In truth, though, this book makes Bridgerton look like the result of years of painstaking research by Hilary Mantel. The ostensible setting for the romance is mid-Victorian England. Gloomy gothic is out, and poppin’ pastel dresses and splendidly lush trellises are in. Characters’ surnames sound as if they are being mumbled by a drunk or spoken underwater. Over here, lurking in the shrubbery, are Lady Ashmond and Viscount Demeroven; over there, guzzling all the finger sandwiches, are the Lords Havenfort, Prous, Frightan, Thorton, and Psoris. Occasional references to “the ton” and the desirability of playing the “pianoforte” hint at the Regency period, but mainly you know you are in Victorian times because the hooped dresses are voluminous, the maidservants are cheeky but devoted, and strapping young men are always chucking muddy rugby balls around when they aren’t playing croquet. And in case you’re still in any doubt, the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act — a real-life parliamentary bill enabling secular divorce for the first time — features as an unlikely plot device.

In every other way though, the dominant idiom is 2000s Californian. In Charlotte Brontë’s roughly contemporaneous fictional world of Villette, Lucy says things like: “Some lives are thus blessed: it is God’s will: it is the attesting trace and lingering evidence of Eden.” Yet in this version of the mid-19th century, younger characters have somehow mastered Friends-style ironic repartee. “I don’t know about you,” says an august lady character at one point, “but I think I sweat my body weight on that walk.” Gwen and her rascally father tease and flirt with each other to an extent which cries out for a family therapist’s intervention. The cook and the maid have been having an affair for years. And Beth’s liberal mother just wants her gay daughter to be happy.

It’s not new for those writing for teen audiences to plunder the classics for inspiration — in the Nineties, Clueless smartly reworked Austen’s Emma by setting it in high school, and 10 Things I Hate About You retold The Taming of the Shrew — but it is relatively new to “queer them up”, as the parlance now goes. Alongside DWYLABF, we have recently been treated to Manslaughter Park, a reimagining of Mansfield Park “as a queer romance and a murder mystery”, and Emmet, a “gender-bent” retelling of Emma as a gay man. And soon to be published in the UK is Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa, whose blurb tells us that its protagonist Oliver Bennet feels trapped: “Not just by the endless corsets, petticoats and skirts he’s forced to wear on a daily basis, but also by society’s expectations. The world — and the vast majority of his family and friends — think Oliver is a girl named Elizabeth.” Luckily for Oliver, though, along comes “a sweet, intelligent boy with a warm heart” called Darcy. Suffice it to say I doubt that any of these titles will appear on Florida school district reading lists anytime soon.

Though they superficially might look similar, these creative endeavours should not be confused with established academic attempts to “queer” literature from the past. A staple of would-be edgelords in the academic humanities for decades, the hypothesis goes that, whenever a repressed author of yore such as Austen or one of the Brontës wished to represent same-sex desire to her readers, she was thwarted by nasty heteropatriarchy. Accordingly, she had to create secretly “queer-coded” characters or images instead, hoping against hope that, centuries hence, some Gender Studies major would uncover the truth. And so, via the medium of heavily meaningful paragraphs about a woman’s archery skills, the sensory delights of hyacinths or the impenetrability of walled gardens, otherwise conservative authors supposedly indicated the presence of homosexuality even as they described deeply traditional social arrangements of the time.

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Indeed, these days, attempts to find secret signs of homosexuality in great works of fiction from the past are so ubiquitous and unshocking that one wonders whether some kind of alternative academic practice should be introduced instead, whereby explicitly homosexual texts are trawled for their subversively heteronormative content. And in fact, Don’t Want You Like A Best Friend would be a good candidate. It’s basically a traditional marriage plot but with a couple of twists. According to scholar Talia Shaffer, Victorian literature offers at least two competing ideals of marriage: the ideal of romantic marriage, reliant on passion and sexual intensity, versus the “marriage of rational esteem”, predicated on trust, familiarity and shared family ties. Gwen and Beth seem to achieve both: madly excited by each other, but also exhibiting levels of friendship and mutual understanding impossible to reach with the men around them.

Being newly published it’s unclear how this book will fare on the market, but what is clear is that — with or without accompanying pseudo-historical paraphernalia, and whether the protagonists are girls or boys — same-sex romance is now a very successful YA genre. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is particularly popular among young women, whether they are emerging lesbians, bisexuals or straights. For, ignoring their modern trappings, at the heart of most such books is something rather old-fashioned and none the worse for it: sweetly passionate love stories.

Many adolescent girls adore the idea of romantic intimacy between two young people, and their adolescence is probably the last time society will allow them to indulge in the illusion of it. Later on, progressive society will tell them they should dilute any residual emotional intensity, quash their jealousy and possessiveness, date promiscuously, and cut off searing feelings wherever possible. Hundreds of magazine articles will promote polyamory to them as a cool, antiseptic modern ideal: the complete antithesis of a teenage girl’s obsessive focus on one person at a time. But for now at least, they are socially permitted to let their burning hearts run away with them.

For the most part, these girls don’t want sexual pleasure simply for its own sake — they can barely understand what that might mean. What they long for and love to read about is passionately intense intimacy. They want a meeting of minds as well as bodies; a merging of twin souls in order to face the rest of the world together as one. The very otherness of the opposite sex in romantic fiction — his essential differences — can seem like an impediment to the female reader’s imagination in this regard, and the spectre of reproductive consequences can also get in the way. But where the lovers are both female (or both male), ecstatic union is so much easier to picture. Everything is just that bit more symmetrical.

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In DWYLABF, the main characters exemplify this ideal very well, though it is far from its only manifestation. Another recent example is the graphic novel Heartstopper, written by a woman and now also turned into a film. In Japan, there is a hugely popular genre of fiction and fan-fiction called Yaoui or “boy love”, featuring homoerotic stories about male couples, written by women for women. Even where the object of teenage female lust is actually a person of the opposite sex, he is often relatively feminine in his presentation — with K-Pop boy bands sometimes taking this to a surgically enhanced extreme.

Arguably, women writing about gay male relationships are typically about as accurate as men making films about lesbians; with the women falsely inflating the role of longing looks and wildly romantic feelings, and the men falsely inflating the role of unfeasibly pornographic sex. Female authors writing about female relationships are probably on safer ground. But either way — and as with wanton carelessness about historical details — it won’t matter one jot to the average young fan of same-sex romances. They are only in it for the swoons.

There’s a deep irony here, I think. The more that the sexes are set up by contemporary society to do battle with one another, and the more all of us are encouraged to disassociate emotionally from strong romantic feeling, the more likely it is that same-sex relationships — as depicted in fiction, at least — will look like a paradigm of intimacy. When Right-wing politicians such as DeSantis or Orbán try to ban books like DWYLABF, they presumably think they are protecting young people from something subversive and corrupting. The reality, however, is arguably the opposite: they are removing a quaintly archaic vision of how close, emotionally committed, and sweetly faithful a human sexual relationship can still be.

Such is the message of Robyn Exton, CEO of lesbian dating app HER, mostly aimed at 20-to-30-somethings. Robyn is very enthusiastic about the cause of lesbianism for all. Last week, in honour of Lesbian Visibility Day, she wrote a combative statement on her business’s website, asserting that attempts to confine the category of lesbians to “only those assigned female at birth” involves a “twisted and erroneous” belief “about what being a lesbian can or cannot entail”. “The future of lesbian is trans”, she continued, before declaring: “we must all affirm trans and nonbinary lesbians… we must all become better informed and put in the work”. She concluded: “On Lesbian Visibility Day, let’s ensure that all lesbians are seen, celebrated, and embraced — regardless of their gender. There’s no such thing as a ‘real lesbian’.” Later, she sent out a message to all users to delete the HER app if they disagreed, and made a TikTok video to the same effect.

