I can confirm that there were lesbians and they were quite definitely sitting on chairs.

On 11th May 2019, an audience of 160 (159 women & a bloke) gathered to hear words of wisdom from five lesbians: six if you add Anne Ruzlyo, who chaired the event. Speakers were Sheila Jeffreys, Julia Beck, Lesley Woodburn, Julia Long and Dovile Lapinskaite.

‘Lesbians on Chairs’ was organised by Standing For Women and, as now is the norm for meetings where women wish to gather and discuss gender and all its affiliated oppression, the venue was kept secret until the day of the event.

Our journey there was fairly uneventful. We took the tube, and coffee was involved at both ends of the trip. As the meeting wasn’t at an ungodly hour in the morning and only a short-ish journey from chez-Maynard, there was no mad dash and, sadly, no interesting anecdotes to relate about adventures on the way.

We surfaced into the sunlight at Euston Station and I stood on the concourse, revolving like a compass as I tried to work out which way Siri was trying to send me. As I strode off to the left, ‘it’s definitely this way’, speaking with more confidence that I felt, I hear a cry of “hey TERFs!” behind us and turned to see Natasha, for once not bearing her knitted ‘woman: adult human female’ banner.

“I have no idea where I’m going,” she greeted us cheerfully, looking around her to locate the women she was meeting.

Almost immediately another group of women arrived, including speaker Julia Long, so I slipped my phone back into my pocket and followed them to the Wesley, trying casually to look as if I’d been intending to turn right all along.

The Wesley describes itself as ‘the first ethical hotel in the UK’ and is evidently ‘committed to sustainable business and social responsibility’. Modern and airy, with spacious conference rooms, clean loos and friendly staff, it deserves to flourish.

It took less than ten minutes to walk from the tube station to the hotel, where we were ushered downstairs; a gilt-framed sign directing us to the Hilda Porter conference room. A starched, white table cloth at the back of the hall sported complimentary bottled water and for one glorious moment I mistook the Standing for Women merch stall for a coffee shop.

We had arrived fairly early so managed to get seats in the second row, close to the front. The room buzzed with chatter as women arrived and took their seats. A series of flags and banners adorned the speakers area, and the women seated there talked together, sipped at water and examined their notes.

My disappointment at the lack of coffee was short-lived, as Michèle discovered the hotel had a coffee shop upstairs. She disappeared and returned a few minutes later with a tray of steaming beverages. My coffee and I sunk down happily in our seat as the livestream was set up and the last few stragglers filed into the hall.

“How fantastic to see a room full of women… and a man,” began Ruzlyo, who introduced herself as a founder member of Lesbians on Chairs. She welcomed us to the meeting, told us where the toilets and fire exits were and asked those who didn’t wish to be photographed or filmed to make themselves known. She reminded us that the hastag for today was #lesbiansonchairs.

“Martina has joined us,” added Anne, with a straight face. We all turned- I almost believed it for a moment- to see Claire coming down the aisle with a life-sized portrait of Martina, which she carefully placed on a chair next to the speakers.

“A round of applause for Martina, there! Martina Navratilova is now a lesbian on a chair!”

And how we clapped!

Ruzlyo thanked Posie Parker and Venice Allan for supporting lesbians and putting on the event, and asked women to offer to take part in Kate’s video project, before introducing us to Tonya, who was filming for a documentary.

“I’m Tonje from Norway… it’s the same in Norway… freedom of expression is not for women… we need to make people aware of what is happening. I’m an artist, I have a lesbian performance band Hungry Hearts and we made the Vagina Anthem…”

Tonya was interrupted here by a well-deserved barrage of cheers and whoops. Have you heard the Vagina Anthem? It’s iconic. Here’s a link. Be warned, it will be stuck in your head for days.

Ruzlyo explained that speakers would have fifteen minutes each. Today I am strict!”Oooo, and we’re all going to the pub after. We’ll announce where at the end when we’re not being streamed. There’ll be a Q&A at the end,” continued Anne, as she introduced Sheila Jeffreys, the first speaker, “but any fan love should be saved until the pub afterwards or we’ll never get out of the door.”

