Despite the aggressive-sounding title of this book, the author claims to want to introduce a new approach to safety that will benefit the whole of society. This approach is based on anti-carceral thinking, i.e. not relying on police or prison systems for protection, instead understanding how these systems can be weaponised against vulnerable groups. The author describes her own history with work in the ‘gender-based violence’ field, starting with volunteering at a rape crisis facility when she was sixteen.

The book starts off reasonably enough, with the author declaring that she won’t use the term ‘TERF’, because it’s divisive and she wants the book to be read by feminists who disagree with her as well as ones who agree. Further, she does acknowledge that much of what she deems to be ‘anti-trans’ thinking is in fact the domain of feminists. So far, so good, as far as not being called a Nazi bigot is concerned.

She does, however, refer throughout the book to ‘non-trans women’ and occasionally, ‘cis women’, so any woman wanting to read this will need to grit her teeth and put up with her womanhood being defined in terms of lack of being a man.

By Page 9, the author is already quoting hate crime stats at us to show how persecuted she deems trans-identifying people to be, and I’m already wondering what happened to the anti-carceral focus. It’s all a bit carceral, measuring oppression in terms of criminal justice stats, no?

To marry together the two strands of this book – carceral thinking and ‘anti-trans’ (gender critical/sex realist) feminism, Lamble has her work cut out in trying to demonstrate that sex realist women are all adherent to carceral ways of thinking and working to an extent that exceeds the norm, and I’m going to focus here on some of the many ways in which she misinterprets and misrepresents feminists and lesbians.

Here, Lamble claims to be surprised by the level of feminist interest in the welfare of female prisoners, claiming that feminists previously showed ‘little interest’ in this group. In fact, in Scotland, the female prison estate was singled out as far back as 2014, as a testing ground at the behest of the Scottish Trans Alliance, to see if the public would object to males being incarcerated with females. (https://forwomen.scot/19/07/2026/the-pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow/). It is completely unsurprising that there has been grassroots feminist activity in this area, given the deliberate targeting of the female prison population for this test of public feeling.

To make her central argument, Lamble also over-focuses on ‘safety’ as the overarching concern of current-day feminists. In doing so, not only does she overlook privacy and dignity – two concepts usually cited along with safety when talking about the importance of single-sex spaces – she also misses out the entire lesbian argument for having our own spaces. Lesbians, of course, are not attracted to men however they present themselves, and our reasons for needing single-sex, lesbian-only spaces are simply that no man can become a lesbian and our culture and community depend upon us having our own places. This does not suit Lamble’s thesis, and so our arguments are not explained. She mentions Get the L Out’s activity at London Pride in 2018, but describes the group members as ‘middle-aged and white’; she may as well be calling them ‘Karens’.

The launch of Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act is described as being plagued with ‘vexatious complaints’ as ‘gender critical and trans campaigners argued over which group most needed the law’s protection’. This account again misses important context.

When Scottish hate crime legislation came into effect, it functioned mainly as a one-eyed mechanism for reporting troublesome women, covering hate crime committed on the basis of ‘transgender identity’ but not on ‘sex’. For those of us who were in grassroots feminist groups, the introduction of such skewed legislation had a chilling effect. Women organised information sessions about what to do if we found ourselves accused of hate crimes. We devised plans for leaving our electronic devices at home when we went out to public meetings. Some women stopped using social media. Some of us joined the Free Speech Union so that we could access legal assistance if needed. Far from being delighted at the thought of a new law with which to indulge our carceral desires, women needed to organise quickly to protect ourselves against the new law being weaponised to our detriment.

Elsewhere, there are numerous attempts to over-represent the power and privilege enjoyed by women and under-represent it in men who claim a trans identity. The hounding of Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex is waived away because it ‘opened doors’ for her, as if this mitigated the experience while it was happening. By contrast, we are repeatedly told that ‘trans people’ are not seen as ideal victims and so are ‘set up to lose’.

The portrayal of ‘trans people’ in this book sits completely at odds with the fact that the Scottish and, to a lesser extent, UK Governments have been completely in thrall to this group in recent years, with the rights of women being sidelined. Lamble appears to have an absolute blind spot when it comes to privilege and power enjoyed by men who claim a trans identify, whether in the form of legislation written to meet their needs, statutory services adopting the language and symbols of gender identity theory, or just simply good old fashioned male violence continuing to be a feature even after a man has started to pretend he is now a woman. The most egregious example of this blindness is when she recounts the sexual assaults carried out by prisoner Karen White.

We are told here that White did not add to his career as a rapist while in prison. He merely did some ‘inappropriate touching’, which led to a ‘moral panic’. Women are, by implication, over-reacting to the threats posed by a double rapist continuing to sexually harass women in an environment in which they are unable to escape.

This book ultimately fails in its stated mission to promote the values of anti-carceral safety approaches for everyone. It’s too skewed, too misogynist and too fond of a bit of DARVO for its central premise to land. By the time the author starts to tell us that anti-carceral work rests on the idea of no-one being ‘disposable’, it’s much too late. The hatchet job on women has been received and understood.

Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 9798888906064

On 22^nd July 2026, the Decentring Heteronormativity: Theorising Lesbian Erotic Life Symposium took place online, hosted jointly by the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship at the University of Essex, and the Journal of Lesbian Studies. Being interested in research as well as whatever is currently being said within academic circles about lesbians, I attended the symposium.

The blurb for the symposium started like this:

Lesbian sexualities have long been rendered invisible, misrepresented, or reduced to stereotypes. The question, ‘How do lesbians have sex?’, is often posed with a lesbophobic undertone, yet for lesbians themselves it opens up rich conversations about intimacy, pleasure, embodiment, creativity, and desire.

I was, naturally, looking forward to hearing how the research presentations would help address some of this misrepresentation and invisibility faced by lesbians. Okay, looking forward is a bit strong, but I was happy to sit through it with my brain switched to ‘critical’.

My review here is based on my own notes and recollections and is as faithful an account as I can give, but the good news is that the Journal of Lesbian Studies will have a special issue next year featuring the papers presented at the symposium, and it will be free to access for a month. I don’t know which month yet, but you can see the Journal of Lesbian Studies’ web presence here.

What is a Lesbian?

Given that the theme was ‘lesbian erotic life’, it was not surprising to hear some speakers pose the old chestnut, what is a lesbian? Anyone expecting a clear definition like the one agreed upon recently, for example, by judges at the UK Supreme Court, was to be disappointed.

In their talk about ‘Lesbian Sexual Practices in Mid-Twentieth-Century Pulp Fiction’, Nicole Marcoux and Denyse Rodrigues proposed the following options: ‘lesbian as an identity – a fixed identity, one along a continuum, or an identity in solidarity with other 2SLGBTQ+ identities’.

Since this was an academic symposium, let’s take a minute to unpack that third suggestion of lesbian as an ‘identity in solidarity’. Our sexual orientation provides, after all, a statement of where our sexual boundaries lie. Does the above suggestion mean that ‘solidarity’ could be a central driving force for calling oneself a lesbian? Surely no lesbian can be propelled through life not by attraction to other women, but by the thought of standing shoulder to shoulder with furries and Nicola Sturgeon at Pride marches.

In other talks, there was no attempt to provide definitions. Introducing their talk, ‘Butch Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Butchness’, the authors Amy Tooth Murphy and Katherine Hubbard explained that they would not be giving a definition of ‘butch’ and the study involved six ‘self-identified’ butches. This talk raised some interesting ideas around stereotypes and expectations, but without knowing whether the subjects were male, female or a mix of the two, or indeed whether any other inclusion/exclusion criteria for butchness were used, it was impossible to fully make sense of the presentation.

Transitioning

Several of the presenters discussed ‘transitioning’. In her talk about ‘stone sexuality’, Róisín Ryan-Flood talked about some lesbians finding touch to be too ‘feminising’ and quoted a lesbian who had explored transition in connection with her dislike of being touched. The author proposed that ‘stone’ lesbians may ‘lack visibility’. In a parallel world, it would be good to know more about this area by researching the possible connections between rigid sexual identities and feeling uncomfortable in one’s own body.

In her presentation, ‘Everyone Wanted a Piece of a Trans Man: Trans Men in Lesbian S/M Scenes, 1985-2005’, Elio Colavito discussed ‘dick in a drawer’ policies adopted by lesbian S&M groups to keep biological men out (i.e. you could be admitted if your ‘dick’ – strap on – could be removed and placed in a drawer). This talk made me feel a bit sad as the author went to great lengths to explore why ‘trans men’ were accepted on the basis of their ‘lesbian pasts’ while the lesbians were not interested in ‘trans women’. So close to recognising same sex sexual orientation, and yet so far.

Due to other commitments, I unfortunately missed a talk by male/female presenting team Sam Bolton and Emily Cousens, in which they presented a case for re-reading Andrea Dworkin through a ‘queer, trans psychoanalytic lens’. I think it’s enough to mention that the symposium went there with an attempt to obfuscate the messages of second-wave feminism.