Based on an Ellen episode drawing on popular stereotypes about voracious lesbians stealing men’s wives, there’s a joke that whenever you recruit enough women to the sapphic cause, you win a toaster. Exton seems to think she can win a toaster for her preferred version of lesbianism by hurling insults at the unconvinced. If you fall into this category, she suggests, you are a “irrelevant has-been lez-bean”, a “fascist”, a “transphobic bigot full of hatred”, and a “sad, hateful clown”. As seduction techniques go, it’s a bold one.

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Is France too sexy for the trans wars?

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By redrawing the maps of womanhood and manhood, so fundamental to human life in numerous ways, transactivists such as Exton have redrawn several other maps. One of these represents sexual orientations — heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual — once understood as involving distinctive patterns of attraction between the biological sexes by definition, but now no longer. Ignoring everything that we know about human sexuality, primary and secondary sex characteristics are now treated as the negligibly important physical wrapping for the irresistibly hot gender identities pulsing away within.

According to this demented sexual metaphysics, if a male identifies as a woman and is also attracted to women, he counts as a “trans lesbian” — which also means he is a lesbian, and you had better not object to him popping up in the app you just paid for. The head of Stonewall, Nancy Kelley, agrees; the difference between female and male “lesbians” is now treated by LGBTQ+ authority figures as no more important than the difference between Scottish and English ones.

Queer culture still allows you, a hapless female seeking females, the right to reject any given “trans lesbian” purely on individual grounds of preference or taste. Maybe you don’t like his politics, or shade of lipstick, or something. This is treated as a straightforward matter of consent. But woe betide you if you reject him on the grounds that he is the wrong sex, or otherwise indicate on your dating profile that you only want to have sex with females, accurately construed. In the latter case, you are likely to get banned from whatever queer app you are using — as you also would be for using the pronouns I just used, for the sake of clarity.

In theory, the map of sexual orientations should get redrawn for each orientation equally, but in practice it has been altered for lesbians most of all. Swiping through the apps and looking for love, you are now bound to come across photos of what are obviously adult human males, dressed extravagantly in florals and hairclips, adopting the sort of girlish head-tilts last seen on Shirley Temple in the Forties. “Putting in the work” to “affirm” these people, as Exton grimly urges lesbians to do, mostly involves dating and sleeping with them.

Many “trans lesbians” are autogynephiles, for whom the adoption of a lesbian identity can be added to a long list of fetishised pleasures about womanhood. To those who are not chronically naïve, there’s no mystery as to why fetishists would do this; but it is a mystery why so many lesbians, in the old-fashioned sense, seem delighted to collude with them. Why are they so keen to try to bully and shame female peers into sleeping with males with the right pronouns? The number of people who identify as “LGBTQ+ women” vastly outnumbers that of same-sex-attracted females, so it probably makes sense for a business like a dating app to cast its net as widely as possible in order to maximise the number of potential consumers. But this can’t be the explanation for everyone.

One underappreciated strand of the current discourse about lesbianism seems to be the weird idea floating about that committing yourself to loving females, as a female yourself, is some sort of moral vocation. Effectively, Exton and Kelley are acting as if, once you have come out as a lesbian (however that’s defined), you then have some moral duty not to sexually reject any woman (or “woman”), simply on the grounds of her womanhood. If you can appeal to some other less sweeping and more individual personal preference to get yourself off the hook, that’s different.

Now, you can argue with their underlying account of womanhood — and I do — but you can also disagree with the implication that being a lesbian ethically commits you to a “no woman left behind” attitude, at least in theory. In fact, morality has nothing to do with it. If, as a woman yourself, you do ever end up sexually rejecting another woman simply because she is a woman — and for no other reason — then you haven’t failed morally, though you might have just ceased to be a lesbian.

To conceive of your sexual orientation as a kind of missionary work may seem strange — and perhaps especially so to many heterosexuals — but it is also shored up by a popular contemporary conception of desire. In this view, sexual desires can be morally criticised and potentially perfected. This is not the mundane claim that you can choose not to act on deviant fantasies. Rather, it’s the idea that, simply on ethical grounds, you can work hard to breathe fire into your loins where there was none previously; or alternatively, extinguish it altogether. As a result, gay men should stop wanting “no fats, no femmes” on Grindr; black men should desire black women more often; it is wrong to feel sexual repulsion simply on grounds of weight; and so on.

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Ironically, early adopters of the idea that desire could answer directly to one’s conscience were so-called “political lesbians”, arguing that any woman could become a lesbian in theory, and urging straight women to do so on the ethical grounds of fighting the patriarchy. Popularly understood as the idea that you could choose to feel aroused by a woman on political grounds, this is daft. Generally speaking, you can’t berate yourself into feeling turned on by something or someone that would otherwise leave you cold — unless, of course, berating yourself is already your kink.

In often conflict-filled discussions of the validity of political lesbianism, it’s sometimes assumed that there are only two choices — “born this way” or choice – and if the idea of a single genetic determinant is false, then your sexuality must be freely chosen. But that’s a false alternative. There is no single gay gene, and sexuality can and obviously does have environmental causes. But it doesn’t follow that you can choose what to like or not like in bed. You can’t choose your environment, and you can’t choose its complex effects on you. Yes, you might decide to leave your husband and shack up with a woman in order to stick it to the patriarchy. But you can’t choose what you’ll feel when she touches you.

Such points seem lost on the likes of Exton and Kelley, pointlessly and destructively intent on converting lesbians out of their homosexuality by shaming them into sleeping with males as a form of charity work. I’ve no doubt that, as a result of such pressure tactics, some lesbians will end up in bed with males. But they won’t like it. That fact of them not liking it is neither a moral victory for lesbianism, nor is it a defeat. It’s a simple description of lesbian sexuality. And if they do end up liking it, they probably aren’t lesbians.

First, I attended the “EuroCentralAsian Lesbian* Conference (EL*C)”. It was international in its participant list, lavishly funded, and linguistically and aesthetically indistinguishable from any other modern LGBT event. There were pronoun declarations and safe space policies. There were wild dye-jobs and big specs. There were workshops on how to undermine women’s sport. There was the robotically impersonal ejection of a heretical wrongthinker on the eve of the conference. In other words, it was business as usual for Queer Inc. — albeit with some more local stuff about Roma and Ukrainian lesbians thrown in.

A second group of mostly young activists, who I met in a Budapest bar, were homegrown Hungarian, cash-strapped, defiantly female-only, and fairly punk in their aesthetic. And they were very cool. We smoked hookahs, got drunk, took selfies in the toilet, and talked about how stupid everything had got. They gave me homemade badges in Hungarian saying “Lesbian not queer” and “Nobody is born in the wrong body.” They solicited drunken soundbites from me for a podcast about how great being a lesbian is. They exhibited a frankly staggering general knowledge of happenings on “Terf Island”, otherwise known as the UK.

Some of this second group worked for organisations dealing with the aftermath of violence against women. They told me how wealthy Western funders, attempting to prop up embattled women’s services against the incursions of Orbán’s anti-feminist manoeuvres, would make their donations conditional on the insistence that organisations be “inclusive”, and so include males. The recipients simply could not afford to say no.

This brand of cultural colonialism — you know, the one that dare not speak its name and everyone’s fine with — was also in evidence at the EL*C conference, where it was quietly whispered that at least €1 million had been awarded to organisers by the European Commission and other private Western funders, partly on the condition that males who identified as women be included too. Despite the name of the organisation, the official focus of the conference was now “LBTI” people — lesbian, bi, trans, and intersex.

