Lauren Black’s speech was transcribed from YouTube.
“Thank you very much for everybody who’s come out today. It takes courage to show your face in this debate. I know some of you have made quite long journeys to be here. I also want to thank the WRN, Standing for Women, Sex Not Gender NI, Radicailin, and network of independent women who do activism in Northern Island and across the country for coming here today.
Allright, so here goes:
I’m a lesbian, who lives with gender dysphoria. I’m here to talk about women’s spaces, and lesbian spaces, and what their loss means for women like me.
By the age of ten, I had heard the word “gay.” People in the 80s and even the 90s were still mentioning homosexuality like it was a disease. I’ve heard it called sinful and disgusting. If school peers thought you were gay at school, you were talked about and bullied.
I knew that I did not feel like my friends did about boys back then. But I also could not imagine a future with a woman. I could not imagine the kind of woman I wanted, would want me back. I couldn’t imagine my own children, or a home. I was ashamed and I was confused. And to make it worse, I felt stuck in this girl’s body. So I made a decision. I might be a girl, but I was going to be a strong one. I took part in all the sports, I cycled and I lifted weights.
I wish that there was somebody, even just one person, back then who could have explained to me what a lesbian was. I needed somebody who understood, to tell me it was ok to be who I am. I needed women in my life who loved other women. I wish there had been lesbian spaces for me to find. But there were none.
I was alone, carrying a secret, and that made me vulnerable.
The young women today looking for lesbian spaces on this island are plunged back in the same position I was twenty years ago.
If I had arrived at that travesty of a lesbian conference in Cork on Friday, to meet men, and males claiming to be lesbians, I would have thought to myself, “if that is a lesbian, then I am no lesbian”. I would have denied my own existence. I would have become even more lonely, more lost and more confused.
Young women seeking lesbian spaces are often vulnerable. Many of these women are lonely, isolated by shame, desperate for love and understanding. They need space to be held for them, and ground to stand on. They need a safe place to land. They need the company of women and of other lesbians. They need to work out that being a lesbian is a beautiful thing, with a proud history. And they need the safety of women-only spaces to do that.
In 2022, these young women find single-sex spaces have vanished. There is not one single exclusively lesbian space left on this entire island. If women want to go to lesbian spaces, we have to take a plane, or a boat, or we have to make our own. In the supposedly lesbian spaces that do exist, males make keynote speeches and sit among the audience. If women say they are same-sex attracted, not same-gender attracted, they are kicked out of those spaces and shunned. It is an absolute disaster for the lesbian community.
Honestly, sometimes I feel hopeless. Sometimes I feel like giving this fight up. There’s so much fighting to be done, and it sometimes feels like everything that was built for women and lesbians is coming crashing down. So many institutions are captured. We are having the conversations in this country, behind closed doors, with politicians and community leaders, but it feels like a mountain to climb and it echoes the whispers behind closed doors and the shame of my past.
Meanwhile, I’ve had to sit in my garden with my wife and ask, “what if they come for us?” I’ve bought security cameras and put them outside my own house. I’ve had to write on my wedding invitations to keep the time, the place and the date secret. I’ve had to explain to my children why the police want to arrest my wife, as my nine year old has answered the door to policemen. And months on from that, I still don’t know whether my wife will be dragged through the courts for tweets about child protection.
Let me say that again, about child protection.
So even my home doesn’t feel like the safe space it once did. And make no mistake, the other side want to reach into every area of our lives. They want to control what we think, what we do, and what we say. They want access to our children, to indoctrinate them without our say so, via the Internet and schools and wherever else they can. They want power, and control, and access. They want to demonise anyone who challenges them.
What do I want? I want what everybody else wants. I want to live my life, raise my children, go to work and run my businesses. I want to spend time with my family and turn wood on my lathe. I want to see my wife happy, and joyous and peaceful. I want to do my bit to make her feel that way. But instead, here she is, and here I am, in a fight we didn’t ask for.
