Last week Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock and Martina Navratilova launched The Lesbian Project. Writing in The Observer, Stock defined the group’s aims as “to put lesbian needs and interests back into focus, to stop lesbians disappearing into the rainbow soup and to give them a non-partisan political voice”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was not to the liking of everyone. 

Strong criticism came from the activist group Speak Out Sister. It tweeted that the group excludes “trans lesbians, cis women in relationships with trans lesbians, trans inclusive cis lesbians and bi women” — in other words, people who call themselves lesbians, but are male or are open to relationships with male people.

”Who,” Speak Out Sister then asked, “do they represent and why?” I’d have thought this was obvious. The Lesbian Project represents lesbians — that is, same-sex attracted women — and tweets such as Speak Out Sister’s provide a good enough reason why. 

What little gains we make are coming at the expense of other women

I am not a lesbian. As a feminist, I know I share interests with women who are not like me. At the same time, there are experiences I will never have, problems I will never face, and social positions I will never occupy. We should all be invested in the feminist fight against objectification and sexual coercion, which in recent years has been termed the #metoo movement. Nonetheless, the way in which this has been playing out for lesbians and for straight women seems to me has been radically different. As a member of the latter group, I increasingly feel that what little gains we make are coming at the expense, not of men, but of other women. 

I have no desire to claim that #metoo has gone too far; on the contrary, the advances have been small, the backlash almost instantaneous. What it has done is make it more acceptable for women such as me to talk about ways in which men have made us feel uncomfortable, transgressions which may, once upon a time, have been dismissed as non-events. It has allowed us to be more open about sexual coercion and the use of power and shaming to extort nominal consent. It has permitted us to reclaim our right to say no, even when we are made to feel frivolous, selfish or cruel. 

All of these things are valuable. Even so, there are times when I feel that these new entitlements offer a kind of cover for the fact that certain overarching feminist principles — principles which ought to apply to all women — have been quietly shelved. 

The idea, for instance, that female people exist as a coherent, definable group, with the right to set their own boundaries and exclude male people indefinitely from their lives, should they so wish, is no longer acceptable to the feminism represented by groups such as Speak Out Sister. Backed into a corner by slogans such as “trans women are women” and “sex work is work”, this iteration of the movement encourages women to take some things very seriously, all the better to demonstrate that others are no big deal at all. We focus on the periphery because the centre has been blown apart. This harms some women more than others.

A woman such as me — straight, white, middle-class — is free to ruminate on whether a man I slept with years ago was abusing his power. Perhaps he was. Perhaps the consent I gave was not valid. It’s not that I don’t appreciate being able to examine such things. Nevertheless, there is something amiss when discussing them right now is more politically acceptable than suggesting that prostituted women cannot give valid consent, or that telling lesbians they must dispense with “genital preferences” is a form of sexual coercion. 

I can see how we have ended up here. My rumination on my own experiences does not form any direct challenge to the idea that male people should have access to female bodies. To question the sex trade is to question the idea that some female bodies, somewhere, should always be purchasable; to suggest lesbians should not have to consider sleeping with people with penises is to set boundaries for an entire class of women. What’s more, to allow lesbians to exclude male people from their dating pool is to imply that trans women are not in fact women, at least not in all cases. The maintenance of the slogan is considered more important than granting lesbians the same rights as straight women to call out male abuses of power. 

It isn’t for all women, but all women should be invested

Vice recently re-shared an article from 2018 in which it is claimed that “everyone is entitled to their sexual preferences, but we should be able to talk about how societal values affect them”. I know — it sounds like something an incel would come out with, shortly before launching into a diatribe on why “Stacys” only sleep with “Chads” because of their flawed value systems. It was, in fact, an article focussed primarily at lesbians, reassuring them that they could sleep with whoever they liked, just that they should “critically reflect on the factors that might shape [their] attractions” — such as whether a person has a penis. This is what coercion looks like. This absolutely shouldn’t need saying, and it wouldn’t, if it applied to women like me. 

As long as we accept a feminism with the central principles ripped out, particular groups of women will suffer whilst others make piecemeal, fragile gains. In the long term, this harms us all because what is at stake is whether female people are sexual subjects in an absolute sense, or merely in particular, male-defined contexts. 

In the short term, this is hurting lesbians in particular ways. I know there are some who will say this has nothing to do with straight women, but as long as we are having our own conversations about power, shaming and coercion, we owe it to others to draw the links. 

In the meantime, the Lesbian Project is much needed, as a way of representing and celebrating women whose very definition is constantly questioned. It isn’t for all women, but all women should be invested in ensuring such environments can exist. That much is about us, too.