Queering

There were many presentations in this symposium, and I have not attempted to comment on them all. It was noticeable that although some presentations did appear to be solely by and about women, pronouns were on display and ‘lesbian’ was used interchangeably with ‘queer’; none of the presenters dissented from the unspoken adherence to queer and gender identity theory. Speakers would mention lesbian, queer and trans all in the same sentence when answering questions from the audience, as if these words were completely interchangeable. You can see an example of this phenomenon here from one of the abstracts for the symposium (Nicole Marcoux & Denyse Rodrigues: ‘Between the Covers: Lesbian Sexual Practices in Mid-Twentieth-Century Pulp Fiction’):

Historical accounts of lesbian sex are not easily found. Queer histories are often ignored, erased, or otherwise left out of our collective memories. The persecution and discrimination of 2SLGBTQ+ people throughout history has resulted in significant knowledge gaps of that history. As a result, queer academics have encouraged the use of alternative record-keeping methods for queer histories (Cvetkovich, 2003; Sedgwick, 2008). Lesbian, Gay, and Trans pulp fiction provides a unique insight into lesbian sexual practices from the particularly repressive mid-twentieth century in the United States and Canada.

In a truly confusing presentation, J.J. Wright took an extremely serious topic - rates of sexual violence – and proposed that ‘lesbian sexual joy is a counter-epistemological force against the cisheteropatriarchal logics of rape culture’. She depicted this idea via the medium of collage, with males and females having taken part in depicting their experiences of ‘lesbian joy’ by sticking pictures of butterflies and pants on paper. It was all presented on pretty pastel slides. The evening had reached its lowest point as far as I was concerned.

I was starting to get annoyed. This was supposedly a gathering of academics and yet it seemed that barely anyone could keep hold of a concept from the beginning to the end of a sentence. This field of research, with its unwillingness to define its terms and its keenness on sowing confusion and blurring boundaries – queering -, is not tucked away within academia as a niche area. It is there in place of lesbian and feminist researchers, aggressively so. Their absence is the real lesbian invisibility.

The Male Gaze

It was explained that the symposium had only really been promoted on ‘queer Instagram’, to avoid men attending out of prurient interest in the topic (presumably, someone thought that ‘queer Instagram’ provided a suitably safe organizing space). There were mentions of concepts such as ‘the male gaze’, which did make me wonder what the organizers’ and presenters’ notion of the male gaze was, given that it was a mixed-sex conference and some of the presenters were men pretending to be lesbians. However, as tends to be the way within liberal feminist and queer circles, phrases like ‘male gaze’ were strewn around without any apparent connection to their meanings.

At the end of the talks, breakout rooms were provided for attendees and presenters to chat. I didn’t want to stay and chat, but I tested what would happen if I joined the breakout rooms with my camera and mic switched off. And lo! I was admitted to a breakout room without question. We’d been told that 600 people had signed up for the symposium, and I think it’s safe to say that men, whether they went to the bother of saying they were lesbians or not, were in attendance throughout the event. They were certainly featured as presenters.

With the symposium’s focus on obscuring sexual boundaries, celebration of everything from S&M to polyamory, and its pretence of the male lesbian and the female man, I cannot say that heteronormativity was decentred at this event. Rather, it was reinforced.

We started Scottish Lesbians four years ago today, and now seems like a good time to reflect on where we started, where we are now and some thoughts about what might happen next.

Where we Started

As we’ve described on here before, the two of us who launched Scottish Lesbians did so without really knowing where the experience would take us. We carried out some online searches to make sure that we weren’t about to duplicate the efforts of a pre-existing group of Scottish lesbians that we could just join and contribute to instead. When our searches turned up nothing similar that was current and genuinely for lesbians, we launched our Twitter account with a tweet asserting the right of lesbians to meet without males, and we were genuinely surprised to be contacted by lesbians from all over Scotland and further afield, wanting to know who we were, what we were going to do and how to join.

The catalyst for forming Scottish Lesbians was none other than the GRR Bill which was dominating political and feminist discourse in Scotland at the time, looming large over us all and threatening to grant any man the right to legally change sex simply by self-identifying as a woman. We’d already joined feminist groups that opposed the GRR Bill, and we could see that there was still a gap for a specifically lesbian group to add to the opposition to the Bill. Many MSPs were arguing that gender reform was an essential tenet of ‘LGBTQI+’ rights. ‘L’ may have been the first in the string of letters cited by these MSPs but in fact, the proposed change was going to have a catastrophic impact on the rights of lesbians, sealing into law the right of heterosexual men to self-identify as lesbians, and meaning that we could not legally exclude them from lesbian groups and events.

We stood with our feminist sisters at demonstrations against the GRR Bill, wrote to every MSP about our opposition to the Bill as lesbians, and we experienced an emotional rollercoaster as the Bill was voted through, unamended, in the Scottish Parliament, only later to be blocked by an intervention from the UK Government.

Where We are Now

Without attempting to give a potted history of the last four years, we are now, of course, a year down the line from For Women Scotland’s brilliant UK Supreme Court victory against the Scottish Government. Jenny wrote for The Frontline recently about our experiences of intervening, together with The Lesbian Project and LGB Alliance, in support of For Women Scotland’s case.

For lesbians, the importance of the FWS ruling cannot be overstated. It clarified that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, lesbians are females who are sexually oriented to other females, based on biological sex. You can read the ruling here.

Of course, as lesbians and feminists, we expected to see resistance and pushback against the Supreme Court judgement. While we could not have foreseen the full extent of this pushback or the fact that resistance to the law would have come from our very Governments (with the Scottish Government continuing to fund organisations such as the Equality Network, LGBT Youth Scotland and LEAP Sports Scotland, all opposing the SC ruling), we have lived within a misogynist, anti-lesbian culture for long enough to know that it would not just go away overnight.

In the last four years, members of Scottish Lesbians have been abused for attending Pride Edinburgh to hand out leaflets, abused for carrying out research into lesbian lives, blocked on social media by political representatives including our ex-First Minister (the ‘feminist to her fingertips’), removed from ‘lesbian’ groups, spoken over, drowned out and indeed named as targets for direct action, for speaking about the rights of lesbians.

During the hearing for the FWS Supreme Court case, we listened as the barrister for the Scottish Government made the argument that groups like Scottish Lesbians could get by on the grounds of being ‘gender critical lesbian’ groups, rather than simply lesbians. We addressed this argument, which would have left us relying on protection on the grounds of belief rather than sexual orientation had the Scottish Government prevailed, here.

The argument made by the Scottish Government is the same one underpinning all the attacks and smears on groups like ours. No one wants to admit, in 2026, to being anti-lesbian. It’s much easier to oppose ‘gender critical lesbians’ or in the words of Bash Back above,’‘vile and hateful’ lesbians responsible for ‘discriminatory violence’.

For lesbians, our fights must continue on multiple fronts. We are in absolutely no doubt that further legal cases will be needed to ensure adherence to the law, and also tribunals to address the discriminatory treatment of lesbians who speak up.

Alongside this, it’s important that we start to move back into all the spaces we’ve been edged out of for being the wrong type of lesbian. The highest court in the UK has underlined that we are simply women who are sexually oriented to other women. The time of scapegoating us as an objectionable subgroup of lesbians is over. We are lesbians, and lesbian culture and spaces are ours.

We are pleased to launch our new Substack, A Lesbian Place, on our fourth birthday. A Lesbian Place will run in tandem with our Scottish Lesbians Substack, and we intend it to be a positive and celebratory counterpart to our activities here. Please do join us there too.

A Lesbian Place

A place for celebrating lesbian achievements and amplifying lesbian voices.

By Scottish Lesbians

(Badge in photograph kindly given to us by Jenny Reilly of Women Won’t Wheesht)

On 16th April, it will be one year since the ruling of the UK Supreme Court in favour of For Women Scotland. Jenny was delighted to speak at the ‘One Year Later’ protest outside the Scottish Parliament yesterday, organised by Women Won’t Wheesht as part of a multi-location protest.

The law is now very firmly on our side as women and lesbians who need access to single-sex spaces and services, but our Governments have some catching up to do. You can see the text of Jenny’s speech below (she did make a few deviations and additions on the day, as is her wont, and we hope there are clips out there as well!).

Good afternoon! I’m going to say much the same as the other speakers, only in lesbian.

I’d like to thank Women Won’t Wheesht for inviting me to speak today.

Isn’t it amazing, the reason we’re all standing here today, is that For Women Scotland won.

We were absolutely thrilled that the lesbian intervention had the impact it did, thanks to our fabulous legal team. ‘Lesbians are not attracted to certificates’- absolutely superb.

And yet, here we are, one year later, and I’m still having to talk about the lesbian intervention, when there’s so much else that Scottish Lesbians would like to be doing and talking about.

And why am I having to talk about it? Because both the UK and Scottish Governments are ignoring the actual law.

And it’s an absolute shocker that the Scottish Government is still waiting, a year down the line, for the EHRC to tell them what to do.

I want to talk about the LGBTQIXYZ hustings which we attended in Glasgow on Thursday night.

We listened as Caron Lindsay, the Lib Dem candidate on the panel, described the year since the Supreme Court ruling as ‘horrible’, in fact, ‘horrible, horrible, horrible’.

We listened as she called the EHRC guidance ‘awful’ and said she’d like the legal landscape changed.

We listened as Kaukab Stewart described her bafflement at so much debate being focussed on a tiny minority, just 0.44% of the population apparently, when I think she’s forgetting women are 51% of the population.

We listened as Maggie Chapman implied that the ruling had led to deaths.

And we listened as women and girls were forgotten or ignored or belittled, and we listened as lesbians were used as human shields for men.

It would be quite nice if the Government would listen to us for a change. There’s an election next month!

But, after the Supreme Court we knew it would be a bit of a slog. Those laydeez in the lesbian groups don’t want to leave, and, sadly, some of the so-called lesbian groups don’t want to kick them out. But our members tell us, loud and clear, that what they want is lesbian spaces. They don’t want to log on to dating apps to see Adam’s apples and five o’clock shadows.