Sheila Jeffreys

“It’s lovely to be here with all these splendid lesbians!” started Sheila, referring to the panel, and going on to say how wonderful it was to be speaking on a panel with the women who were creating the next phase of lesbian feminism.

“I can’t tell you what it means in my heart to be part of this happening again. These are the women… who are doing it right now.”

Sheila said it was her ‘sad duty‘ to give a sketch of what the lesbian community had lost since the 1970s and 80s; that the lesbian politics of the time had enabled women to come out as lesbians with confidence and pride. Lesbian feminists were fundamental to the heart of the women’s liberation movement at that time,

“The literature and the theory and the women’s centres and rape crisis centres and the battered women’s refuges.. you name it, there were lesbians initiating those things and fully involved in all of them… There were lesbian and women-only spaces for lesbians to meet, dance,socialise, make music, art: we had lesbian tradeswomen, bands, novels, poetry, books of theory, we had philosophy. There were lesbian centres and groups all over the country. Now of course, there are trans groups all over the country… None of this included men who said they were lesbians.”

Sheila observed that these men were barely in evidence at the time and had not yet effected state capture. There were ‘a few strange cross dressers’ but she had only ever met a couple back in the 70s and 80s. Lesbians, she said, were not transgendered before the 1990s.

In the 1950s, lesbians didn’t come out. The lesbian community was underground, usually sharing its spaces with gay men, and lesbians were rejected by family, workplaces and society in general. They were often sent to mental hospitals if it was even suspected that they were women who loved women. Many lesbians engaged in butch/fem relationships “within the constraints of heterosexual forms.. to protect their safety, they lived entirely under an unrelieved hetero-patriarchal regime.”

During the 70s and 80s, this was not the case. From the late 60s onwards, the gay liberation movement meant that lesbians became more confrontational and outspoken; the vanguard of the Women’s Liberation Movement. They rejected heterosexuality as an enforced political system designed to extract women’s labour and keep women under control. Lesbians felt able ‘to say they were not freaks and pariahs, they were the very model of a liberated woman. Free of male control, creating their own lives, choosing to reject the enfeebling effects of femininity.”

“The idea that feminists could and should choose to become lesbians was an important part of our thinking,” said Jeffreys, acknowledging that this idea sparks controversy today more than ever. “Joy was absolutely fundamental to what we were doing.”

It’s hard to imagine, reflected Jeffreys, that back then, women were teaching in schools that heterosexuality was an institution, both political and compulsory. Now in schools, “young lesbians are being transgendered and any suggestion that this might be a problem is treated as heresy and potentially a sackable offence.”

“We said it was ok to be man-haters… We could not have been more ‘out’ in public. We were not some pale version of gay men… now prominent lesbians, and their frightened younger sisters on the verge of coming out, are afraid to use the word… they tend to hide themselves under terms such as queer, non-binary, bisexual or transgender. And in this way… we are going back to the 1950s.”

The ideas of the 70s are now forgotten and condemned, lamented Jeffreys, and women like her, who had sexual contact with men before becoming lesbian, are told by some that they have no right to call themselves lesbians. “We are straight-bians” said Sheila, with stern faux-seriousness, rolling her ‘r’ like a French school marm. “Any women not lesbians from birth, with no contact at any time with a penis anywhere near them except in the process of insemination before they were born- it is hard to get away from it, isn’t it?- are just pretending!”

Sheila was so funny when she said this that even many of those who disagreed with her perspective couldn’t help but laugh at her tone.

Jeffreys recurred that lesbians were at the heart of creating women’s culture of the 70s and 80s. Lesbians were writing books of poetry and novels, and these were published by women’s or lesbian presses. There were numerous theatre performances, poetry readings and cultural events, organised solely by and for women. Many spaces were ‘women only’ and there was no controversy about it. There were women’s political spaces, artistic spaces, women & lesbian conferences: woman’s discos were held practically every week night in London. Women ran bookstores and cafés. During the ‘Women’s Monthly Event’ a community centre would be taken over with rooms set aside for pool, chatting, political discussions, dancing and spaces for setting out wares for sale.

