Our year in Scottish Lesbians

Since it’s the last day of the year, it seemed about time to reflect on some of the things we’ve done over the course of 2023. It’s been a big year for women in Scotland, including the low of the For Women Scotland vs The Scottish Ministers ruling, which leaves our single-sex associations open to challenge from men with gender recognition certificates (GRCs). December brought the welcome news that the GRR Bill in Scotland had been successfully blocked by the UK Government, meaning the end of gender self-ID in Scotland, for now at least. The upshot of these rulings for a group like ours is that, thanks to the stopping of the GRR Bill, men cannot obtain GRCs and declare themselves to be women on their own say-so, but those men who do obtain GRCs via a medical diagnosis have the right to ask to join single-sex groups and associations.

Our ‘more than 25 lesbians’ collage

When the FWS vs. The Scottish Ministers ruling was announced, we wanted to put out a visual statement of our intention to continue as a single-sex group; it is not conceivable to us that a lesbian group can be expected to consider admitting a man, regardless of his status. We were very grateful to the courageous lesbians who joined us to create a collage showing an association of more than 25 lesbians - 25 is the crucial number of members required for a group to be considered an association. 

Research

We reported on the results of our research into lesbians’ experiences of coming out, with the full report available on our website. We will write more about our research in the months to come, and will attempt to have it published, but our results showed clear themes affecting lesbians’ experiences of coming out, including having our sexual orientation heard, understood and accepted by others, the impacts of porn culture and fetishization, our need for representation and opportunities to meet, and gender ideology. 

We made a series of memes showing some of the participant quotes from our research:

Jenny also presented the findings of our research at the WDI’s weekly Feminist Question Time session, and you can see her presentation here:

FiLiA

We were able to go to our first FiLiA conference in October, when FiLiA came to Glasgow. Jenny presented our research findings, and gave a second presentation on the state of play with the Lesbian Archive at Glasgow Women’s Library. FiLiA was a great opportunity for us to say hello to some of the women we’d only known online before, and to attend many outstanding presentations and learn more about other groups and projects working for women.

Lesbian Archiving 

2023 was a big year for us in terms of lesbian archiving work. Again, we’ll say more about this in due course, but this work has taken two strands so far: preparing to do some digital archiving of lesbian activism ourselves, and researching the contents and state of play with the UK’s national Lesbian Archive, which was taken on by Glasgow Women’s Library in the mid-1990s. At this stage we would like to thank the women of Feminist Archive North in Leeds, who have very generously shared their time and expertise with us, and FiLiA who supported us to access some valuable training this year. 

Glasgow Women’s Library

In November, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, two of us attended an exhibition of activist placards held at Glasgow Women’s Library, which was promoted as being in association with the 16 Days campaign to end violence against women. We were informed that many of the placards in the exhibition had been donated by the Cabaret Against the Hate Speech, a group known for disrupting and opposing women’s events, including FiLiA. 

We wrote a letter to the Board at Glasgow Women’s Library, and this was supported by many other concerned groups and individuals. 

As we have written previously, our criticisms of Glasgow Women’s Library are personal as well as political. We miss the GWL of old, and hardly recognise it in the institution which now sees us as not being in alignment with its values. 

Letter in support of Lesbian Action Group in Australia

The challenges facing lesbians in Scotland are, of course, not unique or restricted to our country. We were appalled when the Lesbian Action Group in Australia was denied an exemption to hold a lesbian-only event to mark International Lesbian Day. We were glad to be able to write in support of our sisters in Australia, and our letter can be seen on the Australian Human Rights Commission website. We continue to follow this case and are ready to offer further support. 

Political Meetings

We can’t give many details here, but we have had the opportunity this year to meet with Members of both the Scottish and UK Parliaments and their advisers. We are glad that grassroots groups such as ours are having our voices included and increasingly being recognised as stakeholders in decisions affecting lesbians. 

Working with other groups in Scotland

Scotland is seeing a resurgence in grassroots feminist activity, and we’re happy to work alongside women in groups including Glasgow Tactical Feminists, Women Won’t Wheesht, WRN Scotland, Scottish Feminist Network and others. Here is a picture taken from Women Won’t Wheesht at Glasgow this year. 

Meetups and socials

We always enjoy meetups with other Scottish Lesbians, and whenever we ask women what they think we should be doing more of as a group, social meetings come through loud and clear. For the last two years we’ve made a point of having our own social meetup in Oban at the same time as Oban Lesbian Weekend, an event we’ve written about before which welcomes men. We’ll always resist events like this, which are just part of the erasure of lesbian culture and community as far as we’re concerned. 

We’ve already got a list of things to get started on for 2024, and we’re looking forward to another busy year. As always, we’re happy to hear from other lesbians who would like to join us.