@queerautism @some-loser-on-your-feed @sufferingandasense
The TERF above is not actually trying to make an ideological point about suffragettes. She's referencing a specific TERF myth. From the TERF point of view, responding by talking about suffragettes is accepting the legitimacy of that premise, which is NOT legitimate and should not be legitimised.
One of the lesser-known TERF talking points is that the genderqueer flag is actually the British suffragette flag and genderqueer people "stole" it because... woman-hating reasons, I guess.
(For some TERFs they've been exposed only to increasingly abstracted versions of this myth to the point that they seem to not even be aware that this is the genderqueer flag, which which may be the situation for the TERF above, or she may just be seriously committing to the bad faith.)
This is false for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from:
That is not what the British suffragette flag looked like.
Even if it were, genderqueer people using those colors would be a complete coincidence. But, again, IT IS NOT.
The colors of the specific organisation WSPU were white, purple, and green. The WSPU was a specific "militant" fringe organization* affiliated with suffrage; the colors you would have more commonly seen at the time are red, green, and white, the colors of the much larger organization, the National Union of Womenâs Suffrage Societies. The reason the white, purple, and green are a bit more known today is that the WSPU sold a lot of merch with their colors to fundraise, so the physical stuff we have is largely in WSPU colors, and photos from that era are black and white.
*"Militant" is the word commonly used because the WSPU did things like bombing trains and sports events, burning down churches and hospitals, making assassination attempts, and inventing the letter bomb. It does not here mean "uncompromising" or "verbally aggressive" or even âbreaks windowsâ and âhits pigsâ.
However, even the WSPU would very rarely have used something that looks like the genderqueer flag, because these were, again, just colors, not a flag.
These are what the actual physical flags used by the WSPU looked like:
But they rarely used the colors as a flag anyway; they were mostly in banners, like these:
Or, much much more commonly, these:
Responding to the TERF above by talking about suffragettes accepts that they are relevant to the conversation, which they are not. It gives TERVes something to point to in future to say "see, they're admitting that they stole the flag because they hate women and women's rights activists!" Which is NOT true, for a LOT of reasons. It's a myth created by someone looking at shutterstock and amazon.com images because either they don't know how to find actual historical sources, or they don't want to.
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/hosting-the-suffrage-flag/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign
https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/suffragette-flag/
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/parliamentary-collections/collections-suffragettes/flag/
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