Julie Bindel on What Lesbian Erasure Warns Us About

Lesbian feminist and author Julie Bindel joins us on The Lesbian Take to talk about where lesbians are now, why we should all care about lesbian erasure, and why feminism is as important today as it was decades ago.

For more about Julie:

• Visit her Substack
• Listen to Julie's podcast The Lesbian Project 
• Check out Julie Bindel's Books

Read MC's Essay: I wasn’t born in the wrong body, but the world keeps telling me I am

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:10

Julie Bindle doesn't just write about feminism and lesbian politics. She has been in the trenches fighting for women's liberation for decades. Julie's a journalist, an author, an activist, and yes, a very proudly outspoken lesbian who will say exactly what a lot of us are thinking, but are a little too terrified to voice. I personally found Julie's new book, Lesbians Where Are We Now, to be a very compelling read. Welcome to the lesbian take, Julie. I am so honored to have you today as a guest. Uh, is there anything else you would like our listeners to know about you?

SPEAKER_01 0:50

No, but thank you very much for the invitation. And it's lovely to be speaking with you also.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Yes, I'm I'm fangirling just a little bit. Um, so I have a question for you. So, like maybe we'll start off with my first question. When I entered the lesbian dating scene in the early 2010s, um, lesbian culture felt very alive and strong to me. We had community amongst ourselves, parties and actual spaces. We even used the word lesbian. And then I met my partner. I stepped back for a decade, and when I came back to it, I literally thought, what what the fuck happened here? Like, what is this? And I just thought maybe you were the best person to ask about this. What what happened? And where are lesbians now?

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Well, first of all, um, a decade is quite a long honeymoon period, so good for you both. But where are we now? Well, we are now in the midst of a war that is in the UK at least, is definitely dying a death with the feminists and the gay men and all of those brave people that have spoken out against gender ideology. I know that Canada, which we lovingly refer to as Tranada, uh, is uh way behind, as is Australia. But we seem to have, I think, in the UK, fought the battle maybe a bit more effectively because we had a very strong feminist movement. And to fight this nonsense, you have to really begin by understanding the absolute madness of gender ideology. Now, I'm not suggesting for a minute that other people don't have a stake in fighting this awful uh battle and stopping the ideology from translating into irreversible harm to children and to adults. But definitely feminists laid the ground. So a little bit of history. Now I'm 64, so I was still in my teens when I got involved in the women's liberation movement at the very, very end of the 1970s. And already by then there was a book by the American scholar and feminist activist Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire. And that was already published, and there were already women in the anti-violence against women groups I then gravitated to, the feminist campaigns that fought the porn industry, rape and sexual assault, neglect from the criminal justice system. But there were already feminists in those groups talking about the danger of men that in those days were referred to as transsexual. Um, and it was a conversation that really nobody else was having because the medics were pretty much captured. So fast forward to now, um, where we are is in the death throes of a movement that captured pretty much every single institution in the land, in my country, in your country, and elsewhere, where, like never before, we have seen a takeover of common sense, of science, biology, and plain logic by a group of people who are the most vicious men's rights activists I have never, ever, ever encountered in my more than four decades as a feminist campaigner. And I've encountered a lot of very angry men who wish to punish women who are trying to ensure that they don't rape and kill us on a regular basis. So yeah, it's kind of good and kind of bad in that you're still very entrenched. There's many of our institute institutions that are still clinging on to deal life, to gender ideology over sex-based rights, but we will get there.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Yeah, and the the sex-based rights piece is it's very important to lesbianism, you know. Um just a bit. I'd say very, very much so. And I think that's that's partly why I was I was just like floored because I was like, what do you mean I have a preference? What do you mean I have a a genital pre 10 years? I go away for 10 years, I come back and I'm told I'm a bigot because I'm a homosexual. I was very shocked, to say the least.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

