Korea is a difficult place to be female. Its president Yoon Suk-yeol ran on an explicitly anti-feminist platform, claiming feminism “blocks healthy relationships” between men and women. You’ll find similar language in the Korean equivalent of the manosphere, where popular influencers describe feminism as a “mental illness”.

As female participation in education and employment has increased, so has men’s resentment. Rates of domestic violence are alarmingly high, and the country’s standards of female grooming are so severe, “Korean beauty” has become an international export, characterised by exhausting (and expensive) multi-step routines. Women are desired but also despised: the insult kimchinyeo (“kimchi bitch”) suggests women are spoiled, materialistic parasites seeking to live off men. Small wonder a minority of women are drawn to a drastic repudiation of men.

But when the 4B women proclaim their independence, that too is received with hostility. Women who visibly signal their disinterest in men by cutting their hair and rejecting makeup are subject to open abuse and harassment. In 2016, a man stabbed a woman to death in a Seoul public toilet and told police that he did it “because women have always ignored me”. (Police declined to take the perpetrator at his word and treat it as a hate crime.) This, of course, only serves to vindicate the 4B women’s approach.

In an onerously patriarchal culture, Korean women are increasingly opting out of marriage and motherhood: the country has the lowest birthrate in the world, with an average of less than one child per woman of reproductive age. And 65% of Korean women (48% of Korean men) say they want no children at all. So while it’s very likely that there are more women claiming to follow 4B than there are doing so in practice, there are even more women again whose lives reflect at least some of the movement’s core refusals.

In that context, it’s harder to see 4B as a perverse form of feminist extremism. Rather, it’s the utopian fringe of a situation where relations between men and women have broken down so calamitously that the future survival of the nation is in doubt: 4B represents an ideal of female-only existence, where male violence and sexual and domestic exploitation can be eliminated by simply ridding yourself of the males who do these things. Not just the eschewal of men, but the creation of a parallel world by and for women.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that one of the reactions to Trump’s re-election has been a flurry of young American women declaring their affiliation to 4B. Like South Korea’s Yoon, Trump has positioned himself as a defender of traditional masculine values (and unlike Yoon, Trump has been found liable in a civil court for sexual battery). Kamala Harris made considerably less play of her gender than Hilary Clinton did in her 2016 campaign, but nonetheless, this was an election where for many, sexual politics were on the ballot.

Trump’s first administration laid the groundwork for the appeal of Roe vs Wade, enabling individual states to remove legal access to abortion: much of America is now a dangerous place to have a miscarriage or termination. Embracing 4B is a way to “show people that actions have consequences”, a 21-year-old adherent from Georgia told the Washington Post. “Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion. They can’t have both.” What she’s describing is essentially a sex strike, an idea with roots going back into antiquity and the Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata.

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In that play, the womenfolk organise to withhold intercourse until men bring an end to their war. It’s a comedy because the scenario is presented as inherently ludicrous — for one thing, the women find it as much of a struggle to contain their libidos as the men do — but crucially, in the end the women win. Students of the history of female separatism might find Lysistrata’s ending the most absurd thing about it. Through the 20th century, the feminist movement in America and Europe gave birth to various forms of women-only societies, and all of them seemed to end in failure.

In 1975, Leeds Revolutionary Feminists published a pamphlet with the deliberately provocative title Love Your Enemy? “We… think that all feminists can and should be political lesbians,” declared the opening statement. “Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified-woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women.” Heterosexual sex itself was suspect: “every woman who engages in penetration bolsters the oppressor and reinforces the class power of men.”

Some women — including Julie Bindel — have written about how liberating they found the idea that they could choose their sexuality, but while this may be personally true for them, it is probably a “choice” that is easier to make when your underlying sexual orientation is pointing in the right direction. In a recent article about 4B, for example, the singer Janelle Monae is offered as an example of someone who has supported the idea of a sex strike against men. It is probably relevant that Monae is a self-described pansexual.

While bisexual women probably do have the option to round themselves up or down to lesbian or straight depending on circumstance, and lesbians have routinely been coerced into tolerating heterosexual relationships by social norms, female libido is not universally negotiable. The most generous interpretation of Love Your Enemy? is that its authors had mistaken their own experiences for generalities: the liberation they found in rejecting men would be far harder to come by for women whose sexualities were stubbornly straight.

