#70

Violence Against Lesbians 

FiLiA conference 2019

Sally: There's a couple of things I want to say. This panel, as I said, is about discussing violence against lesbians. We will be talking about lesbians as same-sex loving women. That is the definition that we're working to, and we'll be talking about women as adult human females.

If that’s a problem for anybody, that's absolutely fine, and I'm really happy to chat with you outside of this panel, but we will not be wasting any time on questions that question either of those things, this panel that's taken as read. 

And I don't want to take any more time up because I'm blessed to be surrounded by four wonderful, intelligent women that have… and experience to share.

So we can start off by handing over to Counsuelo. A lot of you will be aware of her, an activist, an EFL teacher, sociologist, feminist, lesbian, writer, and publisher, seems to be there's not much this woman can't do. She practices Sym/biography and Flourishing, two concepts that she's coined and developed throughout the years, and as a publisher, gives huge importance to the enmeshing of both concepts above in a wider system called Bibliodiversity. 

As a writer she loves in memory, in company. So she formed part of, and please excuse my Spanish cause I'm really bad at languages, Las Juanas, which is a feminist literary collective of women,  and SLAP (Latin-American poets and writers), to Exile Writers Inc.

So without further ado, I'll hand you over to Counsuelo.

Counsuelo: Can you hear me at the back? Yes. Good. 

Before I start, let me tell you that this morning at about one o'clock in the morning, I heard, and then I read, that the President of Chile, right wing President of Chile, has declared a state of emergency. So they've got the militaries out into the streets of Santiago. So what I'm going to do today is even more relevant than before.

What comes next is an extract of a paper that my partner Lynda Birke and I wrote years ago, I think in about 2001. I can't remember. We almost didn't finish this collaboration, because I cannot write in a scientific way, and I am forever flouting the rules. Like today, when I am supposed to present a paper, yet I am exposing myself in a public performance of my pain.

But also because it was difficult for Lynda to hear about my arrest, torture, and rape during protests against Chilean military dictatorships in the ‘80s. When they arrested me, I thought it was because I was protesting with other teachers, and students. But later I realized that they targeted me and other women because I am a lesbian.

When they put me onto the bus in the first stage of the arrest, they already knew I was a lesbian, and they threatened me with raping me in front of whom they said was my partner at the time. So I can only assume that someone had betrayed me and other companeros and companeras. 11 years after I was released, when we had gone back to a democracy, a policeman came to the British Institute where I worked, and said I should go to the Commissaria, which is the police headquarters, with him.

It was in this place where they had raped and tortured me for three days before I was sent to a women's jail, run by Catholic nuns. After convincing me that there was nothing to fear, I went along with him. When we got to the place, he took me to an office where I suppose there was a general, or a colonel, I don’t know. He was an officer. 

This person offered me a seat and a cup of coffee, which I refused. He asked me whether I had liked the tour of the Commissaria, because they had deliberately taken me through corridors, and even the cells where they had some prisoners, before we got to his office. His apparent benevolent tone and fucking smile told me he wanted to make sure he knew I had been there before, and that I should be very afraid.

To cut the story short, because I'm writing the long version of this in a memoir, he wanted me to have sex with his female lover. My heart and mind were racing, and I managed to stay calm, and even asked him why he wanted me to do this. We came to an agreement that we would meet again in two weeks, and that he would only watch. What he didn't know was that I was flying to the UK in five days, to live here, so I left him there.

Here I am in front of you, feeling naked, shaking, and in pain. I am going to tell you the story of my pain today and through this, the story of many other people's pain. That pain that cut's throats and vocal cords and leaves only groans and silent cries. 30 years have gone, but I can still smell my own fear and that of my companeras.

It was always like this, sticky tension pouring from our sweated bodies. The bodies of all of us defying teargas, water cannons, and carabineros. Run, shout, think, sweat. Remember, remember. I can feel the adrenaline rushing through my entire body. My throat is dry and hoarse of so much shouting against this barbaric, mad regime.

“Why are people running now,” I shout, but nobody listens to anybody. I cannot stop. I have to keep running and find a safe place away from the bullets and the force of the water separating the crowds. Emma is gone. I cannot see her anywhere in this chaos. This noise is driving me mad. I am so scared. Yes, I am terrified.

My heart thumps in my chest and my temples. My eyes are itchy. I cannot breathe properly. I have to keep running. Run, run. Don't think.

What's this terrible pain on my back? I cannot walk anymore. I feel very tired. 

Why has everything gone so quiet? Silence is all I can hear. Silence can take many shapes. Silence can be touched, sliced. It can be uncomfortable, if experienced for too long. It can be used, does it break, to relax and enjoy the company of one's cells, living in one's body. 

It very often embodies resistance itself. It can be used as a weapon to break someone's spirit in a session of torture. Torture means severe pain. They had warned me in my training sessions in the MIR, which is a revolutionary left movement. No training session prepared me for this intense pain.

All this alienation, this empty vacuum, my body, my mind, my pain. This is not happening. I am a little speck in the universe. Which universe? The world is not anymore. I am disintegrating, bit by bit, yell by yell, electrode by electrode. The pain, all this pain here, and there, down there in my vagina. The agony.

Where am I? Where is my eye? This is cutting right through myself. I am. I am no longer. I dissolve in this pain. This monster is eating me alive now. I am trapped in the here and now, in this alienness, in this erupting, without control. I am a volcano. Yet anger is no more, only terror and pain. That is all there is.

