The Gender Dissidents SurveyAs a lesbian, I’ve already been labelled a terf for daring to say that I won’t date a TIM {trans identifying male), let alone sleep with one, because I am not attracted to male genitalia or masculine posturing.
I have started to have discussions with close friends and speak up a little more on Facebook.
I’ve been defriended by a friend, and labelled transphobic.
Stephanie, Historian, writer, USA
I am a Black Lesbian woman. Aside from being told I’m a bigot because I don’t date males, I’m being told that my womanhood is only valid because men can be women too. TRAs are using racist rhetoric that kept Black women from accessing the same facilities as white women.
I have called this racist sexist rhetoric out at work (it got me fired). I have talked person to person with other women about this. I have raised my voice in disagreement when a law was being considered in my small city (I’m in the United States).
Fired from my job. Subject to sexist and racist harassment.
T, Black Lesbian Woman, adulthumanfemale11, USA
I’m a lesbian and was for years active in a women’s centre which acted as a hub for local lesbian activities and groups and support. I and other volunteers held monthly brunch meetings for lesbian women, we had a monthly lesbian feminist group, a monthly cafe event, a newsletter that publicised everything from walks and bike rides and dining clubs and festivals and weekends away to personal ads. We probably reached the best part of 1000 women. We had innumerable women tell us we’d been a life-saver for them. People actually moved to this area because they knew there was this wonderful, open, established lesbian network they could plug into.
Then a trans-rights activist in a wig and lipstick and long nails came to a couple of our events.
He stood out because he didn’t look like the rest of us. We asked him to leave. He refused. He came to a brunch, made a speech about how he’d come to educate lesbians about transgender issues and, as women tried to leave the room, forcibly hugged them. They made complaints to us. We banned him from lesbian events for touching women without their consent and took the issue to the police who did nothing. The trans-identified man said he’d take the women’s centre down. And he did.
He applied to become a committee member. The committee at that time was dominated by straight white Momentum Labour women who welcomed him. The BAME women, many of whom are not allowed by their faith to attend events where there is a man present, took their funding and left. Many of the lesbians boycotted the women’s centre events in protest. The women’s centre closed down. The lesbian women’s movement fractured as some women took a GC stance and others took the ‘poor transgender people’ stance. Friends fell out. Younger lesbians told off older lesbians for their failure to be kind and reasonable. This fracture in the lesbian community is still festering and I can’t see a time when we will ever be able to rebuild what we had.
I have educated my MP about this, but while she’s sympathetic and makes GC noises to my face she still maintains a supportive pro-trans public persona.
I’ve written 50+ letters and emails to the BBC, the Guardian and other media organisations, occasionally with success (ie, articles have been changed, headlines have been changed) Lots of emails to Radio 4!
I send postcards of support to many women, particularly whose who are fighting alone within their professions/ institutions.
I’m out and proud as GC on my very secure FB page and found that as soon as I started talking about it, quite a few others started saying that they’d felt the same way but had felt uncomfortable about discussing such things.
I’ve taken a firm, rational, non-emotional GC line in lesbian social groups etc and while some people are offended, I usually find that the majority even if they’re silent at the time, sidle up later to say they agree.
I belong to a Resisters group and have stickered and gone out on the streets leafleting. Again, the majority of people agree with a GC line.
Once you start talking to people you realise that 80% are GC, 10% are confused or don’t care and fewer than 10% really take the TWAW line — and even then can’t justify that belief.
I’ve lost several people with whom I thought I’d be friends for life. I had a lesbian GP friend who is now so deeply enmeshed in transgender ideology that she has gone off to specialise in transgender medicine and refers to me openly as a TERF. She spouts all the Mermaids stuff about hundreds of trans teens killing themselves and won’t hear a rational response. It’s brought out a sort of Messiah complex in her: she’s going to rescue and protect all the poor transpeople. It’s profoundly disturbing to realise that even someone like her — clever, educated, years of experience in public service in the NHS — is so emotionally and intellectually susceptible to irrational ideology.