That made political lesbianism contentious for heterosexual women, who took the victim-blaming implication that their inherent desires made them responsible for the abuse men inflicted on them. It was also unpopular with some lesbians, who were adamant that there was nothing voluntary about their orientation — and resented their sexuality being lumped together with celibate straights. A movement that claimed to elevate lesbianism could be seen to have reduced it to a lifestyle label. The proponents of lesbian feminism rejected those criticisms. But when the idea was put into practice, it didn’t necessarily look the way they had envisaged it.

The Van Dykes were a troop of leather-clad lesbians who cut a peripatetic sweep across America in the late Seventies. Under the charismatic leadership of Heather Van Dyke (the name was self-chosen, for self-explanatory reasons), they travelled between patches of “women’s land”, minimising contact with men as much as possible. The writer Ariel Levy describes Heather Van Dyke as “a kind of lesbian Joseph Smith, driving around the continent looking for the promised land with a band of wives and ex-wives and future wives in tow”.

Perhaps inevitably, this was a circumstance that fostered power-play and eventually sadomasochism: while the theorists of lesbian feminism had believed that removing the penis from the equation would remove the brutality from sex, the Van Dykes set about vigorously reinstating it via whips, chains and dog collars. Eventually, the Van Dykes dissolved. Few could sustain their commitment to separatism. Life got in the way of ideals: one of the Van Dykes resumed talking to men after finding a new female partner who already had two sons.

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For straight women, a man-free life is even harder to maintain, though the prospect of doing so remains tantalisingly appealing. “I decentered men. Decentering my desire for men is harder,” lamented an article in the New York Times earlier this year. The author no longer believed marriage and motherhood were the twin pillars of a successful existence, but she remained, to her own disappointment, stubbornly attracted to men. You can try to subordinate your orientation to your politics, but in the end your orientation will likely win. It’s probably a mistake to make your principles the hostage of desires you’ll never be able to change.

On that count, the 4B movement is doomed to fail. You can find YouTube videos of 4B recidivists describing their enthusiastic return to heterosexual femininity: prodigal wives, safely back in the fold. And 4B itself can be seen as a reinvention of chastity culture under the colours of feminism. In one gloating response, Brandon Morse of the Right-wing media organisation Red State said of 4B: “They went so Left they started going Right, claiming they’re going to stop being hoes and won’t put out until men respect them. That’s what we’ve been saying you should do all along.”

But Morse and his brethren should pay attention to the demographics of South Korea, and check their complacency. The appeal of 4B may be nothing but a blip in the trending topics for American women, but the social currents it was born of — falling marriage and birth rates, and rising male resentment at women’s emancipation — are already embedded in the US. However hard it is for women to stop liking men, if men don’t like women, refusal becomes the only rational female choice.

This is a company that has been awarded government funding. On Monday, it was reported that Scotland’s national arts quango is reviewing REIN’s £85,000 award, “because its hardcore content is more explicit than initially indicated”. The publicity suggests that three performers will be doing an explicit sex scene — actual, non-simulated sex. Which perhaps explains why the company is seeking applicants with “experience of porn and sex work”.

These applicants must be “Dyke identifying performers”, but the list of sub-genres is long. It is topped by trans dykes, followed by, among others: poly(amorous), stud, baby, bi, asexual, fag, daddy, and princess dykes. In fact, the site clarifies that anyone who has “a relationship to the word DYKE” can apply. That is, anyone at all.

This is pornography, postmodern style. Here, lesbian terminology is being subverted beyond all recognition. And there’s no reckoning with the thorny question at the heart of the endeavour: is it even possible for lesbians to produce “ethical pornography” for the consumption of other lesbians, when “girl on girl action” is one of the most popular genres among men?

For the libertarian, porn is about freedom; for the libertine, fulfilment; for religious conservatives, it is immoral and depraved. Many feminists, like me, see it as misogynistic propaganda. But if my 40 years of researching the industry have taught me anything, it’s that porn is just big business, one of the most profitable industries on the planet. Annual revenue has been estimated at up to $90 billion, nine times more than Hollywood’s revenue.

And unfortunately, the lesbian market is just too small to be attractive to the key players in porn. Therefore anything in the “girl on girl” genre must, if it is to generate profit, appeal to men.

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As Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, tells me: “I think the industry phrase ‘girl on girl’ is key… Porn producers I have interviewed over decades never talked about making ‘lesbian porn’.” He spells it out: “The target audience is straight men.”