I was like, what? Yeah, I mean it is shocking. And if a Martian dropped onto Earth and had to learn about humankind, we would have to do some pretty complicated explaining. Because on the one hand, it's very straightforward. Trans activists that are fuelled by very, very angry men and enabled by extremely be-kind women who've become handmaidens or transmaidens or whatever you want to call them, have taken over the common sense of entire nations. And the simple truth of the matter is that whether you are a social conservative and believe that believe in sex stereotypes and believe that women should behave as women in the 1950s and do the domestic chores and raise the children and men should behave like the provider and not do any domestic chores. Or if you're a feminist like me who believe that sex stereotypes are bad for girls and boys, but particularly girls, and that this sometimes is explained as gender roles or gender rules, as I always say. And if you believe that sex stereotypes should be challenged, then that's all that means is girls can play with whatever toys they want, and if they want to be engineers when they grow up, that's fine. Boys can be soft and caring and nurturing, that's also fine, and they can dress what how the hell they like. But it's there there is no such thing as gender identity. All it means is the way that a person wishes to display themselves, their outward appearance, and some fantasy about an internal gender. There's no such thing. We are people, and the thing that determines how we are treated, the rights that we have, the crimes that are committed against us, the opportunities we have is because of our biological sex. And of course, the role of feminists is to say there are some stark differences between men and women. We are not doing a Judith Butler idiocy of denying that they exist. They do exist, but that the fact that childbearers are women and that men have more physical strength in almost all cases should not determine the rights and the opportunities that we have. And the role of feminism in particular, I think, that's been very helpful and useful and was going pretty well until transactivism came along, is to break down sex stereotypes, is to say it's not true that women are much more interested in staying at home or have less confidence than men, or don't have as a logical a brain as men. These are sex stereotypes, right? That's it. But their entire argument on embracing sex stereotypes that they call gender identity.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Yeah, I have a really big problem with the the gender, like the sexist stereotypes. Like I actually wrote an article recently saying I wasn't born in the wrong body, but the world keeps telling me that I am. And so a lot of my struggles with what they would call gender identity, it wasn't gender identity, it was that I am naturally a certain way. And my whole life, I constantly was told that I was doing everything wrong because I didn't fit sexist female stereotypes. And, you know, I grew up, I went through puberty, I got a little money, and then I realized I could do whatever the hell I want. And it and it had, and then a lot of my insecurities went away. So a lot of it I think is just like social uh commentary or pressure to fit this mold. And I think that the radical feminists were are basically pushing to say, hey, like we don't need any of these boxes. Let's get a really get rid of the boxes, and then people can express themselves however they want, sort of to s to speak. So I I wouldn't necessarily call myself a a radical feminist because there's some elements that I'm like, okay, I I like capitalism per per se, like I've benefited from it. So I'm probably I'm probably one of those people who's not looking to sort of tear apart the whole system, but there are a lot. I would say that I am, like, at least like in the last couple of years, like I have slowly grown to be more feminist. And so I've been reading a lot. I've been reading a lot. I've read even um uh uh so your podcast. I don't know. I'm getting I'm drawing a blank, but your podcast, you have a a co-host. I read uh materi Kathleen Stock. I read Kathleen Stock's book, uh Material Girls as well. Um but maybe I'm gonna I'm gonna focus back on the the questions. There's a there's actually a section in in your book, um lesbians, where are we now, that's mirrored something that I've seen play out over and over, which is lesbians feeling pressured to agree to statements and ideas that don't actually match what we believe. So for example, males identifying as lesbians. I can tell you, and I'm not proud of it, Julie. I've done it myself. Uh, you know, I've I've stayed quiet, I've nodded along and accepted stances that never sat right with me. And I'll be honest, I only sort of like sat quietly and nodded along for I'm I made it for like maybe two months because before this wasn't an issue uh 10 years ago for for me at least. I I didn't see it this happening. It's only when I came out of my shell recently that it like so, anyways, I'm like going off topic. But a question I have for you is around why is it that you think that lesbians often go along with these ideas that end up erasing or minimizing our identity? And what do you think is driving that? Is it social pressure, fear of backlash, politics, or is it something else?