“Heterosexual women came in large numbers and because of the extraordinary erotic buzz, many of those women became lesbians- and some of them may be here today! …

The disappearance of lesbian culture took place over a several decades but caused enormous grief, says Jeffreys. The women’s presses and centres closed, the discos disappeared; the bands went mainstream. It was especially sad because “all of us believed that our culture would last forever”.

“Now there are almost no women’s spaces left and it is impossible for women to meet without the inclusion of men, some of them in dresses, some of them in trousers. No one would have imagined it would come to this in the heyday of lesbian feminism. Without our own space we cannot imagine the erotic and political joy of joining together with other women. We cannot create a lesbian perspective that allows us to see the world in a completely different way.”

Jeffreys spoke faster towards the end of her allocated time, the audience feeling both the power of the world she described and the pathos of its loss. Yet she concluded with a message of hope that had the audience burst into a cheer.

“The most extraordinary thing is that I’m standing here today and we’re going to create the whole thing again and it’s happening RIGHT NOW!”

Julia Beck

Anne introduced Beck as “a writer and organiser from Baltimore, Maryland. She helps produce a monthly radio broadcast for Women’s Liberation Radio News. Last year she represented lesbians at Baltimore Pride and on the law and policy committee of Baltimore City’s LGBTQ commission. She’s currently at the forefront of the fight for women’s and lesbian’s rights in the USA – Julia Beck.”

Beck was met with cheers as she stood up and took the microphone and it was a minute before she could speak. “You’re a shero!” called out one woman, a cry met with whoops from another, and Beck seemed genuinely surprised at the warmth and ferocity of her reception.

Plans to march in the Baltimore Pride parade were hatched last May over dinner with lesbians in Baltimore City. “We wanted to cause a ruckus and a ruckus we did cause!” she said with a laugh. Julia says she was inspired by the actions of Charlie Montague and Renée Gerlich in New Zealand and by an anonymous woman at the 2018 Vancouver women’s march.



None of the women who marched with her that day were looking for notoriety but Beck was named on Twitter and ‘thus began my journey into the public eye.’

Julia writes about her experience here, in her article ‘How I became the most hated lesbian in Baltimore’.

Although she is a citizen, Beck prefers not to call herself an American, observing that there’s more to the Americas than the States alone. She pointed out that she, Marielle Franco and Megan Murphy and could all be called Americans but were all born in different countries. This year Beck has appeared on television and testified twice in Congress. She acknowledges that she was able to do these things not just because of her ‘absurdly true’ story but because of the privileges of race and education and the opportunities that she has been given. While education should be a human right, the US acts as if it is a privilege, and Julia describes academia as ‘the intellectual militia’. Access to social media and other digital platforms, she affirmed, are privileges that we need to use with honesty.

We should not be surprised that ‘the legacy of feminism in the USA is riddled with racism’ and Beck reminds us that the struggle of women is ‘ongoing and global’, while we live in a dystopia where ‘men can be whatever they want and women can be whatever men want’. Paula Giddings, Beck told us, writes in her book ‘When and Where I Enter‘ that in the year Martin Luther King was assassinated media attention to the women’s movement was focused primarily on a bra-burning protest at the Miss America pageant. ‘When the media is run by white people you can probably guess what makes the news’.

“Sometimes violence is the answer. Property destruction can be a political act, so I encourage women, especially lesbians, to become more militant.” A cheer from the back of the room. “But violence against people? That’s usually not so good. Male violence is a global problem. Men are killing women, each other and the planet at a seemingly exponential rate.”

Beck observed that while in the UK we are making strides in the battle to protect women’s sex-based rights, in the US there is a lot more ground to cover, partly because the US is so vast. She believes there are as few as two or three women working offline in most major US cities.