“But wait”, I hear you cry, “loads of women love watching porn!” In fact, in 2017, an article published in Marie Claire claimed that women were more likely than men to watch lesbian porn. But the research was conducted by YouPorn, which is owned by the same businessman whose portfolio boasts MindGeek, Pornhub and RedTube. Another recent article claims that women are “by far” more likely to access lesbian themed porn. The source? Pornhub, which has more than 40,000 lesbian porn videos in its archives. Obviously, it’s in the site’s best interests to suggest that porn is consumed and enjoyed primarily by those most harmed by it.

It’s tempting for porn apologists to view lesbian porn as Mexican sexologist Karimme Reyes does: as “an egalitarian sexual encounter in which the enjoyment of the other person and vice versa is very much taken care of. There is no focus on the obsession for penetration and you can see an enjoyment in different forms of pleasure for all tastes.”

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But this ideal doesn’t match reality. I’ve been on three different porn sets over the years, and have spoken to directors, “minders”, and on occasion performers. On one, the team was shooting entirely lesbian porn; I asked if the performers were lesbians. “Yes, of course,” came the reply. And yet, each and every performer was accompanied by a pimp describing himself as her “boyfriend”. One performer, an actual lesbian, told me she absolutely hated doing a scene involving “strap-on anal” (not the most common or popular sexual practice among lesbians). She also told me she had suffered a vaginal tear because her female co-performer, who had never had sex with a woman before, had no idea how to penetrate her.

Typical titles of “lesbian” videos on the big porn sites include: “Cheerleader seduced by teachers”; “Mummy wants her pussy eaten”; “Two hot babes, fisting”. There’s an entire “Wild scissoring” genre, and one for lesbian threesomes, lesbian squirt parties, and Japanese lesbians on heat.

It’s worth comparing these titles to those on For Her Tube, which platforms content supposedly by women, for women. There are more than 3 million videos in the lesbian section. Some titles sound tamer than others: “I think about sex with a woman,” or “Two gorgeous housewives, giving into their wild, lesbian urges”. The usual fisting and giant sex toy themes are there too, and even a naughty lesbian nun. Then there is some hardcore sadomasochism. It’s not dissimilar to what you would find in mainstream porn, which is guided by male fantasies.

Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, does not believe that lesbians are being targeted as consumers: “There are over 143,000 videos on Pornhub under the lesbian category. In 2023, according to Pornhub stats, ‘Lesbian’ was the most searched term,” she says. “We know from studies that men are the main consumers of porn so clearly these videos are made for men.”

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It would be nice to think that lesbians could enjoy artisanal porn produced by a collective of “DYKES”, all of whom have happy experiences on set, only doing stuff that really turns them on, with regular health checks. Erika Lust, the self-described “ethical porn producer”, claims to promote the rights and fair treatment of performers: she is a big fan of the role of the intimacy coordinator — so much so that at last year’s Oscars she called for a new category: “Best Intimacy Coach in a Motion Picture”. But intimacy coordinators are used on film sets during scenes involving nudity and simulated sex; porn, of course, involves actual sex. As does the REIN production, which similarly sets a lot of store by the intimacy coordinator.

And yet, this project conspicuously ignores the fact that the vast majority of “lesbian” porn is violent, degrading or painful; like all other genres, it is defined by domination, sadism, and brutal, endless penetration. Because, to cut through in a saturated market, porn producers will objectify female bodies in every imaginable way, for the sexual pleasure of predominantly male audiences.

The inherent misogyny of porn is a key reason why so many lesbians tend not to consume it. It’s not made for us. I don’t believe that women have sex with each other wearing five-inch spike heels and brandishing three-inch sparkling false talons: this is how men fantasise about women getting it on. There is evidence, however, that lesbians watch gay male porn — perhaps because it is the only kind free from misogyny.

Does that mean it’s impossible for porn featuring women to ever be ethical? To go back to the Scottish project: what if they really did manage to just hire lesbians — who were totally comfortable with everything they were doing during the performance? And what if there were only lesbians in the audience?

It’s still exploitation. The porn industry profits from non-consensual acts and causing harm to performers. And even if the spectators are lesbians, it doesn’t make the dynamics safer. I once interviewed female strippers at a since-closed bar in Soho, and many told me how much they hated stripping in front of crowds of baying lesbians, some pushing banknotes into the dancers’ underwear. Women who seek enjoyment from the sexual debasement of other women are not dissimilar from their male counterparts. Live sex on stage is prostitution, not, as REIN might have us believe, art.

