Guest Article by Rach, founder of Lesbians Against Fascism and Transphobia (LAFT)
LAFT can currently be found on Instagram.
I was born in the early 80’s so my most formative years were lived under Thatcher. I was also born into a religious doomsday cult that is patriarchal, anti-science and deeply against LGBT+ people. This was a somewhat challenging start to life for a gender non-conforming, neurodivergent lesbian.
From a young age I was aware of the anti-LGBT+ sentiment in this country. It was in the news, preached at the Kingdom Hall and whispered among my classmates. Like many lesbians who grew up at the same time, I became aware of my sexuality as a slowly dawning sense of unease that culminated in a feeling of horror around age 8 when I was finally able to put words to my feelings. I tried to hide and suppress that I was different but it often felt as though I had a huge target on my back and a neon sign over my head that said “DYKE”.
Once I reached Secondary school, the other kids seemed to instinctively know that there was something different about me, calling me a “lezzer”, saying I had AIDS, treating me as though I was a sexual predator. I was actually sexually assaulted multiple times by my cis female bullies. The entire time, I was still closeted. I tried to conform and pass as “straight”, I pretended that I was attracted to boys, yet those kids could tell that I was different and that was enough for them.
It’s notable to me now that many of those who bullied me at school for my appearance and presupposed orientation are the same people who now proudly identify as “terf’s” or are generally anti-trans. It seems to me that as they’ve grown up, the bullies have found a new target.
Were it not for the institutional repression of Section 28, I might have been able to find support. There might have been safe spaces in my school where I could escape. Perhaps even some positive role models. Maybe I would have felt safe enough to confide in them about the abuse I encountered both at school and at home. In small Yorkshire towns in the 1980’s and 1990’s, sadly, no such things existed. Instead, the message I received loud and clear was that being a lesbian was wrong, that I was defective, a degenerate and would grow up to have a sad, lonely and miserable existence.
This is the environment that young trans kids find today. Whilst the internet does at least provide a space for them to find each other and create small, safe communities, the internet is also a place of vicious anti-trans hatred. Just look at the Facebook comments of any article about the murdered girl Brianna Ghey to see what trans children have to face online. The Government guidance to schools is a return to section 28 for trans children. They are prevented from even small acts of social transition without parental consent, parents who themselves could be abusive, homophobic and transphobic like mine were. The message to trans kids is clear – you are wrong, you are defective and we don’t trust or believe what you say about your own mind and body.
I finally found the courage to come out as a lesbian when I was at university. I didn’t feel safe enough until I was away from my family home, away from the cult. It wasn’t one of those dramatic “comings out” that we see on TV. I still felt a lot of shame and internalised homophobia. I could barely bring myself to speak to other LGBT+ people. I was too scared to join any groups or clubs. I still felt like a freak. I felt a deep need to hide myself and I also felt stupid and ignorant of how to be a lesbian, how to be a functional person at all in fact. All those years of trying to suppress myself and pass as straight meant that I didn’t ‘look’ like a lesbian and other lesbians judged my appearance, my lack of knowledge about lesbian issues and my complete naivety around lesbian subculture. It didn’t help that the cult was very controlling. I was discouraged from making non-cult friends and was forbidden from joining clubs or sports teams. Being unpopular at school meant that I had few friends and hiding large parts of myself meant that I never dared get close to anyone.
This is one of the reasons I object to the anti-trans rhetoric around “male socialisation”. I was raised and socialised to be a submissive, straight, childbearing wife. I have never been those things and never will be. I was rebellious from a young age. When I was five years old, I asked my mum at one of the cult meetings “why is everything about the men? Why don’t the girls ever get to speak?”. I bristled at being told to “submit to men” and that women are “weaker vessels” and need protection both from and by men. When you aren’t the thing you are being socialised to be, you do not become that thing. Just because trans women were likely socialised to be men, it doesn’t mean that’s what they become any more than I became a married tradwife with three kids. I learned how to be a lesbian and I learned how to function in relationships and society despite my upbringing, not because of it.
I’ll fast forward a little to my mid twenties. This was a time when I was finally becoming comfortable in my own skin. I started dating and met my first girlfriend at 24. I developed a group of cis lesbian friends and existed happily within that small-town echo chamber for several years. I’d never knowingly met a trans person and when I saw trans women in women’s spaces, I didn’t like it. The narratives I’d been raised with were amplified within my social group – “they are just men pretending to be women and they are invading our space”. I felt uncomfortable around trans people and so never spoke to them or listened to anything they had to say.
Despite resisting so many of the narratives around sex and gender from my childhood, I was still holding on to some remnants. Society had become more accepting of lesbians and gay people but not as much of trans people. In my ignorance, I was doing to trans people what had been done to me in the past. I held on to those views for several more years but didn’t really spend much time examining them. I was completely ignorant, yet despite that, somehow felt qualified to judge. I was completely wrong.
In 2010 I saw a local news story about Roller Derby, it looked amazing and I went to watch my local team play as soon as I could. If you aren’t familiar with it, Roller Derby is a full-contact sport played on roller skates. It’s rough, it’s fast and it involves a lot of hitting. I completely fell in love with the sport, joined the team for two glorious months and then moved to a tiny village in Southern England where there was no Roller Derby. I vowed that if I ever moved back to civilisation, I’d join a team again.