I am in pain. I am losing myself. I don't want to tell you anything, you bastards!

Silent. Be silent. That will bounce your distress back to them. If I give thought to the pain, if I manage to speak to it from the borders of my weak body, perhaps it will leave me, perhaps my self will be back together. I have lost my self.

Maybe, maybe it was my fault. I shouldn't have bought into this. Maybe if I tell them that I won't do it anymore, maybe.

I speak with a swollen tongue, which threatens to suffocate me to madness. This pain does not have a body. It is just a huge mouth devouring me. This pain does not have ears. It doesn't listen to what I can say. I retch, I vomit. I want to fly away like a kite. No, better than that. Fly like an eagle, proud and free, fly like a condor, like a phoenix.

But I will never rise from the ashes of my body. I scream in silence. I want to cry out loud. Maybe my mother will put me back in her uterus then and silence will be. What am I saying? My mother is not here. And this pain does not have a meaning. I do not have a meaning. Life is only silence. I, with no voice, no tongue, no mouth, no body, anguish, terror.

My throat is boiling sand. My breast, my belly, my vagina, my anus, all wave after wave of electricity. No control. I am losing control of myself. I cannot stop the shit, the piss, the tears, the jerks, the yells. I want the silence of death. It hurts. I don't want to be dispersed, or sliced. 

Mama, where are you? Take me back into yourself. 

I don't want to think. I am being banished, for daring to think, and for loving women. Papa, is that you? I am a good girl. Can you see? I am in silence, just as you wanted me to be. They must be killing my self, but I cannot die. You need me, my son. I don't even remember your name, mi niño. 

Hush now. I will be fine. It is only a little praying. I promise it doesn't hurt. 

Is that you, Christina, my love? They said all I needed was a good fuck, from real men. But what they will never understand is that I love you precisely because you're not a man. They laughed, then. They laughed with an evil laugh. And then everything was silence after silence, after silence, after silence. 

My name is Counsuelo. My mother is no consolation in this cold. Why am I so cold in this… I'm terrified that my body will betray me.

I am having a break from the Barria. Will they let me go now? Counsuelo, my name is Counsuelo. Everything is silent now. They want to drive me mad. Maybe if I chant silently, fly like an eagle, proud and free. 

This is part of my story. I am safe now, away from Chile. But for people like myself, there will never be an ‘after torture’, because once you have been subjected to physical and psychological torture, pain remains. It gets stuck to your skin, to your bones, to your guts, to your heart, to your memory. And I go to a counsellor here in Britain who tells me, “we do not torture here.” Patronising old git. 

And then I go to a doctor who asks me to tell him exactly what happened. I want to say that I don't want to describe the Barria, the electrodes, the blows, the kicks, but end up crawling back into my silence and say, “I don't remember well.” But everything is blurred in my mind, because I realise that physicians don't speak my language. 

Yet the body remembers again and again. The body remembers and pain becomes part of our dreams, and of our nightmares, because we don't have a valve to release them in any other way. The body wishes to be a body again. The body wants to have a mind and to remember better times. The body wants a soul. My body is dying to have some comfort in the here and now.

I resist disintegration in this presentness by doing the exact opposite of what I did during my torture. I have broken my silence. I have finally given voice to my pain, but in my terms. By the way, did I tell you that my name means consolation? I am Counsuelo. I am Counsuelo. Am I? Thank you.

Sally: Wow. It is really difficult to follow that, but so important that we hear these words and we hear the truth, because that's what we're so often silenced from sharing. So thank you so much for sharing your truth with us Counsuelo. 

I'd like to introduce now, Susan Hawthorne, who's joined the Women's Liberation Movement in 1973 and joined the collective of Melbourne's Rape Crisis Centres in ‘74. She's been involved in many different areas, and I love this, including as an aerialist in the performing of the women's circus. Little bit jealous of that. Susan's always busy organising writers' festivals, feminist conferences, I think there's 15 books that you've authored, three from fiction, nine poetry, and three nonfiction.

Importantly for this discussion, in Uganda back in 2002, a woman said to Susan, be careful, in Uganda lesbians are tortured. And this set her on the path to researching why she'd not heard about this before. So from 2003 onwards, she's written numerous research papers and spoken on the subject to torture of lesbians, across the world. 

Her novel Dark Matters, which you can find in News From Nowhere, the bookstore, was published and she hopes to reach a large audience, and get this message out more widely. 

Susan: Thank you. And Counsuelo, thank you so much for your talk just then and sharing what you've been through. 

In Australia, we have a tradition of acknowledging the elders of the land on which we hold our events. But here, I would like to acknowledge our fore-sisters, the lesbians who've been before us, whether it's ‘Gentleman Jack’, Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, which I gather is not too far from here, Sappho, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there are many of us and there always have been. 

So, why am I here? Well, what happened was, as you mentioned in the bio, I was in Uganda in 2002 at an International Women's Congress and there was a session on radical feminism in Africa. And I thought, “great, I'm going to go to this session.”

And it was great, was fantastic. But during the conversation I stood up at some point, and mentioned the word lesbians and said something else, I don't know what. And at the end, this woman came up to me and said, “be careful, because in this country, lesbians are tortured.” And it really, it was like a fuse going off in my brain and I thought, “well, if I don't know about it, probably not too many others know about it either, so I'd better start reading.” 

