Why are lesbians no longer welcome at Pride?

The lesbian group Get The L Out UK, founded to protest gender ideology and the pressure on same-sex attracted women to date trans women, joined Pride Cymru yesterday to make their voices heard amidst a sea of hostility. Ever since the trans movement decided that lesbians who reject sleeping with trans women are somehow morally deficient, same-sex attracted women have been harassed, defamed and abused in the name of trans equality. Get the L Out represent those old-fashioned lesbians that reject the penis and all that is attached to it.

As a lesbian that came out in the Life on Mars days of the 1970s, when I was told, on a regular basis, that all I needed was a ‘good f––’ to ‘straighten’ me out, I have watched with horror at the vilification of lesbians for firmly rejecting men that claim to be women from their dating pool.

The protest, captured live on film, is yet another example of how the word ‘lesbian’ has returned to being a dirty word.

The women at Pride Cymru were carrying banners adorned with the words, ‘trans activism erases lesbians' and 'lesbians don't like penises', which caused a major kerfuffle amongst the crowd. Rather than having a word with the individuals that were screaming abuse, police decided to eject Get the L Out. So, lesbians were kicked off a so-called Pride procession whilst the rest of the LGBTQQIA2Spirit+ crowd, many of whom will doubtless be heterosexual kinksters, stayed.

The hostility towards any lesbian that stands her ground amongst the new cool queers has been building for some time. In 2018, at the first Get the L Out protest, the gay male MC joked on stage that the protesters should be dragged off the parade 'by their saggy tits'.

A brief history lesson: the very first pride-type march I attended was Lesbian Strength, in 1981. The majority of lesbians involved in the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s had walked out, having become fed up with the sexism from the men in the organisation. It would appear that sexist stereotypes are not only confined to heterosexuals. The women have since reported that their needs are always placed second to the men; demeaning and often misogynistic comments were made about women; and that they were pretty much expected to make the tea and take care of the men, just as straight women were.

Lesbian Strength was a wonderful antidote to Gay Pride. It meant that lesbians, many of whom did not wish to be lumped in with men, could be front and centre of our own liberation movement. We argued back then, and I would argue now, that lesbians have very little in common with gay men, except that we are same-sex attracted. Gay men don’t face the double bind of sexism along with anti-gay prejudice. And, like it or not, some gay men hate women, just as do some of their straight brothers.

Whilst Pride became populated with floats carrying drag queens resplendent in tassels, glitter and sequins, with rollerskating nuns following behind, lesbians sought to continue to remind the world that there were real issues to be fought, such as women losing their children to violent men because of anti-lesbian bigotry in the family courts; compulsory heterosexuality and the pressure to marry men and have babies, and a total lack of understanding that women have the right to control our own sexuality.

Lesbians have had enough, as we saw from the Cardiff parade yesterday. If gay men wish to turn what used to be an honourable protest march into nothing more than a street party, and include kinksters and cross dressers in the rainbow flag, that’s up to them, but lesbians have a lot of work left to do.

As Angela Wild, a founder member of GTLO told me, they protested the march to highlight the appalling treatment of lesbians by the queer-identified crowd, and the climate of sexual coercion that lesbian have to navigate daily. 'The way we were treated, both by the LGBT crowd and the police who refused to let us march and failed to protect us is a clear reflection of the current anti-lesbian image brought by trans activists,' says Wild.

In its statement, issued after the footage had gone viral on social media, Cardiff police claimed that the group was purposely blocking the procession, which is why they were told to leave. But what the lesbians were in fact doing was to show the world that enough is enough, and we are not giving up. The women in Get the L Out are, to me, the finest example of women refusing to capitulate to men’s demands. Being a lesbian in a misogynistic society is damned hard. The trans activists should know by now that us lezzers are not for turning.