Predictably, with this widening of scope came a narrowing of what you could permissibly say at the conference. The result was a change in subject matter, away from boring old women who love and have sex with women towards something more soothingly generic, and the usual blanket denial that there had been any change in subject matter at all. Oceania had never been at war with Eurasia, and lesbians had never needed to politically organise away from males, just for themselves. The fact that only a few years prior, the EL*C had aimed to do exactly that seemed to have been memory-holed.

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Officially, the story from the stage was that the rainbow coalition needed to stick together like glue against the anti-gender backlash currently being waged by Orbán, Putin, Erdogan and others: no queer left behind! For these self-styled strongmen, “gender”, vaguely defined, is a strategically useful symbol for everything terrible about the decadent West.

The original political target of Orbán Fidesz’s party was liberal feminism and gay rights. But with the official addition of the T to the LGB internationally in the last decade, and the sudden Western shift towards extreme policies such as self-ID and the medicalisation of trans-identified youth, not to mention the Western presentation of transactivism as a logical extension of feminism, a golden opportunity emerged to give added plausibility to Fidesz’s tale of crazy identity politics and moral corruption. Now they could juice up their disparagement of “gender” with tales of young girls being made to believe they were boys, and predatory males in women’s changing rooms. These days, I was told, the biggest focus of Orbán’s anti-gender campaign is extreme transactivist demands imported from the West and their consequences.

Inevitably a polarised situation has emerged, with both sides insisting the T be lumped together with the LG and B, for good or ill. On one side, Fidesz use the extremes of Western transactivism to justify incursions on the rights of women, gays, and the sex-non-conforming generally. And on the other, in the name of solidarity, Hungarian and Western progressives insist there is no difference between these extreme demands and more staid requests like being able to teach schoolchildren about homosexuality or demanding the right to gay marriage.

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Reading between the lines, testimonies at the EL*C suggested that a similar dynamic is taking place elsewhere in the former Eastern bloc. A charismatic Albanian lesbian activist, Xheni Karaj, told the conference that she had visited the UK and worked in some capacity with Stonewall towards a campaign for greater acceptance of LGBT+ parenting. Going back to Albania, the idea had got out that she wished to replace the words “mother” and “father” with “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”.  In a highly conservative country such as Albania, this notion caused a huge scandal, and Karaj became the subject of severe abuse and harassment because of it.

Karaj was clear on stage that she had never intended to suggest replacing the word “mother” with anything else. I believed her. But what she didn’t also say was that, only last year, Stonewall suggested doing precisely this in the UK. The idea was incendiary enough to many when made over here — let alone in a context like Albania, where religious leaders have a large influence, the family is venerated, and homophobia and misogyny is entrenched.

And Albania is not the only place where the creative projects of bored rainbow bureaucrats from North London are being used to make mischief. In his annexation speech last week, Putin said “no more Parent 1 and Parent 2, only mother and father”. A few days earlier, a 2019 speech by the new Italian leader Georgia Meloni went viral on Twitter — and was retweeted not just by conservatives but also by some gender-critical feminists who seemed to assume they had found a fellow traveller. “I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother,” she complained. “No. I must be Citizen X, Gender X, Parent 1, Parent 2. I must be a number.” Sound familiar?

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Left-wing gender-critical lesbians like those I met in that Budapest bar are stuck in the middle of all this, a means to everyone else’s ends. The state paints them as deviant and anti-family to bash the liberals, while progressives in Hungary and their Western supporters demand that they pretend that their interests perfectly align with the rest of the rainbow. If lesbians nonetheless insist, perfectly sensibly, that female biology makes a difference to their political interests as lesbians, they are treated as somehow in league with the far-Right. And, in terms of optics, matters are not helped by the fact that Fidesz-supporting publishing houses are now buying up gender-critical titles to translate into Hungarian. Indeed, I discovered on my trip that the would-be Hungarian publisher for my own book was an Orbán think tank. (Since I got home, I have pulled out of the deal.)

In the febrile climate of UK gender politics, there is a tendency for those fed up with biology-denial to fall gratefully upon anything which looks like it asserts the primacy of material reality in a more sensible way. But feminists should beware strongmen and women bearing gifts. The international rejection of extreme trans ideology will be a pyrrhic victory if it is accompanied by a raft of measures against women, gays, and sex-non-conforming people. And the futures of young lesbians like those I met in the Budapest bar will be all the poorer for it.

Mermaids claims that LGB Alliance was not, in fact, established to support lesbians, gay men and bisexuals — but rather to discredit and disband Mermaids itself. The LGB Alliance, allegedly, “does not have charitable purposes”. If Mermaids wins this case, the consequences will be devastating for lesbians and gays. Any future charity set up to advocate specifically on our behalf will be wide open to legal challenge.

LGB Alliance was founded in 2019, in response to Stonewall’s refusal to engage with concern, voiced by lesbians and gay men, about trans orthodoxy. We are concerned that “same-sex attraction” has been recast as nothing more than a dog whistle for transphobia — an argument made by Mermaids in court. We are concerned, too, that lesbians are being labelled bigots for not wanting to have sex with people who have penises. And we are concerned, most of all, by the wholesale acceptance of this orthodoxy by organisations, such as Stonewall, which are supposed to protect same-sex attracted people. Mermaids’s case is being supported by Gendered Intelligence  and the LGBT Consortium, groups that promote the notion that “gender identity” should carry as much, if not more, weight in law as biological sex. Together, they are arguing that LGB alliance is “denigrating trans people” and does not “serve the public interest”.

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But what does “denigrating trans people” actually mean? Before gender ideology captured the liberal masses, and allowed misogynistic men to scream “TERF” at any passing feminist, it was a phrase that might usefully be used to describe the discriminatory and cruel treatment of people living as the opposite sex. But in 2022, “denigration” can apparently mean campaigning for women-only services such as rape crisis centres and changing rooms.

And how is advocating for lesbians and gays not a positive public service? As someone who came out in the Seventies, facing hellish bigotry and a lack of any legal protections, I desperately needed the support of a community that respected same-sex attraction. The Gay Liberation Front was, for me, a lifeline. It was set up in 1970 by Bev Jackson, who found herself compelled to come out of retirement to start the LGB Alliance. Her cofounder is another veteran of the movement, Kate Harris, who was a Stonewall Ambassador until breaking ties with the charity after it shifted away from lesbian and gay issues to trans orthodoxy.

“When Kate and I met in 2019, we discovered that we’d both been trying, independently, to engage with Stonewall about our concerns,” Jackson tells me. “We met a brick wall. The mantra was ‘no debate’. We were also told the change from ‘sex’ to ‘gender’ did not cause any conflict.” Jackson tells me that, in her view, “something has gone very wrong with this movement”.

Between them, Jackson and Harris have spent a century campaigning for the rights of same-sex attracted people. They have set an example by living as out and proud lesbians. And yet, every day, they are attacked on social media. Journalist Owen Jones, for instance, has branded them “monstrous, unhinged, horrible fanatics”, adding that LGB Alliance is a “ludicrously titled organisation”, simply because it chose not to add the T to the LGB.

Why is it considered “ludicrous” to focus on the needs of a specific minority? The LGB Alliance mission statement seems perfectly reasonable: it will stand up for the rights of same-sex attracted people; it will uphold the definition of homosexuality as same-sex attraction; it will accept the biological reality of sex. How have we got to a stage where this is seen, by trans activists and their allies, as hate-filled bigotry?

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The scenes I’ve witnessed in court since 9th September have suggested that what is ludicrous about this case is not the position taken by LGB Alliance, but rather Mermaids’s arguments that gender identity trumps biological sex. Paul Roberts is Chief Executive of the LGBT Consortium, representing more than 500 LGBTQ+ groups. A disciple of gender orthodoxy, he said during cross-examination that he believes “anyone who identifies as a man is a man”, adding that he believed if a biological woman identifies as a trans man, that person should be able to access male-only services. When Roberts was asked if, given his view that people are attracted to gender identity rather than sex, a lesbian couple in which one is butch and one femme are actually a heterosexual couple, he responded: “I don’t believe there are many lesbian couples like that.” Many of the lesbian spectators in court, myself included, couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that.