Now, the incredible thing is that about a month later, I found Counsuelo’s article that you and Lynda had done together, and I read it. And although it had been published a year earlier, I hadn't seen it. So you've got to know what you're looking for, really, don't you? 

And I was absolutely blasted by the power of what Counsuelo had written. And I thought, “okay, let's start.” So I started doing the research and I looked up ‘lesbians plus torture’ on the internet. All I got was porn. And that actually continued for probably about the first five years. There was nothing, absolutely nothing. 

And so it was clear to me that a) lesbians were being tortured, because we knew a little bit about it. I did find some research in some books that Amnesty International had done on LGBT, and guess what? The GBT took up a lot more of the book than the L. And when I got to the research they'd done on women who'd been tortured, guess what? Lesbians were in the appendix. 

So I was very disappointed and I continued to be disappointed with Amnesty International. So I went back to Counsuelo and Lynda's piece, and I reread it and I wrote articles. That quote that you have at the beginning, that you say, “where is my eye?” And I feel that's a really central question for lesbians, for lesbians attempting to understand the torture of lesbians. 

“Where is my eye? What is my eye? Do we have an eye?” That, I think, is what is under attack presently, and has been under attack and is under attack, under patriarchy all around the world. We know it happens. 

Gillian Hanscombe, wonderful poet who lives here in Britain, who started out in Australia, wrote a book called Sybil: The Glide of Her Tongue, and she writes, “no one cares about dykes, only other dykes.” And I think that's something that keeps coming back to me all the time. 

Now the other questions that came up were, why is it that lesbians are so rarely mentioned in the literature on torture? And I think, there's a wonderful quote from a Peruvian lesbian whose name I do not know, she said: “When I speak of my right to my own culture and language as an indigenous woman, everyone agrees to my self-determination. But when I speak of my other identity, my lesbian identity, my right to love, to determine my own sexuality, no one wants to listen.” So there are battling things going on there, and some oppressions are regarded as more important than others. I refuse to use the word identity, because of the way it's gone downhill in recent times. 

In Zimbabwe in 1996, a woman called Tina Machida wrote about her family: “They locked me in a room and brought him to me every day to rape me, so I would fall pregnant and be forced to marry him. They did this to me until I was pregnant.” Sadly, Tina Machida died some years ago. And I find that a terrifying thing, that it is the state who tortures lesbians, it is the family who tortures lesbians, and torture happens in numerous other ways and places. 

So, for example, in Tehran, they push lesbians off the top of buildings. In the USA and Russia, they incarcerate lesbians in prisons and mental institutions, because they're criminals, or hooligans, or just simply young lesbian rebels. in way too many places, lesbians are murdered and their murder is rarely attributed to being a crime of hate. And it's rarely even noticed that the victims are lesbians.

And you know, there's a very strange thing that happens when you read the media. You see certain kinds of violence that are perpetrated against gay men, against transgender people, against heterosexual women, but lesbians? When was the last time you read a story in the media, which mentioned that a lesbian had been attacked, murdered, beaten up, tortured, because she was a lesbian? It doesn't happen. 

There is only one example that I can think of, that made the mainstream Australian media in Australia, and that was the crime of corrective rape in South Africa. Now, I had been writing about the crime of corrective rape in South Africa for maybe five, seven years before this came on. And at around that, by that time around 500 lesbians had had corrective rape done against them. Many of them were murdered, but this was not newsworthy. And I find this so appalling. 

And it's exceptionally bad on the southwest cape in South Africa. But as we know, lesbians are raped on a regular basis.

I did have an argument with the people at Amnesty International. I won't tell you the whole story, but I tried to write an article about the torture of lesbians. Cause I noticed that they had lots of stories about different groups of people who were being subjected to torture. And at first I thought they were going to do it, and then they refused. They refused to take a piece on the torture of lesbians. They may have changed their mind since, but I gave up fighting with them after about three years. 

If you're interested in some of the things that I've written, I wrote a blog for the FiLiA site. I've got lots of links there. So, because it's very distressing, many of the articles that I've written, I can barely read, and so forth. 

But after all of that, I decided that I had to write something different. And so in 2004, I think it was, I started writing my book Dark Matters. And cause I thought, you know, three people are going to read my research articles, I've got to get it out in some other way cause I'm a poet and I’m a novelist, I thought that that was probably the best way for me to do it. 

But it took me an awful long time. It took me 15 years to figure out how, how to make it readable, how to make it possible for a reader to come in and, you know, start cold turkey at the beginning and not put the book down after five pages.

And so I've structured it so there's a young woman, Desi, who is the niece of the main character who has been abducted and imprisoned and tortured, and her aunt, Kate, also called Ekaterina sometimes, has left her some boxes of papers and she has died. But Desi thinks, “oh, bloody hell, I guess I'd better have a look through before I throw them out.”

She sits down and she starts to read through the papers and realises that she needs to keep reading, and she's not going to be throwing them out. In fact, she starts doing a PhD, as one does. And so she becomes the kind of leavening voice throughout the story that makes it possible for the reader to identify, if they're not a lesbian and, you know, they don't want to identify with some of the terrible things that are happening to Kate.

And it took me a long time because I couldn't figure out how to put the pieces together and it’s written in fragments. And, in the last year before I published it, I was lucky enough to get a grant. Finally, after 30 years of applying for a grant from the Australian Council, I finally got one. That enabled me to go to Argentina first, and then Chile. 