And it’s not just our group members. 700 lesbians took part in our research, published last October, and they told us they want lesbian only spaces.

So how are we going to do this? Some of the work is going to come down to us as lesbians to rebuild what’s been taken from us, to get our stuff back.

But, the Government could help us by stopping throwing millions of our pounds at LGBTWTF organisations who are quite happy to think men can be lesbians.

And every employer, service, organisation, school, in Scotland could help us by stopping using LGBTQIA when they actually mean trans and, let’s be honest, mostly men.

For Women Scotland’s Supreme Court win was a massive step forward for us all. It’s now time to focus on what needs to happen next.

We need our politicians and our institutions to stop talking over us and start listening to us.

As lesbians, we need the forced teaming to stop.

And as women, we need our politicians to know that our human rights matter, too.

Whoever forms the next Scottish Government needs to stop messing about and follow the law.

The law is on our side. One year later, it’s time it was upheld.

Thanks very much.

For Women Scotland’s Supreme Court case was, of course, of momentous importance for us as lesbians. Jenny was very pleased to write for The Frontline this week, about her experience of being a lesbian intervener in the case, and how much the case means to us. You can read her article on The Frontline.

New Substack coming soon - A Lesbian Place

As part of the process of reclaiming and recreating our lesbian culture and spaces, we’re pleased to say we are working on a new Substack, A Lesbian Place, and we’ll be launching it shortly. Please sign up for free and you’ll be among the first to receive updates! We’ll continue to maintain our Scottish Lesbians Substack too, but we thought it was time to have a dedicated place for ‘all the nice stuff’.

Sign up at A Lesbian Place and we’ll see you there soon!

I’m quite big. Tall. Six feet* tall, in fact, and broad in proportion. You could safely use the word ‘strapping’ to describe me. I outgrew children’s shoes at the age of 11, when even the size sevens were too small for me, and for many years I had to get my clothes and shoes from niche or specialist outlets. Even now, when there are more and more tall women around, I find M&S ‘long’ trousers a bit on the short side, and don’t get me started on blouses. It would be lovely to think that, at some point, M&S will realise that women with long legs tend to have long arms as well. 

Anyway, I’m tall. Taller, in fact, by nearly two inches, than the average British man, and almost eight inches taller than the average British woman (according to the 2021 Health Survey for England). I’m right at the end of the normal distribution curve: 

However, despite my height, I’m still a woman.

Every woman knows that men are stronger than us and, in the main, taller. Height is one of the many factors we use to identify someone’s sex- I’m very used to women in the ladies’ clocking my height, looking startled, then giving me a second glance and visibly relaxing. However, when it comes to assessing risk, it doesn’t actually matter how tall a man is; a short bloke can be just as much a danger to women as a six footer.

Tallness in men is not the characteristic that means they shouldn’t be in women’s spaces. It’s been quite difficult to see recent comments and stories about trans-identifying men make much of their height, as if, had the (reportedly) 6’2” Theodore Upton been shorter, it would have been more acceptable for him to join Sandie Peggie in the ladies’ changing room.

Height is often used as an intensifier, something to emphasise the wrongness of men in women’s spaces, but only when the man in question is tall. ‘Katie’ Dolatowski is frequently discussed with reference to his height, reportedly 6’5”, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen mention of the height of, for example, ‘Isla’ Bryson. Presumably that’s because he isn’t tall, but I don’t think anyone would argue that his shorter stature means he’s less of a threat to women. 

Emphasising height, rather than any other characteristic, and ignoring the fact that women also come in ‘tall’, is unhelpful to those of us who already get those funny looks in the ladies’.

Gender ideologists and queer theorists are very keen to reduce women to their component parts or characteristics in order to blur or destroy sex classes. We need to keep the focus on the fact it’s not the height of a man that makes him pose a risk to the dignity, privacy, or safety, of women, it’s his maleness.

*Not six feet four, as reported by Libby Brooks in the Guardian.

The Worst Day of My Life

The worst day of my life happened in a place in which I usually experience great joy and happiness. I went into my local Waterspoons, armed with the latest list of reading recommendations from Big Val. At the front of the shop, I saw on a table piles and piles of a book with a hellish title. ‘The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht’, or ‘The Bigots Who Never Shut Up’, as I prefer to think of it, if I think of it at all.

Suddenly, I was overcome with a wobbly feeling. I put my hand on the table to steady myself, and it shoogled a bit and some of the copies fell to the floor. A lovely purple haired assistant came to my aid immediately. ‘Can you not put these in the Early Medieval Russian History section with all the Julie Bindel and Helen Joyce books?’ I enquired. The assistant looked crestfallen as she/they explained, ‘We’ve all had a reminder that Waterspoons is a commercial company and this book’s going down very well with the TERFs’. We paused for a moment together, gazing sadly at the pile of books and no doubt both thinking of what might have happened in happier times.

Thankfully I noticed that the polis were outside in a car painted in the colours of the Progress Flag. I was able to rise above my distress and have my photo taken in front of the vehicle, in support of our LGBTQIA+ community. Despite the sadness of the day I was even able to have a go in the car as I had, earlier that week, proudly managed to pass my driving test.

I’m no stranger to a bit of literature myself. When I am feeling distressed or distraught, I like to sit and watch the sea as people have done for many hundreds of years. The sea has a calming effect and also brings out the poet in me.

Sexuality

Sexuality

It's like the sea

The tide can be either in or out

A bit like me

Lesbians, Frankly

My friends Big Val and Hoarse are always saying, 'any woman can come out as a lesbian, Sticola, at any point in her life'. I usually agree with my esteemed friends, but on this point I can’t completely concur. For hundreds of years, the exquisite joy of being a lesbian has been available exclusively to women. I always like to champion the underdog. I can't sit back and do nothing when I see such a historic case of inequality. That's why I was first in the queue to applaud the brave male lesbians as they took their place at the table. I like to think history will remember me as the First Minister who ushered in genuine equal opportunities in sexuality.

I assembled a travelling squad of Scottish lesbians, all hand picked for not being the bigoted type, and we went on tour together to spread my message of kindness. All my lesbian pals may have partnered with women themselves, but, in the spirit of equity, they are always overjoyed to be able to welcome male lesbians into the lives and beds of women who aren’t them.

I am always being asked if all this camaraderie with lesbians means that I am a lesbian myself. I want to be absolutely clear about this and to put the record straight once and for all. I am not one for talking of things which may be traumatising yet curiously titillating at the same time. Such matters should be kept private, frankly.

I cried when I heard the result come through from the Supreme Court. As a lesbian this means everything; that I can now be recognised as a biological women who is same sex attracted to another biological woman. That is what the word Lesbian means, anything else just won't do.

The ruling means we can meet up as lesbians on our own spaces without the fear of men being there too. We can go on dating sites without men being on these too.

I am over the moon.

A lesbian in central Scotland

I was honoured to attend the Edinburgh For Women Scotland Supreme Court event. Drove up early so went for coffee and gradually more and more women started arriving. There was a hushed atmosphere of women filling up the seats. Finally what we had been waiting for Lord Hodge started speaking on the big screen. The whole room erupted, we cheered, we hugged, we had tears of joy streaming down our faces. Trina trying to speak to us as we gave her the standing ovation she and ForWomenScot deserve for everything they have done for the women of Scotland. It was loud.

Gradually we left the room at the offer of a wee toast to the women, the hall filled with women hugging not quite believing what had been achieved. I was embracing one of the Alloa Women when the media caught me. My relief was all to see, my delight that lesbians didn't have to have men in our spaces was now all over the news. Then we sang, with beautiful acoustics, the perfect song (thank you Lucy Hunter-Blackburn) as if it had been written for that moment. We stand together side by side we will defend our rights. The Scottish women joined together and won, and we would do it all again. This isn't over yet.

A lesbian in central Scotland

I look forward to the first women’s dance after all these years. And knowing that it’s an actual women’s dance. And I sincerely hope it lives up to my expectations. I look forward to using the word lesbian as frequently and loudly as possible, giving it laldy. Because it has meaning again. But probably more than anything I’m utterly relieved that the decision didn’t go the other way because that would’ve have been like an episode of Black Mirror — a nightmare. It was a high risk play. Thank goodness it came off.

A lesbian in the West of Scotland

I was totally delighted with the ruling and I feel very proud to be a Scottish Lesbian, especially because of the extremely important intervention made by Scottish Lesbians, along with the other Lesbian Interveners! To have it made plain and clear by the highest court in the land that lesbians can have their own groups just means so much to me.

I have been battling for several years with Scottish Government funded LGBT organisations, such as LGBT Health and Wellbeing and LEAP Sport Scotland, over their insistence that lesbian groups cannot be provided or supported by their services unless they include "all lesbians" by which they mean "trans lesbians" AKA heterosexual men.

These organisations will no longer be able to justify their policy of excluding lesbian groups, or have their funding from the Scottish Government be made dependant on having such policies. These things shouldn't have been happening anyway, but now there can be no pretence that these policies have been legal. I look forward very much to concluding my battles with these services and to the re-establishment of government funded groups and services for lesbians in Scotland.

A lesbian in central Scotland

I'm a young lesbian in Scotland, and I'm very glad to hear about the Supreme Court ruling clarifying the definition of sex in the Equality Act 2010. However, this is just the beginning. Now that we have the law on our side, we as lesbians need to fight to change the culture that tells us we have to accept men in our spaces, in our dating apps, in our bedrooms. But for now, we celebrate!

