‘A lesbian who does not reinvent the world is a lesbian in the process of disappearing’.
Nicole Brossard, The Aerial Letter.
The word ‘lesbian’ has gone out of fashion. If it was ever in fashion. Over time, lesbians have been called Uranians, Sapphists, lemons, asocials, damned women, amazons, black sheep, purple women, witches, lavender menace, mad, vampires, hooligans, criminals, hysterical, bitches, cows, dykes, butches, mauve peril, and more. Today, lesbians who stand up for lesbians are called bigots, trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), Nazis. What has caused this mass hatred of lesbians in a time when the rainbow flag can be seen in many places? Queer, trans, LGBTQ+ seem to have the ear of governments and corporations.
Why are these authorities and organisations now so much less likely to listen to lesbians as a distinct group?
It is not as if the world has become any safer for lesbians. Women around the world have seen an increase in violence against them. In 2018, Diane Cole documents in her U.N. Report: 50,000 Women A Year Are Killed By Intimate Partner, Family Members the horrifying numbers of women killed globally. What is never clear in these figures is how many of these women are lesbians. Lesbians are rarely a statistical category.
Let’s look at some of the reasons for this. In countries where being a lesbian is illegal, the consequence can be prison or a death sentence. In countries where a high level of shame is attached to being a lesbian, some lesbians commit suicide; some marry to hide their sexuality; some simply stay very quiet and hidden. In countries where criminality and shame are not so severely enforced, there is still a significant level of fear of being out as a lesbian. This has been further complicated by the increasing practice of a younger generation to describe themselves as non-binary, trans or queer, sometimes as a strategy for avoiding stigma in a period when such identities have become not merely destigmatised, but celebrated. In doing this, the specificity of lesbians is erased. All of these strategies make gathering statistics virtually impossible. In Australia, the vast majority of those happy to use the word ‘lesbian’ are of the generation who began to be politically and socially active in lesbian communities from the late 1960s to the 1990s.
The late 1960s saw the beginnings of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and that movement included many lesbians. The first national lesbian conference in Australia was held at Sorrento in 1973. In the 1990s, we had lesbian festivals in many states, and in 1991. on the final night of the national lesbian festival, the Sydney Opera House was the venue for a huge concert of lesbian singers and performers. This is unimaginable today.
Diane Starski, who had attended the first national lesbian conference in Sorrento in 1973, wrote in 1994 about the national lesbian conference in Sydney in 1991:
It was exciting also to realise that in the space of twenty years lesbian visibility in Australia has emerged as a strong presence and in the creation of our communities and our culture we are also making our own history.
Today, we see Mardi Gras, Midsumma Festival, Feast, Pride marches, as well as LGBTIQ++ weeks and months, but lesbians are frequently not visible and, in some places, have been forbidden to attend. An example is the Lesbian Action for Visibility in Aotearoa whose stall was cancelled at Out in the City in Wellington in 2021 because, claimed the Pride Board, it would make trans people feel ‘unsafe’. The mostly older women who were to staff the stall, and who set up a protest against its exclusion, were not aggressive. Some of the pro-trans demonstrators ‘carried signs displaying slogans such as “Fuck TERF Cunts”.’ This kind of behaviour has been experienced by lesbians in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere—and of course Australia, from which I’ll draw most of my examples.
Colonisation of lesbian spaces
This process began in the late 1980s when men calling themselves women started coming to lesbian events. There had always been men attempting to gatecrash women’s dances, but they had done so as men. The annual women’s balls attracted up to a thousand attendees, the largest of which was held in St Kilda Town Hall in 1987, with around 2000 women attending. Finding a public event advertised for lesbians is virtually impossible these days.
Over the last forty years, around sixty lesbian spaces have been lost in Melbourne alone. The LGB Alliance Australia hosts a page that documents the lost lesbian spaces. These were spaces devoted to the arts, entertainment, sports, social justice, politics, meeting and discussion groups. According to the map, only three remain (one, Spinifex Press, is now located in Queensland and has not gone underground, as some believe!). Those that do still exist have had to disappear to all except their own communities. There are meetings, organisations, political groups and places of entertainment, but they are not public.
The Victorian Pride Centre, a huge, well-funded new building, says that it is ‘Australia’s first purpose-built home for LGBTIQ+ communities’. But when the Melbourne-based Lesbian Action Group (LAG) tried to book a lesbian-only event at the centre in 2023, they were refused. LAG then applied to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for an exemption under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984. This too was refused.