And I knew when we arrived in Chile that the other character, Mercedes, had to have come from Chile, because it just connected somehow. And as well as that, there were Chileans who came to Australia in the 1970s, and early ‘80s who were escaping from the Pinochet regime. 

And Chile and Australia kind of share something, in a way, it's probably the Pacific Ocean, but I think there's also a kind of historical coincidence there, of things. So that enabled me actually to finish my book. And the other thing I have to say is that Christine, the woman in Uganda, is one of the people I dedicate the book to. Counsuelo is the second person I dedicate the book to. And a friend in Australia who did not want to be identified, is the third person. 

So those, those stories and things made it real for me, made it possible. 

And I also met Counsuelo, in the same year that I went off to Chile, I think. Yeah, 2016. So that was great too, because it was wonderful to actually meet Counsuelo, although we did have a story by you in our doc-book.

And so the reception of the book. Well, this has been fascinating. There's been a huge range of things. So I've had fabulous reviews from lesbians, really nice ones, comparing, I have to say this, comparing me to Monique Wittig and Sappho. That was a bit of a thrill. But the other kind of response has been deathly silence. So, you know, great reviews from lesbians, deathly silence from the rest of the world. And I'm not surprised by that. 

And, I actually want to read just one section, which is written in the book, is written by Kate, because she's written a whole lot of stuff, not only about her time in prison, but also her thoughts on life, and stuff about her biography. But this one is at a moment of sheer despair. 

“I cry, I cry for all, for all the women, for all the lesbians. I cry because no one cries for us. In Kampala and Chicago, we are shot and raped. We are thrown from the top floor of a high building in Tehran and Mecca. When they arrest us, they put us in cells with violent men who think nothing of having their own fun. In Melbourne and on the Gold Coast, we are tossed from cars, rolled into a ditch. In Santiago, we are imprisoned and put on the Barria. In Buenos Aires, they insist we accompany them to dinner outside the prison, we are caught, used, and banged away again at midnight. On the Western Cape, they come for so many of us that even the media notices, but most of us remain hidden. There are few reports of the crimes against us, fewer readers.” 

So I think I was having a day of despair that day too. And I guess that the important thing about trying to write about this kind of experience that Counsuelo has passed to us today, is that it's very difficult. My partner says that I was a difficult woman during the writing of this, I don't believe it, but anyway. 

I was also in the women's circus, the performing on the women's circus at the time. And one day I discovered an article and pictures of a particular form of torture, which I knew of as a monkey roll in circus. It's a trapeze and you stick your arms around in different ways, and you roll, and it's quite hard to learn. But the important thing about it is that you keep moving, and then it hurts a little bit, but it doesn't hurt that much. And so when I discovered that in fact this particular move, which is an aerial move, is used in torture, that really threw me as well. 

But the critical thing is that when you are tortured using this, you are left to just hang there. Like a sheep, like a carcass, you know, you were just left hanging on this thing. So I used my circus experience, as you use every possible experience you have, to write about that. And I can't imagine the kind of level of pain that one goes through under these sorts of experiences. 

Before I finish, I just want to say that the whole, the kinds of attacks on lesbians at the moment are really terrible. And I've been watching, Facebook, you know, from Australia watching the things that are going on here. In Australia also, we have the same sort of self-declaring, a changing of birth certificates going on. And a few months ago, I decided, “okay, now's the moment,” finished up writing this book, In Defence of Separatism, which I first wrote back in 1976 as a philosophy honours thesis.

And I thought, “well, now's the moment to get it out there.” So all of these things sort of come together and I really, really hope that what's possible is that we can strengthen the women's movement, that as lesbians we can get a voice, we can have a place, we can have our eye, we can find our eye, and I think that's all I have to say for the moment, and I really hope that we can do that. Thank you very much.

Sally: Thank you, Susan. And one of the things we really love about FiLiA is not just hearing the interesting experiences of women, but a call for action. So what we are going to do about it. It was really good to end on that note, to kind of think, “okay, what's our part then, in taking this forward?” 

Next I'd like to introduce you to Hilary McCollum, award-winning writer and feminist activist. Her first novel, Golddigger, won the Golden Crown Literary Society Award for historical fiction back in 2016, and since then she’s written three plays about LGBT lives, and a lesbian comedy drama about conversion therapy, which I can't wait to see now, and that was developed with the support of the Arts Council Northern Ireland and Big Lottery.

Hilary is currently undertaking a PhD at Queens University in Belfast, creating a lesbian history through historical fiction. And she's worked on the issue of violence against women, and including in that violence against lesbians, for more than 30 years. Over to you, Hilary.

Hilary: I always like to be on my feet. I tend to mutter, so if I start muttering and you can't hear me, though hopefully the mic will fix that, do say. And I'm really glad to be here because I think the whole issue of violence against lesbians is hardly ever talked about. And I'm going to just touch on five issues.

So I'm going to talk about legacies of previous male violence, violence targeted specifically at lesbians because they're lesbians, violence by other women, the impact of internalized homophobia, and lesbian invisibility as a form of violence. And I'm going to be drawing from my own knowledge, but also I'm going to be drawing on interviews that I did for separate plays that I wrote, one on lesbian life specifically, the other more widely on LGBT lives, but these were interviews that I did with lesbians. And I'm also going to be drawing on some of the work I've done for my PhD. 

So I'm going to start with what might be an obvious point. But lesbians experience violence because they are women in the same way that all women experience violence. They experience rape, and sexual assault, and domestic abuse, and sexual harassment, and FGM, and forced marriage, and all of the other things that all women face. 

