Firstly, sorry, that this is a much longer post than I anticipated. I originally wanted to write a post mainly aimed at other lesbians who are struggling with everything that’s going on at the moment with the queer movement but it was difficult to find anywhere to put it that was anonymous, not a ‘queer’ space and not a specifically radfem space and it morphed into a rather longer post and a bit different than I intended once I started writing it down.
To be clear, when I’m talking about lesbians I mean female homosexuals – biological women who are only attracted to other biological women. The meaning of the term has been changed a lot. At first, it was just males who identify as women and sometimes their female wives/partners who were calling themselves lesbians - The term lesbian was pretty unpopular generally until very recently, with queer being the more acceptable alternative for women. However, over the past year or so, the word lesbian has started being used a lot and its meaning expanded much further. For example, it is used as an umbrella term for all lesbian, bi, queer, pangender, feminine-identified people and also just as an identity that you can choose if it feels right to you (so you can get couples who are both opposite sex and opposite gender e.g. a transman and a transwoman who identify as lesbians, people who don’t identify as being women identifying as lesbians, he/him lesbians etc).
I’m someone who came out as a lesbian a long time ago. Although I’m out to most people in my life, I don’t really talk about a lot of the stuff that’s happened to me. I think there’s some stuff that straight people would understand (like that I lost my job because of my sexuality and had no legal recourse because it wasn’t illegal to discriminate against someone on the grounds of sexual orientation) and some that I think is difficult to understand if you haven’t experienced it or probably doesn’t sound like much (e.g. growing up knowing that you are this thing that people only talked about as something disgusting or as a joke, knowing that your family and community would reject you if they knew but not having access to any alternative community that you could be part of.)
When I was able to move away to a city, I finally met other LGB people - and, while the community was male dominated and often misogynistic, I was with other people who had had similar experiences to me, felt a sense of belonging and we worked to build the community, support others coming out and fight for our rights.
Over time things seemed to be getting better, for me personally in finding my community, but attitudes and laws had changed too. It wasn’t perfect, of course – I’d be cautious about who I was out to, or if I held my girlfriend’s hand in public but that was okay. I’d compare it to the way women have to be cautious and security conscious in ways that don’t even occur to men. Yes, it shouldn’t happen but it becomes so much second nature that it’s normal and you don’t really think about it. I could accept the past and everything that had happened to me because things were improving and we had fought for that change so that younger lesbians wouldn’t have to experience what we had gone through.
Seeing what is happening now, especially for younger (female homosexual) lesbians, I have found it difficult to accept that my past and what I had experienced was actually probably as good as it got for lesbians. I saw similar things, similar perceptions about lesbians, that I’d heard back in the bad old days returning disguised in woke language – and coming out of the mouths of self-identified progressive, queer people who claimed to be part of my community. I saw everything going backwards for lesbians, while from the outside it looked like everything was still there – that we had our rights, our community, our organisations, our venues, our Pride celebrations, which were actually now filled with queer-identified people embracing their chosen identities and kinks, and waving their rainbow flags around, while the gay men largely carried as normal, unaffected, or even enjoying the opportunity to put the boot into lesbians.
When I was growing up, it was being same-sex attracted and having relationships with women that was considered immoral and that attitude came from outside the LGB community but now it is not being attracted to males and not being open to relationships with men that is considered wrong. So there are plenty of people who are involved in the queer movement who embrace the notion of same-sex activity between women (from women who are actually bisexual to those who will put on a bit of a show for the men as part of a queer, kinky lifestyle to others who adopt the language but only actually get involved with biological males) as long as you are also open to sex with males.
It started more subtly maybe about 12 -15 years ago with the message that sexuality was fluid and the slogan ‘hearts not parts’ repeatedly appearing in articles on lesbian sites (now rebranded as queer women’s sites) – and they did make it sound to me like it was a better, purer, more progressive way to be - to be open-minded and willing to love the right person for their heart, regardless of their sex. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I was only ever seeing this slogan on lesbian sites – that out of the four groups of people only attracted to one sex, it was only lesbians who were being bombarded with the idea that we could change our sexual orientation and become nicer, better people by being open to sex with men. After a while of seeing this message from ‘my community’, I decided that I should at least be open-minded about the possibility of a relationship with a man so, for a period, I went around being open to feeling attraction to men… to no effect. I didn’t meet any men I felt attracted to so in practice the open-minded thing didn’t make any difference to me. (Back then it was only about considering men as possible sexual partners and someone you could potentially be attracted to, not encouraging you to overcome your feelings and ‘try the mouthfeel of different penises even if you don’t think you’ll like it’ or advising you that ‘if you repeatedly have sex with someone with a penis you could learn to cope with it’.)
It is only more recently that this message about a positive, superior, open-minded sexuality has also been combined with openly negative comments about perverted, weird ‘genital fetishists’ (a lot of which echoes views about lesbians from when I was younger, that I thought we’d moved past) – and I also started seeing this happening in real life, not just online – although I may have been slow to see it and younger women in university and youth clubs probably experienced it a lot sooner. The message was that sexuality was fluid, everyone had the potential to be attracted to both/all sexes/genders and not being attracted to males was a kind of prejudice (both anti-trans and anti-male) or a personality flaw that we could and should overcome. It is (for now) only not being open to transwomen’s ‘girld*cks’ that makes you a TERF and that will get you actually excluded and possibly attacked but not being open to sex with males who still identify as men can also attract criticism and get you rounded on by queer people.
