On Saturday, 150 lesbians marched through Leeds to celebrate female homosexuality and protest the erasure of lesbian identity. Lesbian Strength marches took place through the 1980’s and we wanted to re-start this tradition of lesbian organising to reclaim lesbian and women-only spaces and rebuild community. We chose Leeds because it has a proud feminist and lesbian feminist heritage.

For anyone who is confused, a lesbian is someone born female who is exclusively sexually attracted to other people born female. For years now, lesbians have been pressured and coerced into redefining their sexual orientation to include anyone who wants to identify as a lesbian. There are four sexual orientations that are defined by biological sex and yet only female homosexuals are routinely told that they need to ‘unlearn’ their preferences because they are exclusionary. Attraction towards another person is instinctive and impulsive, no one should be forced to consciously reshape that to conform to group norms. That is a foundation of both the gay rights and women’s rights movements.

When discussing women’s rights or lesbian rights I am often told that there is no clash between our existing rights and the proposed right of transgender people to self identify their gender and by extension their sexual orientation. However the presence of a group of protesters at the start of our march illustrates why this is not the case. The event was advertised as lesbian-only and evidently the protesters felt that pro-lesbian is implicitly anti-trans. We know. They know. In whose interest is it to obscure this?

Protesting against anyone’s right to be same-sex attracted should not be a good look in 2019. Homophobia is always homophobia, even when it comes from within the LGBT community or those who believe they are ‘allies’. Look at the placards, when these people say TERF, they actually mean ‘lesbian’. Have we really gone that far backwards?

We do not protest trans-only events, because we are simply concerned about our own rights and community and are not in fact ‘transphobic’. We have protested at LGBT pride because, at least nominally, we are part of that community. Stonewall and other LGBT organisations have let us down badly, by failing to advocate for us and by actively encouraging the redefinition of the word lesbian without our involvement.