“Everyone else is ruled by fear, plugged in to the 24 hour news cycle, filling their minds and bodies with processed garbage. We are so complacent and pacified. I am disgusted. It’s almost as is US citizens are afraid of discomfort. We are afraid to think for ourselves.”

“When people come together they form groups, and groups equal culture. We do need to look inside ourselves to some extent: we need to know our own stories and the stories of our ancestors, these stories help us grow. When women talk to each other, especially when lesbians talk to each other and share our stories, we realise we have a lot in common.

This is how we raise consciousness. This is how we wake up.”

Most traditions in the States are capitalist, reflected Beck, the beauty industry promoting a world of make believe where celebrities are used to sell products to women who can never be good enough. Likewise, femininity is artificial, making women into products, marked as somehow ‘less than’ men and for the consumption of men.

“Femininity hinders our movement. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to each other to stop painting our faces and shaving our bodies. If we stop doing it then men will have nothing to mimic. Femininity is a male fantasy anyway.”

A murmur of approval ran round the room at this well-expressed and uncomfortable truth, accompanied by a small wave of slightly awkward applause, as a sizeable proportion of us were wearing make up.

Our bodies are all we have, continued Beck, our best weapons. That is why men want to control them. She called on women, especially lesbians, to learn combat sports, train their bodies for strength. Women who cannot do this should train their minds. Women need to know how to fight, and create connections and strong pockets of resistance. She compared women and lesbian communities to a germinating spore which needs protecting at the beginning.

“We need sisterhood for sure, but more than that we need sisters in war. The revolution starts with you, in your mind. No man is going to rescue you… say no. If feminism was reduced to one word it would be ‘No’.”

Beck concluded by referencing Stormé Laverie, the black butch lesbian who sparked the Stonewall rebellion, who called on her peers to ‘do something’.

“We need to do something, because it’s now or never.”

When applause for Beck had died down, Anne Ruzlyo reminded those who had bought the ‘super duper whopper ticket’ to pick up their pack, a box containing an ‘adult human female’ notebook, lanyard, stickers, pin, badges and pen.

The next speaker was Lesley Woodburn.

“You may have seen Lesley a few times just recently. Lesley is a socialist, Trade Unionist and community activist.”

You can read about why Lesley was in the news recently, here.

Lesley Woodburn

Lesley, who has attended many Mayday marches over the years, attended this year with a friend. On the march they carried a sign bearing the definition of woman: ‘adult human female’. The stewards on the march saw the transactivists, who Woodburn believes had just come out of the London School of Economics, heard what they said, looked at Lesley’s sign and were baffled as to why anyone might be objecting to it. Initially the transactivists were moved on by the stewards and prevented from joining the demonstration.

“I was called ‘black scum’ whilst marching. I was called ‘TERF’. We actually expected the TERF comment and the ‘transphobic’ comments, but the racist comments? I don’t think I expected that.”

Woodburn observed that the activists were very young, mostly white and seemed to be middle-class. These young people, she said, have never had to fight actual fascists. “That’s why they can call women ‘fascists’… because they have no idea about fascism or fighting fascism.”

There are people in this room, continued Woodburn, who fought to close down the British National Party headquarters in Welling, who demonstrated against the Poll Tax and marched against Clause 28. These young people are ‘resting in the rights which… we won for ourselves and we won for them’.

Trade unions, added Lesley, are colluding to ensure that ‘rape culture is actually enshrined in law’ and that trade union members need to call them out on it. Union members need to resist the ‘gender jail that they want to send us all to’ and bring the unions back into line; trade union bureaucrats have lost sight of the fact that people are fed up of living under austerity and holding down half a dozen jobs just to survive. People need to ask their unions what they are doing about this.

Woodburn praised the women who have fought back against the ‘gender jail’, women like Florida Macdonalds worker Yasmine Jones who was grabbed by the throat by a male customer and retaliated by beating him up; the Yeovil, UK students who smashed CCTV cameras in their school toilets and the Alaskan school girl who fought a young man who trapped her in the toilets. She mentioned the woman who was kicked out of her local pub for wearing an ‘adult human female’ T shirt, and emphasised the importance of passing on those stories.

