I’m a lesbian who grew up and then came out in the 80s/90s. Growing up there were hardly any positive images of lesbians and it really wasn’t something I wanted to be (the thought terrified me). I remember reading when I was about 12/13 years old that crushes on girls were sometimes “a phase” that teenagers went through and I really prayed that that would be the case with me but reassured myself that, even if it wasn’t, I could still just carry on, get married (to a man) and lead a normal life and no one need ever know.
When I got to university there was a lesbian and gay society and I met others in the same boat. It was quite common that these young men and women had tried dating the opposite sex. I remember one young woman telling me that she had been dating a boy and that they both came out as gay to each other. They thought their relationship worked well because they got on and neither of them really liked sex very much (which on reflection was because they were both with the wrong sex!).
I soon learnt that you got targeted by men for being a lesbian, men who wanted to ‘convert’ you and believed they could ‘show you what you were missing’. Some lesbians get subjected to far worse. In some places this can include ‘corrective rape’ which it was believed would make lesbians straight.
Repeatedly, I encountered the view that it was ‘perverted’, morally inferior to heterosexuality and that it was just about sex (whereas no straight woman who talked about her husband or walked down the street holding hands with her boyfriend would be told that she was throwing her sex life in people’s faces).
Later, I attended groups where I met newly-out women in their 30s and 40s – Women from the previous generation where the pressures to be heterosexual were even stronger and they had felt the need to get married and live within a man for many, many years before coming to terms with their sexuality.
I also met (a few) people who had undergone conversion therapy and one who had been exorcised due to her sexuality – This was a lot rarer than it had been for the previous generation but still went on occasionally.
And that’s what makes me so angry about what is going on now. We have seen this all before, many of us have experienced attempts to change our sexual orientation – either by others or by ourselves due to internalised homophobia. It seemed to be getting better (at least in the UK) and now it’s all coming back.
For those who don’t know the background to this, male people with penises are identifying as being lesbians and lesbians are being told we are bigoted and need to be re-educated if we don’t want to have sex with people with penises. A movement has built up around smashing the “cotton ceiling” (the cotton ceiling representing lesbians’ underwear which the people-with-penises want to break through) [1]
And all the same stuff is coming up again:
- We’re morally inferior, perverted and our relationships are only about sex - “bigots” and “vagina fetishists” [2]
- That it’s a “preference” not a sexual “orientation” which we can and should be re-educated to overcome [3]
I was already aware of workshops taking place for people-with-penises on how to break through the cotton ceiling (which again sounds like stuff I remember appearing in lads’ mags in the 1990s on how to bed a lesbian). [4]
Now I hear that students in UK universities in 2018 are being taught that there is “too much emphasis on sexual autonomy” and that sometimes the rights of a person with a (self-identified) marginalised identity (ie a person-with-a-penis who identifies as being a lesbian) to have sex with a lesbian should outweigh the rights of a (female) lesbian to refuse all sexual contact with people-with-penises:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3416075-Shocked-by-sexual-offences-lecture-sex-by-deception-and-bigoted-women
(The academic person-with-a-penis espousing this view is from Keele University – although I believe this lecture took place elsewhere with the lecturer just teaching those views).
And there are other people-with-penises in prominent positions advocating similarly, for example, Dr Rachel McKinnon (the same person who won the women’s cycling race amidst some controversy) lectures on the topic of the “cotton ceiling” and argues that lesbians can learn to “cope” with penises:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3411070-Rachael-McKinnon-another-gem-from-the-you-couldnt-make-it-up-guidebook#prettyPhoto
Meanwhile, parts of the lesbian media (which is primarily run by non-lesbians) are ‘educating’ lesbians on how to have lesbian sex with someone with a penis:
www.autostraddle.com/how-to-have-trans-woman-lesbian-sex-with-a-penis-414839/
If this kind of stuff was coming from evangelical Christians or right-wing politicians Stonewall would be loudly condemning it. So why are they silent on this? AIBU to think they should take a stand?
[1] tgforum.com/wordpress/the-cotton-ceiling/
[2] www.afterellen.com/general-news/553883-despite-cyber-bullying-erasure-young-lesbians-claiming-l-word
“Recently, novelist and LGBT advocate Nora Calder came under fire for asserting that as a lesbian woman she experienced same-sex attraction. One could be forgiven for hoping that in 2018, attitudes might have shifted to the point that such a statement would not be met with backlash. Yet Calder was criticized for disclosing the nature of her sexual orientation, sent a litany of Tweets which accused her of being a “vaginophile”, “vagina fetishist”, “disgusting”, “transmisogynist”, and a “penis demonizer”. In the rush to condemn Calder’s sexuality as bigoted, quite a few people forgot to check their lesbophobia at the door.”
[3] Are Genital Preferences Transphobic?
[4] terfisaslur.com/cotton-ceiling/#jp-carousel-321
. LGBT & the rainbow are not about lesbians.