John Nicolson MP, Deputy Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global LGBT+ Rights, also submitted evidence in support of Mermaids’s position. He pompously declared that he knows what a lesbian is, because he is a gay man. “You are a lesbian because you declare yourself one,” he proclaimed. Male-bodied trans women are, in other words, entitled to use this label.

When Michael Gibbon KC, counsel for Mermaids, was cross-examining Harris, he asked her to reflect on whether some people would understand “lesbian” to refer to something other than a natal female who is attracted to other natal females. Or, as he put it, would Harris consider whether some people would have a different understanding of “lesbian” from the understanding her organisation is based on?

Harris broke down into tears, asking: “That a lesbian can be a man with a penis?” After composing herself, she responded: “I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world, who are lesbians because we love other women … We will not be erased and we will not have any man with a penis tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is.”

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The phenomenon of men claiming to be lesbians is nothing new. In 1973, at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, there was a row over a scheduled performance by Beth Elliott, a folk singer who was referred to as transsexual (the terminology which was applied before gender ideology prevailed). Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker at that event, said: “I will not call a male ‘she’. Thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman’.” Today, almost 50 years after Morgan spoke truth to power, the situation is far worse than any of us in the lesbian rights movement could have imagined.

The fact that one of Mermaids’s key criticisms of LGB Alliance is that they even use the phrase “same-sex attraction”, which Mermaids claim is “weaponised” against trans people, tells us all we need to know. We are no longer allowed to use the language we have developed to describe ourselves because eliminating perceived slights towards trans people must always come first.

“Sometimes one person’s demands clash with another’s rights,” Bev Jackson tells me. “That is what happens when someone with a penis claims to be a lesbian, and lesbians object. We have the right to define ourselves and not to be redefined by others. Basically, the whole concept of ‘gender identity’ erases homosexuality and is homophobic at its core.”

If it is ruled that LGB Alliance was founded with the purpose to undermine Mermaids, it will mean that same-sex attracted people have no right to campaign for their specific needs: a terrifying prospect. But win or lose, the case brought by Mermaids has revealed the organisation’s ideology for what it is: deeply homophobic and relentlessly misogynistic. This offensive contortion of “LGBT rights” will, it seems, backfire, by inspiring people to support LGB Alliance and rescue our once-proud movement from the jaws of gender fanatics.

“We are one small organisation facing a global movement to eliminate the sex-based rights of LGB people,” says Jackson. “We have experienced an ongoing torrent of abuse, but also an outpouring of love and gratitude. We will not be silenced or discouraged: we will prevail.”

This month, media organisations and mega corporations will bend over backwards to find an LGBTQ angle to cover. But what you won’t see or hear is the underside of Pride: a culture of intense social and sexual pressure that’s pushing some lesbians back into the closet and encouraging others to identify out of womanhood altogether. 

It started with the push to redefine “lesbian” to be inclusive of heterosexual males who identify as women. But it didn’t stop there. Now same-sex attraction is out, redefined as a problematic “genital preference”. A surprising number of hardline activists vilify lesbians as “genital fetishists” and accuse them of practising “sexual apartheid”.

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Meanwhile, lesbians are bombarded with suggestions on “how to have lesbian sex with a trans woman”. Safe-sex guides for lesbians provide information on avoiding pregnancy and performing blowjobs. Healthline’s “How Do Lesbians Have Sex?” guide, which targets sexually inexperienced women and girls, reminds readers that “any person can have any type of sex”. “[D]on’t apply assumptions you apply to cis men to us, our body works in different ways,” a columnist for Allure scolded readers: “Keep an open mind, and remember you’re having sex with a woman who knows more about her body than you do about hers.”

Not convinced yet? “Estrogenized dicks are… a lot like if a vagina was shaped like a dick and testes… Sex with an estrogenized dick is its own experience, but it’s MUCH MORE like sex with a vagina than sex with a man’s dick!” This remarkable advertisement concludes with a denial of what’s being pushed and why: 

“Don’t have sex with anyone you don’t want to! You don’t ever have to give a reason why you don’t want to have sex with someone… But if you go out of your way to tell everyone that you won’t have sex with trans women, and your reasoning is that you think trans women are men, and that sex with us is like sex with men, don’t be surprised when people call you out as an uninformed bigot!” 

Or, as one “trans lesbian” put it: “Being shut off from the very idea of it, not even considering that having my penis inside you is different from having a man’s penis inside you? That hurts.”

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Somehow, telling lesbians that they “just haven’t tried the right dick yet” went woke.

Young lesbians get the message — from their peers in the “queer” community, their role models in arts and culture, the media, and medical providers — that their discomfort with any of this means that they may really be straight men trapped in gay women’s bodies. Sometimes, adopting an idiosyncratic gender identity — like “transmasc non-binary who’s attracted to women” or “feminamoric” — may be the only way a young woman can set boundaries around her sex life.

Last year, two friends and I launched Unspeakable LGBTQ. We asked: What do you wish you could say about your experiences as a woman in the LGBTQ community? 

Some women talked about intense pressure to identify out of womanhood. When femininity — not sex — makes someone a “woman”, women who don’t conform to stereotypes come under scrutiny: “I wish I could talk about how non-conforming women are being pressured to identify as a different gender to validate transwomen’s ‘femininity,’” wrote one respondent. “Feeling alienated by femininity is a near-universal female experience, especially for gay and bisexual women — not something that means you’re not a woman at all,” wrote another. Another respondent confessed that she now feels “​more comfortable around my conservative neighbors than I do in ‘queer’ liberal circles because my neighbors call me a lesbian and a woman… [in the LGBTQ community] I’ve had people ask me if I am truly non-binary or a trans man because I have short hair and don’t wear makeup or dresses.” 

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Relentless policing of lesbians’ sexual orientation and self-expression run through these stories. One woman compared the LGBTQ community today to her experience growing up in the Mormon religion, “where women are subservient in every way that matters”:

“We are allowed to have no leadership positions without the permission or surveillance of men, even in our own organizations… I was excited to join LGBT spaces and meet people like me. But it wasn’t like that. I left one cult and found out that what awaited me was another. In LGBT and other “progressive” circles, women don’t have the right to assemble without the presence of males who, by nature of being male, have no ability to relate to the experiences of female people. Just like my old religion, you aren’t allowed to question the ideology (in this case transgenderism) without being ostracized… Just like my old religion, men’s feelings and sensibilities must be taken into account in everything that women do.”

Another recalled her evangelical upbringing, writing: “I’d really really like, as a lesbian woman, to no longer be surrounded by transwomen who parrot the same talking points and shame tactics used, nearly word for word, by the youth pastor that tried to help me ‘pull away from sin’,” one woman wrote. “I never thought I would have to defend my sexuality against people in the community”, said another. “I get to feel wrong for how I am and how I love all over again.”

One university student described her brief involvement with the LGBTQ community on campus: “I hoped to meet other same-sex attracted people in the ‘lgbtq+’ club at my new university. It was not a community. There were some gay men and some lesbians, but there were also men who told me to my face that they were lesbians. That I should ‘be open to penis’. That I was a bad person for being a lesbian. I didn’t stay.” Another respondent admitted, “I forced myself to date trans women because I was made to feel like I was a bigot for not being attracted to them as a lesbian. It was incredibly traumatic and I was treated like utter crap.”