SPEAKER_01 11:24

It depends on who you're speaking to or about. Now, I wrote about this in my book because it was something really quite traumatic that happened to me after eight years of being pretty much in the wilderness speaking out against trans ideology. So a little bit of background. In 2004, I wrote an article in the Guardian newspaper where I used to be a regular columnist, and it was based on Vancouver rape relief being sued and harassed through the courts by a male, trans identified man. He would call himself a trans woman. And he wanted to become a volunteer at a rape relief centre, and didn't see a problem with why they said that that wasn't appropriate, a women and girl-only service. And I read about this, it was before I'd actually been to Vancouver, and nobody was talking about the trans issue. We'd just had the Gender Recognition Act um approach the court, it would be made law that later that year. There were some kind of old school transsexual rights people who wanted new birth certificates and didn't want to be searched through the airport. That kind of thing. But effectively, this was not a war, this was not a thing. Feminists weren't talking about it, except for probably about two or three of them in different countries. So I wrote this article saying it's absolutely outrageous that a man thinks he has the right to identify as a woman and volunteer for a rape crisis center. It's absolutely mad that these surgeons and other clinicians are saying that you can be trapped in the wrong body. This is bonkers. This does this cannot happen in real life. And they came after me, the trans rights movement, which had just begun to gather force because of this new law that was coming in. And they've never left me alone. But in the early years, up until 2012, which is the year that this terrible traumatic thing happened to me that I wrote about in the book, a lot of people who should have stood up and said, I agree with Julie publicly didn't. Of course, all my friends did, but most of them didn't have a public profile as I did. So I was very well known in the media and in feminist circles, did lots of TV, that kind of thing. So everywhere I went to talk about male violence against women, not even the gender thing, screaming hordes of activists would turn up. They made my life an absolute misery. They prevented me from getting journalism awards that I was nominated for. You name it, they did it. And I was absolutely desperate to, well, I mean, they derailed my career completely. I always had lots of work, carried on working, but they derailed where I was heading. And I felt very alone and very down and wanted to try to show people across the board, because all the liberals were keeping quiet or they were being on the side of these poor trans people. It's just like being lesbian or gay, they're very victimised, we need to stand up for them. When in fact, it was just misogynistic, aggressive men claiming to be women. So I started to contact reasonable trans activists and say, let's sit down and have a debate, let's sit down and have a discussion. Sort of reaching across the aisle type of thing. And I'm quite good at that. I'm quite good at speaking to people with whom I disagree and vice versa. And just finding a bit of common ground. And this culminated in me going out for dinner with an editor of a particular magazine that ended up being queer. And she suggested that I do it with a transactivist who, as it turns out, is the most horrendously misogynistic man on the planet, just about, called Paris Lees. And I should have cancelled it when I woke up that day feeling completely and utterly unconfident, intimidated. Before I'd even got there, I was on the edge of cracking up, I think, at that time. Things had been really hard for me with with the bullies. And I didn't, because I always like to think of myself as tough and brave and all the rest of it. Went along, everything went wrong. My voice recorder, where I wanted to record him so that I had my own version, wouldn't work. Um he'd got a camera person in to film the um interview, which I hadn't agreed to. I wanted it to go smoothly and already. He was bristling with with just viciousness and and it was it was very clear the way things were going, and what I should have done was walk out, and I didn't. So when he said to me, Well, if you identify, if one identifies as a a woman and that person is in a relationship with another self-identified woman, can they be lesbians? And I just caved and said yes. And the reason why I did wasn't because I believed it, of course, nobody believes it. I wanted to get out of there. It was like a hostage situation. It it was horrible, and I can still remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach to this day. So I did my best. I fought back on lots of different things. I insisted that it was child abuse to transition children. I did absolutely fight back on 95% of all of the stuff that he was presenting me with, but I just caved. Now, when I got out of that studio, I thought I'm never doing this again, taught me a lesson. But unfortunately, somebody who is quite very jealous sees herself as a rival of mine. I don't know why. She she speaks out a lot. Um, she she's would refer to herself as the kind of biggest kind of turf on the planet. Who knows? Who cares?

SPEAKER_00 16:56

It's a compet why is it a competition?