So speaking just for me, I grew up in a household characterised by my father's coercive control of my mother. He was emotionally, occasionally physically abusive to the rest of us, and he also sexually abused me. And I don't think he targeted me because I was a lesbian. It started when I was four. But it's had a huge impact on my life, and on my life as a lesbian, and on my relationships with other women. 

And I guess that's what I mean, when I say that part of addressing violence against lesbians is addressing the legacies of male violence that so many of us carry. And it's also not just the legacies. We all still experience the fear of being raped, the fear of being attacked. We experience harassment. Some of us are raped. I know lesbians who've been raped in their relatively recent past having never had sexual relationships with men. So male violence that all women experience, lesbians experience too.

In the late 1980s, Camden Lesbian Centre Black Lesbian Group used to run a lesbian survivors’ group, lesbian incest survivors’ group, which I attended. And it was such an incredible space to talk about how the abuse had impacted, and how it impacted on how you felt about your body, and how it impacted on how you felt about your sexuality.

And it was somewhere you could talk with other survivors about the cultural narratives, that you're only a lesbian because you had a bad experience with a man. And being sexually abused as a child kind of counts, in that narrative. Or you're a lesbian because you can't get a man, or you're a lesbian because you want to be a man, and that kind of space is hardly ever available anymore. That space where we can talk about the impact of that, all of that patriarchal violence and narrative, and how it shapes what we do and how we are. 

Of my five long-term relationships with women, four partners were sexually abused as children by men or boys. One was physically and sexually abused by a former partner, one was raped by her male partner, and two grew up in households with domestic abuse. This is the routine violence that all women and girls experience, that lesbians also experience. So all the women I've been involved with have been living, at least to some degree, with the legacy of male violence.

And that was largely true for the lesbians that I interviewed for the plays that I've worked on. And whilst we might talk with our partners and sometimes with our friends about how we deal with those legacies, the public space for that is very, very small. 

I want to move on to talk about targeted violence, because I have also experienced violence because I'm a lesbian. I've been punched and kicked. I've been flashed at. I've been with a group of women who were attacked by a hoard of men at the end of a lesbian club. Seen a friend of mine punched unconscious. I'm not going to talk about those experiences now because of time, but I am going to read from several of the stories about anti-lesbian harassment and violence that I was told during my interviews.

“I had death threats when I was heavily involved in LGBT activist stuff. Sometimes I wonder whether my femme identity is a protective measure, because certainly the more violence I experienced, the less likely I was to wear outrageous political t-shirts and to be as strong and fierce.” 

“I used to live in London. I was with my partner waiting for the bus, and we were cuddling. This woman next to us started muttering “burn in hell, burn in hell, burn in hell,” over and over, “burn in hell.” It was really creepy.”

“I've had an experience of rape that was homophobic. It was really tricky because I was so messy at the time. He took lots of advantage of that, lots of being told horrible things about my sexuality while being beaten and raped from behind. “You fucking dyke, you deserve this.” It was someone I knew. I didn't talk about it for a long time, and I lost a partner over it.

I had a beautiful relationship at the time with a woman who was a bit older, and I just remember after it happened, I grabbed my clothes and I got dressed and there was sunshine, so that was bizarre. I drove home, I remember exactly the track on the radio, and I drove home and then I sobbed, and then I went upstairs and I scorched myself in the shower.

I remember not knowing how to language what was happening, and saying, “so-and-so just had sex with me,” and her being outraged, and thinking that I'd slept with him, and her leaving and me not having the language to explain. And so she was just gone, and when I tried to explain later, it was all wrong. At the time, I was so vulnerable and so heartbroken by my girlfriend not understanding what happened, and I was taking so many drugs at the time, I was nowhere near the perfect victim. 

At the time I knew it was rape and it was homophobic, but I couldn't say those words. It was only through therapy that I was able to piece it all together. It was through therapy that I was able to construct it for what it was and stopped blaming myself, which I had, because we'd been with my girlfriend and I dropped her off and said, “I'm just going to drop this guy home.” And then he'd said, “come inside for a spliff.” And I said, “sure.” Because I didn't have any at the time. 

And it was very violent, but I couldn't acknowledge any of it at the time. I was all, “what were you thinking, going in for a spliff?”

As well as violence from men, lesbians also experienced violence from other women, both straight women and other lesbians. And again, I'm going to read from one of the interviews I conducted. 

“I was seeing a girl at the time and I kissed her good night outside of a bar, and these girls took offense to that. They landed me in hospital. It had to be a bit of a secret. She wasn't out. Her family weren't very accepting. So when I kissed her good night, it wasn't a full-on thing. It was just a wee kiss on the lips and off in your taxi. 

Then I turned around. I was greeted by five girls. They were shouting things at me like “dirty dyke.” I remember being punched and kicked. They knocked me out, unconscious. I didn't wake up for two days. 

I loved my job. I really loved it. But after I got beaten up, I absolutely could not leave the house. I always had this fear that I was going to meet these girls and it might happen again, or someone else would hurt me. I didn't feel safe. Even inside with windows locked, curtains closed, mostly in the dark, not able to go out. I ended up quitting my job because I didn't feel worth very much at the time.” 

An LGBT project encouraged this young woman to move so that she could get more support, and she met a new partner and moved in with her quite quickly, in order to get away from the homeless hostel she was living in. But her new partner turned out to be controlling and abusive. 