But we are in it now. I can’t stop men like the one who has come after my wife. I can’t stop the police from referring my wife to the prosecution service every time someone feels threatened by her tweets about child protection. I can’t stop the other side sending disgusting, pornographic messages, threatening messages, insulting messages to my wife on the daily. I just have to live with them insulting me and telling me I’m really a self-hating wannabe man, and I should just transition already.
So we are here, and I will fight.
But who are we fighting?
I’ve heard a lot of people on the other side of this debate argue that they are left-wing. They say that in the best left-wing tradition, they are fighting for the poor, the marginalised, the socially excluded, the dispossessed. Well, I call bullshit. The people I’m fighting for are the young lesbians, looking to find their place in the world, who go to lesbian conferences and find men, and google “lesbian fashion” only to find breast binders and links to gender clinics.
I’m fighting for the women in Limerick Prison, the very definition of marginalised, excluded, dispossessed, who are housed with males.
I’m fighting for the hard-working, disciplined sportswomen, who are having their places at meets, on podiums, at events, stolen by mediocre males.
I’m fighting for abused women in rape and domestic violence shelters, who need a space away from men.
I’m fighting, maybe most of all, for the girls who want to jump in the mud and hit things with sticks and climb the world and fight the boys on their own terms. Girls like I was. I’m fighting for the boys who want to draw, and collect teddies, the boys with great big hearts and great big eyes and great big feelings, who cry at sad music, and love going shopping, and pressing wildflowers, and make the very best listeners in this world.
Those children don’t need to be told that they are the opposite sex to the one they were born. They need to be told that they are amazing and wonderful, just the way they are. They need to be told that there aren’t “girl things” and “boy things,” and that there is a place for them in the world. Maybe most of all that there are people in the world who will love them, just how they are.
The kind of radical self-acceptance I’m trying to foster in my own children is a lesson it has taken me personally a lifetime to learn. The space I learned it in was, in the end, my wife’s arms. And now I’ve found it, found my voice and found my strength, I’m here, being what I need, and doing my best to build again what has been lost.
Thank you very much.”
Other women activists spoke that day - all well worth listening to: Ceri Black, Rachel Moran, and Belfast Beatnik.
This article was first published in Uncommon Ground. We republish with their and the author’s permission.
The Four Horsemen of the Gender-Critical Apocalypse
Bending principles for the sake of gender critical trans allies risks splitting the movement and undermining the message.
In the Bible, the world ends when the first four of seven seals open and four horsemen ride out with the creepy monikers of Pestilence, Famine, War and Death. Something similar is happening in the gender critical community right now with an internal rift that could bring an end to our credibility and effectiveness. Our horsemen don’t sound nearly as bad as those biblical dudes, but like those four horsemen of the Bible, these four have come to represent familiar reminders of popular cultural role models that most of us in the western world understand and even feel comforted by. And, they have the potential to be just as apocalyptic.
These four share some characteristics that make them ‘good trans’ and allies to some important gender critical activists. For example, all are prominent individuals who claim ‘trans’ as their identities, but all are, to some extent, gender-critical themselves – that is, they acknowledge that they have not actually changed sex. They oppose trans-ing children. They’re concerned about women’s and girls’ rights. That’s great, but as gender-critical women, we cannot be in the business of sorting “trans” people into “good trans” and “bad trans” or aligning ourselves in a serious way with allies who themselves are walking, talking contradictions to what we claim to be analysing under a critical lens. We have to remember that these individuals are merely thinking and feeling that they need to medicalize themselves and more dangerously for all of us, that they believe that there are also “trans” children under 18 who may actually be better off being given puberty blockers and medicalised in order to find peace with themselves.
Let that one sink in.