A lesbian in central Scotland

Wednesday 16th April 2025 - this was the day the Supreme Court handed down judgement on For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers on the effect of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 on the definitions of “woman” and “man” for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010. A date that will forever be held in our memories.

The judgment held that the terms “man”, “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. My wife and I cheered and clapped for joy and relief that common sense now prevailed. We witnessed the highest court in the land clearing up the muddled mess caused by the Scottish Government.

Women and girls now have protection.

We have a definitive ruling that Self Id was never part of the Equality Act.

Women have the right to single sex spaces and services.

Lesbians have the right to exclude men from their social events and dating circles.

However, I was left with a strong sense of disbelief and anger that the Scottish Government, politicians, NHS, policing and other institutions had allowed themselves to be ideologically captured to such an extent that they willingly and wilfully ignored the law, got it so badly wrong, with such detrimental effects.

It was left to grassroots women's organisations to crowdfund and fight for our sex based rights and protections. To fight for the rights of lesbians to freedom of association without including men, with or without a GRC. Let it be clear, the Supreme Court has ruled, and its position states what the law has always been, not what it should be from the date of the judgement onwards. There can be no more excuses for not abiding by it.

A lesbian in Southern Scotland

I am very relieved that the ruling has confirmed that the definition of ‘woman’ rests on biology rather than ideology. Now we need to get all the men out of lesbian groups and off the dating apps, and we need LGB separated fully from the TQ+.

A lesbian in the East of Scotland

It could be easy to underplay the significance of the Supreme Court ruling in my own life, after all I've hardly been at the front of this campaign, but in my own quiet way, resources permitting, I've written letters and blogs, visited elected members, attended the odd Central belt event, and engaged on social media.

I felt a great pressure to do more, possibly under the banner of all women rather than lesbians specifically, but if this ruling has taught me anything, it's that women can and do create change, that speaking out against the tide is uncomfortable at times, and that it's OK to play a small part.

I feel a renewed sense of hope and connection that I haven't felt since pre-Covid times. In an understatement most would recognise, the Scottish Highlands aren't renowned for being a bastion of lesbian activism, but I feel far less alone and more confident about speaking up than ever before, and for that I have an army of bright, bold, and dedicated women to thank.

A lesbian in the Highlands

I couldn't be more pleased with the Supreme Court judgement. To have men demanding access to lesbian spaces, dating apps and events was just terrible. Even worse has been the pressure on lesbians, particularly young lesbians, to accept these men as sexual partners. It's been very rare that the word Lesbian has been so often mentioned in such an important case.

This judgement says what we all know to be true, that lesbians are women attracted to other women.

Thank you to the Lesbian interveners

A lesbian in the Hebrides

The Supreme court judgement has given me confidence in the UK judiciary system. It has ratified what we are already knew that the definition of a woman is biological 100 percent adult human female.

Common sense and scientific fact prevails.

The national bodies who promoted this myth for financial gain now need to be challenged. The domino effect of this misinformation has been a breach of our human rights.

The extension of the acronym LGB needs addressed, we can’t group sexualities with medical conditions and fetishes etc it is nonsense.

A lesbian in the West of Scotland

I am relieved that Scottish Lesbians and other lesbian associations can now operate in peace and in confidence. The provision of lesbian groups has been left to ordinary women to organise. We have had to use our own time and resources and we have had to run the risk that a man might legally challenge us if we refused him membership. We look forward to better times ahead for lesbians and to being left alone to start rebuilding our community.

A lesbian in the West of Scotland

Please feel free to add your own thoughts or reactions in the comments!

Last week’s UK Supreme Court judgement was all about biological versus certificated sex, a binary problem with no compromise position. It’s clear that the lesbian intervention helped the judges come to the conclusion they did by presenting the problems caused for same-sex attracted people by a ‘certificated’ approach to sex:

The very basis of our sexual orientation (and, indeed, everyone else’s) depends on a biological interpretation of the word ‘sex’. Our ability to meet and associate in single sex organisations depends on it. It’s a huge relief to us that the court affirmed that ‘sex’ refers to biology, not identity. This means that there is no such thing as a trans lesbian- there never was, of course, but now it’s official. This has upset TransActual who, in their letter to Keir Starmer, describe it as ‘new’ and ‘offensively erroneous’:

In other words, lesbians are once again saying no to men and this makes us a problem.

Lesbians are also the solution! 

Trans rights activists have chosen lesbians, and especially butch lesbians, as the solution to the problem (alongside the usual demonisation of JK Rowling and allegations involving mythical pots of far-right cash) because women who don’t conform to feminine stereotypes are so beyond the pale that we can’t reasonably be viewed as women at all. This means, in TRA logic, that if lesbians can be allowed in women’s spaces, so can men.

This is all being presented firstly via the medium of toilets. TRAs have focused, once again, on ‘we only want to pee’. It’s all about the loos, and here come the lesbians as a useful prop.

Here’s Dawn Butler MP speaking in the debate on the Supreme Court ruling in the House of Commons. She was the only MP to mention lesbians in that debate, and it was all about the toilets:

Kate Osborne MP also mentioned being challenged while using ‘facilities’ in the Lesbian Visibility Day debate:

As did the ever-reliable Nadia Whittome MP, who thinks that lesbians fail to meet ‘Euro-centric’ standards of womanhood, and women should therefore welcome men in their toilets.

It’s not just MPs who hold these views. Apparently some lesbians have such masculine appearances and attributes that we’re going to be banned from anything to do with women.

Of course, it’s not just toilets: we’re also useful for our romantic/sexual histories. The Equality Network, in their letter to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee, chooses to interpret the ruling to mean that any lesbian who has ever been romantically involved with a man can never actually be a lesbian. Her lesbianism must be denied because of her past sexual history. Presumably the Equality Network has never heard of Adrienne Rich and the concept of compulsory heterosexuality. 

This despicable approach is not taken with any other minority sexuality, and it’s used purely as a means of redefining lesbian relationships to include men. 

So, lesbians caused the problem by asserting our boundaries, and we can fix it by having them taken away. Plus ça change.

It’s still hard to take in exactly what happened. I’m delighted that the result was a positive one for us, and that Scottish Lesbians will no longer be breaking the law if we refuse to admit a man, but it feels very much like the start of a very uncertain, difficult time. Already, in the few days since the ruling, protests against it have been organised and there has also been an outpouring of rage that I can only describe as entitlement denied. However, it’s also possible to see the beginnings of longer campaigns to change equalities law to what trans identifying people assumed it was- and, indeed, had been told, by the policies of so many Stonewalled institutions and organisations, that it was.

First up is the smear campaign, aiming to discredit the Supreme Court, the judges, and any organisation or individual involved in the For Women Scotland side of the case. The Supreme Court as an institution has been described as far-right, out of touch, in the pocket of JK Rowling, biased, and ‘actively hostile to trans existence’. Lord Hodge, who delivered a unanimous ruling from all five judges who heard the case, has been dismissed as old, crusty, white and male and, along with his fellow judges, overpaid. The case itself has been described as a ‘sham’. 

The court has been accused of hearing only from ‘anti-trans hate groups’, while trans identifying people were ‘specifically blocked’ from giving evidence. Our solicitor, Peter Daly, put out an excellent thread on Twitter explaining why this is nonsense.

The ruling itself has been described in hyperbolic terms as devastating, fascist, unjust, violence, anti-scientific and Trumpian. It has even been likened to imperialism. The feminist groups involved in the case are variously described as ‘far right’, ‘well funded’ and backed by ‘powerful people’. Scottish Lesbians has been described by one commentator, who applied unsuccessfully to intervene as an individual, as being a fake organisation run by two non-Scots from the south of England. It’s vastly easier, of course, to attribute our desire for clarity in law to nebulous non-people or other evil bogeymen than it is to understand that these are the feelings of millions of British women who are sick of having to give way to men.

Next is the fear mongering. It is being asserted that the ruling will remove trans-identifying people from public life completely, while also exposing them to ‘medical violence and death’. People who do not conform to gender stereotypes will face ‘consequences’ and scare stories are already being circulated of butch women being forcibly removed from public toilets. The racist trope that women of colour look like men and will be excluded from women’s facilities is being rolled out, and women are being told that we will have to show our genitals before being admitted to public toilets. Most disturbing is the fearmongering aimed at children, who will apparently face ‘torture and death’ at the hands of therapists practising conversion therapy.

Finally, we’re being warned that ‘consequences’ are coming. ‘What the Trans’ has compiled a list of 30 protest events around the country as an immediate reaction to the ruling. The Trans+ Solidarity Alliance has launched, on Instagram, a new campaign called ‘Unite 4 Trans Rights’ which calls for action to counter ‘hate’. Other organisations have started fundraising in order to bring legal actions, including discrimination cases, which means the courts may soon have more decisions to make. Some organisations appear to be encouraging defiance and lawbreaking, while trans identifying individuals are using social media to state their intention to ignore the ruling and continue to use facilities designated for the opposite sex. 

‘Haven’t you got anything better to worry about?’

Of course, in parallel to all of this, we’re told that the ruling is completely inconsequential, affects a tiny number of people, and is a ‘ludicrous waste of time’. Defining what a woman is is ‘policing boundaries’, ‘politicising’, and ‘narrow minded’. Instead of campaigning for legal clarity and women’s rights, women should be focussing on the really important issues like disability cuts, poverty, and male violence against women. But only the male violence committed by men who identify as men, obviously. No tactic, it seems, is too low for people who are desperate for ordinary, leftie women (and their hard-won rights) to disappear in a puff of right wing smoke. The Governments in both Westminster and Edinburgh need, as a matter of urgency, to commit to upholding the law as, we now know, it has always stood.

