Lesbians at Edinburgh Pride 2024

It was a hard sell, asking lesbians if they would like to do some leafleting at Edinburgh Pride this year. In the five years since this account was written of lesbians’ experiences of a previous Edinburgh Pride, things have hardly improved for us, and many lesbians choose not to go anywhere near Pride in its current incarnation. 

So why did we want to go to Edinburgh Pride? We had a few reasons, and none of them to do with wanting to insinuate ourselves into the LGBTQIA++ party people community. It may be some people’s idea of a fun day out to congregate to listen to the greatest hits of Atomic Kitten while wearing nothing but gaffer tape across your nipples and receiving pats on the head from Maggie Chapman, but we’re obviously not taking the right drugs to enjoy that sort of thing. 

We wanted to raise lesbian visibility. Visibility of the old sort of lesbians, the ones who love and are attracted to other women and who have boundaries and whose oppression is based on the holding of those boundaries. We wanted to hand out some leaflets, because we think there are other lesbians who, for one reason or another, still attend Pride while keeping a low profile, or lesbians who are either just beginning to think about the issues facing us, or are not quite there yet. We weren’t kidding when we called ourselves Scottish Lesbians; we want to continue to grow and reach other lesbians in Scotland and maybe even one day have the time and headspace to work on some of the other issues facing lesbians, if we can get past the current existential crisis. It would be nice not to have to say ‘penis’ or ‘dick’ quite as often as we do now. 

On the day, four of us went to Edinburgh Pride, equipped with our Scottish Lesbians banner and our newly printed leaflets. The leaflets, deliberately, spelled out who we are here for, what we do, and how to contact us; our interest was in bringing our group to the attention of other lesbians, both via our leaflets and by being there and being visible in the first place. 

We stood at the side of the road as the Pride march went past, displaying our banner and handing out our leaflets. Unlike the experience of our sisters in 2019, we were not made to feel unsafe and we managed to hand out 400 of our leaflets. That’s not to say we were welcomed. A man shouted ‘Trans rights! Fuck off!’ through a megaphone at us. Another man tried to grab our leaflets from our hands. A group tried to screen us out by standing directly in front of us, holding a large trans flag to block us from view. Presumably they prefer lesbian erasure to lesbian visibility. 

The response from individual women was more muted. Many, we’re pleased to say, took our leaflets. One woman came back to return, politely, a leaflet to us. Another asked if we were ‘trans inclusive’. We were also asked if we were ‘TERFs’. We explained that we are a lesbian group, for lesbians. 

It was after the event that things escalated into abuse towards us, predictably, on Twitter. Here is a small selection of the tweets we saw about our leaflet, and about our presence at Pride.

The negative responses, both the muted ones on the day and the decidedly non-muted ones on Twitter, all had something in common. Our leaflet deliberately only mentioned lesbians, yet what everyone wanted to know about, or to object to, was the lack of mention of men. The woman who asked politely if we were ‘inclusive of trans women’ wanted to know if our group was open to males - strangely, no one who asked us about inclusivity was interested in whether we include trans-identifying females. 

The tweets were predictably abusive. Our group for same sex attracted women was ‘looney shit’ which should be nowhere near the ‘queer community’, according to one individual presumably too young to know anything of the history of the Pride movement. We were ‘ugly cunts’ and ‘dangerous’ according to another. We were ‘transphobic bullshit’. A slightly more polite tweet pointed out that lesbians are welcome at Pride, just not the ones who ‘limit’ or ‘rigidly define’ people - again, missing the point about how sexual orientation, boundaries and the oppression of lesbians work. 

It was a depressing litany of the same questions lesbians hear over and over again - ‘why don’t you include men?’, ‘why are you so rigid?’, ‘why aren’t you more open to not being a lesbian?’ In a modern Pride movement characterised by an ever-expanding acronym that includes even the most niche of identities, you’d think someone would propose a small corner available for women who love and are attracted to other women. But no. These self-defined progressives still can’t tolerate lesbians, and especially not lesbians who organise and go round in groups. 

Pride was once an occasion on which lesbians (and gay men) could march together in a show of strength and solidarity, refusing to be invisible in the face of homophobic culture, laws and politics. Now, Pride itself is the site of the homophobia and the misogyny. 

Footnote

We have written to First Minister John Swinney and Minister for Equalities Kaukab Stewart, both of whom attended Edinburgh Pride, to ask for their comments on the abuse we received. You can see our letters here.