But enough of my mash note. Dr Stock is such a fascinating figure because she represents everything about being a lesbian that men — no matter how much they stamp their massive feet in their stripper heels — can never possess. It’s nothing to do with pornography and lipstick, the twin pillars of this strange new faith; she highlights the profound emptiness of their performative fantasy of femininity.

Where once society was defined by Penis Envy, Lesbian Envy is today’s driving force. So much performative thespian-lesbianism has taken place in popular culture that you’d think every woman was at it, but if we regard the history of lesbianism, most of it has gone on in secret.

Many lesbians point out that, historically, there has been little overlap between the problems and pleasures of lesbians and homosexual men. Men are reviled for it in the Scriptures and have had laws passed against them, while women are more likely to simply be ignored, culminating in Queen’s Victoria’s refusal to believe that lesbianism existed. Yet, at the same time, homosexuals had great power in the Greek and Roman empires, while lesbians certainly didn’t. While Oscar Wilde could be a tragic martyr to The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, lesbianism has long been easy to reduce to titillation and entertainment. If you admire the female form, the onanist logic goes, why not admire it times-two? And, unlike with straight porn, there won’t be any well-hung male hanging around to make you feel bad about yourself.

This can lead a certain type of man to feel that, even for them, lesbianism can be a little something on the side, even something which adds to their own appeal. In the Nineties, I had an idea for a Bateman-style cartoon that portrayed a man being shunned by his contemporaries: The Man Whose Wife Wouldn’t Do Girl-On-Girl. It was around this time, during my second marriage, when I fell for a woman and my second husband gave me “permission” to see her, even doing a humorous routine for his friends: “Lesbians make such fascinating wives!” He wasn’t laughing when I left him for her, whereupon I uttered the classic line to the Evening Standard gossip column: “Miss Raven and I are not lesbians — we are simply in love.”

I wasn’t being super-straight or shy in saying this. Rather, I was aware that being the capricious creature I am, I didn’t feel morally worthy of bearing a name which brave women had suffered for, simply because I was following a whim which I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be indulging in for long. (Sure enough, I soon ran off with her brother.) Today, by contrast, straight people stampede to call themselves queer, so prevalent is the idea that “heterosexual equals bad” and “homosexual equals good”. There are so many young women holding up their baby boys on social media and pronouncing them “Gay!” that I’ve often thought that if a certain sort of young woman could be guaranteed to have a gay baby, the moribund birthrate of the West would shoot up.

But lesbianism has been ditched by those with the most claim to it and who could be most inspired by its history — a dirty word among young girls who prefer to be acceptably queer or trans. As the young American pop and reality TV star JoJo Siwa said last year: “I don’t like the word [lesbian] itself. It’s just like a lot. At the end of the day, that’s what I am… but it’s like the word moist. It’s just like… ugh!”

Meanwhile, contemporary gender activists do their very best to make lesbianism sound not “sexy fun”, as it was from Tallulah to Tatu, but just another workaday drudgery of dealing with the worst sort of pervy, grope men. As no less than John Hopkins University this month noted in its online glossary of LGTBQ terms, a “lesbian” is someone who is a “non-man attracted to non-men”.

Amid this erasure of women from lesbianism, there was something particularly lovely — and not just for lechers — about the case of the lesbian beauty queens Miss Argentina Mariana Varela and Miss Puerto Rico Fabiola Valentin who met at the Miss Grand International pageant in 2020 and married last year; supernaturally beautiful, both had surveyed the men of the entire planet and found them inadequate. And yes, of course it’s a proper pay-day for capitalism when two brides decide to outdo each other in the grandeur of their marital meringues — but it’s also gorgeous to see femininity unbound.

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It confirmed that modern lesbianism, far from being the furtive trauma of the past, has the potential to be a hen-night that never ends, avoiding that morning-after let-down when one of the giddy girls is given away by one sober suit to another and must now knuckle down to the humdrum habits of adult life. Even when lesbianism begins as little more than a cheap thrill or a style tip, it has the power to bring down worthless heterosexual unions, which can only be a relief all round. All that disposable income and free time can’t help but give a happy couple a head start when it comes to fun — and, of course, the unshakeable advantage of doing something that society doesn’t really approve of, which has a way of keeping people young like nothing else. Which is all the more reason why it must be guarded from incursion from the male sex. When I was a youngster, the sure sign of a creepy man was that he would refer to himself as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body; it still is, only this time they don’t slink away nursing their semi when you laugh at them, but call you a fascist.

