My head and heart were so full after five days at WoLF camp

By Amanda Kovattana

My head and heart were so full after five days at WoLF camp. I finally felt at home among these amazing women in such a beautiful setting. At times I felt moments of a mutual collective psychic sensibility, so highly attuned and intuitive were our collaborative conversations. 

Below is the report I posted to my FB page, spinning together stories from our time together along with commentary on what is going on today, for women, so that my normie friends would get how impacted we were by trans ideology as I have been informing them these past few years. The stories I gathered at camp were particularly salient examples.

"Somewhere far to the North at a private campground, some 60 women gathered together to speak freely among themselves. Nine of us from the Bay Area. Over the five days of this annual Rad Fem Summer Camp, we sat outside in temperatures ranging from the low 60s to low 70s, plus a day of rain, so we could hear from speakers on a variety of topics concerning women today internationally and domestically. 

Hosted by the Women’s Liberation Front, an organization defending women’s bodily sovereignty and sex-based rights, it was a chance to reunite and hang out with women I only see online, as well as my dear friend and “support lawyer”, Ellie, who was now president of WoLF, having retired from her duties on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. We were also meeting our new executive director, Jasmin Faulk, whose book “The Last Sandstorm” chronicles her escape from Saudi Arabia. The first woman to escape the abusive system of veiling girls and women, basically to market them for breeding purposes. Her mother was Italian, so she had the advantage of being able to compare how the two nations treated women so differently. When I introduced myself, we immediately noted our shared dual cultural heritage as American immigrants. A rare occurrence in my life that lit me up.

For lesbians and bisexual women, it was also a chance to escape a Pride month that no longer offered activities for lesbians without the intrusion of lesbians with penises expecting us to date them. The L of the LBGTQ effectively silenced to center the T and Q. The Q, a catch-all category for anyone wanting to subvert heteronormativity through the veil of gender identity, i.e., a straight couple who have swapped their genders. Subverting such categories is the DNA of Queer Theory. This appropriation of the word queer obliterating the original reclaiming of this slur by the lesbian and gay community during the ’80s AIDs epidemic and the fierceness which birthed Queer Nation with its confrontational activism and die-ins. A controversial strategy at the time.

These spicy straights, as we call them, “queering heterosexuality,” are apparently also spared the need for birth control, as reported by a gay man doing an intake at a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. Such is the power of the mind to escape biological reality these days.

So we were grateful for a space far from this maddening crowd that allowed us to embrace solidarity with all women in this asymmetrical world of male power and domination. As we shared our stories, freely expressing our incredulousness, laughing a lot, eating together, rotating chores, and taking care of each other, we were also soaking up a brightness that would carry us high above the swirling dark energy of these insults to our biological reality and social standing. We would also learn new ways to combat it with words, frame it, fortify our resolve, and strengthen our spirits, knowing we had a sisterhood that had our backs.

No photos were to be taken with people in them, and photos of individuals had to be scrubbed of metadata. All to protect ourselves from opportunistic harassment should our opponents find us. Luckily, my iPhone does not carry a SIM card stateside, so it does not upload locations. (I use a flip phone to buffer my brain from too much connectedness while I’m out in the world.)  

We began with a panel of four women who told their stories of cancellation. Women who had been doxxed (phone numbers and addresses made public), fired from their jobs, legally persecuted, or restricted in some way just for saying variations of men cannot be women. The youngest lost all her friends at once and was alone for two years. Ellie was threatened with a Title IX case by the very law students she was educating about Title IX, just because she said the name Dylan Mulvaney in a tone of disbelief when he was offered as an example of a woman suffering discrimination, and she had the audacity to ask for another example. Jasmin, too, had a story. One that sent her our way to serve our cause with us. She was also there serving us at every meal. I appreciated this gesture, which gave me frequent opportunities to exchange a few words with her.

On Saturday at breakfast, one table over from me, Exulansic held out her phone so we could marvel at a video on X of our political enemy, Scott Weiner, being run out of Dolores Park, where he was walking to join the trans march. A mob led by a heterosexual man was following him, telling him he could no longer call himself Queer because he was terrible on Gaza, having stated his support for Israel as a Jew. The crowd grew louder and more menacing as he was told he did not belong there. He looked stressed, monitoring them, but staying quiet like a cornered animal. We had mixed feelings seeing this man bullied, one who had so championed the queering of society at the expense of women and girls. Now he was being silenced by a mob that thought they owned him. This Queer Trans movement, having commanded social power in the liberal sphere, now felt it could demand submission to every political position they deemed sacred. 