“She could be lovely. And then just like that, she'd switch. She'd turn into a complete monster. Start shouting, start calling me names, hitting me. I always thought it was my fault. I left her for about a year. Eventually I went back. 

She was fine for a couple of weeks, and then out of the blue she came home from work, stressed with a bottle in her hand. She hit the drink very hard, and actually flipped to the point that I couldn't get her off me. She was right in my face, threatened to kill me, bit me, spat at me, pulled my hair, kicked me, punched me.

She was shouting at the top of her voice, “it's all your fucking fault!” The neighbour rang the police. It was still going on when they arrived. They arrested her, but she never got prosecuted. I got a non-molestation order. It was a way of keeping her away from me. 

I want anybody who's going through it to know that you're not alone, especially those who are in the same sex partnerships. It's still abuse.”

Negative attitudes towards lesbianism impact on lesbians themselves. Almost everyone I interviewed had experience of drug and alcohol problems, either directly themselves, or through a partner. One woman had a partner who died of an overdose, and several had either attempted suicide themselves or someone close to them had. And again, I'm going to read from an interview.

“Had a partner nearly die, she overdosed and I found her and took her to hospital, called her mom. It was really sad, she was fucked up about her sexuality, and she took risks and more drugs than she should have.” 

Even if you haven't had direct experience of homophobic violence or discrimination, it's still there. Homophobia is a daily mini-colonisation of our minds, and our minds are having to work against the constant colonising force of heterosexuality. It's there in the microaggressions. It puts edges to what you can be in the future, and some people really internalise it. It's a problem, a real problem. Drugs and alcohol are a means of coping.

And I think it's really important that we pay attention to that wider context for violence against lesbians. Whilst there have undoubtedly been gains for lesbians in many parts of the world over the last 30 years, we still live against the backdrop of that constant colonising force. Lesbian lives remain undervalued, hidden, and erased. One of my interviewees gave us an example of this. 

“One time at school, my daughter wrote something about LGB and they made her take it out. She wrote something about going to gay pride, and the teachers made her rub her out, and wouldn't let her say nothing about it.” 

Since I was coming out more than 35 years ago, we've talked about the problem of lesbian invisibility, and it's still a problem. Although we have become more visible in the present, our history is still denied.

Queer theorists would have you believe that the term ‘lesbian’ didn't exist until the late 19th century. In fact, Emma Donoghue has found that ‘lesbian’ was used in the 17th and 18th centuries as both a noun and an adjective to refer to same-sex relationships between women. Going back further still, historian Judith Bennett found that the Byzantine commentator Arethos used a term ‘lesbian’ with broadly its current meaning more than a thousand years ago. So not the end of the 19th century.

Stories of the past are a key part of every culture. And lesbians are largely missing from those stories. Without a lesbian past, do we even fully count as human? If stories of the past are part of what defines us as human, and lesbians aren't in them, where does that leave us? And I consider that denial of our past, a form of epistemic violence. So that's a violence relating to knowledge. 

It undermines our sense of our own identity. It denies us access to the tradition of passionate relationships between women, and it distorts social and cultural understandings of female sexuality. And I think it's part of the context for both internalized lesbophobia, and for anti-lesbian violence.

The huge response to the BBC's recent Gentleman Jack series shows how hungry we are for a sense of our history, and how positive an impact it can have on us. I think drama and fiction have a key part to play in reclaiming the history, which is why I write historical fiction. And I think we need to use all the tools we can find. We are fighting for our lives here, for our history of lesbian existence, love, ingenuity, resistance, joy, and community. 

Thank you.

Sally: We may take a couple of minutes to do a little bit of technology here, as we set up for our next speaker. Really pleased to introduce Angela Wild. She's a lesbian feminist and activist, a writer, a researcher, and a political artist. Her work focuses on promoting uncompromising lesbian visibility, building our lesbian culture, and fighting for women only spaces, as well as challenging compulsory heterosexuality, institutionalised femininity, motherhood, and pornography. 

She's a founding member of Get the L Out, the lesbian activist group, and author of, we're going to hear more about, Lesbians at Ground Zero, the first research in the cotton ceiling. She's a contributor to the radical feminist journal, Rain and Thunder, and her works featured in the Archives Recherches Cultures Lesbiennes in Paris. She's currently pursuing a Masters in Women's Studies.

Angela: Hello. Can you all hear me? I'm surprised that my voice is coming out of my body after all these talks that I thought were really emotional, and as I was listening, I was watching faces and reflecting exactly how I felt. I think all the talks that we have, gave some really good, like, I think all this really fits together, and I hope you're going to find that as well.

So I'm going to talk about the cotton ceiling, and I want to say first that I'm really grateful that we are having a session just for lesbians. In my life, I've never seen that really, anything, in the feminist movement, and I don't want to say this, but it can happen that we feel a little bit silenced, as well as in the world around. So it's really important and really grateful to figure, to have this opportunity. 

So I'm going to talk about the clash of rights that exists between the movement for trans rights, which we call transactivism, and the movement for lesbian rights, and how and why these two groups and these two ideologies are not compatible, can never be compatible, and the reason why, when lesbians support trans rights, they actually go against their own interests and their own rights as lesbians. 

So there's been a lot of talk about the clash that exists between trans women and women. And very often we talk about the right to access or to deny access to women-only spaces. When we talk about lesbians in that context, the women-only space whose access is being debated is our bodies. So we are immediately talking about sexual violence here. 