Responding to a climate where women who dissent from gender identity ideology face threats of violence, one woman wrote: “I want to talk about the incredible setbacks we’ve made in both women’s rights and same-sex rights without people threatening to beat, rape, or kill me.” 

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By Julie Bindel

For women who have firsthand experience identifying as transgender or transitioning — before deciding to desist or detransition — the LGBTQ community reinforces patterns of thinking that caused distress and harm. One detransitioned woman reflected: 

“I spent years running from being a butch lesbian. I transitioned in order to escape the shame & fear I had. When I finally came to terms with the fact that transition had not really helped & I was still the same me I detransitioned… I wanted community more then anything. But there isn’t a place for me anymore. Before I transitioned there were several lesbian groups in my area. They aren’t here anymore. As far as I can tell there is no lesbian space or group anywhere in my area… I can not express how painful it is to not have a place to belong.”

One of the most wrenching submissions was also the simplest and shortest — speaking to something the community at large seems to have forgotten: “there is nothing wrong with women who are only attracted to the female body.” An LGBTQ community in thrall to gender identity and “trans inclusivity” necessarily sacrifices belonging and acceptance for same-sex attracted women.  

For women who want to be part of the LGBTQ community, there’s no escaping gender identity ideology. “The problem with leaving the ‘trans cult’ as a lesbian is that you can never really leave,” one young desisted woman wrote. “The ideology is in every LGBT space, every LGBT charity, every dating site, on the front page of our news sites every single day.” 

In other words, you can accept yourself as a lesbian. You can desist or detransition from a trans identity. You can accept your sex and your sexual orientation. But if you want to stand under that rainbow flag, you’re not allowed to say so.

The next day, I read the article. It referred to high-profile lesbian journalists and was based on an interview with an American woman called Amy Dyess (now known as Beau Dyess), with whom I had briefly spoken a few months earlier when she was planning to come over to the UK to speak at the same event as me. I had cut off all contact with Dyess after I grew tired of her constant slating of a number of feminists I respected — I had heard she was not pleased at being rejected.

“The ‘gender critical’ feminist movement is a cult that grooms, controls and abuses, according to a lesbian who managed to escape,” was the headline of the article. “Looking back on her time in the ‘gender critical’ feminist movement, she is unequivocal: it’s a cult,” the story read. “A cult that groomed her when she was vulnerable and sleeping in her car; a cult that sought to control her, keeping tabs on her movements and dictating what she could and couldn’t say; a cult that was emotionally and sexually abusive towards her.”

“One British lesbian even promised to find Amy a wife, so she could stay in the UK and galvanise the struggling gender-critical movement here,” the article continued. As well as the fact that there are no other high profile lesbian journalists in the UK who had been regularly targeted by PinkNews, this was enough to lead several individuals to identify me. I had come to be associated with the so-called Terf movement and a hate figure — mainly as a result of all that PinkNews coverage. I also learned that weeks earlier, Dyess had made allegations about me on Twitter, including that I had “promised to find her a wife” when she visited the UK.

The next morning I searched my name on Twitter and found that within a very short time of the article being published, I had been identified as the person referred to in the article. Speculation was rife as to exactly what level of criminal behaviour I had been involved in. I was horrified. Even my fiercest enemies recognise that I have been at the forefront of campaigning to end exploitation, coercive control, and all other forms of violence and abuse towards women and girls — for decades — and yet the implication was that I was involved in the abuse of a vulnerable lesbian.

My partner — a human rights lawyer — read the article and was aghast. Neither of us quite knew what to do. I considered my options: ignore it and thereby invite accusations of guilt; deny the allegations, which would be absolutely outrageous and bring about further suspicion; or try to tear it apart in a humorous way. I took the third option. I felt I had no choice because there was so much Twitter chatter identifying me as the subject of the article.

“So Prick News has finally revealed I am a cult leader that traffics vulnerable young lesbians to the UK & matches them with a mail-order bride,” I wrote. “And Talcum X [Owen Jones] is delighted it has all come out. I would like to extend my apologies to the whole of Twitter for my outrageous behaviour.”

My reference was to the Owen Jones tweet plugging the article to his one million followers on the day it was published: “Must read article… about a courageous woman who left the anti-trans cult.”

Over the years, I have swallowed so many accusations of transphobia by PinkNews. But this was on a different level. It was devastating for me to be, as I saw it, implicated in being part of a cult that did all the things I have spent more than four decades fighting against. It seemed to me that the clear aim of the piece was to smear an entire group of feminists as abusers and cultists. If PinkNews felt able to make allegations of sexual abuse and coercive control against me, what and who would be next? I had no choice but to sue.

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In its defence, PinkNews says it didn’t intend to identify me. In defamation law, however, intention as to meaning is irrelevant, because the question is what the reasonable reader would take from reading it. It is clear to me that I was identified in the piece.

But I have never — and would never — call myself gender critical. I don’t believe in gender in the way it is used and defined by trans activists, ie that it is innate and overrides biological sex. Therefore, for me to be “critical” of gender in this context would be the same as saying I was critical of god when I am a non-believer. There are some women, both feminists and not feminists, who refer to themselves as “gender critical”, and who came to prominence by railing against trans ideology. Many have never campaigned on any other issue relating to women’s liberation, and so I have little, if anything, in common with them.

I object to extreme trans activism for the simple reason that its goal is to do away with women’s hard-won sex-based rights and women-only provision, such as domestic violence refuges, rape crisis services and prisons. Women-only spaces have historically been critically important to feminists because they provide a space for women to share their common experiences of growing up female and of enduring male violence. A space to freely discuss this without a fear of offending the men in the room is crucial for women’s safety and sanity.

As it turned out, the interviewee, Dyess, had no proof to back up any of her serious allegations, and was soon to publicly denounce PinkNews on Twitter, claiming to have been harassed by a PinkNews staffer and their lawyer over the story, and later for “misgendering”. Dyess soon changed their name to Beau and began to identify as non-binary. In my view, Dyess was used by PinkNews, and, once they realised I really meant business and would pursue the case until the bitter end, seemed to suggest that her allegations were so ludicrous that no-one would take them seriously.

It was also implied that she was not a reliable source. For example, in one letter from PinkNews’s lawyers to mine, they state:

“…the reference to the GCM as a “cult” would plainly not be taken literally and there is plenty of context to show that this use of the term ‘cult’ was Ms Dyess’s opinion and/or merely dramatic licence by her. The Article also could not be clearer that Ms Dyess’ account of her experiences roves widely and consists of an attack on multiple (largely unidentified) women she claims were part of a so-called ‘international lesbian’ network.”

In my view, the article appeared to be intending to slur any and every feminist that PinkNews consider to be a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. In its defence, PinkNews denied targeting me. “The claimant has not been treated any differently from other gender critical feminists who have been regularly mentioned in PinkNews coverage of the highly charged ongoing debate and clashing views between transgender activists on the one side and gender critical feminists on the other.”

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By Julie Bindel

As I said at the beginning of this piece, the last thing I wanted to do was to sue a publication. But this time, the article went too far and in the tradition of not standing for, what I saw as, the bullying and vilification of feminists, I felt I had a responsibility, if not a duty, to challenge it. PinkNews and I have now settled the case, and I refer to the joint statement which has been published on the PinkNews website. But it has been a long 18 months.

By sending the first letter of complaint, 10 days after the article was published, I had the expectation that PinkNews would acknowledge the risk and take the article down, or at least mark it as “subject to a legal complaint” as is commonplace in such matters. Sadly they did not, but chose to defend the case for a year and a half causing immeasurable stress and expense. It makes me wonder why they thought it worthwhile.

I sincerely hope that no one else has to go through the appalling experience I did. And given that PinkNews has said that following my case, they are going to review their editorial processes, perhaps that wish will come true.