The minute we do this, we have implicitly bought the legal fiction that is “trans” at all. And when you scratch the surface, it becomes clear that these particular folks are viewed as ‘good’ for reasons that corrode our credibility out of existence. They fulfil stereotypical ideas of what men and women should really be, so that we end up buying that they’re the real thing: ‘true’ ‘trans’—presumably as opposed to those AGP fetishists, non-passing fakes, predators, narcissists and confused teenagers who aren’t the real thing. Which means we’re right back to a basic belief in gender stereotypes as a valid system for understanding what it means to be male or female. This is the gender-critical apocalypse. Whatever struggles these people have or are experiencing, they of course have the right to how they have dealt – and still do – deal with it. But the propping up and even a kind of religiosity and adoration that has arisen needs to stop now. The tweet praises, the artwork dedicated to them – it needs to stop.
Having personal experience living as a gender non-conforming lesbian for over fifty years myself, and as someone who was on the psychological tract over 30 years ago to undergo what I thought would be a ‘sex change’, I know it’s risky but feel the time is right to call this critical moment out for what it is. We’ve all been groomed and we need to recognize that. So to make my point really clear, I’ve chosen to compare these individuals to the prominent familiar dolls found in our very gendered pop culture:
Barbie = Woman: Blaire White
With his porn-actress exterior, hyper-feminized mannerisms and silicone breasts coupled with a simple diary-approach to facing the camera, this effeminate gay man became a marketing genius by choosing the perfect timing to jump into YouTube culture. He has garnered millions of monetized views and likes to occasionally remind us that “it costs A LOT of money to look like this.” He’s been grooming women and men of all sexual orientations since 2015 to buy into his model of performing a socially acceptable form of femininity. Much of his early focus was on ripping into feminism and spouting politically conservative views while focusing on hair flipping and lip puckering.
While he was building his fan base, a whole slew of truly heinous men-in-bad-drag-behaving-badly erupted in public, and that piqued his interest. Specifically, Blaire viewed men like J Yaniv as inferior to himself, both because they were morally repellant and because they (unlike himself) failed to achieve a visually passing, heteronormative appearance.
By doing this, Blaire gathered a large new audience of gender-critical women, such as those on the Gender Critical Radical Feminists Facebook page, where members frequently post Blaire’s videos with comments like, “I wish more men would listen to her.”
But beyond admitting he’s still technically male, what makes Blaire White an ally? He embodies the twin fictions that acceptable femininity = stereotyped, hyper-sexualized and silicone-pumped Barbie-woman, and the idea that gender-dysphoric people can and should seek happiness through medical and surgical (at least above the waist) transformation. We should not be saying yes to this. As Blaire is famous for saying, “Not today honey.”
Ken = Man: Scott Newgent
A mother of three young children, ‘Kelly’, aka Scott apparently never received the memo that the rest of us did regarding the life-threatening nature of the surgical procedure for getting a fake dick attached to our bodies. Her first operation went wildly bad and now she wants to warn the world that it’s not safe for kids to be subjected to the dangerous surgeries and bad surgeons that are out there.
In fact, she believes that only ‘trans’ people can save women and children from… well…’trans’ people. So on July 3, 2020, sporting her cowboy hat and good ole ‘boy’ white knight attitude, she launched a GoFundMe campaign to gather other medically transitioned adults and head from the U.S. to the U.K. on a multi-city tour. The plan was to ‘educate’ the public about the evils of the organisation Mermaids, which promotes (among other things) the medical and surgical transition of minors. The campaign raised almost $10,000 before failing to secure major sponsorship. On top of not securing any sponsorship, the fantastic news we received recently that Mermaids has had to change their tune as the UK has moved against self-I.D., Scott is now found waving her cowboy hat no more.
What’s interesting is that now that she’s dropped her campaign, where will all that money go?
It’s always a clue when people who do fundraisers decide not to mention anything about the raised funds when they’ve fallen short.
While some gender critical women have been quick to embrace Scott as a ‘good’ ‘trans’ ally, she remains a problematic figure. While she opposes ‘trans-ing’ minors, she still believes that transition can be appropriate for those 18 and up. Because she, like a lot of “trans” people still believes that gender identity is real, so for some people (like her) getting medical assistance to gaslight people that you are the opposite sex can make you feel better if you suffer from (in her case) internalized misogyny to the nth degree. In a recent interview with a youtuber, Scott even admits that when she’s leaving her house sometimes, she feels like she’s “a liar”.