The survey has been written so that it can be completed within a few minutes, but we’ve also included space for longer answers if there’s more you’d like to tell us. We know we always appreciate being given space to say what we really think in a survey, so please do feel free to make use of the space if you have something to say.

Please share the survey link far and wide with other lesbians too!

Lesbian Survey 2025

However, in recent times the RCN has changed. They have refused to support fellow member Sandie Peggie in her fight to keep a male doctor out of the female staff changing rooms. In fact, they have remained eerily silent on this issue- you won’t find a single word about it on their website. They’re not the only union with this problem; you won’t find anything on the Unison website about the four Darlington nurses who also found their changing room being used by a man, and who also found that they could not count on their union’s support. However, the RCN is a union specifically for nurses, midwives and nursing support workers, an overwhelmingly female workforce. Why would they refuse to support a woman who doesn’t want to share a private space with a man? 

You can find some answers in a search of the RCN website (links are below): 

0 results for ‘Sandie Peggie’

0 results for ‘single sex’

1 result for ‘Gender critical’: a po-faced legal update about the Maya Forstater case which goes out of its way to reassure readers that trans people are still protected by equality legislation. 

15 results for ‘non-binary’, including a much more positive piece about the Jaguar Landrover Employment Tribunal which widened the protected characteristic of gender reassignment to include people who identify as non-binary. 

5 results for ‘Stonewall’

9 results for ‘pronouns’: nurses are encouraged to announce their own pronouns, ask the pronouns of people they are treating or working with, be ‘kind and understanding’, and avoid being a ‘diversity wrecking ball’. 

19 results for ‘transgender’, including:

• A piece by a clinical nurse specialist who felt she had ‘come home’ when she started working in ‘gender affirming care’

• A guide (currently under review) for nurses caring for trans and non-binary people which demands nurses affirm the ‘true gender identity’ of trans and non-binary people, including children. It also uses the scientifically illiterate phrase ‘sex assigned at birth’.

• A gushing piece about a guide to ‘transgender’ for people with learning disabilities, for which the nurse author was nominated for an RCNi nurse award

An entire page on Pride in Nursing: https://www.rcn.org.uk/Get-Involved/Campaign-with-us/Pride-in-Nursing

And what about lesbians? A search of the RCN website finds six results for ‘lesbian’. Four are actually about LGBT or LGBTQ+, with barely a mention of the actual word ‘lesbian’; one is a link to the Pride page; and the sixth is a link to a 2015 RCN and Public Health England guide for nurses about preventing suicide in LGB young people. There is a separate guide, from the same year, about suicide prevention in trans identifying young people. Clearly, ten years ago, people understood that the two groups have different needs.

The capture of the RCN has been swift. A 2011 guide to the then-new Equality Act doesn’t mention ‘trans’ at all- although it twice uses ‘gender’ when it actually means ‘sex’- but since then the RCN has gone from ‘treat everyone with respect’ (Respect Charter, 2017) to ‘being visible…adding pronouns to your email signature…wear badges, stickers…make it known that you’re an ally’ (Five ways to be a good LGBTQ+ ally, 2023). 

For the RCN, women’s health is no longer just about women; their paper on support for women’s reproductive health in the workplace (May 2024) positions actual women, adult females, as a subset of women: ‘When faced with women’s reproductive health concerns, many women, including those with female reproductive organs, may consider reducing their work hours or leaving work entirely’. Presumably the RCN would be happy to support ‘women’ who need to make a deposit in the sperm bank in work time.

‘Equality, diversity and inclusion in women’s health’, last updated in Feb 2025, is at pains to point out, in the introduction, that the ‘most vulnerable’ in society often have the greatest health needs, and links this directly to ‘our gender-diverse society’:

The guide to abortion care requires nurses to refer to trans identifying patients undergoing termination of pregnancy as ‘he’ or ‘Mr’, while the ‘trans and non-binary’ section of the guide to menstrual health advises nurses to introduce themselves with their pronouns and talks about discussing controlling menstrual bleeding with ‘those assigned female at birth who retain a uterus’. It also asks nurses to use the body part terminology chosen by the patient; I’m sure most nurses will be just thrilled to talk about ‘front holes’.

The RCN has been so thoroughly captured by gender ideology that they have lost sight of their core demographic and purpose. It’s disgraceful that they have refused to support a female nurse purely because she understands that sex is real and can’t be changed. They have forgotten their own legal update from 2021, that gender critical beliefs are worthy of respect, and have chosen instead to champion an ideology that harms all women, including nurses. I’m no longer proud to be a member.

A few snippets from the RCN website:

Guide to the Equality Act (from 2011):

Single Equality Act and healthcare | Royal College of Nursing

Pride In Nursing | Campaigns

RCN Respect Charter

Five ways to be a good LGBTQ+ ally | RCN Magazine | Royal College of Nursing

‘Conversations about gender are integral to patient-centred care’ | RCN Magazines | Royal College of Nursing

Legal update on the Maya Forstater case: 

Legal update: gender critical views and belief protection | RCN Magazines | Royal College of Nursing

Avoiding being a diversity wrecking ball

Our equity, diversity and inclusion strategy | Publications | Royal College of Nursing

Legal update on the Jaguar Landrover case: 

Legal update: protection and gender identity| Activate | Royal College of Nursing

Fair Care for Trans and Non-binary People

Termination of Pregnancy and Abortion | Publications | Royal College of Nursing

Promoting Menstrual Wellbeing

Care for trans patients: what nursing staff need to know | RCN Magazines

Scottish Lesbians, along with The Lesbian Project and LGB Alliance, submitted a written intervention to the For Women Scotland appeal heard at the UK Supreme Court on 26 and 27 November 2024. You can see resources for the case, including links to watch the recorded proceedings online, on the FWS website. Our submission can be found here and we are very grateful to its authors, barristers Karon Monaghan KC and Beth Grossman, as well as our solicitor, Peter Daly. Our legal team worked pro bono on our intervention, enabling the lesbian submission to be made. We’re writing here about our response to one important point made by the Scottish Government’s barrister, Ruth Crawford KC.

On Wednesday, we watched as Ms Crawford, representing the Scottish Ministers, attempted to negate all recognition of same-sex sexual orientation by arguing that heterosexual men become lesbians on acquisition of a Gender Recognition Certificate. Notwithstanding that our own intervention in the case states quite clearly that lesbians are not attracted to certificates, Ms Crawford suggested that such a transition shouldn’t be a problem for lesbians; we can simply refuse to date these men, in the same way that we may reject a woman on the basis of her personality or differing political opinions. She even, in a truly surreal sequence, appeared to be offering reassurance that we would continue to be lesbians despite our lack of attraction to men with certificates.

…a woman whose sex is recorded at birth, who is sexually orientated towards other women, whose sex is recorded as such at birth, becomes no less attracted to persons of the same sex, to women, because some in that class may be persons who have become women in consequence of a GRC.

For lesbian groups like ours, the Scottish Government’s position was laid bare. Should they prevail, we would cease to have our right of association as lesbians (and, indeed, our very sexuality) protected. Instead, we would need to scramble to find a different type of protection if we want to continue as a lesbian association. Ms Crawford proposed a solution using a different protected characteristic: that lesbian groups like ours could continue to operate, not on the basis of our shared sexual orientation, but on the protected philosophical belief of being gender critical. That is to say; we couldn’t be a lesbian association, but we could be a ‘gender critical lesbian association’.

Scottish Lesbians, for example, hold to the philosophical belief that sex is immutable. They would be entitled to exclude on that basis…

Gender critical beliefs are, of course, only recognised as protected beliefs thanks to the tenacity of Maya Forstater of Sex Matters.

From an operational point of view, what would it look like to run a ‘gender critical lesbian association’? Spotting a man in a group of women is easy; detecting someone’s internal belief system less so. In Scottish Lesbians we ensure we get to know lesbians who want to join us, for the safety and security of our group due to our potential to be targeted by men’s rights activists. We reject any thought of such screening for safety and security becoming a normalised part of running a lesbian group. And, of course, becoming a belief-based group hands a very simple road map to a male GRC holder wanting to access lesbian spaces; he needs only to say that he is a gender critical lesbian.

Lord Reed, in summing up this part of the Scottish Government’s case, identified a further problem:

…if I’m following what you’re saying, a transwoman [man, with a GRC] who is attracted to women is to be treated as a lesbian and can’t be excluded from a lesbian association unless they espouse a particular political doctrine. On the other hand, a transwoman [man] who doesn’t have a certificate and is attracted to women is to be treated on your submission as a heterosexual man. So the difference between them is pretty stark. And the only way the association can tell which category a person belongs to is by knowing whether they have a certificate, and that’s something that they can’t ask.

Ms Crawford denied that this catch 22 situation, where we can exclude a man without a GRC but not a man with one, and it’s against the law to ask that man if he has such a certificate, would have a chilling effect on lesbian groups. Apparently we can ask instead for a birth certificate, which those men with a GRC can change to show their birth sex as female. This back door method of ascertaining someone’s GRC status would seem to suggest that Ms Crawford is well aware that those men with GRCs are easily identifiable as men, regardless of what their birth certificate says.

