‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women.’ This is the title of a recent BBC News article. The piece was centered around the testimonies of young lesbians who have been coerced into sexual relationships with transwomen. They spoke of social pressure from friends and lovers, threats of violence, and even sexual assault.
“I’ve had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler,” said Jennie, a 24-year-old lesbian. “They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent, just because I won’t have sex with trans women.”
The article quickly gained traction on social media. It received hundreds of letters, in support and complaint. Caroline Lowbridge, the journalist behind it, received so much abuse that she was forced to delete her Twitter account. And the backlash didn’t stop there.
When asked to comment on this pattern of coercion and assault, Stonewall’s CEO compared same-sex attraction to racism. “Nobody should ever be pressured into dating, or pressured into dating people they aren’t attracted to,” Nancy Kelley told the BBC. “But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of color, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.”
Stonewall was founded as a gay rights charity. Yet its most senior figure disregarded lesbian survivors and likened being gay to a form of bigotry. Kelley’s homophobic remarks raise serious questions about Stonewall’s claim to stand for “acceptance without exception.”
Novara Media editor Ash Sarkar echoed Kelley’s comments. She compared lesbians saying they don’t want penis-in-vagina sex to racists not wanting relationships with women of color:
Nobody should be pressured into sex with anybody, for any reason.
— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) October 26, 2021
I wouldn't want someone to feel they had to have sex with me out of social pressure, but it'd be fair to ask whether racism plays a part in announcing every 5mins that they'd never sleep with a woman of colour!
Columnist Owen Jones described the testimonies of these lesbians as “conspiratorial hate.” He did not acknowledge their experiences of sexual coercion and rape, instead framing a group of survivors as the oppressor:
“It’s beyond belief that the BBC published such unbelievably appalling journalism, based on no reliable data and the testimonies of anti-trans activists. You’d expect to find this sort of conspiratorial hate on the darkest recesses of the internet, not on the BBC.”
And Dr Finn MacKay, a feminist researcher and activist, Tweeted that it’s “…outrageous that the BBC has produced a lengthy, anecdotal, opinion piece that headlines with, & promotes the idea that, trans women specifically are a rape threat & particularly to lesbians.”
“I was one of the women interviewed for this article,” responded Kat Howard. “You can choose not to believe my ‘anecdotal evidence’ but myself and two other lesbians were all assaulted by the same transwoman at university, and we were targeted BECAUSE we were lesbians. That is a problem, I’d say.”
Back in 2004 MacKay revived Reclaim the Night – marches against rape and all forms of male violence against women. And yet she opposed addressing the problem within the LGBT community:
“There are rapey creeps in our community unfortunately. I just don’t think it’s going to help us to address it, with the sex & gender conservative mainstream peering in from outside & using that to pursue an anti LGBTQ agenda, picking off trans women first.”
But women have always been expected to stay silent about experiences of abuse for the supposed greater good. Whether it’s for the family, the church, the company, or the community, too many survivors are expected to stay silent. And the only person responsible for sexual violence is the perpetrator. It’s on the perpetrator alone to think about how their violence and entitlement reflects on the community. Never the victim.
Unfortunately, the backlash didn’t stop there. The following day, in response to the BBC’s article, a hashtag trended on Twitter. It contained professions of love and solidarity. But these public outpourings of compassion were not aimed at any of the lesbians who had shared their trauma. People posting on #CisWithTheT didn’t acknowledge lesbians as victims or survivors; they chose instead to prioritize the demographic to which the perpetrators all belonged.
“This is the problem with mainstream feminism,” said Kat Howard. “Lesbian women who have shared their stories of assault and rape have been ignored, and instead women have rushed to comfort males because that is who they have been told by Stonewall to empathise with. There is still far too much lesbophobia amongst women, and too little sex solidarity. Empathise here with your lesbian sisters.”
Team AfterEllen stands alongside every lesbian who gave testimony about her experiences of sexual coercion.