I’ve also been very badly patronised by younger women friends who think their brand of feminism (intersectional feminism) is better than my 1970s/1980s feminism. It’s come as a real shock to realise that these apparently impeccably feminist young women don’t centre women in their politics. Some of them treat me as if I have learning difficulties. You know: ‘You can’t blame Issilly for her opinions, she comes from the medieval school of feminism where women hate all men…’
The biggest negative consequence has been realising how irrational and misogynistic and homophobic the world still is, under the guise of being ‘nice’. Lesbians are under attack from all sides, including other lesbians. I feel really glad to have had a wonderful 30 years of positive lesbian feminist culture and so sorry for younger lesbians who have nothing that I had to cling onto.
Issilly, who was just a lesbian until she discovered she was actually a radical lesbian feminist
This matters to me as I feel I would have been put down the trans route if I were growing up today. Typical gender non conforming child who grew into a same sex attracted woman.
I became single after a long relationship and after a long illness I recovered emotionally and physically to go back on the dating scene. I was horrified at men approaching me on lesbian dating sites. Most of them didn’t declare this and I worked it out.
I felt humiliated and a bit scared that I might have met someone in person without knowing they were biological men. It chilled me to the bone. I can now spot them and block them, but it was unpleasant and degrading for me at the time.
One person had been stalking me on line and in my social life – I had that experience from men in my 20’s and 30’s. I found it impossible to understand why they were there in the first place and it led me to question what the hell is going on.
I created a twitter account. I discuss it with friends and family. I also challenge the new norm at work by calling out the ridiculousness of language and mixed sex toilets.
Some friends especially the ‘woke’ younger women are unkind or think I’m old fashioned.
EJ, Proud vintage lesbian who feels like an outsider all over again but this time it’s the heterosexuals who are my allies, magdelen berns appreciation society
This matters as I want to find a wife, raise a family and I work in STEM. This matters because the same arguments that were used against me as a child (that female brains are not suited to certain activities) are now being used to ‘prove’ certain men are trans women because they like ‘girly’ things.
I have discussed it with a close friend and my brother and touched on it at work.
I have been harassed on social media and one girl refused to go on a second date with me again because I was same-sex attracted and outspoken about it.
Elizabeth, Lesbian, Switzerland
I care about this issue because I’ve realised that women and girls are losing their rights to men. Also, because of controlled speech – everyone is losing their right to freely use correct biological pronouns when addressing others – freedom to tell the truth.
I care because I know lots of adult lesbians who wished they were a boy when their breasts started growing, grew out of it, and now are perfectly okay with turning out to be lesbians. I care because I’ve seen young lesbians trying to turn themselves into men where I work – a twenty year old has grown hair on her face and had her breasts removed. She looks like a girl with a hairy face and no breasts. Social contagion is destroying young people’s bodies.
No baby is born in the wrong body. I think it’s stemming from homophobia- it’s better to pretend to be the opposite sex than to be a lesbian.
Transgender women – men pretending to be women and demanding rights that destroy women’s rights is a different kettle of fish. A fetish. Autogynephilia. It stems from misogyny from jealousy. They see women as subservient sex objects, so they mimic badly and play out their fetishes all day. I don’t want to share female places with them.
I have joined social media ( which is a big move for me ), tried to learn more about the issue, and started to speak out to friends and colleagues and family. I’ve spoken up in online groups and been kicked out of them. Where I live it’s a very small community so that’s made it hard to meet people. I’m fairly new to speaking up, but feel I must on this issue. It’s a start.
I’ve been made to leave online social groups because of saying, politely, that LGB should drop the rest of the alphabet as they’ve nothing in common with transgender people. Where I live, that’s difficult.
Doc, Enough is enough
My family consists of my sister, my mother and my grandmother. I have no living male relatives. I am a lesbian who has been sexually assaulted, my mother has been harrassed, my sister and grandmother have been raped, my girlfriend has been raped. My sister has mental and physical disabilities and needs professional support, so does my grandmother.
