Why it’s time to take the L out of LGBT – JULIE BINDEL says it time to break from the ever-growing list of identities that make up the current acronym
- Last weekend, police removed a group of lesbians calling themselves ‘Get The L Out’ from the Pride Cymru procession in Cardiff
- Julie Bindel has been labelled ‘homophobic’, ‘biphobic’ and ‘transphobic’ for asking when lesbians will get attention from LGBT organisation
- She has been beaten up in gay clubs by fascists whilst gay men turned away
Last weekend, police removed a group of lesbians calling themselves ‘Get The L Out’ from the Pride Cymru procession in Cardiff, claiming that the women were causing a ‘confrontation’ with trans activists and supporters.
In recent decades, we have become used to the idea that such Pride marches are something we can all be part of to celebrate diversity. But this incident tells me, loud and clear, that for lesbians like me this is simply no longer true.
We are no longer welcome at such events; it is time for us to break from the ever-growing list of identities that make up the current acronym of LGBTQQI.
Has the rainbow acronym expanded so far that it is now meaningless? In my view, the coalition of voices is now so deeply divided that it simply makes no sense to those of us who have been campaigning for lesbian and gay equality for years.
Last weekend, police removed a group of lesbians calling themselves ‘Get The L Out’ from the Pride Cymru procession in Cardiff
Alongside a growing number of lesbians, I believe that we have, in recent decades, become ever more invisible and irrelevant.
I have been told that my 40-plus years of campaigning for lesbian rights, and against all forms of discrimination towards women, is irrelevant because I have dared to speak out against the Stonewall transgender ideology that appears to have taken over the entire same-sex community.
I have been labelled ‘homophobic’, ‘biphobic’ and ‘transphobic’ for asking when lesbians will get any attention from the so-called LGBT organisations that purport to speak on my behalf.
‘Get The L Out’ is a grassroots campaign group founded to fight back. They were at Pride Cymru to protest at the continued invisibility and marginalisation of lesbians within the ever-expanding Pride umbrella.
This now includes, it seems to me, more straight people than it does gay, what with male ‘kinksters’ who have a penchant for choking women, or those with a foot fetish, all of whom can be defined as Queer according to the modern proponents of the rainbow flag.
Police accused the women of ‘causing confrontation’, to which one protester replied: ‘We’re lesbians: it’s Cardiff Pride.’
The women were making it clear to the police that, as lesbians, they have every right to be there. The demand for respect and inclusion need not be confrontational, but Get The L Out were making an important point: that Pride has been taken over by groups that seem to have a visceral dislike for lesbians.
Yet it was they who were forced to leave — not the trans supporters shouting at them and grabbing their banners.
Police claimed ‘Get The L Out’ had not registered as a protest group for the march and therefore had no right to be there — but surely at Pride, of all places, those women should have the absolute right to speak out. They are talking about issues that have had a profound effect on young lesbians.
What on earth has brought us to this? How is it that lesbians have been made to feel so unwelcome within what is supposedly our own community?
Julie Bindel (pictured) has been labelled ‘homophobic’, ‘biphobic’ and ‘transphobic’ for asking when lesbians will get attention from LGBT organisation
And why have so many gay men joined the extreme trans-activists in turning against us so viciously? The truth is that this schism in the LGBT alliance is nothing new.
I have been beaten up in gay clubs by fascists whilst gay men turn a blind eye, and then disbelieved by police when I reported it. I know of many women who have had the same experience.
I was assaulted outside Edinburgh University, after I had delivered a speech on male violence, because I was deemed to be a bigot for not agreeing that ‘trans women are women’.
I thought lesbians had come a long way since the 1970s, when neither we, nor gay men, were protected in law against discrimination. The very word ‘lesbian’ was considered repulsive, and I felt pressurised into using the term ‘gay’, to soften the blow.
Neighbours on our housing estate told me I was a pervert and unsafe to babysit their children; they asked if something had happened in my childhood to make me ‘hate men’.
The current tongue-twisting acronym, at its most expansive Julie has heard given, is LGBTQQIAAPPO2S
After meeting feminists for the first time in 1979, when I was 17, I finally began to feel proud of my sexuality.
We shared some social spaces with gay men, because we weren’t wanted in mainstream society, but although we played nicely what we had in common was always limited. After all, we were women and therefore faced sexism on top of other discrimination — often from gay men themselves.
As we moved into the 1980s, in addition to Gay Pride parades, we began having Lesbian Strength marches for women only — named in recognition of the fact that it took a certain amount of courage and tenacity to be an out lesbian in those days.
Stereotypes about being ‘butch’ led many women to reject this term, but we managed to overturn those stereotypes to some extent. Lesbians are often severely punished for rejecting men sexually, and in my experience face far more pressure to marry a man and do the conventional thing.
Gay men, meanwhile, now have more freedom to live their own lives, and these days are, I believe, far more celebrated within society and popular culture than lesbians.
Of course, when the AIDS epidemic hit in the mid-1980s it brought terrible prejudice, bigotry and violence towards homosexual men. Many lesbians directly supported gay men through this terrible time.
Section 28 (the homophobic legislation that forbade schools from ‘promoting homosexuality’) was introduced by the Thatcher government in 1988. This was the very first time that lesbians and gay men had been targeted together by legislation, and we joined forces. But for many lesbians, it was an unhappy alliance.
Thus cemented together, we became ‘lesbian and gay’, then LGB to include bisexuals; and thereafter, the initial letters of other groups having nothing whatsoever to do with same-sex attraction (such as transgender, asexual, aromantic, and queer) have simply been added on.
The current tongue-twisting acronym, at its most expansive I have heard given, is LGBTQQIAAPPO2S. As my friend Simon Fanshawe pointed out, this is more like an unbreakable WiFi code.
Whereas lesbians and gay men share being vilified for same-sex attraction, others represented by these letters do not necessarily have anything in common with us at all. And no one has the right, whether they represent the G, T, or Q, to tell lesbians what to do.
Today the word ‘lesbian’ has become stigmatised afresh. Young lesbians seem to be under pressure to call themselves queer or non-binary, or become trans men.
And we are under pressure not only to accept the idea that male-bodied trans women are lesbians, but also to accept them as sexual partners.
Stonewall’s CEO Nancy Kelley has branded the notion of lesbians rejecting trans women as ‘analogous to issues like sexual racism’. As someone who grew up being told that all I needed was a ‘good man’ to ‘cure me’ of my sexual perversion, this does not sit well with me.
It is staggering to me that lesbians can be told we are bigoted, fascist, and discriminatory when we dare complain that malebodied transwomen who identify as lesbians do not belong in our groups — or our dating pool.
The ‘Get The L Out’ women are, in my view, valiantly standing up for the rights of lesbians to be allowed to define what it means to be same-sex (as opposed to ‘samegender’) attracted.
The good news is that Lesbian Strength, which had fizzled out by the 1990s, is back, and will march in Leeds later this month. I, for one, will be there. It is high time for us to focus on our own needs and community — and recognise that we are no longer welcome at Pride.
We’ve fought long and hard for lesbians to be accepted within mainstream society, and we will not be pushed back in the closet.
Source: Read Full Article