Uganda has some of the worst legislation on — and social attitudes toward — lesbian and gay rights on the planet. In 2014, the nation’s Parliament passed an anti-homosexuality bill, which introduced the death penalty for homosexual encounters. It has since been declared “null and void” by a constitutional court, but there have been several attempts to reintroduce it since then.

The ugly, often deadly, anti-gay bigotry in Uganda is notorious amongst the international human rights community. The latest atrocity to befall gay Ugandan men will be reported on worldwide, but little has been written about the horrific abuse of lesbians here — which includes forced marriage and punishment rapes — nor their almost equally awful treatment in neighbouring nations.

I recently spoke to several of the 25 lesbians in Kakuma, via shaky Zoom calls and WhatsApp. They explained that LGBT refugees were segregated, in Block 13, meaning it is easy for other camp inmates to identify — and harass — them. Everyday activities such as gathering water, washing and shopping have become dangerous for these women because of the risk of further assaults. “We are in the same block as gay men,” Juliet, who is from Mbale in eastern Uganda, says, “and they mostly take the night shifts of watching over us and whenever we are attacked, they try to help us.” But they never feel safe.

Dire living conditions compound the issue. “Some of us sleep outside in the open space. There are not enough tents for everyone. We wake up early in the morning, we get water as soon as it is available, we do some cleaning, take a shower, feed the children.”

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Juliet was forced into marriage when she was 17. Her husband worked in the United Arab Emirates and only spent one month a year with her. And so she became close to his sister, with whom she started a relationship. After her husband died in 2018, “my father-in-law found me with my sister-in-law and told the police. Even if the men stone you to death there will be no punishment for the men, only for us.”

“I decided to leave Uganda because my father-in-law paid someone to come and kill me and my two sons,” she says. “I have four children, three boys and one girl, but my husband’s father took the girl from me after he realised that I’m a lesbian. They say that I’m a bad person and they can’t let me be with that baby girl. She is four now, my youngest child.”

“We didn’t know much about Kenya’s stance on lesbians,” says Juliet, “but in Uganda you are killed, you are hanged for being lesbian, and we were told, ‘Go to Kenya, they will take you in’.”

After she arrived in Kenya, Juliet was told that in Kakuma refugee camp, she and her children would have access to schools, hospitals and food. Above all, they would be protected. But after living in the camp for three years, she has found that Kenya is just as homophonbc as Uganda. “I thought that maybe if I come here, the UN will move me somewhere where I can be safe and live my life with my children. I thought maybe I would be safe and protected.”

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In reality, she’s in mortal danger. “In June, I was in my shelter sleeping, when someone came and poured petrol all over it, but before it was lit someone smelled the petrol and shouted. There have been multiple assaults on lesbians. There is never a week when we are not attacked. There have been rapes.”

“The most common problems we get here are rapes, attacks and beatings,” says Latifah, another young lesbian who fled Uganda because of threats to her life. “Many of us have been attacked and assaulted, but the only people we can talk to are the police at the camp, who tell us we are not human beings and they don’t help us at all.”

Her testimony is corroborated by Kevin (a common girls’ name in Kenya). “When you go to the police to report an assault, all they do is say, ‘Why don’t you get married to a man? Why did you choose to be that?’ So they end up not helping you,” she says. Kevin is from Kampala, and has been in the camp for three years.

“We were told the police would give us protection but they don’t send their reports to UNHCR. When you reach the police, you can be arrested for going to report. Realising we are lesbian they say, ‘Why do you pretend to be a boy?’” Kevin has tried to leave the camp at Kakuma several times, but is never given the necessary documents to do so. This signals another sinister form of persecution: not only do the authorities fail to protect women in the camp, they trap them there.

Annie-Marie, another lesbian I spoke to, says the women are in desperate need of support from feminists around the world. “We feel panicked all the time. We need to get out of Kenya. It has reached a point that we cannot be protected anymore,” she says. “We are alone in this world, no one has our backs. We have tried to cry out to everyone and tell them what we are going through.”

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Some feminist groups in the UK, such as FiLiA, are calling on people to speak up on behalf of lesbian refugees and demand action from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). But, Annie-Maria tells me, “our attempts to make UNHCR listen have been ignored. We call and call the UNHCR helpline but no one answers. The switchboard person just tells us to ‘wait your turn’.”

When I approached UNHCR to ask about Block 13 and the allegations of assault and intimidation against lesbians, I was simply told that: “UNHCR acknowledges the challenges faced by vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers in Kakuma, including some with an LGBTIQ+ profile, and is closely following their security situation. UNHCR encourages anyone facing security issues to report to the police immediately and UNHCR for any protection and legal assistance.”

Despite such assurances from human rights organisations, the women in Block 13 tell me they fear for their futures and even their lives. “We have run from one dangerous situation into another,” says Latifah. “We are in limbo, and feel like no-one wants us, and we are hated wherever we go. Surely it is time for lesbians to feel safe in the world, in 2021?”

This is the story of one block in one refugee camp in one country. But violence and oppression of lesbians does not just happen in East Africa. I have personally encountered sexual and physical violence, as well as harassment and intimidation, at the hands of men since coming out in the 1970s in the UK. I have also witnessed it in countries that are supposedly benchmarks of social equality, such as Norway and Sweden.

I have heard distressing tales from women in Brazil who experience punishment rape and forced into marriage. And in the United States I have met many lesbians whose families force them into gay “conversion therapy” in order to try to force them to be straight. But there are at least laws to prevent such abuses in many countries around the world, thanks to the lesbian and gay liberation movement. But in Kenya and Uganda, there is little or no protection for these women.

They deserve better; they’re not asking much. “We dream that we can get to countries where we can express our feelings and they accept our sexual orientation,” says a resident of Block 13. “It doesn’t matter where it is, but what we need is a place for our life to go on.”

To put it rather crudely, some consider themselves to be “virtually normal” (as Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 book argued). By which I mean they want nothing more than equality before the law so that that they can get on with living lives which are pretty much — except in the bedroom — just like everyone else’s. Others, though, consider themselves to be outlaws: their experience of same-sex desire placing them outside of mainstream, “heteronormative” society and they (at least in the case of gay men) would never be so bourgeois as to restrict sexual activity to the bedroom.

It’s the conservatives versus the radicals: the former position is the traditional “equality” argument; the latter is the more “liberationist” one.

But this good-natured debate is as nothing compared to the division that has opened up in lesbian and gay communities following Stonewall’s 2015 decision to re-formulate homosexuality around the nebulous concept of “gender identity”. Its policy today, which it has promoted through its Diversity Champions scheme, is that biological sex is less important than self-declared “gender identity” — an inner feeling of being either man or woman, male or female, which, according to Stonewall, is an identity we all possess. It follows that biological males can be lesbians, and biological females can be gay men. To disagree is transphobic.

It has riven us like never before, and only now is society waking up to this as a slew of private and public institutions pull out of the Diversity Champions scheme. Ofcom is the latest to quit stating that taking part “poses a conflict or risk of perceived bias”.

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The breadth of support Stonewall enjoyed until now was predicated on its small-c conservative agenda; lobbying for legislative equality and wider social acceptance of LGB people, and seeing legislative equality and social acceptance as linked. Its consensus-seeking agreeableness enabled buy-in from politicians of Left and Right. In particular, the issues of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage enabled socially conservative politicians to be absorbed into the equality project.

For radical liberationists, a background of legislative equality was tacitly welcome as a precondition to a more disruptive ultimate goal. On the whole, whether you wanted assimilation or a radically “queer” reshaping of society, Stonewall’s activities were largely uncontroversial among lesbian and gay people.

But the gender identity handbrake-turn fractured that consensus. Stonewall’s strategy for dealing with the fallout has been to insist that there can be “no debate”, characterising entreaties to discussion as equal to debating trans people’s very existence.