“The only way to be resilient is the be visible as much as we can, take action as much as we can and to understand what our collective experience is and pass that on… we need to ring the alarm and ring the alarm now.”

When the applause died down, Ruzlyo reminded us that many trade union members are women and that unions are a good place to meet collectively and communicate.

“Julia Long is a lesbian,” said Anne, in introduction, “one of the old fashioned kind that doesn’t have a penis. She’s worked in education, local government, academia and the women’s sector and is currently a researcher in the field of male violence against women.”

Julia Long

Long started by saying she was ‘blown away’ by everything she had heard so far, and said she wanted to reflect on where the ‘gender critical’ movement was at the moment. Long is not a fan of the term ‘gender critical’ but acknowledges that it is hard to find an alternative. Because it is important to ‘name the reality in which we find ourselves’ lesbian feminists frequently have to use ‘the language of catastrophe and disaster’.

Long observed that while there had been a lot of talk about lesbian erasure; the demise of the lesbian feminist movement; the loss of lesbian spaces, we hadn’t spoken much about the harm being done to young lesbians and the destruction of young lesbian bodies. She wondered how we might bring a different reality into being, expressing concern that using the language of loss and erasure might have the effect of adding to that narrative. New ways of thinking and using language would be needed to do this.

“Women throughout history have this choice fall into two camps, to what extent do we want to resist patriarchy… to what extent do we want to create our own reality?” The gender critical movement uses so many euphemisms, for example saying we are ‘critical of gender identity ideology’ because we are afraid of being seen to be ‘anti transgender’.

Writing letters, academic papers, protests, talks, online discussions are all very well, but are actions taken in ‘response mode’. there is a lot to be said for trying to get men to change, but to some extent ‘what we resist persists’. Paying huge amounts of attention to inconsequential entities – these men who are being created as celebrities- perpetuates the problem. Long suggested that a lot might be gained by reading the works of Sonia Johnson who says:

“Women have resisted patriarchy with unsurpassed cunning, craft and passion for at least five thousand years. I don’t want to seem hasty but it seems that five thousand years is long enough to try any method, particularly one that doesn’t work.”

Sharing a phrase of her own coining, Long purports that to some extent ‘argumentation is validation’. Giving these men attention suggests that what they are saying is important; giving them our energy encourages them. Julia suggested that if we don’t want to spend our time in ‘response mode’ perhaps there are better things we can be doing with it.

“As a lesbian feminist I do not define myself in relation to men. It is not my responsibility to clear up the mess that men have made… to squander my time, my knowledge and my energy in what I increasingly believe to be a futile and pointless attempt to clear up the horrors that men have wrought, whether these be the horrors of transgenderism or any other form of male violence against women or against the planet.

What is my responsibility? As a lesbian feminist, my responsibility is to my Self… to be conscious of the significance of my Self… we are hugely significant and it is a challenge to us to really take that on board, be conscious of it and then to act and manifest that.”

Long spoke of the work of Julia Penelope, who spoke as long ago as the early 90s of how lesbian feminists had lost the sense of their own significance. Rather than spending energy arguing with men, Long feels, lesbian feminists could be spending that energy on greater things.

“Lesbian feminism IS women’s liberation.. my challenge is… to create more space, more possibilities and more potential for myself and for other lesbian feminists: to create more lesbian feminist consciousness and lesbian feminist reality in the world.”

Long suggests that one of the ways lesbian feminists can do this is by articulating a lesbian perspective in mainstream heterosexual environments. She reminded the audience that just because a woman is a lesbian it doesn’t necessarily mean everything she says is coming from a lesbian perspective; that many high profile lesbians support male supremacy.

‘The more we are worshiping in the cathedrals of patriarchy, the less available to us is the lesbian perspective. We need to ask unpopular questions. If you aren’t frequently being made to feel that you’ve said something unpopular, you are living a cramped and timid life.’

Long said she wanted to finish with a quote from Andrea Dworkin.