I turned away, glad to be far from San Francisco, and continued to collect the stories of women I hadn’t met yet. So many carried stories of trauma typical for women — domestic violence, emotional abuse, rape, gaslighting, religious oppression — all from men. I asked how one recovers from such trauma; one doesn’t, a young woman told me, yet I saw strong women all around me, some angry and some simply determined not to be taken again or let others be taken in. This determination fueled our activism. I had just learned, too, that rape survivors experienced four times more PTSD than someone suffering from war trauma. This brought home to me the impact of this intimate personal violation.

I approached one young couple striking in their beauty and their butch/femme pairing. The butch partner told the story of her skateboarding competition being infiltrated by men under the guise of their woman identity. Men who hardly presented as women, she said. This sport was already so dominated by men; I felt a further outrage at them wanting to beat women in competition where they would so clearly have an advantage. It offended my sense of fairness. Where once the women were respected and thought cool, she told us, they were now regularly dog piled upon by men, trans or not, if they made any objection to this inclusion. This bullying is another arena of male domination, while those men who agreed with them would stay quiet, only voicing their support privately.

I also met an attractive woman close to my age who had been married to a trans identified man much older than she had been at 22. We know these women by the name “trans widow” for the symbolic death of their husbands. Their stories were very similar. The man would come out gradually within the marriage, often after a child was born, when he felt the attention of his wife diverted by the new baby. They were very controlling to begin with, becoming more so as time progressed and their narcissism grew. These women confirmed for me that it was part of such men’s sexual arousal to see themselves as women. They were in love with themselves as women, obsessed with their female persona, dressing up and spending money to fuel the fantasy. Soon, the wives felt invisible as their husbands stopped relating to them as people. One said she was being observed as a template for female behavior and sexual response. My new friend agreed that this happened to her too, while her name was gone, as he would only call her mom once their child was born. He also blamed her for her unhappiness, saying it was her fault because she couldn’t accept these changes in him. When he suggested she go outside the marriage to “have her needs met”, this pushed her over the edge and landed her in hospital with a nervous breakdown. Only then could she begin to think of leaving. She was not the only trans widow at camp.

This emotional abuse by a family member was also shared by the moms who lived with the threat of rejection by their trans identified children, ever hoping their teenagers would emerge from the clutches of the cult, as they called it. To one woman raised in the Mormon “cult,” it clearly was a cult, just not with a charismatic leader. Her son, she told us, was introduced to the concept by characters in a book by a popular author who had been asked by his fans to create trans and non-binary characters like them. Those who knew the author groaned upon hearing this, so carefully did they try to screen what input their children absorbed. She spoke about how all these parents were being held hostage by these children, silenced and kept from joining our activism out of the hope that if they behaved, they wouldn’t lose their children. But they will anyway, she said, once they are grown, and thus she was reclaiming her voice. (The moms in our group, who are the most outspoken, have children who have already desisted.)

This self-absorption and aggressive insistence that women serve their female persona are greatly reflected in the men who confront us when we protest the invasion of women’s spaces by such men. The threat of violence is voiced in their TikTok videos as they preen and claim to be more glamorous than any woman. Their heterosexuality twisted into an identity they would kill to defend. Thus the “kill all TERFs” epithets. Their justifications for such threats were that we were the haters for misgendering them, for refusing to comply with their insistence that we validate their woman selves. This is not a live-and-let-live movement. It may not even be the sentiment of a majority of men who call themselves trans, but it certainly is the driving force. It was part of what Lierre Keith, the founder of WoLF, called male sexual sadism, reflected in the plundering of the planet and women for resources and services.

It was Lierre’s feeling that we would have to hit bottom with the pillaging and run out of surplus resources before we could rebuild. Hopefully, we will prevail. In the meantime, we could live well and heal together. The more miserable the weather, the more remote the location, the greater the sacrifice to carve out this space, the safer we felt. The quality of this freedom to talk freely, so seldom rewarded in the world at large, elevated our mood as the sun came out for our final days together."