The “no debate” strategy was intended to delegitimise opponents’ views while the charity worked behind the scenes with the Government to drive through its preferred changes to the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act before critical voices could get a public hearing.

Today, the “no debate” shield is starting to fail. This is largely down to all those women who refused to concede that a man who claims to to “identify” as a woman counts as a woman in exactly the same way as a biological female does. Stonewall’s stance on gender identity, and the public consultation on the GRA in 2018, created some powerfully angry grassroots women’s organisations, such as Woman’s Place UK and Fair Play For Women. It also produced the LGB Alliance, founded by seasoned lesbian activists Kate Harris and Bev Jackson. (Full disclosure: I was involved in the early planning of LGBA.)

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This means that there are now two lobbying charities aiming to represent lesbian and gay people. Stonewall, which argues that the policies and principles of LGB Alliance (prioritising biological sex over gender identity) are transphobic, and LGB Alliance, which argues that the policies and principles of Stonewall (prioritising gender identity over biological sex) are homophobic.

Nothing represents the extent of this schism more powerfully than the intervention of Simon Callow — a gay man who came out publicly in 1984, five years before Stonewall was founded, when gay and lesbian people were commonly hounded by the tabloid press, and when the age of consent for gay men was still 21. Earlier this week Callow pointed out Stonewall’s “strange turn to the tyrannical” regarding self-identification. And described the “extraordinarily unproductive militancy” that surrounds its current position.

As for the charity’s ideological shift, he said: “When it impinges on women’s rights, hard-won women’s rights, the right to exclusive spaces for women, away from any threat at all — I think that’s a very serious issue.”

This must be discussed, he pointed out reasonably.

But reason is in short supply. The last few years of gay and lesbian politics has turned the consensus which held for thirty years upside down. Our most reliable lobbying charity, within which most of us used to be able to see at least something of ourselves, has become radicalised and divisive, igniting and reframing that discussion which had simmered in the background but never seemed existentially important in the way that it now does, namely — what does it mean to be gay or lesbian? Who are we?

For many of us, Stonewall’s position conflicts profoundly with how we feel about our gay or lesbian nature. Let me put it bluntly; I experience sexual desire for men, not human beings of either sex who claim to identify as men. My sexual orientation is towards male bodies — and yes, that means male genitalia too. If you explore this on Twitter (and I don’t recommend it) you will encounter people minimising same-sex desire to “genital preference”, arguing that it is inherently transphobic. Stonewall has avoided endorsing this view — but it has also avoided speaking up for specifically same-sex desire.

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For three decades, Stonewall was broadly representative of the majority of people for whom it lobbied. There was only occasional dissent — a minor kerfuffle over whether or not it should follow up its successful campaign for civil partnerships with lobbying for same-sex marriage, for example. But now, through the fog and noise, one thing is becoming clear; Stonewall’s legitimacy is eroding, and with it the illusion that there is one LGBT community, to which the vast majority of us affiliate.

If your answer is “no”, it’s probably because you’re straight.

It happens to homosexuals, though. What makes you gay? Even now, in these supposedly enlightened times, there is a body of scientists spending time and money trying to find out what it is that makes a minority of humans same-sex attracted. The latest study was published earlier this year, and I constantly wonder why it is a subject of such interest among the scientific community.

It’s the gay gene they’re after. It’s much like the search for the Loch Ness monster, as they cling on to the fantasy that a biological basis for sexual preference does exist.

The history of the search for the gay gene is not a comfortable one. One of the most controversial studies was conducted by gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay in 1991, who claimed that gay men’s brains were “more like women’s”. Then there was the study suggestion that boys with older brothers are 33% more likely to be gay because of occupying a womb where a male foetus has already been.

Appallingly, the then Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Immanuel Jakobovits reacted to news of LeVay’s research by saying: “If we could by some form of genetic engineering eliminate these trends, we should — so long as it is done for a therapeutic purpose.”

In 1993, American geneticist Dean Hamer was purported to have finally discovered what was nicknamed the “gay gene”. In a study of 40 gay brothers, Hamer found that two-thirds shared a distinctive pattern of DNA at a particular point on the X chromosome, which men inherit from their mothers. The gene was labelled by Hamer as “Xq28”.

The response to Hamer’s study was largely that of horror. Alarmists said the discovery would be used to try to “cure” homosexuality, ignoring the fact that Freudians, fascists and supporters of eugenics alike have been trying to eradicate homosexuality for decades on the assumption that it was something that could be “fixed”. Yet gay rights activists in the US and Britain were, on the whole, delighted at the discovery of the “gay gene”, seeing it as ammunition in the war against homophobia. To them, the gene proved that their sexuality was instinctive and inevitable, not perverse.

As a consequence of Hamer’s study, researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Washington DC said their findings would help prove that sexual orientation could be inherited, and that it would be possible to predict whether a baby would be gay and give the mother the option of a termination.  “Abortion hope after gay gene findings” read the headline in one newspaper — and yes, as recently as 1993.

But closer inspection showed that Hamer had not in fact identified a definite genetic basis to same-sex attraction. In 1999, researchers from the University of Western Ontario, who repeated the experiment with a larger group, failed to find the same link. The study, reported in the American journal Science, found there to be no more DNA match-ups than would have been expected by chance.

A further analyss in 2003 led researchers to say that they had found persuasive evidence to support the theory that a person’s sexuality is developed before birth. They had measured the “eye-blink reaction” of straight and gay test subjects who were subjected to sudden loud noises, finding significant differences in the response between male and female, heterosexual and homosexual participants which, they said, could be linked to the area of the brain which determined sexuality.

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To many people this is more than dry scientific study. I came out aged 15 and was told I was a freak of nature, something I believed until I met other lesbians and gay men who had a sense of pride in their identity. This was the end of the 1970s and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) were in full swing.

Both groups understood sexuality as a social construct, rather than something innate. For women it was about allowing ourselves to dare admit our attraction to other women and throwing off the shackles of what the lesbian writer Adrienne Rich  called “compulsory heterosexuality”. Rich argued that heterosexuality for women is a subtle yet forceful psychological prison from which most women could break free if they wanted.

The booklet Love Your Enemy? picked up on the debate in the UK, the central argument being that heterosexuality might well be enforced as a tool of patriarchy. “We think serious feminists have no choice but to abandon heterosexuality,” the manifesto reads. “Only in the system of oppression that is male supremacy does the oppressor actually invade and colonise the interior of the body of the oppressed.”

Many feminists considered sexuality purely a matter of innate desire, and the idea that lesbianism could be in any way a choice crazy. I understood that one did not “choose” to be gay or lesbian as such, more that if true choice for women existed, we may well be open to act upon our desires.

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In her 1999 book Generations of Women Choosing to Become Lesbian: Questioning the Essentialist Link, Australian academic Lorene Gottschalk interviewed three different generations of lesbians, asking whether or not they believed in biology as the root cause of sexual attraction. Gottschalk found that those who became lesbians in the 1970s believed they chose their sexuality, but those who became lesbians in the 1990s thought it was biology.

I can see why today young lesbians are far more likely than their older counterparts to insist that being gay is biologically determined: feminism in its heyday provided women with the vision that it was possible to leave a miserable heterosexual existence, and many of them did. By the 1990s, however, the development of queer theory led many lesbians to identify more with gay men than with second wave feminists, and thereby adopt the “please tolerate us, we can’t help it” line.

The men of the 1970s-era Gay Liberation Front understood that homophobia came out of a desperation to maintain strict gender roles, and many believed that heterosexuality was oppressive to women and that all anti-sexist men worth their salt should be gay. But to say, as did the singer Tom Robinson in 1978, that we were “glad to be gay” invoked horror from many gays, and terror from straights. After all, many gay men wanted to be “tolerated” and believed they would illicit sympathy if they could convince people that they “could not help” how they were.