For most of the next decade I remained transphobic and isolated. I saw things about trans women in women’s sport and railed at the perceived injustice. I saw anti-trans articles in the BBC and Guardian and assumed that I must be right because they were renowned for being liberal publications. I read Julie Bindel, Sonia Sodha and Julie Burchill and was horrified by everything I read. These trans people are monsters I thought, they’re entitled fetishists, they don’t care about women at all! It was easy to get swept up by it all. As a lesbian and life-long feminist, I was on high alert for anything that might be bad for women’s rights. With this and the big gaps in my understanding, I was easily swayed.
In 2019 I finally moved back north. I escaped a very abusive relationship with a cis woman and went to therapy. I signed back up to the roller derby team and watched a couple of games as I waited for their new intake in a few weeks. One thing I noticed, and felt very uncomfortable about, was the presence of trans women on the team. As I watched the games unfold, I noticed something interesting – the trans women were not dominating the cis women. In fact, many of the cis women were stronger and more powerful than the trans women. On the team benches, the trans women were just as valued and appreciated as their other teammates. For the first time in my life I saw trans women fully integrated and thriving, happy, smiling, confident. They were a far cry from what the media and my upbringing and social circles had told me. I started to feel doubts about my beliefs. Then Covid happened.
During lockdown I continued therapy. I dealt with the aftermath of the physical and sexual abuse I’d endured in my last relationship and at the hands of other cis men and women but I also started to deal with my childhood too. I challenged a lot of assumptions and unhealthy beliefs I’d held about myself and about other people too. Along the way, I started to look at my transphobic beliefs. I watched a lot of TV including the show Sense8. I absolutely had the hots for Jamie Clayton. I didn’t realise she was trans at first, not until I Googled her. I was quite surprised, she absolutely blew away so many of my assumptions and beliefs. I still felt completely secure in my identity as a lesbian. I’m not attracted to men, even back then it was clear to me that Jamie Clayton was not a man and to suggest otherwise would have been ridiculous. What I did have to confront was the fact that I’d probably been wrong about my other assumptions regarding trans people too.
I spent some time over lockdown reading trans stories, listening to the experiences of trans people and learning more about the science of transition and gender dysphoria. I’d had absolutely no idea about testosterone suppression and the effects of cross-sex hormones. If you spend time in anti-trans circles, you would think that a trans woman is just a man that wears a dress and puts on makeup. Like that awful Little Britain sketch. I realised that wasn’t true at all and I learned about the history of trans people and how they’ve been pivotal in the struggle for women’s and LGBT+ rights.
As lockdown came to an end, I saw the article by the BBC about “trans women pressuring cis lesbians for sex” and was disgusted at the way the article was written. The ignorance, the outright lies and distortion. I wondered how I’d have reacted to that article pre-lockdown. Would I have recognised the manipulative language and fear mongering or would I have just taken the BBC at its word? I decided to look back at previous articles in the Guardian to see how much my perspective had shifted. I realised that so much of the language used in the articles was bullying, manipulative and alarmist. A lot of the tactics used actually mirrored the way the cult manipulates its members. I’m not surprised by the growing influence of the far-right and evangelical Christo-fascists within many parts of the anti-trans movement. Bullies recognise their own.
The last part of my journey was my return to roller derby. I finally joined a team after lockdown and met trans people in real life. I still had niggling concerns about athletic advantages and decided to find out the truth. I’m a scientist by trade, I actually worked in sport science for a while so it wasn’t hard to find research papers and evaluate their quality. I was pretty disappointed by how few studies have been done. Because trans people are such a small proportion of society and there are multiple barriers to their participation, it’s hard to do sport-specific research. What evidence I did find however, absolutely put my mind at ease. Trans women perform athletically like cis women, trans men like cis men. Especially at grassroots and amateur levels, there’s absolutely no reason to exclude them.
Roller derby gave me a vibrant and accepting community. I lost some of my old friends along the way but I’ve gained so many more. Many of my friends are trans and they’re some of the kindest and most gentle people I know. So many are vegans, support Palestine, work for charities, worry about violence against women and girls, the climate crisis…you get the idea. I met my partner through roller derby, she’s a blue-eyed beauty with cheekbones to die for and just happens to be trans. She’s also the kindest and most emotionally secure woman I’ve ever had a relationship with.
It’s been so painful the past couple of months watching my friends and loved ones be hurt so much. The Supreme Court ruling and subsequent fallout has been brutal on their mental health, their feelings of safety and dignity. I can’t stand by and do nothing so speak with as many people as possible. I’ve gone to protests, written letters, and met with senior leaders at work. None of it feels like enough and that’s why I founded Lesbians Against Fascism and Transphobia. I hope to provide a place where lesbians who have questions about trans people can find answers. If they’ve been swept up by the very convincing but very manipulative anti-trans rhetoric like I was, they can come and listen to other views. I try to make sure that everything factual we post is researched and evidenced because in the end, it was learning about trans people, their experiences and the underpinning science that made me realise I had been wrong.
I was incredibly ignorant, and to everyone in the trans community, I’m deeply sorry. My time spent in transphobia was time that could have been spent meeting amazing people, forming beautiful friendships and learning more about myself. I’m incredibly angry at the way women, particularly lesbians, are used by anti-trans groups. They have the audacity to say they speak for me, for all women, they do not. Trans women are women and belong in our spaces. Trans men are men and should be given access to male spaces where they belong.
Transphobia harms all women and distracts from the real issues affecting women and girls.