The Pride Centre, on its website, does not list among lesbian organisations Matrix Guild, a very active lesbian-run housing initiative based in Victoria. It does mention Acegirls Tennis Squad, a lesbian tennis training club. The national organisation Coalition of Activist Lesbians (CoAL) and other organisations fighting for women’s and lesbian rights are invisible. CoAL has Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) status at the United Nations and was the first lesbian organisation in the world to achieve this status in 1995. It survives on the voluntary hard work of the committee and receives no outside funding other than donations by members. Matrix Guild of Victoria also depends mainly on donations, especially money willed by lesbians through their estate. It has also been granted some external funding. The Australian Lesbian Medical Association gained ECOSOC status in 2013 and on its website says its focus is on ‘LGBTIQ+ Human Rights’. It is included in the Pride Centre. Any lesbian organisation, therefore, has to toe the line and spread its focus across all same-sex and gender identities in order to have a place. But it is clear that lesbians as a group are denied access if their focus is on lesbians and same-sex-attracted women-loving women.
By contrast, an organisation such asACON—originally the AIDS Council of NSW—is well funded. It is modelled on a similar organisation, the Diversity Champions Workplace Equality Index, published in the United Kingdom by Stonewall. The ACON approach to funding becomes obvious when you look at the related site, Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI), especially its awards page:
The AWEI now stands as the definitive national benchmark on LGBTQ workplace inclusion and comprises the largest and only national employee survey designed to gauge the overall impact of inclusion initiatives on organisational culture as well as identifying and non-identifying employees.
In 2024, business advice company DLA Piper, with offices in four Australian cities, and gambling giant The Star Entertainment Group are Employers of the Year, while the next ten—Platinum Tier Employers—are Accenture, AGL Energy, the Australian Taxation Office, Capgemini, Clayton Utz, Deloitte, EY Oceania, MinterEllison, NAB and PwC. For more seehere. These companies and government departments pay thousands of dollars in membership fees and as sponsors.
The effect of postmodern and queer ideologies
Funding for lesbians and gay men has been a perennial problem since the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements sprang into existence in the late 1960s. Lesbians have rarely been a priority, though occasionally a group or individual would slip through and receive some support. But the erosion of lesbians as a distinct group has picked up with the invention of LGBTQ+. In reality this comprises two groups with very different ideals. LGB is about sexual orientation; TQ+ indicates a non-material identity and has been widely supported through postmodern and queer academic disciplines. The addition of TQ+ marginalises lesbians so that the mere presence of lesbians in distinct lesbian-centred organisations at Pride marches is enough for lesbians to be accused of transphobia.
The Pride Centre, like many other LGBTIQ+ organisations, claims to represent the entire ‘rainbow family’. But only under certain conditions. LGB refers to sexual orientations, whereas the TQ+ element refers to a self-chosen identity. LGB organisations have existed for many years. Until the mid-1990s there was an LGB aisle of publishers at the American Book Expo. In these years, gender identity began to overwhelm sexual orientation, and feminist bookstores began to disappear, as I noted in my book Bibliodiversity. There are fewer than a handful now. In 1995, the book, Lesbians in Print listed around 130 Canada- and US-based bookstores.
Postmodernism also began to flood the humanities in those years, a movement that can be critically read as nihilist and reactionary from a materialist feminist viewpoint, as expressed in critiques such as Somer Brodribb’s Nothing Mat(t)ers (1992) and the contributors to Diane Bell and Renate Klein’s anthology Radically Speaking (1996), two key texts to tackle postmodernism. When queer theory developed as an active approach, drawing its logic from poststructuralist approaches, it seemed to be very steadily creating obscurity, with ‘queer’ completing the task of disappearing lesbians. A further stage of this has been achieved with transgenderism, an ideology that allows for so-called male lesbians with penises and whose proponents will not debate matters raised by radical feminists on anything to do with important lesbian issues. Instead, a lesbian is accused of transphobia—of being a TERF—for exclusively preferring sex with women, even though that is the definition of a lesbian.
As detransitioner Max Robinson wrote in 2016, ‘The language of detransition lends itself readily to abusive gaslighting that disguises and distorts women’s ability to name what is happening’. Young lesbians like Max Robinson found it difficult to find lesbian community. She documented her experience and her theoretical insights stemming from that experience in her book Detransition: Beyond Before and After (2021).
In the heterosexual world, coercive control has begun to be noticed, and laws are being implemented to criminalise it as domestic violence. In the world of lesbians, however, as Angela Wild reports, lesbians experience ‘relentless … psychological coercion’ and there is no consideration of a penalty of any kind for those perpetrating such threats and violence against them. The anthology You Told Me You Were Different, edited by Kitty Robinson (2021), brings together more than thirty pieces by women who experienced harm, including rape and physical, emotional and coercive violence, by men. Writing about male-pattern behaviour in the trans community, she notes that, ‘Trans male violence & misconduct is just a subcategory of male violence & misconduct’.
Laws that sideline lesbians
The 2013 change to the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 to incorporate the word gender and remove the word woman has had severe consequences for lesbians. Legal change by stealth, by shifting language so that it no longer means what it usually means, is an authoritarian move creating ‘authorised’ definitions contrary to everyday use. The parties that should be improving the lot of women—the Labor Left, the Greens and others—have instead become the mouthpieces of an ideologically distorted political stance.
