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Responding to Anti-Lesbian Bigotry Published in the Opelika-Auburn News 2001-08-09
Editor, Opelika-Auburn News:
Thank you for your recent editorial defending Southern Girls Convention's rights against censorship, including our right to use the same facilities that every other student organization has the right to use. As an SGC organizer, I would like to add a few points.
Southern Girls Convention is an annual convention devoted to building pro-woman community in the South. It focuses on problems facing women and girls in the South and other social justice issues that we believe are closely connected to the struggle for women's rights. Some of the issues we discussed and took action on at the convention included violence against women, access to safe and legal abortion, fighting racism, working conditions faced by people in poverty, men's role in fighting sexism, women's health and self-defense, and positive body images for young women.
Not all of SGC's participants were lesbians, and we dealt with issues affecting women of all sexual orientations. Not many people in Auburn would oppose the workshops we held on "Internet Literacy," "Screen Printing," "Healing After the Assault," or "Organizing for Women's Human Rights." Our critics have focused in on a select few workshops because it's relatively easy to play on anti-lesbian bigotry.
Nevertheless, we don't hesitate to defend the inclusion of lesbians and LGBT issues in our convention. Women and girls across the South come from all different sexual orientations: straight, lesbian, bisexual, asexual. Many of the Southern women who attended the convention were lesbians and we dealt with bigotry against lesbian women, because we have pledged to work for all women in the South, not just those that fit Right-wing notions of what women's sexuality should be.