“It doesn’t make any difference what genitals someone has!” A very sneery teenager barked this statement at me during a discussion on gender identity and the recent London Pride parade. We were referencing a group of women who had moved to the front of the parade and carried banners protesting lesbian erasure from the LGBT movement and the swelling tide of transgender dogma which says lesbianism could, even should, involve biological males.

Much has already been written about the reasons for this action [*1]. I’m not a lesbian and it wouldn’t be fair of me to speak for the women involved. However, were I in their place, I would certainly feel betrayed and abandoned by a movement which was supposed to protect my rights and safety. Lesbianism means “Female homosexual”; women who are same-sex attracted. It does not involve males or male genitalia. If even the LGBT community itself will attack and pillory women for making what should be such obvious and basic statements, we know something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Over recent months I have seen lesbians vilified and abused for trying to define their own sexual boundaries, described as Nazis for daring to suggest that their sexuality does not include male reproductive organs. I have read articles you’d swear were satire describing how lesbians should learn to love ‘girl dick’ [*2]. One of them, published in Autostraddle [*3], even schools lesbians in how to stimulate an erect penis and perform fellatio. There is a YouTube video in which an older transwoman encourages a nervously giggling ‘babydyke’ (their word) to have sex with ‘trans ladies’ [*4]. The infamous Riley J Dennis makes YouTube videos telling lesbians that rejecting penis makes them ‘transphobic’ and likens having a ‘genital preference’ when dating to being a racist [*5].

What makes me really uncomfortable is that most of these articles and videos are aimed at the young. I can’t imagine the effect they must have on young lesbians who are only just beginning to understand and explore their sexuality. Shaming young women for asserting their own sexual boundaries…? Biological males coercing and blackmailing young women into having sex with them…? In any other context, we’d call this grooming.

I’ve heard from lesbian friends that they have been forced to allow physical males who ‘identify as lesbian’ into their clubs and organisations etc. Refusing them access means losing the funding they receive from the very LGBT charities which are supposed to be supporting their right to be same-sex attracted. I understand there are many physical males who litter lesbian dating sites. I’ve heard time and time again about lesbians being abused, bullied and even physically threatened for daring to refuse biological males as potential partners. Every time I log onto social media, I see some man raging against the lesbians who won’t include him in their lesbianism.

Believing that women must centre men in their sexuality is the epitome of male entitlement. However, I think there is another very obvious reason behind this endless, rabid insistence that lesbianism must include physical males; if lesbians are allowed to refuse penis, we must acknowledge that the penis is not female. And that is a heresy which cannot go unpunished.

Only a couple of years ago I was blissfully ignorant of these issues and had no idea that society was heading down a deep, dark rabbit hole called “GENDER”. Now I am acutely aware of the debate, however, and I grow increasingly alarmed about the way women (the class of people with female reproductive anatomy) are being effectively erased. If, as the government intends with proposed self ID legislation, any man can be a woman by simply identifying (you have to say the magic word!) as one, then the word “woman” is rendered meaningless. And if we have no word with which to describe our biological sex, then we cannot challenge the oppression and discrimination inherent in it.

Women are being erased, subsumed, over-ridden… generally swallowed up whole by this well-financed and very powerful trans lobby. Women must shut up, shove up, give up their spaces, their rights, their opportunities, even the very language they need to discuss their lives and experiences… and if they protest they’ll be terrified into silence with screams of “TERF!” and “Bigot!”.

Make no mistake, this is a 21st century witch hunt. A woman has opinions you don’t like? There is now a very powerful and effective way to silence her, to terrify her into submission. These new trans activists are a snarling, menacing, all-powerful tour de force and women must either subjugate themselves completely (as some are clearly doing) or face the very serious consequences of non-compliance. They make McCarthy look like an amateur.

Only last week a respected female lesbian academic faced a barrage of abuse and had her employment threatened for daring to air some perfectly innocuous views about the reality of biological sex. It’s happening everywhere, all the time. Women are doxxed, intimidated, their jobs and families are threatened, they’re no-platformed, their meetings are disrupted, on one occasion even terrorized with a bomb threat [*6], a trades unionist is attacked on her own picket line [*7] and a 60 year old women gets punched in the face by a 20 year old man for simply attending a perfectly peaceful talk [*8]… and this is all deemed acceptable under the new regime.

The rules are clear; any reference to female biology as being inherent to womanhood is transphobic, any questioning of the mantra that “Transwomen are women” makes one a fascist, any refusal to believe that penises can be female and you will surely face the consequences. ‘TERFs’ are the new witches. That one word renders all the violence, intimidation and aggression women face perfectly acceptable. Women are literally terrified of speaking out to protect their hard-won rights and safety. And if this sounds like an Orwellian dystopia to you, that’s because it is.

What an utterly tragic and unnecessary situation; it never used to be like this. Transwomen and women were once each other’s strongest friends and allies. We respected and supported each other’s rights and safety. We fought side by side on the same team against the common enemy – toxic masculinity. Tranwomen never made any claims on womanhood. Both sides knew that our lives, challenges, experiences and biology were different. But that didn’t matter; transwomen were welcomed into the club as honorary members and we all rubbed along together in harmony.

That, however, was back in the day we knew what “Trans” actually meant. A transsexual was someone who had medical treatment and surgery in order to live socially as the opposite sex. But now the new identity politics woowoo has allowed the trans community to be invaded and overtaken by cross dressers, transvestites, fetishists, autogynephiles, men with porn-soaked lesbian fantasies, any attention-seeking, gender non-conforming male who loves glitter and lipstick and calls himself non-binary… They’re all covered by the ‘trans umbrella’. Trans now means everything. And it means nothing.