Also, in her case, like Blaire White above, gender is a matter of conventional stereotypes. Gender-critical women seem to view Scott as ‘true trans’ because of her conventionally handsome appearance, smidgen of beard stubble, and a ‘masculine-enough’ body, and then – there’s that dick. We shouldn’t and can’t be going along with that. We should instead be celebrating those rare women unafraid to demonstrate the range of expression and presentation of what it can mean to be a woman. The very authentic tension that only non-conforming lesbian women carry creates a confidence that needs no medical intervention to prove anything, and to medicalize this is to surrender to the danger of gender once again.
The Barbie Wannabe: Fionne Orlander
Poor guy. He’s simply a gay man who is so effeminate that nothing would make him happier than to be a princess. His presence on Twitter is a mixed bag – he admits he’s a man, but insists on identifying as ‘trans’. He sells himself as a ‘good’ ‘trans’ person who can be trusted and who sometimes stands up for women against troll transactivists, in contrast with the ‘bad’ ‘trans’ people who want to hurt women and children by invading their spaces.
He’s obtained a bevy of gender critical women followers who pour positive ‘feels’ on him. They also circle the wagons of cyber-motherly affection any time he gets cruel troll treatment.
In a particularly unpleasant instance where an online meanie opined that Fionne’s face ‘looked like a brick’, Fionne was hit hard by the criticism and chose to react by creating a crowdfunder to raise £25,500 so that he could obtain the surgical procedure known as Facial Feminization Surgery (FFS).
In his own words, “The massively expensive target price will cover my jaw, chin, brow, nose & hairline to be softened & in one fowl(sic) swoop I feel like 80% of my dysphoria would be dealt with.”
This crowdfunder was launched on July 4, 2020, one day after Scott launched her anti-Mermaids effort — which, however misguided – was at least arguably aimed at a more laudable goal of saving children from genital mutilation, rather than helping a male insecure about his face, redo himself into the western, white, male-gazed ideal of a ‘real’ female face. Fionne only wants what Blaire already achieved, and so why shouldn’t his fans all help foot the bill for that ‘cause’?
The results of the crowdfunders’ efforts came fast and almost competitively furiously on Twitter. The concern for Fionne’s desired beauty was more intense than for Scott’s effort. From some revered GC thinkers of note, we watched as permission was turned over as so:
By the time the weekend was over, the two fundraisers had exposed the split in the GC community between fans of Fionne and the much smaller following that Scott has. The conflict did real damage, destroying previously strong bonds between women, both online and in real life. Those who would argue (as I do) that these urges to donate financially to either beggar wrecks our credibility.
GI Joe meets Care Bear: Susan “Buck” Angel
Maybe more than any other prominent ’trans’ person who believes she was literally trapped in the wrong body, Buck Angel has attained the status of almost a religious icon for some in the gender-critical community. The obvious reason is her occasionally tweeting of statements as a ‘gender critical ‘trans’. Similar to Scott attempting to play the role of a ‘rescuer’ of women and children, Buck has recently been choosing to go a similar route in her social media presence, and it’s helped keep her popularity afloat.
But 25 years ago as myself a member of the very large lesbian community in the San Francisco Bay Area, I watched as ‘Susan’ became ‘Buck’ who I would say was a handsome gender non-conforming lesbian. As she appeared to distance herself both politically and socially from that community, she instead chose to become one of the first medical experiments of what we now know as a very specific agenda instigated by big pharma funding. Although Buck never got ‘bottom surgery’ she altered her exterior with body building and cross hormones. She was often making appearances on stage and seen flexing her new façade with her Tom of Finland look she attained. She not only successfully inserted herself into the gay male porn world which had a large home in the famous gay Castro District, but her PR campaign of exposure effectively resulted in a certain percentage of younger gender non-conforming lesbians seeing this look as a cool fad. This fad became enough of a social contagion that was timed with the more public access to obtaining testosterone.