So, back to my adored Doc Stock, hated so often not for her words but because she shows what a woman is; not the way you dress, or sit, or present. It can’t be bought. A woman is whatever a woman wants to be — and what a man cannot be. And, most of all, what a man cannot be is a lesbian.

Critics adored her. “Page’s presence and timing are extraordinary,” enthused Roger Ebert. “I think she will be one of the great actors of her time.” Juno won her an Oscar nomination for best actress. But it wasn’t craft alone that made Page so appealing. It was also something about her as a person — as a girl. In a period when the dominant mode of female celebrity was the “trainwreck”, Page was different. She was big-eyed and skinny, but she didn’t party. She didn’t cycle through boyfriends. She didn’t drink-drive. You never, ever saw her falling out of a club — or out of her clothes. 

“If she and her contemporary Lindsay Lohan were put on an attention-seeking sale, they would certainly be at polar ends,” wrote Helen Pidd. “Flashing her crotch getting out of taxis is so not Page’s style (this is just speculation, but she seems like the kind of big-pants gal who wouldn’t even contemplate wearing a thong).”

Page’s peers were quizzed about their sex lives and their scandals. Page talked about politics and feminism. “I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools,” she told Pidd. “As a girl, you’re supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin?”

Still, Page wasn’t unscathed by the gossip machine. The very fact that she didn’t date, and did dress like a tomboy, raised a whole other set of questions: was she (whisper it) a lesbian? “Is Juno a you know?” asked an article in the Village Voice. Ellen DeGeneres had successfully negotiated coming out in 1997, but she’d done so as the beloved lead of a hit sitcom. Page was only just getting established, and a preference for flannel shirts was hardly compatible with the part of the rising starlet.

It took till 2014 — when Page was 26 — for her to declare her sexuality publicly. “I am tired of lying by omission,” she said in a speech to the Human Rights Congress. The scrutiny of her perceived failure at femininity had taken a toll. She told the audience that a website had recently run photos of her in sweatpants, with the question: “Why does this petite beauty insist on dressing like a massive man?” With audible exasperation, she delivered her answer: “Because I like to be comfortable.”

Page seemed, for a while, happy. She wore suits on the red carpet: an adorable baby butch. She got married to choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. And then, in 2020, Page came out again — this time as transgender. “Dressing like a man” had never merely been about comfort, apparently: it had been about actually being a man. 

Page had top surgery — a double mastectomy. In an interview with Time, Page called this “not only life-changing but lifesaving”, and described it as a remedy to the “total hell” of puberty. The public reaction was widely supportive: Netflix immediately announced that it would update the credits on The Umbrella Academy, in which Page stars, to reflect Page’s chosen name. Ellen Page disappeared. Elliot Page emerged instead.

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In the Time interview, Page said that the journey to identifying as trans started with reading trans people’s memoirs, in particular Becoming a Man by P. Carl. Through identifying with Carl, “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.” So it makes sense that Page has now contributed his own volume to the genre — Pageboy, released for this Pride month. “An ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength and joy,” according to the flyleaf. 

But Pageboy doesn’t read defiant, strong or joyful. It reads sad: the story of a vulnerable girl thrown into the entertainment business at the age of 10; unprotected by her family; struggling with food; closeted, and reminded by the casual homophobia of Hollywood to stay that way; and subjected to sexual assault and harassment by people who should have been trusted colleagues.

In the memoir, Page says: “At certain points I’ve referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it’s not an invitation for anyone to do the same.” But talking about Page’s past as though it happened to a boy is nonsensical: Ellen’s experiences are tied to her femaleness, and more than that, her lesbianism.

Not that Page refers to his pre-transition sexuality as “lesbian”: “queer” is preferred, and when the word “lesbian” comes up, it’s marked as something held in contempt, by others if not by Page. At one point, Page calls lesbianism a “repugnant” feature that directors cannot allow on-screen.

Any resistance to compulsory femininity — high heels, tight dresses — is cast by the industry as Page being “difficult”. Roles for women are so sexualised that at one point Page describes Juno as representing “a space beyond the boundary”. This is, remember, a film in which Page’s character is pregnant: you could hardly get a more female role. But because Juno is not “hyperfeminised” — because Page wears tees and jeans for the part — the pressure of gender is lifted, somewhat. 

