‘Trans Tits’, ‘Girl Dick’ and a pressure as old as time

Thanks to the last decade of intensive trans rights activism, there is quite a body of signage and messaging around which is offensive and harmful to lesbians. I'm going to focus here on a very recent example; two signs that were held up by protestors against Let Women Speak in Edinburgh on Saturday 6th April. One sign said 'Dykes Love Trans Tits', while the other said 'Dykes Love Girl Dick'. The signs appeared to be held by a male and a female.

Let Women Speak Edinburgh, organised to take place in the week in which the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 began to be enforced, contained the usual mix of elements hostile to the idea of women being allowed to voice opinions in public. There was containment of attendees by the police, with masked protestors allowed to surround women for the duration of the event, bellowing slogans through megaphones and standing face to face with police officers as they did so. There was the presence of the Cabaret Against the Hate Speech group, with its sound system providing a blunt instrument to literally drown out the sound of women's voices, accompanied by frontman Tom Harlow's carelessly out of tune singing and interspersed with quasi-religious sermonising from guest speakers, one of whom declared, 'Blessed are the trans people'. It barely appeared to matter to organisers what was being said or sung, as long as it was performed loudly and disruptively over the top of women speaking.

We attended Let Women Speak with our Scottish Lesbians flag, attempting to increase visibility of organised lesbian resistance to gender identity theory. Our flag flew alongside another lesbian flag, depicting a labrys and held aloft by a friend and fellow Scottish lesbian campaigner.

Our presence as a lesbian group was, predictably, criticised on Twitter/X after the event:

Like many other groups of women and lesbians, we've grown used to far-fetched, untrue, unsupported accusations that we're on the far right. It's nothing more than a form of abuse whenever these messages and comments are sent to us.

Slurs made towards our group are one thing. As annoying as they are, they don't have quite the same potential for far-reaching damage as the signs saying 'Dykes Love Trans Tits' and 'Dykes Love Girl Dick'. These signs are aimed at all lesbians and not only that, they are aimed at undermining us as lesbians, by directly targeting our sexual orientation. The references to 'trans tits' and 'girl dick' are references to male bodies. The makers of these signs want to communicate that, on pain of being seen as bigots, lesbians must somehow discover a desire for the bodies of men who want to be seen as lesbians. This is the same argument that was put forward by former Stonewall CEO, Nancy Kelley, in her notorious message likening our sexual orientation to 'prejudice'. The screenshot below is taken from a BBC article.

Last year, we produced our research into lesbian experiences of coming out. You can download our research report here. Lesbians who took part told us about many different factors which can influence experiences of coming out as a lesbian. The main themes we found in the data were related to reactions from friends and family, the importance of lesbian role models and representation, the impact of pornography, and the impact of gender ideology. These were only the main themes and lesbians also told us about many other factors that had influenced their experiences of coming out, such as workplace cultures, the law and so on.

Coming out and living life as a lesbian can still involve a lifetime of dealing with complex and numerous pressures not to be a lesbian. Some of these pressures may be benign, at least in intent; for example, the parent who worries about what life may have in store for us and wishes that we could settle down with a man instead. These pressures can be damaging enough, however well-meaning the intention behind them.

By no stretch of the imagination can the influence of porn culture be seen as benign. Lesbian sexuality is portrayed in a completely distorted and degrading way and served up for male gratification in a massively profitable industry in which, were the protagonists to acknowledge the existence of real lesbians at all, we would be seen merely as collateral damage. 

Into the mix of existing pressure on lesbians, and increasingly difficult to screen out in recent years, has been the attempt by gender ideologists and queer theory adherents to co-opt and redefine lesbian sexual orientation. This attempt has in places been reminiscent of porn culture; everything is reduced to body parts (hence ‘trans tits’ and ‘girl dick’) and lesbians are encouraged to refocus our desires for the gratification of males. Friends, family and popular culture can all be sources of instruction to ‘be kind’ to ‘vulnerable’ groups and not to hurt anyone’s feelings by recognising a man as a man. There is pressure and division within lesbian community itself, and we lose a potential role model each time yet another celebrity lesbian claims not to be able to tell men from women. 

We are encouraged to question all the things that we previously thought we understood. Men are not men, they are lesbians trapped in men’s bodies (a claim oddly familiar to those of us of a certain vintage, from nights in the pub in the 1980s). Lesbian is an umbrella term, sheltering anyone who wants to be seen as a lesbian. Lesbian culture is thriving, and who wouldn’t want there to be lots more lesbians than ever before? To fail to broaden your perspective and consider a heterosexual relationship is to literally deny someone else’s existence. On and on it goes. 

For lesbians, the battle is always centred on our most personal relationships. It’s always about sex, and specifically it’s always about getting us into sexual relationships with men. It’s not surprising that so many young lesbians are choosing to identify themselves out of womanhood rather than play along with this coercion. 

‘Trans tits’ and ‘girl dick’ are simply the latest crude examples of a very long line of devices used with the intention of changing the sexual orientation of lesbians. The messaging is more pernicious for its insistence that magical processes can turn men into lesbians. They cannot, and to pretend otherwise is kind to no-one, least of all young or newly-out lesbians struggling to find community.