Some background: By 1986, gone was the more traditional slower (2 year) process for ‘transitioning’, and an explosion of and decimation of lesbian culture along the west coast began. So rampant was the push for big pharma to secure new victims that I myself was approached in the early 90’s while standing outside a dyke pop-up bar with other gender non-conformers and we were offered testosterone in pill form in small blue cannisters. I knew this was war coming at my community, and I mistakenly thought that lesbians were the only target. Now we all see what even Buck did not see then. None of us knew they would come for the kids.
But in 2020 Buck is viewed as an elder and styles herself as the wise ‘Tranpa’. With her musculature, trucker’s hat, tattoos and leathers, she has managed the delicate balance of emanating physical threat — spit and fire — as well as putting on a cute and even cuddly persona so that she can avoid scaring her main followers too much.
But the GC women who love Buck’s act are forgetting some crucial points. When this former lesbian opted to transform her body and pretend to be something else – some hybrid of sexuality via medicalization of her precious body – this was far from solving the problem we now face. She was (and remains) a big part of helping normalize the idea of FtM (female-to-male) medical and surgical transition.
Second, Buck’s newfound ‘gender critical’ Save The Children posture seems more connected with a love of publicity than anything else. This is someone who sought out the spotlight 25 years ago, and she’s never stopped wanting to bathe in that glow. To sustain popularity, one has to stay in tune with shifting public currents and find the right moments and messages for being talked about and looked at.
Finally, Buck’s gender-critical cheering section overlooks the fact that Buck was a porn performer who takes positions that are, or should be, repellent to us. As they’re busy honoring her with tributes like this…
…Buck’s hard at work helping defend Pornhub against criticism by Rose Kalemba, a young woman whose rape at age 14 was filmed and showed up for sale on Pornhub where it was screened for men all over the world. The BBC did a story on this and Ms. Kalemba’s life has been put at risk as a result of her attempts to shut Pornhub down once and for all because she’s learned of other girls younger than herself that this has happened to.
A Pornhub performer named Valentina Nappi tweeted against Ms. Kalemba. ‘Tranpa’ chose to insert herself in this twitter fight with potentially harmful financial and political implications to herself, and she rushed to the cyber-side of Ms. Nappi to join in against Ms. Kalemba with this (now deleted) tweet:
Gender-critical women, when you give props to Buck Angel or view her as an ally, remember the moment she sided with the country’s wealthiest, most powerful porn site against an exploited, 14-year old rape victim.
It needs to stop
It is time to stop idolizing people who represent the opposite of what we stand for. This is a fight for the survival of the gender critical movement. There is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ‘trans’, and there certainly is no such thing as a ‘true trans’ individual. Put slightly differently, we must mean what we say.
We say that gender identity is a fiction and sex is real – so we cannot behave as if that’s true for everyone except these beloved four horsemen and other ‘trans’ figures like them who seem to be “true trans.” That makes us liars and hypocrites.
We say that gender itself is false, wrong and oppressive. So we cannot behave as if ‘passing’ with stereotypically gendered looks is life affirming in a way we can align with. That makes us liars and hypocrites.
We say that ‘trans-ing’ children and teenagers Is child abuse. So we can’t champion people who continue promoting the message that medical or surgical transition made them happier and saved their lives. That makes us liars and hypocrites.
We oppose ‘transgenderism’ yet these people still claim to have a ‘transgender’ identity. No one should be claiming a ‘trans’ identity. No one. And if anyone does while also claiming to be ‘gender critical’, they are lying. If we are championing them, that makes us liars and hypocrites.
Bottom line: these identities are fictions. Gender-criticals cannot be so desperate for allies that we prop up icons who represent everything we oppose, from exterior looks at the extremes of gender ideology to cheerleading for Pornhub. We cannot ignore it any longer. We are in a fight for our credibility and our humanity. It’s that simple. We talk a lot about ‘grooming’ in feminism, but we’ve been grooming ourselves to accept ‘trans’ allies who say what we want to hear, and it needs to stop. It’s time to think critically, put the four horsemen out to pasture and live up to what we know is true.