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But 2007 was also the year that trans writer Julia Serano published Whipping Girl, which is probably the most influential text in terms of solidifying gender identity theory. In it, Serano argued that “feminine verbal and aesthetic expression” are “driven by intrinsic and deep-seated inclinations that are likely to be the result of biology”. In other words, regardless of your actual sex, if you don’t act or dress “girly”, you might not be a girl at all. 

As this idea gained intellectual purchase, femininity standards in popular culture were growing ever more exacting. This pressure was even dramatised in Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody’s follow-up movie, Jennifer’s Body, which starred ultimate hottie Megan Fox as a cheerleader succubus, and Amanda Seyfried as her hoodie-wearing, jealousy-gnarled best friend. The space for the kind of girl-character Page played — girls who were not limited to being objects of desire — was shrinking.

But Hollywood was only amplifying messages Page had heard from her family. Page’s mother informs her daughter that she can “do anything a boy can do”, but from Page’s perspective, this is never sincere. There is continual maternal pressure for Page to be more girly, as well as an absolute rejection of the possibility of homosexuality. One of the few vignettes in which Page recalls his mother being happy is when Page requests a shopping trip to buy “girl clothes” as a teenager. (Page enjoys the way the new wardrobe alters her social standing, but not the way the clothes make her feel about herself.) When Page initially comes out as gay, her mother’s reaction is to yell: “That doesn’t exist!”

Becoming a “transgender guy” doesn’t spare Page from judgement and disgust. (Page still seems wounded by a Jordan Peterson tweet that referred to the surgeon who performed Page’s mastectomy as a “criminal”.) But it does resolve the problem of being a lesbian: Page’s mother, at least, seems better able to accept a trans child than a gay one. “She loves her son endlessly,” writes Page. Transition also makes Page’s body safer — a body that has been repeatedly violated and threatened. Page mentions an “acquaintance” who told her, after she came out for the first time, “I’m going to fuck you to make you realise you aren’t gay.” There’s also a male director who “grooms” her, a male crew member on an early film who forces oral sex on her, and a female crew member on another film who sexually assaults her while presenting it to Page as a consensual relationship. Over and over, Page is informed with violence that her body is not hers.

Again, Hollywood reinforces what began in Page’s childhood. Her adversarial relationship with her body can be seen in her reaction to her stepmother’s cooking. Page hears an “internal voice” saying “no, that can’t go inside you” when she’s confronted with food that scares her: a terror of adulteration, of losing control. Puberty inevitably heightens this. Page describes the age of 11 as “the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent”. This is, I think, a common sensation for girls: puberty ends an era of uncomplicated, happy embodiment, and launches you into a world where your body appears to invite dangerous attention against your will. Not a shift from boy to girl, but a shift from “person” to “thing”. As Hilary Mantel wrote, some girls want out. They starve themselves, or punish their bodies, and now they have the option to disown their sex entirely.

Trauma is a commonplace of trans memoir, or rather, of trans men’s memoirs. Trans women’s memoirs are, for the most part, exuberant narratives of self-actualisation (albeit usually with some background homophobia, similar to Page’s mother’s). Trans men’s memoirs are often wrenching accounts of rape and self-harm, climaxing in irreversible body modification. Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive features a harrowing description of the author as a 10-year-old girl being sexually assaulted by her father (the abuse started when McBee was four). It initiated a “split” between self and body. “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden,” writes McBee, who nonetheless separates his masculine identification from the depersonalisation caused by the abuse. 

Carl (in the book that inspired Page) also relates being sexually assaulted at the age of 11 or 12, also by his father: “You’re becoming a woman. Your breasts are beginning to show. I like watching you change,” Carl recalls him saying. Later, the first stage in Carl’s transition is a double mastectomy. “I feel a fiery rage … for what men did to me,” Carl writes, before adding: “I feel so much joy living in a man’s body.”

For Page, these experiences of rejection and violation are incorporated into a story of latent maleness — or rather, of boyness. As the title suggests, there is little interest in being seen as an adult male. Even his new name, Elliot, is inspired by the boy hero of Spielberg’s E.T. Ceasing to be a woman confers a sort of immunity to time. Carl, who transitions in midlife, is spurred to take action by impending menopause: “I knew menopause, becoming an older woman, would kill me, that menopause would shove my femaleness in my face in a way that would make me too sick to live.”