Heterosexuals on the other hand were comforted by the idea that we did not “recruit”, and therefore their offspring were safe — unless, of course, they happened to be born with the rogue gene.

Unfortunately, immutability has never helped black people, Jews or women escape bigotry and oppression, and it won’t save us, either. The determinist case is often used to argue against Christian gay conversion therapy, in which so-called therapists “pray away the gay”, the logic being that if we have no control over our sexuality, what’s the point of trying to change it?

But as I know only too well from my undercover investigation into the practice, which goes on in Britain as well as the US< the bigots who promote conversion therapy neither know nor care whether we are born or choose to be gay — they just want us to live a heterosexual lifestyle, or failing that become celibate and remain in the closet.

It is also argued that some of us only “realise” we are gay later in life, while others remain in the closet through fear or shame. For instance, Sex And The City actor Cynthia Nixon came out as lesbian in her 40s, having previously been in a long-term relationship with a man, and she was vilified by a number of gay men. “I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better,” she said, invoking the wrath of the biological determinists.

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By Ian Birrell

Nixon, despite being an excellent role model for young lesbians, was accused of playing into the gay-hater’s hands. If you can choose to be gay, they said, homophobes will argue that we can choose not to be.

Most recently un 2019, the largest ever study of its kind examined data and DNA information of 500,000 people and found there were thousands of genetic variants linked to same-sex sexual behaviour, most of the them having a minor impact. There is no “gay gene” as such, but many different mutations might play a small role — yet the researchers said that non-genetic factors, including upbringing, personality and nurture, had far more influence on a person’s choice of sexual partner.

I appreciate that scientists have instinctive wonder as why things are as they are, and to seek answers. But I cannot deny that the incessant search for the gay gene offends me, because of the underlying and unspoken implications. My sexuality is not a problem waiting for a cure, and nor is it an oddity which needs explaining. Lesbians and gay men should not have to rely on (slim-to-non-existent) evidence that we “can’t help it” in order to be tolerated.

Knowing there are scientists spending huge amounts of time, money and effort in an attempt to ascribe a biological basis to our sexual orientation makes me, and countless others, feel like a specimen under a microscope as opposed to a person deserving of rights and respect. To the governments and other bodies funding such research I say this: pour that money into challenging anti-gay prejudice and support for young people struggling with life. As the Alix Dobkin song goes: Every woman can be a lesbian.

This year, an endless string of physical attacks has been reported in the news. In London, for example, a group of young men assaulted a lesbian couple on a bus after the two women refused to kiss for their entertainment. The teenagers responsible were charged last week. Then, Ellie-Mae Mulholland, an 18-year-old lesbian from Walsall Garth, was beaten black and blue by assailants who told her “you and your girlfriend are going to get it 10 times worse next time”. In Chile’s Fifth region, multiple butch lesbians have been assaulted and murdered.

Lesbians need as much support now as we ever did. But even within LGBT spheres, where we are – at least theoretically – part of the community, lesbians are now being vilified. For decades, gay and lesbian rights advocates fought for our sexualities to be accepted as legitimate.

But on Twitter the word lesbian has become a suspicious ‘TERF dogwhistle’. TERF is a nasty term. It stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist and is used, in particular, to describe lesbian feminists, because we aren’t always willing to toe the latest ideological line when it comes to gender. It has also become synonymous with being subhuman.

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How transgender turf wars put lives in danger

By Julie Bindel

A quick search online will give the uninitiated an idea of the inflammatory language that has become typical. “Punch a TERF.” “Knife a TERF.” “Burn a TERF.” Whatever the initial intentions behind the acronym, it has quickly become shorthand for ‘women deserving of violence’:

“Somebody slap this TERF c**t across the face.”

“TERFs can choke on my girl dick.”

“Pop quiz: if you kill a TERF, is it considered a crime? Answer: it is not. They are not considered lifeforms.”

There are countless more examples across social media platforms. And this dehumanisation has real life consequences. At the Edinburgh Pride March this year, lesbians were sworn at and shamed. It wasn’t social conservatives or religious Right-wingers who made them feel unsafe at Pride, but other members of the LGBT community.

Women carrying a banner proclaiming “Lesbian Equality” were told that they’re “an embarrassment to homosexuality.” People on the official Pride bus gave the middle finger to the women holding a banner that read “Lesbian, Not Queer.”

One woman gave a devastating personal account of the hostility lesbians experienced at Edinburgh Pride:

“As a migrant and lesbian who was born in a totalitarian state it was really shocking to come to the Scottish Pride, where we carried a banner ‘Lesbian visibility’, and be shouted at, by a group of mostly male white teenagers with the transgender flags, that we need to be “fucked”, “ashamed” and “get the fuck out”.

“I am not sure what this Pride is supposed to represent, but what I experienced was very simple and uncovered misogyny – and a specific misogyny towards homosexual women who dare to define and defend their sexuality without men telling us what it should be – clearly sanctioned by the Pride organisers.”

Similar incidents have taken place at Pride Marches across the country.

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By Douglas Murray

And in Edinburgh, during the run up to Pride Month, a lesbian, Julie Bindel, was physically attacked. She had come up to Edinburgh to join in a panel discussion about the rights of women as a political class. On her way out of the lecture theatre, only the intervention of campus security kept Julie from being beaten.

Her detractors have argued that Julie was speaking against the rights of transgender people. They used this claim to justify the attack on her. But I spoke alongside Julie on the panel – having been terrified out of my wits by the security drill beforehand – and listened closely to her talk. She did not say anything about or against transgender people.

And you need not take my word for it. Last week, a full video of the event was posted online. Anyone can watch Julie’s passionate speech about the importance of challenging male violence against women. She talked about the harms that result from treating every part of women’s bodies – be it wombs, hair, breast milk, or sexual organs – as commodities to be bought and sold. And she spoke about what it meant to grow up in a working-class community where the police didn’t care about women’s safety; about realising that there was no town, county, region, or country where women were entirely free from the fear of male violence. Her talk was powerful.

And it was free from transphobic prejudice. When she Tweeted the video last week, Julie challenged her detractors: “Those of you making those allegations, watch and listen if you dare.”

I had 'asked for it'. Go on, challenge yourselves, you brave social justice warriors, and tell me if one of these brilliant panellists spouted hate: https://t.co/oDBnoqlzyE

— Julie Bindel (@bindelj) July 25, 2019

According to Julie’s account, it took three security guards to stop her attacker. Thanks to the intervention of campus security, she made it to the airport safely. But the fact remains: someone attempted to attack her – someone who had previously Tweeted “beat them up” about lesbian protestors attending London Pride last year.

“Any trans allies at #PrideLondon right now need to step the fuck up and take out the TERF trash. Get in their faces. Make them afraid. Debate never works so fuck them up.”

This assailant has repeatedly incited violence against women, targeting lesbians in particular, using the language of misogyny and lesbophobia.

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By Christopher Rhodes

This attack was an example of how the persistent strain of violent sexism in conversations surrounding gender is making lesbians particularly vulnerable. Meanwhile, most of the local feminist community failed to condemn the attack – perhaps they were afraid of being tarred by the same TERF brush. Yet it is precisely because I am a feminist that I believe we must challenge male violence whenever and however it manifests.

As the late, great Audre Lorde said: “Your silence will not protect you.”

Julie’s assailant is male. No matter how this person identifies, their actions are woven into a wider pattern of male violence against women and girls that feminists call patriarchy. There are some who would class this statement as an act of violence on a par with the attempted assault. But it is a statement I stand by. If we cannot name and identify male violence, we cannot challenge it in any meaningful way.