The proposed change to theSex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Act 2013 was raised by the AHRC consultation in 2010. A group of lesbians put in a submission at that time under the nameErinyes Autonomous Activist Lesbians. In 2010, they predicted precisely the effect that legislation prioritising gender over sex would have on lesbians, and indeed all women. If these words are puzzling to you, here is the difference: ‘sex’ is all about biology; there are two sexes female and male; ‘gender’ is all about behaviour and societal norms. Babies cannot have a gender, but they do have a chromosomal sex, even in the case of intersex individuals.
The writers of the Erinyes submission argued that ‘the definition of “women” is repurposed to include male-to-constructed-female transgendered people’, leaving natal women and girls without a word to articulate their own girl-, woman- and lesbian-based experiences. They predicted that gender-based laws would protect men claiming to be women, but leave lesbians stranded without any legal protection. The changes to the Sex Discrimination Amendment Act in 2013 have resulted in outcomes of this kind. Lesbians wanting to hold a lesbian-only event are prohibited. Lesbians wishing to speak up about the effect of discrimination against them are labelled bigots and threatened with legal action. Lesbians participating in sport are finding themselves competing against men who are enculturated into male society. It is affecting lesbians in hospitals who cannot request treatment by women only. Worse still, women in prisons, women seeking safety in refuges and rape crisis centres might face a male when it is previous trauma caused by a man that they are seeking to avoid.
Erinyes summarised the likely outcome for lesbians at the end of their submission:
It is short sighted and dangerous to legislate as though a proven biological basis for the phenomenon of transgenderism exists. Such legislation will result in the denial of rights of women-born-females.
It’s not as though the AHRC wasn’t warned of the likely outcomes. They could have listened to well thought-out arguments by lesbians.
What happens to lesbians under this regime? They are made invisible or are erased altogether. The widespread hatred of lesbians remains obscured. One of the main reasons I have written so extensively about lesbians—in poetry, fiction and non-fiction—is to make lesbians and lesbian ideas and culture visible.
Though the currents are strongly ideological, the play of interests also needs to be discussed. There are billions of dollars to be made from the medicalisation of the gender identity framework, with medical and pharmaceutical behemoths behind them. In Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy (2020), I drew on the early work of Jennifer Bilek in this area. Bilek, an investigative journalist, was following the money trail of funding by billionaire medicos and pharmaceutical and investment corporations who are profiting from the desire for transformation arising from a switch from orientation to identity, and the astroturfing going on, as she points out in her recent book Transsexual Transgender Transhuman (2024).
Bilek documents that the money going into both the development of medical facilities oriented to gender-based treatment and the advancement of LGBTQ+ ideology is substantial. Donations by the Pritzker family are just one example. After initial donations of USD$1 million to transgender programs at the Lurie Hospital in Chicago in 2013–14, the Pritzkers followed up with USD$15 million in 2019 and USD$6.45 million in 2022. At the same time, Pritzker created the first chair in Transgender Studies at University of Victoria in British Columbia. Bilek documents many donations of seven- and eight-figure sums by corporations, powerful families and NGOs to such causes.
There have been some victories, including the release of the Cass Review in the United Kingdom (ignored in Australia), and the use of the Equality Law in 2023 which enabled the FiLiA conference in Glasgow to proceed in October 2023—they had been given just twelve hours’ notice to cancel a huge radical feminist conference and protested successfully using the Equality Law. But in Australia the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Guidelines are still accepted, in spite of the files revealing medical malpractice, and they are also followed by the Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa. In Australia, two court cases are impending. Tickle v Giggle was heard at the Federal Court of Australia in April 2024 and will now go on appeal to the Supreme Court. The argument here is about what constitutes the meaning of the word ‘woman’. The TQ+ include ‘transwoman’ in the category woman. But women looking for a safe space—online, as in Giggle, or in spaces such as refuges, prisons or lesbian events are either sued or have to pursue legal action of their own. The LAG mentioned earlier is likely to appeal the AHRC refusal. It’s not surprising that the AHRC did not allow the exemption, since their conference in June 2024 was held at the Hyatt Hotel, owned by the Pritzker family. Three Australian states—Victoria, South Australia, Queensland—have already introduced Self-ID laws and NSW is on the cusp of doing so through the Greenwich-sponsored Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Bill 2023.
The problem with the big foundations, the billionaire philanthrocapitalists, the corporations making money from pharmaceutical and medical products is that they are distorting the trajectory of political movements. And they are being supported by the Left—the Greens and Labour in the United Kingdom and the Democrats in the United States. It is a conflicted alliance that needs to be challenged. Lesbians have been a key target and lesbians are fighting back. Will you join us?