L – For solar panels and wind turbines, they will say – other things are more destructive as if that’s somehow ok that we would add an additional destructive industry. Of course we should be working to reduce all things that are causing harm. Not, we’re causing harm already to let’s destroy everything. It makes no sense as an argument. In a biological sense, this is a planet of bacteria. They are the people doing the basic work of life. They keep the basic cycles going–the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, without which no animals would be here. We need to get profoundly humble before the incredible activities they do that make our lives possible. That humility needs to be the basis of our culture, our religion, our reality. They started throwing things at us, cans filled with liquid that fell and sprayed all over us. Speaking for myself, someone approached me and sprayed something in my face. The impact hurt my eyes physically and whatever they sprayed got all over my face and clothing, but it did not injure me,” Dansky explained.

One of the trans women who showed up at the Radfems Respond conference, a thirty-five-year-old software engineer from California, with a tiny nose stud and long brown hair, agrees. She understands why trans women are hurt by their exclusion from Michfest and other female-only events and facilities, saying, “It’s not really wanting to invade space. It’s a deep-seated wanting to belong.” But, she adds, “if you’re identifying with women, shouldn’t you be empathizing with women?” Our analysis is correct. Starting from first principles, we are seeing that sadism and necrophilia are the problem and the power relationships that inevitably come from that, are the problem. We’re not going to save the planet or human rights until we name it and figure out how to fight it. Allen, Pamela. 1970. Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation. New York: Times Change Press. There is a 3rd choice here which is protecting life on Earth which is actually defending the wild and that means this way of life has to stop but that’s the thing nobody can say out loud.Morris, Bonnie. 2016. The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Anti-trans bigots and hate group Women’s Declaration International (WDI) are coming to town this Nov. 19th. Save the date to give them the welcome they deserve,” wrote Antifa propaganda artist “No Bonzo.”

BNT: You write “If you hear nothing else in this book, hear this: there is no personal solution.” (p264) Also, “the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible – it’s to dismantle those systems.” (p265) Why do you feel the mainstream emphasizes personal lifestyle choices as the main path to a better future, and why do you believe this path is misleading?

To go along with that theme, in this and the following Thursday profile blogs I’ll feature two people who faced these forks in the road (pardon the pun). Michfest, as it’s called, takes place every August, on six hundred and fifty acres of land in the woods east of Lake Michigan. Lisa Vogel founded it in 1976, when she was a nineteen-year-old Central Michigan University student, and she still runs it. The music, Vogel says, is only part of what makes Michfest important. Each year, several thousand women set up camp there and find themselves, for a week, living in a matriarchy. Meals are cooked in kitchen tents and eaten communally. There are workshops and classes. Some women don extravagant costumes; others wear nothing at all. There is free child care and a team to assist disabled women who ordinarily cannot go camping. Vogel describes the governing ethos as “How would a town look if we actually got to decide what was important?” That might be an exaggeration, but only a slight one. The members of the board of the New York Abortion Access Fund, an all-volunteer group that helps to pay for abortions for those who can’t afford them, are mostly young women; Alison Turkos, the group’s co-chair, is twenty-six. In May, they voted unanimously to stop using the word “women” when talking about people who get pregnant, so as not to exclude trans men. “We recognize that people who identify as men can become pregnant and seek abortions,” the group’s new Statement of Values says. Lienert, Tania. 1996. On Who is Calling Radical Feminists “Cultural Feminists” and Other Historical Sleights of Hand. In Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, ed. Diane Bell and Renate Klein, 155–168. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Such views are shared by few feminists now, but they still have a foothold among some self-described radical feminists, who have found themselves in an acrimonious battle with trans people and their allies. Trans women say that they are women because they feel female—that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”

So it does mean questioning industrialised civilisation and beyond that it means questioning civilisation itself. The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability is a 2009 book by Lierre Keith published by PM Press. Keith is an ex-vegan who believes that "veganism has damaged her health and others". [1] Keith argues that agriculture is destroying not only human health but entire ecosystems, such as the North American prairie, and destroying topsoil. [2] [3] Keith also considers modern agriculture to be the root cause of slavery, imperialism, militarism, chronic hunger and disease. [4]

L – In 1978 Mary Daly wrote - Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet and that it’s basic value was necrophilia and that what it was after was dead objects on a dead planet. The number 46 is the energy density of diesel fuel so it’s 46 mega joules per kilogram. That same number for a lithium battery is 1. For an LED acid battery its 0.17 so it’s 46 times more dense than anything you’re going to come up with for solar or wind or any of the others. It just can’t be done. There are really only 3 generations of people who are going experience anything like this and even of those people it was a small slice of rich wealthy countries. No matter how poor you feel in a rich place like America you still have access to all the goodies that industrial civilisation produces. It never existed before and it’s not going to come again. But they don’t want to face that. It’s a measure of how much perceptions have changed in the past thirty-five years that “The Transsexual Empire” received a respectful, even admiring hearing in the mainstream media, unlike “Gender Hurts,” which has been largely ignored there. Reviewing “The Transsexual Empire” in the Times, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz called it “flawless.” Raymond, he wrote, “has rightly seized on transsexualism as an emblem of modern society’s unremitting—though increasingly concealed—antifeminism.”