Also as an introduction, I want to speak about language, and thank you Sally, for introducing that. I'm going to clarify what language I'm going to use. So to enable a clear political feminist analysis based on sex, not gender, based on material reality, not ideology, and as a feminist statement of resistance, I think it's important that we start opposing the use of queer-ified language, and that we drop the practice of preferred pronouns altogether

As they are imposed on us, on women particularly, to gaslight us and to force us into submission. I'm not going to do that to myself and I'm not going to do that to you. So for the term that usually is ‘trans women’, I'm going to use the term ‘man who identify as trans’ or whatever. I will use the pronouns associated to someone's biological sex only. And I think it's urgent that we start speaking in those terms because these terms are forbidden to us. 

So cotton ceiling, do I want to explain to you? No, I don't. I would like to show you. So here we go. 

Are genital preferences transphobic? So this is a man, who identify as a lesbian and is called Riley.

He's not really interested if any genital preferences are transphobic, to be honest. He wants to know if lesbians are being transphobic when they don't want to sleep with him. So, you know, this is a little bit unclear, isn't it? 

So I've picked up a few, just to get an idea, if you've never been, you know, exposed to this, there are hundreds more online, please have your own, you know, on your own time, have your own research.

“Have you considered not being a violent trans misogynist and opening yourself up to trans women, opening yourself up sexually to trans women?” So this is Mackinnon, who talks about the times where cis lesbian, that means just lesbian, get over their genital hang up and realise that she can cope just fine with her penis in her vagina. And here, yeah, somebody saying that you are a lesbian and you only like vagina, you're not a lesbian, you're a TERF.

I can carry on, but yeah. You know, I think you get the idea. So the cotton ceiling, now I'm going to tell you a bit more, was a term invented by transactivist, and a porn performer. And he used it to describe the difficulties faced by men who identify as trans lesbians in being accepted as real lesbians… plenty of quotes everywhere.

They found that lesbians were okay for men to identify as lesbian to join their communities, although I’ll doubt that, but somehow that lesbians were reluctant to choose them as sexual partners. And we know that 80% of trans people in general are non-op, which means that they have their genitals, which mean that in the case of men who identify as trans lesbians, they have a penis. So that might be why, but not only. 

So the term cotton ceiling is copied on the term glass ceiling. So we all feminists and we know what the glass ceiling is. So I'm going to show you a little illustration from Sophia, who I think is here, from ReSisters. 

Audience member: Excuse me. Could we ask the previous speakers to move?

Angela: Oh, okay. So I don't know if you can read, but I think we all know what the glass ceiling is. It describes this invisible barrier, that women face at work to attain a higher position in their field of work because men are gatekeeping positions of power for themselves. 

The cotton ceiling, there we go, refers to the knicker of the lesbian. So the cotton is the cotton of the underwear. The cotton ceiling is the barrier that male who identify as lesbians struggle to penetrate. This barrier is seen as denying their validity as real women as a lesbian who only has sexual, you know, experience with lesbian, will make him a real lesbian. Lesbians who are not consenting are accused of using their genitals to gatekeep womanhood, denying trans lesbian their right to be real lesbians, be accessing lesbians sexually. 

So I'm using the term consensual because it's, you know, the lesbian has to agree, whether it's under pressure, whether under, like, coercion, whether under actual violence, for the sexual relation to validate that man magically. The lesbians explained that they did not want to have sexual relationship with people with penises, so the term was rebranded “girl dick”, “lady stick”, “lady’s penis”, and many others, because in this logic, the penis in virtue of being attached to a male who identifies as female, automatically becomes a female organ.

Lesbians still refuse to consider trans lesbians as sexual partners are called TERFs and other really nice, yeah, vagina fetishists.

So, because we're lesbians and we are privileged, compared to men who identify as women, cause we are ‘cis’ and we are not trans, we are said that we oppress men who identify as lesbian. And the way we oppress them is because we refuse to have sex with them. That's how it is. But it goes further than this. It's really quite insane.

So we are told that trans women are real women. Therefore if lesbians refuse to have sex with people with penises who call themselves lesbians, we cannot be lesbians at all. A little drawing so you can understand it. Imagine, right? Men who identify as lesbian are real lesbians, as in “trans women are women, trans women are women.” Female cannot be real lesbians unless they have sex with men who identify as lesbians, because they're real women. And then it makes them real women too. So if I did lose you, it's normal. The reversal is complete, yeah.

So as this cotton ceiling, as we've seen with the screenshot on Twitter, happens to us all the time online, and we are also told by the very men who do it that it doesn't happen, it doesn't exist, you know, “women are not being coerced, but you're a TERF.” 

And, it’s a form of gas lighting, right? This is emotional abuse. And I wanted to see if this went further than online. I wanted to see what was going on, on the ground, what was the implications for living in their, you know, life outside of the internet, so, you know, LGBT groups or only-lesbian dating sites. 

And, so I started this research, which I've got here and we are selling at the store there as well. And I set up a survey of 30 questions that I sent to women-only group and lesbian-only groups, 80 lesbians responding to that survey in five days.

So it was really easy to find. And I'm really grateful for the women who shared their story and trusting me with them. The sample that I've used does not claim at any moment to be representative of all lesbians, but because the aim was to represent the voice of lesbians that are silenced, and gather the remaining, sorry, the missing evidence.

