Lesbian Labour: Lesbians within the labour movement are fighting back against attacks

Lesbians within the labour movement are fighting back against attacks on their political autonomy and their sexuality, writes Jen Izaakson.

Lesbians on the British political Left face attacks on two fronts: firstly, devaluation within the amorphous LGBTQAI+ sphere, where we are consistently overlooked and considered of little worth. Secondly, immediately within the wider Left we face attack as more and more leftist organisations start to include men within the category of lesbian. Britain’s left-wing has, it should be uncontroversial to state, slid steadily into liberalism over the course of the last decade, increasingly capitulating to postmodernism and identitarianism. Even the Corbyn project, with its radical social democracy and policy based on real socialist ideals, was set to allow men to stand for election on All Women Short Lists if they called themselves women (known as self-ID, short for self-identifying). When did the Left drop its commitment to materialism in favour of linguistic idealism?

Lesbians pay a special price when men who call themselves lesbians start to be taken seriously as such. Our sexual boundaries do not include men, no matter what those men name themselves. We are exclusively same-sex attracted females. Whatever gender identity someone wishes to proclaim for themselves, it does not change the reality of their sex because sex is immutable. It is not possible to change biologically from one sex to another. Lesbian sexuality faces obliteration if lesbians are seriously expected to include men in our dating pools, as if we are bisexual, or heterosexual. Men are increasingly infiltrating lesbian bars, lesbian nightclubs, and lesbian events, with numerous cases of these incursions mounting. Lesbians are being assaulted at gay venues due to gender-neutral toilets and mixed spaces becoming the absolute norm (mixed facilities are statistically dangerous for women generally). When men approach lesbians sexually, knowing we are lesbians, it is deliberate sexual harassment, whether that man considers himself a woman, or identifies as the Sputnik 5 vaccine.

The labelling of this phenomenon as a so-called ‘cotton ceiling’ is testimony to the new form of rape culture lesbians are encountering.

Launched this month, Lesbian Labour is a campaigning group for exclusively same-sex attracted women and we wish to offer an alternative to Labour’s trajectory of self-ID and promotion of the possibility that men like Eddie Izzard are lesbians when in ‘girl mode’ (i.e slapping a bit of lippy on before wiping it off for his next film role).

Out of that difficult context lesbians within the Labour Party, trade unions, and wider labour movement, have banded together to form a new campaigning group, the straightforwardly titled ‘Lesbian Labour’. Launched this month, Lesbian Labour is a campaigning group for exclusively same-sex attracted women and we wish to offer an alternative to Labour’s trajectory of self-ID and promotion of the possibility that men like Eddie Izzard are lesbians when in ‘girl mode’ (i.e slapping a bit of lippy on before wiping it off for his next film role).

The urgency in forming a group just for lesbians is a direct response to the increasing de-prioritisation of lesbian issues within all political parties and the L becoming overshadowed within the ever-extending LGBTQ acronym. Research by Oxford University discovered how year on year lesbians have been the least funded group by gay rights charity Stonewall. We should not be surprised, given Stonewall has been fully captured by gender ideology. That has caused criticism, with founder Simone Fanshawe questioning how opposite-sex (so, heterosexual) couples can be considered queer, before going on to form the LGB Alliance with other breakaways from Stonewall.

We find yet again that lesbians, because we are women, the despised sex class, who love other members of that despised same sex class, are not seen as a demographic to invest in, our needs not taken into consideration, or even conceived of as ‘real’. By considered not ‘real’ I mean that our sexuality as lesbians is regarded as illegitimate and without clear boundaries, as if suddenly when a man calls himself a woman, we will miraculously be open to romantic relations with him. As if lesbianism is merely about identifying as one.  We are meant to stay silent about these matters or risk being called bigots, or TERFs, simply for asserting ourselves as lesbians and naming out loud our sexual borders.

Research by Oxford University discovered how year on year lesbians have been the least funded group by gay rights charity Stonewall.

This mirrors the experiences lesbians often have when growing up as teenagers, of staying silent for safety reasons, retreating into the background as other sexualities dominate. That invisibility has the best chance of being overcome once we carve out a space for ourselves politically. Lesbian Labour is one such attempt to do that within the labour movement.  

Lesbians face dual barriers: lesbophobia as lesbians and misogyny as women. We are discriminated against for who we desire and who we love romantically. Our sexual boundaries often inconceivable to heterosexual society because it goes against the dominant ideology that organises men’s and women’s social relations. We are often rendered within the heterosexual imagination as asexual, or our romantic relationships considered equivalent to just platonic ‘friendship’, as if lesbianism is purely the rejection of men and we don’t possess a sexual desire of our own. So, at best, heterosexual society cannot fathom and believe that we genuinely are women who romantically love other women, whilst at worst, our experiences and sexuality is actively denied and disputed. That combination of sexual oppression as women, and specific sexual prejudice as lesbians, is overlooked as unique and entirely different to the set of problems and very real misogyny other women, say, heterosexual mothers, may encounter.

That duality, of women’s oppression and lesbophobic prejudice, combines towards a specific set of difficulties for lesbians. Unless we develop an understanding around that we will find ourselves subsumed under the rubric of women’s oppression (male violence, etc.) or within the LGBTQ+ narrative historically dominated by gay men and currently dominated by transgenderism.

As lesbians are pushed increasingly to the margins, it is imperative that we regroup and reorganise. Lesbians played a central role in the women’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Those lesbians who are on the left, in trade unions, who are socialists, or members of the Labour Party, should come together to take on this threat to our sexual orientation, culture, spaces, and love lives, asserting ourselves clearly: same-sex attracted females who are unashamed of that fact.

The lesbian community faces an existential crisis, losing young women in particular to transgenderism as more and more gender non-conforming lesbians identify as men to escape misogyny and lesbophobia. These lesbians, in their bid to flee womanhood and return to a second closet, are identifying as heterosexual men and making themselves invisible as lesbians. Given the portrayal of lesbianism as bigoted because it does not include the male sex, is it any wonder fewer and fewer young women are comfortable being lesbians? If lesbians are increasingly not allowed sexual boundaries based on sex, we should not be surprised that, to avoid subsequent sexual bullying or harassment, those women redefine themselves as men (the people who are allowed sexual boundaries). Men do not receive the same flack as women do for carving out their particular sexual preferences. When woke bros watch Pornhub the matter of biological sexual difference becomes vital for their masturbation fix (sites like Pornhub still only have the two categories of male/female). Oddly, the brosocialists are yet to petition this binary as oppressive and redundant.

As lesbians are pushed increasingly to the margins, it is imperative that we regroup and reorganise. Lesbians played a central role in the women’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Those lesbians who are on the left, in trade unions, who are socialists, or members of the Labour Party, should come together to take on this threat to our sexual orientation, culture, spaces, and love lives, asserting ourselves clearly: same-sex attracted females who are unashamed of that fact.

Jen Izaakson is a founder of Lesbian Labour and member of UCU. Follow Lesbian Labour on Twitter here. Check out the Lesbian Labour website and their Facebook Page.