, the hostile environment these postmodernists created pushed every other lesbian academic I knew to self-harm with breast-binders, hormones, and/or surgery….

Via the Glinner.