Very few so-called transwomen have any intention of ever having any medical treatment or physical alteration. They are physical males with fully a functioning male reproductive system and male genitalia. They are women simply because they say they are. Even the ones with beards (no joke – see Alex Drummond). Of course, this hugely undermines the position and integrity of genuine transsexuals and many (Miranda Yardley [*9], Kristina Harrison [*10] and Debbie Hayton [*11], amongst others) have spoken out about the problems they have with transgender ideology in national newspapers and at feminist meetings [*12]. They are dismissed as ‘truscum’ and attacked relentlessly on social media. Only the newspeak of the transgenderists is allowed.

These new ‘transwomen’ are no longer women’s allies in the fight against patriarchal dominance; THEY ARE THE VERY EMBODIMENT OF IT. They are determined to erase and assume womanhood. They demand access to all of our services, spaces, organisations and opportunities and will unleash hell if their demands are not met. See non-binary performance artist, Travis Alabanza, who launched a campaign on social media when he was, quite rightly, refused entry to female spaces. He insisted on and was granted access to Topshop’s female changing rooms despite being physically male.

They are also manipulating language to suit their agenda, dictating to women that we must not reference our biology as specifically female. We are no longer women; we must refer to ourselves as ‘uterus havers’ or ‘menstruators’. We must not use the words “pregnant mothers” or “breastfeeding”; it’s “pregnant people” and “chestfeeding” now. Women must pretend that menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, giving birth, breastfeeding, menopause etc are not uniquely female experiences.

You’ll notice there is rarely any mention of (biologically female) transmen in this debate. There is never any demand made on men to accommodate them into manhood, to give up their spaces, roles, power, authority and opportunities. Men are still men, not testes-havers or prostate-owners. And men-only establishments remain exactly that; they’re open to nobody but biological males. I know exactly what sort of reception the brilliant activists #ManFriday would receive if they tried their luck getting into gentleman’s club, The Athenaeum, or a gay men’s sauna by claiming to ‘identify’ as male. When they arrived at the Hampstead Heath men-only pond, the male bathers objected in the strongest terms [*13] and even called the police! Because female people are still read and treated as female whatever their ‘gender identity’ might be. Whereas men now have a Get Out Of Jail Free card to use with impunity the moment they choose to ‘identify as a woman’. This movement is one of pure misogyny, but concealed beneath a rainbow flag.

This, of course, brings us back to the rather naive assertion made to me that “Genitals don’t matter!” A cunning silencing tactic used to derail debate is that those who challenge gender identity are somehow ‘obsessed with other people’s genitals’ or ‘reducing women to their genitalia’. Lesbians are labelled ‘Vagina fetishists’ if they dare define their sexual boundaries to exclude penis. But the reality is that biological sex exists. There are discernible and important differences between the biological sexes, the most obvious of which is anatomy and reproductive capacity. And this matters. It matters a lot.

For millennia the class of people with vulvas and uteri etc (let’s call them WOMEN) have been oppressed, discriminated against, subjugated, murdered, raped, abused, assaulted, disfigured, held back, held down and terrorized by the class of people with penises and testicles etc (let’s call them MEN). And why?? Because of that very thing we’re supposed to pretend doesn’t exist or isn’t important; our biological sex. But we must not talk about it. Genitals don’t matter, remember??

Moreover, the vast majority of the world’s population base their choice of potential romantic / sexual partners on biological sex. To pretend otherwise is ludicrous. And deeply homophobic. For centuries gay men and lesbians fought and died pursuing their right to enjoy relationships with people of a specific biological sex; their own. Throughout the world gay men and lesbians are still persecuted and put to death for having relationships with people of a specific biological sex; their own.

If we are now pretending that gay men can and should be induced or somehow ‘educated’ to pursue sexual relationships with people who have vaginas, how is that different from the appalling conversion therapy that used to be forced upon them? If we are now pretending that lesbians can and should be induced or somehow ‘educated’ to pursue sexual relationships with people who have a penis, how is that different from the ‘corrective rape’ so frequently forced upon them? It isn’t. The notion that lesbians and gay men can ‘choose’ to have partners of the opposite sex is exactly the what they’ve fought so hard to resist for decades. It is coercive heterosexuality and it’s regressive, reactionary nonsense.

It seems to me that current transgender ideology really is not compatible with lesbianism and homosexuality. There is a huge T shaped cuckoo in the LGB nest. It’s time to speak up.

[*1] Article detailing the reasons for the ‘Get the L Out’ Pride protest

[*2] Article on ‘girl dick’ in Medium.com

[*3] Autostraddle article on lesbian sex with a penis

[*4] YouTube video featuring ‘babydyke’

[*5] Riley J Dennis likens a ‘genital preference’ when dating with racism

[*6] Spectator article detailing disruptions to women’s meetings

[*7] Morning Star article on attack on trades unionist

[*8] Article detailing attack on 60 year old woman by trans activist

[*9] Article by Miranda Yardley on the meaning of ‘Gender’

[*10] Kristina Harrison speaking at a feminist meeting

[*11] Article in The Ecomonist by Debbie Hayton on ‘gender identity’

[*12] Letter to The Guardian by a number of trans women re the GRA

[*13] Article detailing the Man Friday Hampstead Heath protest