We also object to the idea that only lesbians with a particular set of beliefs deserve to have their lesbian groups protected. What of lesbians who wouldn’t define themselves as gender critical, or aren’t immersed in the politics of the day, but prefer lesbian only spaces? What of the young lesbians whose first experiences of the dating world expose them to men saying they are lesbians, and whose college or workplace LGBT+ associations tell them they’re bigots if they won’t accept those men as partners? How do these women make their first steps towards joining a truly lesbian group, if the requirement is to turn up with a fully fledged set of gender critical beliefs in order to be admitted?

The case put forward by the Scottish Ministers opens up a conversation that we’ve been thinking about for some time. We’ve met and learned from many gender critical and feminist lesbians on our journey so far, but our campaigning has never been aimed at improving things for a select group of lesbians and leaving others to cope with having men in their spaces. Lesbians are same-sex attracted women; it’s the one characteristic that unites us. We won’t settle for anything other than protection on the grounds of our sexual orientation. Lesbians deserve our own spaces, associations, community and culture, whatever our political beliefs and however we choose to express them.

We’ve uploaded our written intervention to our website, and you can read it here.

It was a hard sell, asking lesbians if they would like to do some leafleting at Edinburgh Pride this year. In the five years since this account was written of lesbians’ experiences of a previous Edinburgh Pride, things have hardly improved for us, and many lesbians choose not to go anywhere near Pride in its current incarnation. 

So why did we want to go to Edinburgh Pride? We had a few reasons, and none of them to do with wanting to insinuate ourselves into the LGBTQIA++ party people community. It may be some people’s idea of a fun day out to congregate to listen to the greatest hits of Atomic Kitten while wearing nothing but gaffer tape across your nipples and receiving pats on the head from Maggie Chapman, but we’re obviously not taking the right drugs to enjoy that sort of thing. 

We wanted to raise lesbian visibility. Visibility of the old sort of lesbians, the ones who love and are attracted to other women and who have boundaries and whose oppression is based on the holding of those boundaries. We wanted to hand out some leaflets, because we think there are other lesbians who, for one reason or another, still attend Pride while keeping a low profile, or lesbians who are either just beginning to think about the issues facing us, or are not quite there yet. We weren’t kidding when we called ourselves Scottish Lesbians; we want to continue to grow and reach other lesbians in Scotland and maybe even one day have the time and headspace to work on some of the other issues facing lesbians, if we can get past the current existential crisis. It would be nice not to have to say ‘penis’ or ‘dick’ quite as often as we do now. 

On the day, four of us went to Edinburgh Pride, equipped with our Scottish Lesbians banner and our newly printed leaflets. The leaflets, deliberately, spelled out who we are here for, what we do, and how to contact us; our interest was in bringing our group to the attention of other lesbians, both via our leaflets and by being there and being visible in the first place. 

We stood at the side of the road as the Pride march went past, displaying our banner and handing out our leaflets. Unlike the experience of our sisters in 2019, we were not made to feel unsafe and we managed to hand out 400 of our leaflets. That’s not to say we were welcomed. A man shouted ‘Trans rights! Fuck off!’ through a megaphone at us. Another man tried to grab our leaflets from our hands. A group tried to screen us out by standing directly in front of us, holding a large trans flag to block us from view. Presumably they prefer lesbian erasure to lesbian visibility. 

The response from individual women was more muted. Many, we’re pleased to say, took our leaflets. One woman came back to return, politely, a leaflet to us. Another asked if we were ‘trans inclusive’. We were also asked if we were ‘TERFs’. We explained that we are a lesbian group, for lesbians. 

It was after the event that things escalated into abuse towards us, predictably, on Twitter. Here is a small selection of the tweets we saw about our leaflet, and about our presence at Pride.

The negative responses, both the muted ones on the day and the decidedly non-muted ones on Twitter, all had something in common. Our leaflet deliberately only mentioned lesbians, yet what everyone wanted to know about, or to object to, was the lack of mention of men. The woman who asked politely if we were ‘inclusive of trans women’ wanted to know if our group was open to males - strangely, no one who asked us about inclusivity was interested in whether we include trans-identifying females. 

The tweets were predictably abusive. Our group for same sex attracted women was ‘looney shit’ which should be nowhere near the ‘queer community’, according to one individual presumably too young to know anything of the history of the Pride movement. We were ‘ugly cunts’ and ‘dangerous’ according to another. We were ‘transphobic bullshit’. A slightly more polite tweet pointed out that lesbians are welcome at Pride, just not the ones who ‘limit’ or ‘rigidly define’ people - again, missing the point about how sexual orientation, boundaries and the oppression of lesbians work. 

It was a depressing litany of the same questions lesbians hear over and over again - ‘why don’t you include men?’, ‘why are you so rigid?’, ‘why aren’t you more open to not being a lesbian?’ In a modern Pride movement characterised by an ever-expanding acronym that includes even the most niche of identities, you’d think someone would propose a small corner available for women who love and are attracted to other women. But no. These self-defined progressives still can’t tolerate lesbians, and especially not lesbians who organise and go round in groups. 

Pride was once an occasion on which lesbians (and gay men) could march together in a show of strength and solidarity, refusing to be invisible in the face of homophobic culture, laws and politics. Now, Pride itself is the site of the homophobia and the misogyny. 

Footnote

We have written to First Minister John Swinney and Minister for Equalities Kaukab Stewart, both of whom attended Edinburgh Pride, to ask for their comments on the abuse we received. You can see our letters here. 

The Woman’s Hour segment featured an array of women who run all-inclusive bars and who see lesbian as an ‘umbrella term’. We wrote to Woman’s Hour to explain why this is problematic for lesbians. Here is the text of our letter.

To whom it may concern,

We listened with interest to the BBC Woman’s Hour segment on lesbian bars, broadcast on Friday, May 17th. The segment addressed the current dearth of bars or other social spaces for lesbian women, an issue which is very familiar to us as a group of lesbians. In recent years, as one of your guests, Joelle Taylor, pointed out, provision of social spaces for lesbians has been a ‘desert’.

The premise upon which this segment was based, therefore, was fairly uncontroversial. Lesbians have few to no dedicated spaces left.  Much more problematic was the implication that the guests and venues featured were in any way addressing this lack of lesbian spaces. We would go so far as to say that the guests you featured are symptomatic of, and indeed actively contributing to, a culture in which there is erasure of lesbian community and spaces.

You featured the proprietors of La Camionera, a new bar in London described as a ‘lesbian bar’. In this low-quality interview - which made for very poor radio due to the distracting background noises of DIY, work which of course could not be seen by your listeners - the proprietors were at pains to describe that their ‘lesbian’ bar is ‘inclusive’ of anyone who chooses to visit.

You also interviewed Jess, who runs Dirt Dykes, a cabaret night for ‘queer people of marginalised genders’. There was no explanation, given that lesbians were not the focus in this section, of the use of the word ‘dyke’, a word that is used positively by some lesbians but has also been used as a term of abuse. ‘Dyke’ is an epithet historically used for lesbians only, and does not denote anything to do with ‘gender’, so some probing into the use of this word would have been expected as a minimum for this interview.

Following the interviews with women who run these spaces, you featured the two women behind the Lesbian Bar Project, who have recently produced a documentary about the disappearance of lesbian bars. These guests explained that they see ‘lesbian’ as an ‘umbrella term’, and they spoke about ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ people and the outlawing of drag in Texas. Again, it was difficult to see any relevance of this section to lesbian women, other than that it provided yet another example of how the needs of lesbians have been completely subsumed into the needs of other groups of people. 

Lesbians are same-sex attracted women, and the listener would not have understood that from listening to your feature. Scottish Lesbians recently completed a piece of qualitative research asking lesbians about factors which help or hinder us in coming out and living as lesbians. You can see our research report here. The vast majority of respondents in our study talked about gender ideology and ‘queer’ culture as being problematic for lesbians. Lesbians described movingly the importance of having spaces in which to meet other lesbians, and having lesbian role models, in order to feel confident and able to live as lesbians. Young lesbians told us that they struggled to find any lesbian spaces or community. 

One member of Scottish Lesbians describes the importance of lesbian spaces from her own experience: ‘Personally speaking, having a lesbian space as a young woman helped give me the confidence to be 'out'. It showed me that other ways of living, relationships and family were possible and I learned that from my lesbian elders. The lesbian disco I went to was a safe space to be myself away from the male gaze. These single sex spaces were so important and I worry about younger lesbians who don't have the opportunity I had.’

Your segment on lesbian bars was unfortunately symptomatic of the challenges facing lesbians. By uncritically interviewing women who misuse the word ‘lesbian’ to mean, in fact, ‘anyone’, you helped promulgate a harmful misunderstanding that there has been a resurgence in spaces for lesbians, when in fact the opposite is true. Many lesbians self-exclude from spaces such as the ones featured. Opposition to the misuse of ‘lesbian’ as an ‘umbrella term’ was glossed over and barely acknowledged at all in the piece. 

The framing of ‘lesbian’ as an ‘inclusive’ or ‘umbrella’ term is lesbophobic. We are women who love and are attracted to other women. Perhaps, as a follow up to this piece, Woman’s Hour could speak to some lesbians and explore why, in 2024, we are still subject to our same-sex attraction being framed as something that needs to be more ‘inclusive’.