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In retrospect, the Noughties insistence that Page was different to the other girls could be seen as an excuse to mistreat her peers: by casting them as sluts in contrast to Page’s “good girl” figure, the media could suggest that they deserved what they got. Yet Page received much the same abuse; and her reaction was not entirely different. Rather than responding with public self-destruction, Page redoubled a private war against her own body — now his body. Britney shaved her head; Page removed her breasts; both cut away what gave them away as female. 

It feels a long, sad distance from the woman who once protested that she was entitled to wear whatever made her “comfortable”; longer still from the girl who, back during promo for Juno, spoke up for a woman’s right to be at the centre of her own story. In Pageboy, Page’s girl-self seems passive and tragic: a sleeping beauty, held in suspended animation, afraid to grow up, and kissed without her consent. (There is, I suspect, some retconning here. Achieving a career such as Page’s takes considerable determination, and Page does not suggest this was driven by parental ambition. Yet Page never addresses where this drive to act comes from, or attributes his professional success to more than luck.)

As a “trangender guy”, Page can be Aladdin: the main character, capable of making decisions that affect reality. No more pressure to wear the dress or play the princess. But the fairytale Pageboy reminds me of most of all is the Little Mermaid. In the Hans Christian Andersen original, the mermaid fails to meet the condition of her womanhood. Her suffering ends when she is transformed into one of “the daughters of the air”; finally incorporeal, she makes an impossible, fantastical escape from her betraying body.

On the surface, Pageboy is a euphoric account of Page “finding himself”: the model narrative of the trans memoir. The happy ending is Page waking up in a hospital bed, breastless. Between the lines, though, there’s another story, of a self-hating girl who engineers a flit from femininity. It’s obligatory now to be shocked by the cruelty of Noughties culture. When, I wonder, will we recognise the even greater cruelty of inviting women and girls to barter their body parts for self-determination?

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Sarah Ditum’s Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties is available to pre-order.

For many women though, both in the UK and elsewhere, things are very different. Whether in Uganda, where same-sex encounters are a criminal offence, in Iran, where some lesbians have been threatened with state execution, or within the religious enclaves that exist in a number of US states and in which lesbian conversion therapy is widespread, being a lesbian can mean a hard, lonely life. I am keenly aware that 45 years after coming out, and despite decades of campaigning for lesbian rights, much remains to be done before lesbians can feel truly liberated. Which is why, with Kathleen Stock and Martina Navratilova, I have set up the Lesbian Project. The idea has been brewing for a number of years — ever since I began to realise that the word “lesbian” was yet again becoming a dirty one, as many gay men and trans activists accused us of bigotry for seeking out our own spaces and setting boundaries.

We want to explore why our needs and issues have been so thoroughly deprioritised that we are ignored, presumed indivisible from gay men and heterosexual “queer”-identified kinksters, and even — according to other “letters” of the ever-growing alphabet – the baddies?

The rot started to set in when the Gay Liberation Front split. Lesbians, despite having taken the lead in many ways, soon found that their own concerns were coming second to those of men. Sick of being marginalised and asked to make the tea, after three years the majority of the women walked out and began organising independently. These lesbians had become the stuff of legend by the end of the Seventies. And their struggle for liberation was indivisible from that of women everywhere: one of the seven demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement was “The Right to a Self-Defined Sexuality. An End to Discrimination Against Lesbians”.

Suggested reading

The emptiness of being queer

By Kathleen Stock

I was at the first autonomous public lesbian event — the Lesbian Strength March — in London, in 1981, and the exhilaration that my 19-year-old self felt is hard to describe. Back then we understood that the one thing we did have in common with our gay brothers was discrimination on the basis of our same-sex attraction. We also recognised that one common anti-gay trope, namely the suggestion that gay men were not to be trusted around children, was also said of lesbians. But we were also well aware that a number of gay male campaigns, such as those targeting the legal penalties against cottaging and cruising, did not concern us.

Our issues included resisting what the lesbian writer Adrienne Rich called compulsory heterosexuality. Many of us were feeling coerced into marriage with men. I know I was. As a working-class girl hitting my teens in the mid-Seventies, my life had already been mapped out. I was supposed to marry and have kids with one of the men on my estate, and stay with him regardless of how unhappy or unfulfilled it made me.