Around this time, I became involved in gender critical feminism and then later came into contact with radical feminists and lesbian feminists and again the belief that being a lesbian was a choice (albeit a positive one) and that lesbians had been taken in by a politically-expedient narrative that sexual orientation was fixed.
A few years ago, I couldn’t have imagined myself questioning my sexuality like I have been doing - these kind of issues were mainly experienced by people who were just coming out, and I used to be someone who supported women in that situation. But there were so many messages from different sources – including sources that I had thought of previously as ‘on my side’ - that sexuality was fluid, that everyone had the potential to experience attraction to both sexes and being a lesbian was a choice I had made. I can’t really explain how I ended up thinking the things I did because it didn’t tally with my experience and the experiences of other lesbians I knew but so much of what I thought I knew and where I had felt safe and accepted for years had been turned upside down – my sense of belonging in the LGBT community, that we had a shared ‘cause’, my faith in organisations I’d trusted, my belief in and belonging to the left - that I just didn’t know what to think anymore ….and I was questioning everything I believed or thought I knew or trusted in.
I knew I hadn’t made a conscious, deliberate choice to be a lesbian but if it wasn’t something that was just natural for me – and if everyone had the potential for opposite sex attraction - the only way I could make sense of it was that I’d made a mistake when I was a kid – that I’d mistaken feelings of friendship or admiration for girls for something else and accidentally sent myself down this path by labelling myself as (or fearing myself to be) a lesbian and accidentally shutting off the feelings I could otherwise have developed for the opposite sex. This really played on my mind and I felt so angry at myself at the thought that I’d done this all to myself – all the shit that had happened when I was younger and everything that was happening now - that I started hurting myself, which was the start of a downward spiral. After feeling okay and even fairly optimistic about things a few years ago, I hated being a lesbian and all the crap that went with it and really struggled with the idea that I could have had a different life and none of this needed to have happened.
Radical and lesbian feminism provided an alternative to the negative views about lesbians from the queer community, with the message that being a lesbian was a wonderful, happy choice that improved your life but this was just so alien to my experience, and especially where I was at that time. Even the supposed positives didn’t ring true to my life - like that it provided a woman-centred life, when being a lesbian had led me to be separated from and sometimes shunned by other women who felt uncomfortable around lesbians.
I wanted – and knew I needed – to get help to deal with all of this but the LGBT organisations which offered the support, counselling and mental health services for sexuality issues were no longer somewhere I felt I would be safe, let alone supported.
Since then, I’ve found some support elsewhere and am working through this but I’m also trying to work out where I go from here and where I belong.
My response to everything that was going on had been to run away from all the crap in the LGBTQ community and replace it in my life with gender critical feminist groups. I’ve met some brilliant, inspiring, lovely women through the trans issue and I feel I have to stay involved because it’s too important and now is too critical a time not to.
But I also think I need to find a way to stay engaged with what is left of the lesbian community, with people I have shared experience with and a shared culture and history. I know I am a lot more fortunate than many younger lesbians whose lives and friendship groups are much more embroiled in the trans and queer ideology.
Where previously very few of us dared to speak about this issue, over the past year or so, I’ve had a number of lesbians talk to me privately about the trans issue or abuse they’ve received in the queer community for not being attracted to males, or tell me that they’ve signed a petition I shared online, and sometimes the trans topic has been cautiously brought up in public when everyone senses they are in safe company. Not all lesbians are as involved in this issue as I am but, while I know – and avoid – a couple of women who are full-on transactivist allies, everyone else has either shared my concerns or, if they don’t agree, they haven’t said anything or de-friended me.
This has been in sharp contrast to the way things are going in the LGBTQ community generally where the threats and policing of lesbians have got more explicit. Anti-TERF rhetoric from organisations, businesses and individuals has escalated massively with anti-TERF posters and speakers at LGBTQ events whipping crowds up against ‘TERFs’, calling for, at best, exclusion, but also for violence. Organisations and events are also increasingly introducing ‘safe spaces agreements’ - which you have to agree to go to an event or access a service – and which are all about pronouns and trans and queer identities and reporting any other service user or attendee who you view as ‘problematic’. They realise that lesbians are starting to discuss concerns and object as the demands and behaviour of the trans/queer group get more extreme so they need to make us feel too scared to share our experiences and discuss these issues openly.
There are layers to the LGBTQ community. At the centre are the LGBTQ organisations and groups and the ‘gay scene’ (mainly bars and clubs) which have been completely colonised (with collaboration from misogynistic gay men) and then there are more peripheral, less formal groups and then groups of lesbian/bi friends socialising away from the scene. It’s a bit of an oversimplification as life is always messier than that but generally, unless you’re in the younger age group, the further away from the centre you are, the better things are so that’s where I’ll be – away from the organisations, groups and bars that I used to consider my community and finding my community with other lesbians in non-queer spaces.
I know this doesn’t provide a solution for younger lesbians and I’ve no idea how long this will provide a solution for me. I could never had imagined a few years ago that we’d be in this position now – Hell, even a year ago, despite being gender critical, I couldn’t have imagined how much the situation would have escalated in such a short space of time. So I’ve no idea where we’ll be or what options there will be for lesbians in a few years’ time but I’m just trying to find ways to manage for now.