Yours, 

Lorraine and Jenny

On behalf of Scottish Lesbians

Let Women Speak Edinburgh, organised to take place in the week in which the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 began to be enforced, contained the usual mix of elements hostile to the idea of women being allowed to voice opinions in public. There was containment of attendees by the police, with masked protestors allowed to surround women for the duration of the event, bellowing slogans through megaphones and standing face to face with police officers as they did so. There was the presence of the Cabaret Against the Hate Speech group, with its sound system providing a blunt instrument to literally drown out the sound of women's voices, accompanied by frontman Tom Harlow's carelessly out of tune singing and interspersed with quasi-religious sermonising from guest speakers, one of whom declared, 'Blessed are the trans people'. It barely appeared to matter to organisers what was being said or sung, as long as it was performed loudly and disruptively over the top of women speaking.

We attended Let Women Speak with our Scottish Lesbians flag, attempting to increase visibility of organised lesbian resistance to gender identity theory. Our flag flew alongside another lesbian flag, depicting a labrys and held aloft by a friend and fellow Scottish lesbian campaigner.

Our presence as a lesbian group was, predictably, criticised on Twitter/X after the event:

Like many other groups of women and lesbians, we've grown used to far-fetched, untrue, unsupported accusations that we're on the far right. It's nothing more than a form of abuse whenever these messages and comments are sent to us.

Slurs made towards our group are one thing. As annoying as they are, they don't have quite the same potential for far-reaching damage as the signs saying 'Dykes Love Trans Tits' and 'Dykes Love Girl Dick'. These signs are aimed at all lesbians and not only that, they are aimed at undermining us as lesbians, by directly targeting our sexual orientation. The references to 'trans tits' and 'girl dick' are references to male bodies. The makers of these signs want to communicate that, on pain of being seen as bigots, lesbians must somehow discover a desire for the bodies of men who want to be seen as lesbians. This is the same argument that was put forward by former Stonewall CEO, Nancy Kelley, in her notorious message likening our sexual orientation to 'prejudice'. The screenshot below is taken from a BBC article.

Last year, we produced our research into lesbian experiences of coming out. You can download our research report here. Lesbians who took part told us about many different factors which can influence experiences of coming out as a lesbian. The main themes we found in the data were related to reactions from friends and family, the importance of lesbian role models and representation, the impact of pornography, and the impact of gender ideology. These were only the main themes and lesbians also told us about many other factors that had influenced their experiences of coming out, such as workplace cultures, the law and so on.

Coming out and living life as a lesbian can still involve a lifetime of dealing with complex and numerous pressures not to be a lesbian. Some of these pressures may be benign, at least in intent; for example, the parent who worries about what life may have in store for us and wishes that we could settle down with a man instead. These pressures can be damaging enough, however well-meaning the intention behind them.

By no stretch of the imagination can the influence of porn culture be seen as benign. Lesbian sexuality is portrayed in a completely distorted and degrading way and served up for male gratification in a massively profitable industry in which, were the protagonists to acknowledge the existence of real lesbians at all, we would be seen merely as collateral damage. 

Into the mix of existing pressure on lesbians, and increasingly difficult to screen out in recent years, has been the attempt by gender ideologists and queer theory adherents to co-opt and redefine lesbian sexual orientation. This attempt has in places been reminiscent of porn culture; everything is reduced to body parts (hence ‘trans tits’ and ‘girl dick’) and lesbians are encouraged to refocus our desires for the gratification of males. Friends, family and popular culture can all be sources of instruction to ‘be kind’ to ‘vulnerable’ groups and not to hurt anyone’s feelings by recognising a man as a man. There is pressure and division within lesbian community itself, and we lose a potential role model each time yet another celebrity lesbian claims not to be able to tell men from women. 

We are encouraged to question all the things that we previously thought we understood. Men are not men, they are lesbians trapped in men’s bodies (a claim oddly familiar to those of us of a certain vintage, from nights in the pub in the 1980s). Lesbian is an umbrella term, sheltering anyone who wants to be seen as a lesbian. Lesbian culture is thriving, and who wouldn’t want there to be lots more lesbians than ever before? To fail to broaden your perspective and consider a heterosexual relationship is to literally deny someone else’s existence. On and on it goes. 

For lesbians, the battle is always centred on our most personal relationships. It’s always about sex, and specifically it’s always about getting us into sexual relationships with men. It’s not surprising that so many young lesbians are choosing to identify themselves out of womanhood rather than play along with this coercion. 

‘Trans tits’ and ‘girl dick’ are simply the latest crude examples of a very long line of devices used with the intention of changing the sexual orientation of lesbians. The messaging is more pernicious for its insistence that magical processes can turn men into lesbians. They cannot, and to pretend otherwise is kind to no-one, least of all young or newly-out lesbians struggling to find community.   

‘Far right funding’ has become a bit of a running joke among gender critical groups; not because we’d like some, but because the lie that we receive it serves to obscure reality so very effectively.

We, like so many of the women we know, are running our organisation from our living room, in our own time, with our own money, which we have saved from the full time jobs we do to pay the bills. We have to pay for our own website, campaign materials, meetings, badges. The grant system that funds these things, and so much more, for other organisations (LGBTQI+ groups including Scottish Trans and Equality Network shared nearly £3.5 million in funding from the Scottish Government, via the Equality and Human Rights Fund, in 2021-24) would be extremely unlikely to look favourably on single-sex groups like ours. The fact that we have to fund everything from our own pockets is effectively a tax on women defending our ability to define ourselves as women and, in our case, to meet and organise as lesbians.

So, there is no far-right funding. Of course there isn’t. There is no funding at all for any women who want to defend women’s rights. Not a penny. So why do so many people persist in claiming there are untold millions pouring into our bank accounts?

Well, it’s a lot easier to imagine a shadowy financial puppet master pulling the strings of women in Scotland than it is to see what’s actually happening: women are doing astonishingly well at fighting gender ideology despite having nothing more than our own resources, and frequently while facing active hostility from the Scottish Government. Why accept that women are capable of organising so effectively, when you can instead attribute their achievements to the ‘far right’?

The ‘far right’ label also demonises and dehumanises women. If we’ve joined the ‘far right’ and are receiving money from them we can safely be regarded as beyond the pale. We can be ignored, insulted, assaulted, and have our reputations trashed; indeed, we can’t have much of a reputation to start with, if we’re taking money from nazis. We can be described in dehumanising terms, as TERFs, trash, or bigots. 

Calling women ‘far right’ allows our opponents to attribute other ‘far right’ beliefs to us. A belief in the reality of sex means we must also be racist, homophobic, and misogynist, and fighting for women’s rights is nothing more than a ‘cloak’ for these prejudices. No-one needs to listen to us, or engage with our arguments, because we’re nazis and everyone knows they’re bad. Indeed, we must be prevented from speaking at all, and the ‘far right’ label appears to justify any amount of male aggression to achieve that end. Our meetings and gatherings become fair game for protesters trying to drown us out, intimidate us, or make graphic threats of sexual violence, all while claiming the moral high ground.

So of course people who oppose us want to shout ‘far right’. The alternative is to face up to reality: hard working women fighting to maintain the protections gained by our foremothers, and doing so from our own pockets and in our own time. As any feminist who has ever started anything for the benefit of women knows, sooner or later a stark choice needs to be made: dilute your message and abandon your original purpose in exchange for mainstream financial support, or prepare to dig deep and find your own resources to keep going. We’re doing it ourselves, and we’re proud of that.

I attended the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday, for a feminist round table event, organised by WRN Scotland, wearing my ‘Scottish Lesbians’ badge. On entering the building I was told, by a very polite and apologetic security officer, that ‘Scottish Lesbians’ is a political message and the Parliament doesn’t allow those (despite it being home to MSPs from six different political parties). I removed the badge, put it in my bag, and went through to the lobby- where I was checked into the event by a man wearing a rainbow lanyard. 

It seems that the rainbow, universally seen as a (distinctly political) symbol of support for LGBTQ+ people, is welcome in the heart of Scottish democracy, but the two little words ‘Scottish Lesbians’ are not.

Once I’d recovered from the explosion in my irony meter I started to think again about how we came by our name. When Lorraine and I started the group nearly two years ago we gave careful thought to what to call ourselves. We’re lesbians, and we’re in Scotland, so Scottish Lesbians seemed like an obvious choice. It’s purely descriptive, and perhaps that’s why it seemed so ridiculous that I wasn’t allowed to wear it inside the Parliament. It gives no clue to our political stance, or indeed our stance on anything. For all the security officer knew, I might have been promoting a very niche skiffle band.

We felt a bit presumptuous going for a ‘national’ type name, and we confidently expected other lesbians to contact us and tell us that we should join their long established Scottish group instead, but it never happened. It turns out we’re it.

We considered adding in further words to clarify what we are all about, but we didn’t want a name that would tie us to the current issues around gender ideology. Things for lesbians are always a bit of a challenge; if it’s not gender, it’s porn, or compulsory heterosexuality, or reproductive rights, or general lesbophobia. If the gender stuff went away tomorrow there would still be a need for a group or organisation looking out for the rights of lesbians.

We also wanted a name that any lesbian could be comfortable with. Some have been seduced by gender ideology and would, at present, consider us beyond the pale; but when the whole edifice inevitably comes tumbling down and they’re looking for a group that advocates for actual lesbians we want them to look again at us. We need to hold the door open for all lesbians- not the high profile ones who have happily chucked us under the bus, obviously, but the ones who have been told they are bigots if they don’t accept men, or that they must *be* men if they fancy women. ‘Scottish Lesbians’ is flexible enough to do that. 