At that time, and indeed well into the Eighties, it was commonplace to hear of lesbians who, having split with their husbands, then lost custody of their children through the family courts because they were lesbians. At one stage, up to 80% of the women dragged through the courts by disgruntled ex-husbands lost their children this way. It was clear that the issues affecting lesbians were worlds apart from those affecting gay men.

Coming out as a teenager was not my choice. Every girl at my school was deemed either a lezzer or a slag. And because I had rejected the boys in my class, and was clearly more interested in my female friends, by the bullies’ logic I must be a lezzer, so they stared to call me it. For once, they happened to be right. I was bullied and threatened, until my older brother stepped in. But being a teenaged lesbian was also a joy: going to nightclubs with the gay boys and observing the older butch/femme couples was fascinating.

The Lesbian Project is seeking an amicable divorce from our gay brothers. Being lumped in with men is neither appropriate nor useful when it comes to our priorities, and we can no longer pretend that it is. We have only once been targeted by the same legislation — Section 28 — and as women we need to ask ourselves whether we are being afforded the same attention as our male counterparts.

More from this author

The return of lesbian pride

By Julie Bindel

Not that all the issues affecting lesbians are the same. We are not a hegemonic group. If I were cast away on a desert island, with 50 indiscriminately chosen lesbians, we would fight like cat and dog and agree on next to nothing. But we would still share something precious and fundamental: our resistance to the path set out for us by whichever community and nation we were raised in.

There are other things we share. We are all gender nonconforming (despite the fact that prior to queer theory and trans ideology we didn’t ever use that term). We have defied sex stereotypes, and all of us have been major disappointments to those hoping we would grow up looking to marry a handsome, successful man and produce a brace of children. We were supposed to behave differently, even if raised within liberal or socially progressive families. We weren’t supposed to wear scruffy dungarees and play pool in backstreet bars.

Many lesbians will disagree with, even actively dislike, my views on certain issues. Some lesbians won’t be feminist. Others might prefer the term “queer” or “gay” — terms I won’t use to describe myself. But like it or not, we are a tribe. Our enemies are not discerning. We are bound together by our refusal to play by the rules. Every out lesbian has defied sex stereotypes and taken a huge risk in being public. Heterosexuality is not just the norm — it is also the method by which patriarchy flourishes. Whether or not we are conscious of it, lesbians are both a threat and a direct challenge to men’s superiority over women.

Today, I live a privileged, middle-class life, with a media career and a supportive family and friendship circle. Although I am relatively safe from bigotry and violence, I still feel that knot in my stomach when asked by a stranger, “What does your husband do?” Then there are the times I hear direct anti-lesbian sentiments expressed by colleagues, neighbours and others, and I can’t keep quiet. If we can come together to fight the oppression that affects us all, our differences will matter less than they otherwise might. A few weeks ago I was walking my dog in the park when a man, resplendent in tattoos, biker jacket and shaven head, approached me. For a split second, I wondered if he was friend or foe. But as we stood face-to-face, he broke into a big smile, and told me he recognised me “off the telly” and that “my mum loves you! She’s a lesbian too.” I was walking on air for the rest of the day.

Everyone involved in this project has their own history and perspective on what it means to be a lesbian. Joanna Cherry, one of the Scottish National Party’s most high-profile MPs, has been treated appallingly within her own party over her views on single-sex spaces (not just for lesbians but also for women facing domestic and sexual abuse). And Lucy Masoud, a former firefighter turned barrister, has spoken out about biological men identifying as lesbians on online dating apps, for which she was labelled a “bigot” and a “transphobe”.

These women join a long list of those who are fighting back against the new bigotry that has rebranded lesbians as irrelevant or not deserving of attention. Our enemies are the same as when I came out decades ago: misogynists. Above all, men who hate the fact that we reject them sexually and get on just fine without them. Some of our enemies are, unfortunately, young women, although we would never condemn or reject them. Having spoken to dozens of them, I fear these women are motivated by a desire to stay on the right side of the men in the LGBTQ+ rainbow, so they put their own needs aside in order to be accepted. One day they may come to us older lesbians for advice and support. We are here for them if they do.

The Lesbian Project will put us back on the map. Lesbians who are able to be out and proud share bravery, tenacity — and enemies. Whatever our differences, we all want things to be better for future generations of girls. Being a lesbian is to refuse to bow to convention. It is an act of resistance and resilience. And I for one am proud to use that label.