As we know, Stonewall, whose research claim to be representative, whose research claim to be objective, do not represent any of those views or stories. We are instead ignored, dismissed, or demonised. 

So I'm going to go quickly through the findings. I don’t know how much, how much time do I have left? So the finding subjects that there's a huge pressure in LGBT groups for lesbian to accept without question the queer ideology, and the mantra that ‘trans women are women and trans women are women.’ And for lesbians specifically, it means that a lesbian who define lesbianism as same sex attraction at the exclusion of people who have or had penises, this is now considered a form of hate speech and this is violently punished.

So 50% of the respondent have been excluded from their LGBT groups. 66% of the respondent have been intimidated, received threats in their LGBT group, the group that are supposed to protect them and support them, with all sorts of, you know, example here, verbal abuse, death threat. 

Very often this happened also in their real lives. Some women lost their jobs. Some women were physically removed from their groups by men who identified as trans, et cetera, and it leads to social isolation because we know when women are threatened online, they're very less likely to go into events that happen in the real world. You know, they're scared. 

And what we see also is that being silent in group does not free lesbian from the pressure. Instead, they are questioned quite relentlessly, to reveal whether they would or would not date trans women, and sometimes a particular trans women. So the pressure is huge, and it creates a culture of terror.

It leads to women policing each other in order to not appear to be a TERF for the rest of the group. It's really intensifying at the moment as anyone not actively embracing the trans ideology through, for example, the naming of pronouns is suspected of silent TERFing.

So lesbian dating sites are infiltrated by men. So these men sometimes pose as lesbians. Sometimes, you know, they identify as trans women. Sometimes they identify as straight men. Sometimes they pass as women, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they try, sometimes they don't try. But there's quite a few of them. Again, this was collected very quickly on the internet. 

So this one, for example, says that he's a gentleman in his trouser. So he is announcing he’s non-op, he's got a penis, and this one has a beard. So for lesbians, the lesbian dating site is a very unsafe space, because, you know, they could end up, you know, having a date with somebody who turns out to be a man without them knowing.

What the women were saying, is that this constant pressure is a form of psychological coercion and leads lesbian to feeling pressurised to accept men who identify as trans women as sexual partner, and they feel less legitimate to say no in the case that they, you know, are in that situation. The  situation is online, everywhere, and relentless.

There was also some sexual violence. So here you can see this quote: “homosexuality doesn't exist.” Yeah. And I owed it to my trans sister to unlearn my genital confusion so I can enjoy letting them penetrate me. This was told to woman in a LGBT group, by another woman. Yeah, who was probably straight, whether she knew it or not. Lesbians have been subjected so to a wide variety of sexual violence by men who identify as trans women.

They were reported by women from every age range, but the younger generation, so 18 to 24, seem to be particularly targeted. Perpetrators have used queer theory mixed with guilt tripping to pressure, justify, or excuse sexual violence. The sexual violence was committed by men who identify as trans women in a very typical male pattern of aggression.

So it's an example of coercion, online grooming. Some of the girls were underage when this happened to them. Sexual harassment, assault, rape by deception and rape by physical force. It happened in public places. Clubs, women's toilet. Again, we're told it never happens, but it does. Unwanted sexual touching, acquaintance rape scenario, you know, whether the lesbian were vulnerable, unable to leave, or drunk maybe, during dates when the women withdraw consent, or where they’re persuaded or forcibly raped. 

So I've put a few stories here where you can see, “I thought I would be called a transphobe, and it would be wrong for me to turn down a trans woman who wanted to exchange nude picture,” and this young lesbian who felt pressured to sleep with a trans woman to prove that she's not a TERF. And here you've got the story of this woman who was raped when she was under 18 as well. 

I want to conclude by talking about the political implications for lesbians and I want to, you know, just – what is a lesbian? So for us at Get the L Out and for you, I hope as well, a lesbian is a woman who is exclusively attracted to women. 

In my university, Bangor University, a lesbian is a person who identify as a woman who is sexually attracted to another person who also identify as a woman. It could mean anything. It could mean anyone. And this is the ideology that every GBT group, communities, organisation in this country and in the west, promotes and support. And effectively it erases the definition of lesbianism from language, because it now includes men.

And the problem is not only the erasure from language, it's enforced on the body of lesbians. When lesbians are denied the right to experience lesbianism, we are witnessing a form of rape culture and a form of conversion therapy. Heterosexuality is enforced upon lesbian, and today is called queer, and it's called progressive.

So because a lesbian is a woman who is exclusively attracted to women, and because a lesbian who tell a man who identify as a lesbian, “not having sex with you,” she's effectively saying, “you're not a woman, you're a man.” She's denying his validity. In the transactivist movement now, we now have a movement who claim that lesbian's bodies and sexuality are a tool of validation for male.

And if we understand this, you see that it's why it's so important for trans activism to silence and demonise lesbian who dissent, because the lesbian who say no is a threat. She has to be taken down. Individual men who ID as lesbian, as well as trans activism as a whole, relies on invading lesbian bodies for their validation. 

Lesbian erasure from language and practice, our erasure and colonisation of our body is literally a question of life and death for the existence and validation of the trans identity, and therefore of the whole trans movement. And this is what the cotton ceiling is really about. 

And I'm going to leave you with this picture of these trans women, so these men who identify as trans, who walk at a Dyke March, can't remember the location, with a baseball bat painted with the trans flag as a, you know, threat to violence against lesbians. Thank you.