So, although our name is very simple, there’s a lot to it. It was chosen with great care, to be non-political, for lesbians now and, hopefully, in the future. We look forward to the day when we’re not fighting for the absolute basics, such as being able to define ‘lesbian’ as being applicable only to women, or being able to attend meetings in our Parliament without our very name raising objections. 

Yesterday’s events in Parliament, where an MP on one side of the House used her ‘allyship’ to berate a Member on the other side, got me thinking about allies. ‘Allyship matters’ said Alicia Kearns, while acknowledging that she was speaking as a straight woman. The MP she berated is gay and she was giving him a telling off for defining himself as LGB rather than LGBT. What, then, does allyship mean? What’s the point of it? Who is it for? 

Well, not Neale Hanvey, clearly, who was told in no uncertain terms that he’s the wrong kind of gay. 

Allyship is seen as an unequivocally good thing, something all right-thinking people should aim to be. Straight people are encouraged to be allies. There are guides to doing it properly. Stonewall promotes allyship- they run an ‘LGBTQ+ Allies Programme’ to help employers ‘transform workplaces for the better’. In 2022, Manchester Pride produced a seven point guide for allies attending Pride. Politicians of all stripes are falling over themselves to claim allyship. Allies are everywhere.

LGB people needed support from sympathetic friends to get rid of Section 28, gain the protection of the Equality Act, and achieve marriage equality. Scottish Lesbians recently had brilliant support from feminist friends who organised a protest at Glasgow Women’s Library against their showcasing of a lesbophobic zine.

Why, then, does the whole ‘ally’ thing worry me? 

I think it comes down to two, intertwined, things. The word ‘ally’ itself, and the actions of people who claim to be allies. 

‘Ally’ implies a very formal, possibly military, relationship. Allies are in a transactional relationship, teaming up over a single issue, generally where there is mutual benefit or a common goal. ‘Ally’ isn’t synonymous with ‘friend’, and it doesn’t imply respect, or liking, or indeed altruism. It suggests there’s something in it for the person claiming allyship. Of course, for employers, there is- a strong show of allyship means lots of lovely equality points from Stonewall.

‘Ally’ also implies that there is a weakness about being LGB, that we need stronger people to defend us and prop us up in some way. It’s infantilising. It takes our voice away. Some straight people claiming allyship feel empowered and entitled to speak for us and over us, rather as Alicia Kearns MP did in Parliament. It has been a very useful tool to misogynists and bullies, who claim it as their justification for aggressive language and thought policing of anyone perceived to be on the ‘wrong’ side. Abusers can now identify as supporters.

Alicia was also, of course, only being an ally to one part of the rainbow alphabet. She wasn’t concerned with supporting gay people, only trans. The use of ‘LGBTQ+ ally’ reinforces the forced teaming that sees homosexuals and bisexuals- people with a minority sexual orientation- shackled to people claiming a minority ‘gender identity’. This is not uncommon. People claiming allyship often mean that they support trans people. They either fail to understand, or don’t care, that there is a fundamental conflict between the rights of LGB people to be same-sex attracted and the rights of trans people to identify as they choose.  

Because Stonewall have promoted it as an unequivocally good thing, and because no-one wants to be seen as a bigot, allyship has been a very useful tool in forcing acceptance of gender ideology. It’s been embedded so successfully in British institutions that allyship can now be used as a wedge to introduce more and more extreme ideas- support puberty blockers or you’re not a good ally. Support breast binders for pubescent girls. Support surrogacy. Support fetishes. I wonder how many allies realise exactly what they’re supporting when they put their pronouns in their emails. 

Allyship is also very performative. You can wear a badge, show your pronouns, berate bigots and wrong-thinkers, and induce grovelling apologies from celebrities. Our recent First Minister could hardly talk about trans people without a box of tissues at hand. There are depressingly many high profile lesbians who are prepared to vocally express their allyship with trans identifying men, but who strangely don’t seem to have got round to finding them suitable as life partners- although, of course, they’re more than happy for the rest of us to learn to appreciate the shenis. 

I’m sure there are lots of people out there who are claiming allyship with the best of intentions. They genuinely want to help people who have historically had a very hard time. Imagine a world in which this translated to behaviour like listening to the experiences and the knowledge of people in minority groups, rather than talking over them. All too often, ‘ally’ (as trained by Stonewall) reminds us of other words starting with ‘a’. Such as ‘arrogance’ and ‘asshattery’. 

We’ve been told several times, mainly by men, that we have missed the point of the comic, that we’re stupid, self-centred and middle class, that we don’t understand satire, that we don’t speak for all lesbians, and, of course, that we’re transphobic.

These men are entitled to their opinions, but to say we have missed the point of the comic strongly implies that they haven’t read it. However, just in case, I decided to do a bit of a deeper dive.

The cover, with its subtitle about TRANSPHOBIA, sets the reader up to understand that this comic contains something BAD.

The trigger warning on the next page reinforces to readers that the comic contains depictions of BAD THINGS. The author is anxious to make it clear that, while she is reporting these BAD THINGS, she does not herself think BAD THINGS. She’s so anxious to be seen as a non-transphobe that she invites readers to police her opinions for her, and gives her email address so they can let her know if she has got something wrong.

The next couple of pages set the scene, depicting the ‘war’ over the reform of the Gender Recognition Act and the protests by lesbians opposed to this. The author portrays these lesbians (and other women) as ranty and hysterical, opposing a change which would simply make it ‘easy’ and ‘cheap’ for people to identify as trans.

This page shows the same older, white, grey-haired, lesbian who was previously expressing BAD THINGS about gender recognition reform. She cowers as she is showered in bananas and aubergines. She’s expressing fear at men self-IDing as women and lesbians, because she is afraid that those lesbians will have…P-P-PENISES! She doesn’t want to have sex with a P-P-PENIS because she’s afraid of P-P-PENISES, and she’s being mocked for that fear.

The writing of ‘penis’ as p-p-penis indicates that this lesbian is intended to be a comic character- which is probably why the comic’s supporters choose to frame it as satire- who is also weak, nervous, or just not very bright. The ‘TERF is a slur’ slogan on her t-shirt hints that she lacks a sense of humour. The use of bananas and aubergines as penis proxies just serve to confirm that this lesbian, previously shown trying to defend the sexual boundaries of lesbianism, is to be regarded as a figure of fun. 

The author here is framing lesbianism not as a sexual orientation, an attraction to and love of women, but as a fear of penises. She is playing on at least two homophobic tropes: that homosexuals have a ‘genital fetish’ because they refuse to consider as potential partners those people who have the wrong things in their pants, and that homosexual people are uniquely obsessed with sex. For good measure she hints at the trope that gender critical women in general are obsessed with genitals. She holds lesbians who hold those opinions in contempt.

Having framed lesbians with gender critical beliefs in such a thoroughly negative way, the author goes on to question why she does not feel motivated to join them in defending ‘woman’ and ‘lesbian’ as ‘identities’. She spends the rest of the comic explaining her thoughts- her sincerely held beliefs- which, in contrast to those of terfy lesbians, are not intended to be taken as humour or satire.

Her views on men being welcomed into lesbianism are hinted at on page 10, where she berates lesbians for wanting ‘more lesbians’ yet policing lesbianism so rigidly that ‘only a few women could qualify’. Having clear and universally recognised boundaries to our sexual orientation is clearly a BAD THING.

She goes further on the following page, explaining that women already come in all different shapes and sizes and we should be happy to expand that a bit to include women with man-shaped bodies. Women already have a million different experiences, so there’s plenty of room to add some male experiences. Men who want to identify into womanhood are invited to ‘come on in!’ Having boundaries to our sex class is also a BAD THING.

But the really egregious lesbophobia appears on the next page, illustrated with the author holding a giant aubergine. That p-p-penis? It’s just another body part, like a little floppy arm or a vestigial tail. It’s no different to a leg, or an ear. It’s got ‘cultural meanings’, but they can be changed. How do we change them? By telling women who have the wrong idea about penises to shut up.

Women don’t have penises? Transphobe! Other people’s parts are none of your business! 

Previous penis-related trauma? Don’t you dare weaponise that to tell men they can’t be women!

I don’t think any lesbians see penises as ‘abstract’ or ‘not attached to people’; on the contrary, the vast majority of us are well aware that penises are very firmly attached to men. However, the author is absolutely determined to get penises into lesbianism. She wants us to focus on the whole person, not the penis. To see the woman, not the dick. To become homogenderal, not homosexual. 

Following this, the humour is back. The author offers a suggestion of how she sees the future if TERFs ‘win’: internment camps. Apparently the only alternative to full, enthusiastic, flag waving acceptance of men into lesbianism is the imprisonment of trans-identifying people on, er, the Isle of Man, which I really hope is an intentional joke. 

At this point, the lesbian TERF is looking quite jolly, having got rid of all those pesky p-p-penises. However, trans people have always existed, the author tells her, and those people who think the BAD THINGS need to learn that talking about their concerns is ‘giving voice to hatred’. Debate is bad. The only thing the sensible, non-transphobic lesbian can do is stand with her trans sisters, and shut up. 

Any young lesbian picking this comic up will learn that to follow her sexual orientation and exclude men is to be a BAD PERSON. Any trans-identifying man reading it will learn that he is welcome in lesbianism, and that those lesbians who say no to him are bigots deserving only of contempt and ridicule. They’re frightened of penis, because they haven’t changed the ‘cultural meanings’ they hold for it. Once they do that, as the author apparently has, they can enjoy a vastly expanded pool of be-penised lesbians- and the erasure of our sexual orientation will be complete.