Seeing as you enjoyed that one so much, here's another:
“Unless lesbians go out of our way to say we believe that trans women are literal women,” Lyndsay says, “the assumption is that we are transphobic bigots, and our reputations are trashed.”
“Please just use my first name,” she says, “because if I am identified as being in any way gender critical, trans activists will never leave me alone.”
We meet at Sapphic Central, a spacious pub in central Balham, south-west London, which hosts a lesbian night once a month. The popular evening is always packed, with a DJ in the basement. Rickety stairs lead up to an outdoor space, lined with empty beer barrels, where half of the women congregate to smoke and chat.
Over the past decade and more, extreme trans activism has influenced our major institutions, from charities to universities – even our legal system. And as a result of the mantra “trans women are women”, alongside “no debate”, lesbian dating has been driven underground.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the biggest threat posed to lesbians gathering at a publicised social event was that of thuggish, straight men, boozed up on cheap lager and angry that some women rejected their charms. But today, the danger is from social justice warriors, intoxicated on rigorousness, and an insistence that men claiming to be women can also be lesbians and should not be excluded.
“Every single tactic we use to meet in person, trans activists have done their best to spoil it,” says Lucy, (who does not wish to use her second name). Lucy, 44, a former firefighter who attended the Grenfell disaster, has now retrained as a family law barrister. “They purposely stand in our way. And in recent years, it has got worse.”
In 2020, Lucy was thrown off Hinge, the popular dating app, for stating that she was only interested in meeting biological women. Hinge disagreed – within 24 hours, she was permanently suspended, saying that she was banned for “breaching their guidelines”. In response, Lucy took the story to the media.
There is one dating app specifically for lesbians: it’s called Her, and Lucy had already given it a try. But she encountered a new problem. “Every other profile is a man claiming to be a woman, and presenting themselves as ultra sexualised.”
It was on Tinder that Lucy eventually met her girlfriend, but even there “you are getting a ton of profiles that are meant to be female-seeking-female where it is just men pretending to be females”.
Lucy recalls the early days, in the late Nineties, when she first came to London. “It was magical. On Lewisham High Road, where I lived, there were three lesbian bars.”
Twenty years ago there were dozens of lesbian-only bars across London, and several in towns and cities elsewhere in Britain. Today, aside from the odd pop-up evening, there are virtually none that are exclusively for lesbians.
Kelly Frost, an artist, aged 49, is another lesbian who has learnt from bitter experience that running a women-only night at a so-called LGBTQ+ venue is unlikely to end well. Heated campaigns against such “transphobic” and “trans-exclusionary” practices are quickly initiated, and venue owners, managers and even bar staff, inundated with threats and complaints – and fearful of losing their livelihoods, tend to cave in to the pressure.
