On Saturday 3rd of February, a group of women and lesbians staged a peaceful protest against a deeply homophobic and misogynistic piece of propaganda being promoted by a respected institution. Same-sex attracted women throughout history have been bullied and harassed by the notion that “All they need is a good seeing to with a d*ck and that’ll sort them out”. It’s quite something to see this sentiment displayed so egregiously in 2024, as in this comic below.
[Photos captured by Scottish Lesbians @Scotlesbians]
You’ll notice the bigotry and women-hatred present here isn’t the old-fashioned kind. Old-school lesbophobia is disgusting, loathsome and entitled but at least honest about its view of lesbians and women as second-class citizens or below. This is the new postmodernist homophobia and misogyny, where the victims are framed as the oppressors: where the refusal of a women to get down on her knees and service a man will apparently result in the genocide of men who really, really want to sleep with lesbians. To quote what is possibly the most jaw-dropping line in the zine: “To use your own distaste or trauma to invalidate others is not okay.”
It’s a sign of the times that if you’d asked me to guess what institution showcased this comic, my first guess would have been Stonewall. Close but no rainbow-sprinkled doughnut. My second - and correct guess - would have been the Glasgow Women’s Library. See, Glasgow Women’s Library has a history of antagonism towards women who adhere to the reality-based definition of women. This isn’t the first time that material mocking women with materialist views on sex has been put out on proud display. Last November, at the start of the 16 days campaign, a UN-led campaign about gender-based violence, the GWL placard display included material produced by Tom Harlow. Harlow runs Cabaret Against the Hate Speech, a schtick which blends street theatre from hell with harassing women. It entails him braying karaoke at women in a bid to drown them out and humiliate them from trying to gather at various feminist meetings. He gained notoriety last October when he chose to set up outside the 2023 FiLiA conference in Glasgow to jeer at women as they entered the venue, many whom were survivors of male violence and campaigners against FGM and the sex trade. Given Harlow’s widespread media denouncement and the fact he was threatened with legal action for slandering women, the GWL including his placard as part of a display about violence against women sent an interesting message.
There was also that time in 2020 when the library refused to let For Women Scotland hold a meeting to discuss the importance of sex-based rights. Four years later, no lesson has been learned. This promotion of a zine demonising same-sex attracted women shows the library has gone from shutting doors in dissident women’s faces to proverbially spitting in them.
In an attempt to distance the views of the library itself from the content of the zine, GWL has attached the following note to it:
This does raise a point about freedom of information and expression. Those committed to the right to offend (myself included) would argue a library should not remove - or be pressured to remove - the zine from its collection. On this, I actually agree. Libraries should be free to have any and all very controversial texts on their shelves if the purpose is to be educational. Mein Kampf, to use an obvious and extreme example, might horrify any sane person but it offers chilling insight into how fascism, antisemitism and hatred can become persuadable. In a past life when I was training as an academic librarian, I was taught that a patron’s reading history should never be seen as a reflection on their character. If a person had Mein Kampf on their library account, it did not necessarily mean they were shaping up to lead a Nazi movement. More likely they were studying the text to understand why so many people were convinced by Hitler’s manifesto. It’s a librarian’s job to provide information, not restrict, enforce or judge the readers of it.
To this end, I’ll go further. It would be acceptable, in certain contexts, for Glasgow Women’s Library to have this comic out on display. But that context would be if the library had historically offered an equal voice to lesbians and women with reality-based views of sex, which as we have established, it has not. If they had stayed robustly neutral or pioneered open discussion about sex and gender issues. If they had proudly hosted For Women Scotland in 2020. If this display was countered by a display about female embodied reality honouring the women fighting, past and present to preserve sex-based rights in law. If lesbians and other patrons were allowed a real voice by the library to challenge and dissect the regressive ideology present in this zine. If all that had been done then yes, the zine being put provocatively on display could be defensible.
But this lesbophobic comic has not been put out to be freely debated. It is being endorsed and celebrated, the display it has been placed on is supposedly promoting ‘joy’ during LGBTQ+ history month. Moreover, the GWL library staff have made it very clear that the zine is, to use a well-worn phrase…not up for debate. I’ve been informed by attendees at the protest on Saturday that an older woman tried to gently and politely explain to one of the staff why the zine was so disrespectful to lesbians only to have it made crystal clear that no one at GWL was going to engage with her or anyone else there. GWL have also (thus far) declined to make any comment on the protest. One would think that a women’s rights protest against lesbophobia being staged at one of Scotland’s leading feminist organisations would be cause for mass mortification and reflection but it’s been a predictably contemptuous silence from the library. The dignity of Scottish lesbians being so cruelly undermined is not worth so much as an empty PR apology statement from the allegedly feminist library.
