Women's Declaration International Debrief, Part 2
When the fun really began!
See Part 1 for the discussion of the first day of the WDI conference. This essay covers the evening of the second day through the direct action on Monday.
That night, we had the opening night for the art exhibit A Nasty Piece of Work: The Art of Dissident Feminists. My avatar painting was featured in this exhibit. While I was not able to provide the original as it is stored in an inaccessible location currently, I was able to put a high quality screen print from Skull Print into a shadowbox and add lights which I believe add to the overall piece. The history of this painting is tied to its meaning. In late 2020, I said goodbye to my dear friend referenced in the essay, My Night of Dialectical Ethnography on Twitter, who tragically passed away from a hereditary cancer that had taken her father just a few years before.
A kidney transplant recipient, she was on immunnosuppressive drugs, and therefore had minimal capacity to slow down this beast which claimed her life just two months after symptom onset. She was 39. She had a hospital wedding which we watched over Zoom because of COVID restrictions. She had to be wheeled down the aisle, even though a month earlier, she had been fine.
I did what I could to share my limited knowledge and understanding of cancer and other health subjects to help the people around me understand why the doctors were saying it was hopeless. This painting is how I imagined her final days, as she slowly lost her breathing reflex due to the metastatic tumor pressing on her brainstem, and how she had to therefore choose to keep breathing to stay with her loved ones as long as possible. Over time, it came to represent to me the fact also that feminists are fighting an entrenched and unwinnable war. We will never see the end of this fight, but we must choose to keep fighting for the benefit of those who will survive us.
I completed the painting in December of 2020. By chance, it was still next to me on the bed when I downloaded Tiktok, and I decided to make it my avatar. It meant a lot to me to have the opportunity to participate in this gallery, which also hosted work from
and many other artists.
At some point that evening, after we had left the gallery, the gallery was vandalized by trans rights activists. Although the graffiti would have made an excellent addition to the gallery’s theme, reminding viewers of the hostility to the art inside, due to city code, it had to be quickly removed. Not before we had a photo shoot though. Humorously, the trans activists who took credit for this vandalism - who of course remained anonymous, like the cowardly criminals they are - identified this color as “blood red,” revealing with a high degree of likelihood that they are in fact males.
Sunday afternoon consisted of a nonviolent direct action training hosted by Lierre Keith which was to prepare us for the direct action of giving a series of speeches in front of City Hall the following day (Monday). While preparing for this, we went out in search of white T-shirts and got suckered into a “thrift” store where the only white shirt on the rack cost $128. After giving up and heading across the street to a pizza parlor for a quick slice, I had the good fortune of recognizing none other than Jessica Pin, aka @mediclit, the famous clitoris educator and women’s health activist who has been repeatedly targeted by trans activists for knowing that female genitalia is its own entity and recognizing the importance of preserving the medical knowledge of the unique and categorically distinct anatomy of females. She was not attending the conference and just happened to be in the area. She does not identify as a terf, and that doesn’t stop her from being an incredible advocate for the best interests of female people seeking gynecological care. She’s taught me a lot and it was truly an amazing feeling to get to meet one of my she-roes in person.
The next day we had our direct action. You can watch the full livestream of the event on my Twitter @ttexulansic here. I believe WDI is working on creating a subtitled version. Here is my speech pulled out with some audio improvement.
Kara Dansky: They don’t want women to speak. Our next speaker is Exulansic.
Exulansic: Hello. So I just wanted to talk briefly about what it means to be a owman. What does it mean to be a woman?
Communists/Trans Activists: Boo!!!
Crowd: Adult human female!
Exulansic: Thank you. So that is an intersection of 3 independent categories. The category of being human which is your species which is objective. The category of being an adult, which means you are done growing, which is objective. And the category of being female, which is objective as it’s your sex category that originates all people. Every single person came from a female.
Communists/Trans Activists: No TERFs! No KKK! No fascist USA!
Exulansic: It is a developmental trajectory. And it is not an ‘identity.’ It is not a feeling. It is not a ‘social performance.’ It precedes all cultures and all cultural constructs. It’s who we are. It’s who we always have been. And it’s who we always will be. It doesn’t matter whether you can ‘identify’ as what you are. Women with profound disabilities are still women even if they have no concept of themselves as a woman. They still must be protected on the basis of their sex class which makes them uniquely vulnerable to things like pregnancy.
Communists/TRAs: Fascists off our streets! Fascists off our streets!
Exulansic: We must protect women in prisons. We must protect women in schools. We must ensure that women have the same access to opportunities and funding in sports and other areas of education. And we cannot measure whether women have the same opportunities, if we allow women to identify out of the category and we allow men to identify into the category. We have a right to accurate sex-based statistics. We have the right to know whether we are being impacted by discriminatory policies, and by violence, and by other forms of oppression. We have a right to these things and we demand that right. Our right to vote is predicated on the legal recognition of the sex classes. The 19th amendment explicitly references sex! If we get rid of the idea of sex in law, if we turn it into some sort of fantasy that’s separate from our bodies, then there’s nothing protecting our right as females to vote. It is an attack on women’s rights which we must resist. Thank you!
Communists/Trans Activists: No TERFs! No KKK! No fascist USA!
I love this piece. I've always loved your avatar and wondered what it was about. The story of origin via the painting, the loss of a loved one, the painting again, the revival of the painting becoming emblematic of the cause we must fight—"the entrenched and unwinnable war".
I feel the same way about the entrenched part. I'm feeling much better about the winnable part. The events of this weekend gave me so much credibility and traction among my network of Silicon Valley policy makers and leaders, that I began to feel euphoric today. That my mates, my elders, my teachers are actually hearing me and not judging me. The stolen luggage got a lot of sympathy out of them, too, so made it ok despite loss of my hand sewn Chinese dress-to-vest creation. I thank the goddess I still have my handmade shoes.
This art exhibit was so amazing to be a part of, to be among the stars, you and Laura whose self-portrait is phenomenal and has likely gone all over the world by now. I sent image of it, in my report on the exhibit, to an art department head I know deep in the land of DEI at University of Minnesota, (an ex-lover.) She will not be able to deny its power.
Thank you also for the transcript of your powerful words at the direct action which I was unable to attend. Proud to be entrenched with you.
I absolutely love your red dress! You look so fancy. 😍