I want to stand up for their right and my right to places that are free of male people, I want to stand up for their right and my right to refuse being treated or cared for by a male-bodied person, without fear of being accused of unjustified discrimination or gaslit into “embracing their discomfort” and accept a male person as female.
My sister also has a schizophrenia, she relies on strong medication to maintain a grasp of reality and live a mostly independent life. Messing with her knowledge and perception of reality, particularly with regard to the demographic that deeply traumatized her body and mind, may threaten her mental health and independence.
I do not fight for or against trans people, I fight for acknowledgement of reality on which legislation can be based that includes safeguards and exceptions to protect the weak and those who cannot fight for themselves or have trouble articulating and defending their needs.
I am following the debate and arguments in social and mainstream media. I do not live in an anglophone country, but the issue is arriving here, too, and I’m getting ready to engage those parties involved in the legislative process. I monitor guidelines at the institutions that provide care for my loved ones and I keep telling them that they are allowed to refuse care that makes them discomfortable.
Some friends from an LGBTQ friendly hobby group have cut themselves off.
Anna V, middle aged woman working in IT, Germany
I have a lot of reasons but this matters to me because I feel like I am 12 again, in the closet, afraid to come out as a lesbian out of fear. This is the exact same thing, now I fear I would lose more friends and that I’ll be labeled transphobic by just saying that as a lesbian I don’t want anything to do with men and their body parts. That’s the gist of it.
The “other side” keeps telling me that penises can be female, that transwomen can be lesbians. It’s not as bad as conversion therapy but it’s pretty close. I fear that a lot of young lesbians will be growing up confused because they don’t find trans identified boys attractive as they are pressured to confirm to the new norm. Some of them might be pressured into thinking they are men, butch lesbians face this problem because they don’t confirm to society’s stereotypes of what it means to be a woman.
This matters to me because women’s voices are being snuffed, we are told to shut up and conform to the new ideology. I have always been anti organized religion, the left also holds this view apparently yet it’s puzzling to me how the cult-like similarity between these dogmas aren’t distinguished.
TWAW is a dogma, a chant repeated over and over again and anyone who disagrees is considered an undesirable.
I’ve already lived through this as a teenager, struggling with the ever so present homophobia within my society and surroundings. Living in fear of being discovered or outed as a lesbian, not speaking up whenever people proudly displayed their homophobic views.
I found my “tribe” then, my refuge was in the LGBT community. Now that same community is targeting me and other people like me who speak out.
The same community whose principals are being run-over by this new dogma.
I tried to write about it on social media and I got shut down pretty fast after that I began having panic attacks. I made anonymous accounts to voice my opinion.
I have been called transphobic, terf, bigot.
J, Studies philosophy, Montenegro
I care because I believe that the LGBT community is following gender theory in a very dogmatic manner, without even stopping to consider alternatives or thinking critically about it.
As a lesbian, who is becoming aware of how this potentially damage young people and women, I’d like my community to have a more rational and open debate about this issue.
A.L, Italy
I care because I’m worried for the safety for woman. Especially as a lesbian I’ve seen the negative effects all around me. When I was a teenager I was involved in queer trans activist discussions online and those spaces pushed me into wanting to transition.
I’m lucky that I found gender critical thoughts before I voiced that wish and instead learned to deal with my internalised homophobia and accept that my reasoning was not genuine body dysphoria but rather my internalised homophobia and issues with the sexist society we live in and how that affected me growing up.
I have talked extensively about it on social media and will talk about these issues with any friend or family member willing to listen. I’ve also met some radical feminists in my town and have become more active there.
I have been very lucky that there haven’t been many negative consequences and I don’t have to worry about them either. I’m a university student still living with my parents. Even if I where to lose my job, it wouldn’t have much bearing on my life. Despite being a lesbian I do avoid Lgbt spaces, since those tend to be extremely pro trans.
Vanessa, Germany
The Gender Dissidents Survey