Women like me

A guest post from my wife, Lauren Black. The full text of her speech in Belfast today.

Thank you everybody for coming out today. It takes courage to show your face in this debate. I know some of you have made long journeys to do it. Thank you to the WRN for putting this together today as well.

Ok, 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 80’s and even the 90’s were still mentioning homosexuality like it was a disease. I’ve heard it called sinful, and disgusting. If school peers thought you were gay, 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 having my own children, or a home. I was ashamed. I was confused. And to make it worse, I felt stuck in my girl’s body. So I made a decision. I might be a girl, but I was going to be strong. I took part in all the sports, I cycled, 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, and were unafraid. 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 looking for lesbian spaces on this island are 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, lost and 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 to be in the company of women, 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 a single exclusively lesbian space left on this entire island. If women want to go to a lesbian space, we have to take a plane, or make our own. In the supposedly lesbian spaces that do exist, males make key note 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 has come 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 house. I’ve had to write on my wedding invitations to keep the time, place and 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 place 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, 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 anybody 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 we 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 sports women, 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.

Those children don’t need to be told that they are the opposite sex. They need to be told that they are amazing and wonderful, just how they are. 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, exactly 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 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 needed, and doing my best to build again what has been lost.

Thank you very much.