This is the problem with the new ‘intersectional feminism’ promoted by institutions like the Glasgow Women’s Library. Despite the glittery packaging and nice-sounding words, the values and beliefs at the core manifest as an activism that is bullet-proof from reflection or deep thought, let alone remorse and humility. It’s a feminism that will shameless crow at others to ‘educate themselves’ while smugly refusing to entertain the task themselves. It’s a feminism that insulates itself not just from material reality but decency.
The Ministry Of Inclusion
I know it is seen as utterly hack to quote Orwell in relation to modern times but I’m going to do it anyway.
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”
When it comes to the Women’s Sector, be it the Glasgow Women’s Library, Rape Crisis shelters, Gender Equality campaigns, programmes, and funding boards, there is no word more thought-corrupting than inclusion. Even more than ‘diversity’ (the other big buzzword fervently recited) the usage of inclusion has become, IMHO, the best example of progressive newspeak. Unsurprisingly, the word appears numerous times on the GWL’s website, including right at the top of their FAQs.
“GWL is open to all, and is free, friendly, inclusive and welcoming.”
Many women would call this disingenuous but I disagree. I’m not even going to call it gaslighting. It is lying. Glasgow Women’s Library is not friendly, inclusive and welcoming to all. Not if you’re a lesbian who refuses to let her sexuality be redefined from same-sex attracted to the meaningless ‘same-gender attracted’. Not if you’re a women who think sex trumps gender identity as intrinsic and definitive of femaleness and has the audacity to want to talk about it, to argue for it. And not only does GWL not wish to include these women, it wishes to exclude them. Or at least, create an atmosphere of such hostility to women who don’t subscribe to the empty, regressive, so-open-minded--brains-have-fallen-out version of feminism, that they self-exclude. In this sense, GWL is no better than Edinburgh Rape Crisis, another ‘inclusive’ organisation. In the words of Mridul Wadhwa, the CEO currently at the centre of a discrimination tribunal against a former female employee, women who are uncomfortable with male counsellors should be taught to ‘reframe their bigotry’ so as to not hurt the feelings of trans-identifying individuals such as himself. Show me the difference between this coercion and shaming of women and the ‘Lesbians Are Dying Out’ Zine platformed by GWL.
My question to Glasgow Women’s Library is this, why not just be honest? Why not admit that it is only certain types of people - women - you want in the library and others you’d rather stay away? Why not change your name to the Glasgow Gender Library? There’s the obvious answer in that an explicitly ‘No-GC’ policy or display would have you rightfully sued for discrimination. Perhaps though, there’s something else. Something more personal and uncomfortable. How can you successfully convince yourself you are ‘friendly, welcoming and inclusive’ while so obviously being the exact opposite to the women who peacefully protested and sang in solidarity at your library? Shunning them and the thousands of women they represent? I suppose the only choice is to dehumanise them enough in your mind that excluding them doesn’t count as real exclusion. Your exclusion must be a special kind that is actually inclusion. How many fingers, Scottish Lesbians?
The reality is the Orwellian ideology of inclusion that GWL - and so many other organisations in the so-called Women’s Sector - adhere to is contingent on exclusion; exclusion of women who want to speak the truth and defend their rights; exclusion of some of the most vulnerable and marginalised women in society. Their voices must be excluded in favour of the hollow echo chamber of fake virtue and validation of ‘all genders’ because that’s currently where the funding and publicity is.
One wonders what certain staff members in Glasgow Women’s Library, Edinburgh Rape Crisis and so much of the Women’s Sector would be faced with in Room 101? A mirror, would be my best guess.
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If you like my writing and think it is valuable to the new women’s rights and freedom of speech cause, it would mean the world if you would pledge a subscription fee or encourage others to subscribe. Certain content will always stay free but if I can put up a paywall, I can launch and pursue bigger, more impactful projects to heighten the voices of young freethinking women (and buy myself a new suffragette umbrella to replace the one I lost). Many thanks, Nina xx
A most thought-provoking (and terrifying, and depressing) piece, Nina. Oppression via buzz-words is the most insidious of all. Thanks, as ever, for being one of the women courageous enough to speak out.
I am dismayed that you have to fight these battles, and grateful that you are doing so when so many of us are limited to contributing to crowd funders and quietly shunning our friends who are infected with this stuff.
Have you any idea what's going on?
Obviously a cancel culture removes the brakes - so many careers rely on having a mixed professional/social network, that genderwang rarely gets challenged. However, the people pushing this stuff often seem so sincere and it has the vibe I remember from middlebrow religious folk growing up: "discomfort is good for you", "let's you and him do virtue" etc.