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Uh you know what? It's really not something that I would aspire to. I just want the war to go away so I can just get back to working a hundred percent of the time to stop men raping and killing women and abusing children. But but this person obviously um took a um screenshot, took a little video of the that clip of the interview. Not all the rest where I was fighting back against him, not the rest of it. And it's taken been taken down offline anyway. I don't know who's got the full version of it, but I certainly don't. But no, that clip was shared and shared and shared. And anyone that dislikes me, or anyone that wants to prove a point, or anyone that doesn't like the fact that it's sometimes pointed out to them, that they came into this battle probably 15 years at least after I did. And it I never point it out, others do, they get spiteful and vicious and nasty and post it to prove a point. So from 2004 to 2012, I, apart from being polite and nice to individual trans people that came up to me at events and saying, yes, of course, you can have a selfie and just being friendly, glad that they're not all raving misogynist, violent, crazed beings. Um, it's used against me. And yes, in reality, this has been going on for me for 22 years now. I'd love to see the ones that spread that little clip of the video around of me caving into Paris Lee's. I'd love to be the kind of nasty person that would share things about them when they were caving into trans ideology or even when they were trans activists themselves, as one in particular was. There's all the receipts, but I won't do that. Because everybody should have the right to either make mistakes as I did, or change their minds, evolve. And I didn't have to change my mind. When I said, when I agreed with Paris Lees, yes, they can be, um, lesbians, I I was saying it to get out of there. I was saying it because I caved. I was saying it because I had a moment of absolute, I don't know, psychic madness. But why do we do this? Why do we punish women for not being purist, for not being a hundred percent perfect? They should be in my shoes, having had what I've had to deal with for over two decades, and still I still go up to um protesters when they're screaming and shouting my name, still try and talk to them. There's video of me on my Substack um trying to talk to an absolutely crazed group of students in Vancouver a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, when I was going to talk at an event about rape and single sex spaces, and they scream at me and call me Hitler, and they do this to other women as well. But it's been a long road, and I really would love to talk to the people who shared that video, got it up online, because I know who they are, and just say why. I've never denied it. I've never denied it. I wrote about it in my book. What do you want me to say? But in terms of your question about why do women do this, why do women go along with trans ideology, why why, in fact, are women the most active foot soldiers for trans ideology? Because they are. If you'd have asked me this ten years ago, I would have said fear and intimidation and the dread of things happening to them that they've seen happen to the likes of me. And that's still a reason why some won't speak out. But now there's loads and loads of us speaking out. I don't think that's any longer the case. I think it's turned out that most of the women that ke that just go along with this, in fact, promote it on so-called pride marches with older dykes for trans rights and no tea, no L without the T and all this bullshit. It's because they they want the cookies. They want to be liked by those in power, and these trans activists have been very powerful, less so now. But they also, these women, it's a class issue. We have a very rigid class system in this country, and I'm telling you, the the upper classes and the upper middle classes dominate this debate. So these women, they feel that they can give the rights away that I and others fought for for them while they sat on their chaise lounge and ate their fancy food and drank their expensive wine, while we were in the trenches fighting to set up rape crisis centres, domestic violence shelters, and change laws like introduce a law of rape in marriage. We were doing all of that whilst they were just swanning around calling themselves gay women and doing fuck all to change the landscape when it came to men's violence. So they feel they can now give those rights away because they don't think they'll ever need them. Hospital ward. It was part of the campaign in the 1980s to fight for single-sex hospital wars before anyone heard of trans ideology. We just wanted our own spaces where we weren't going to be sexually harassed and assaulted by men that might be in there. And now look what they're doing. They're demanding that so-called trans women should be in those wards with vulnerable women in near naked states, ill and unable to fight sexual predators off. Because they could afford to go to private hospitals. And access private medicine. And they send their children to fee paying schools. And if they have to leave an abusive, violent man, they can buy themselves a new house somewhere he won't find her, right? Working class women can't do that. Women that aren't privileged to that degree can't do that. That's why working class women in particular need. All women do. So I think that's what is going on. They just it suits them better. They want to be liked. It's virtue signalling, and they've never understood what fighting for women's rights has been. They've just had it handed on a plate.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Yeah, I think that that makes a lot of sense. And I just want to let you know, Julie, when I was reading that part of the book, I really felt free. And like I I personally, as like as I said, like I I have been in the situation where I sort of like nodded along and I was just like, I feel yucky. I think that also there is what probably is driving it is a lack of information. I think that if lesbians and women actually knew about AGPs, because for 10 years, like I thought there was just like a social contract. This is how I view trans. It was like sort of like a social contract where we all knew, okay, like, you know, you're not actually a woman if you you're you're trans. You're not actually a man if you're trans. But to make you feel good, like to come from a place from empathy, we're gonna play like it is the truth, right? But but to a degree. Like there was boundaries, and we had the boundaries, and the boundaries back when I used to be really involved were very clear. And there wasn't any of that crossing the line, at least where where I was here too. Um, and I think this is because it this was before gay marriage um happened in the US. I think everything kind of like just really went to to shit after that. Um but in Canada, we got gay marriage, I think like 10 years or something before the US. So like we had this this period of time where you could just be gay and that was okay, and this wasn't an issue. And so when I came back into the community per se, like although I don't consider myself part of the the acronym, I was still under the impression that the the social contract was being honored. And so for that reason, the whole 10 years that there was an escalation of like, hey, they're just trying to pee the whatever, I wasn't something that I was like, I needed to get involved with. I didn't think it was that bad. It was only until I started putting my foot down and I said, This is my boundary, absolutely not. And I started getting harassed and attacked and bullied that I started doing my research. And then I was like, holy shit, this is so much worse than I could have ever imagined. I can't believe I just went along with this for 10 years. And I think that that's it too, is that a lot of us just don't have the the information um that we probably need to know. And it, you know, so um another concept in your book that I found really, really interesting was that lesbians are the canary in the coal mine. What would you say exactly does the current treatment of lesbians warn us about?

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Women uh obviously everywhere, whoever we are, women and girls experience sexism uh to some degree at some points in their lives and within the the workplace, within the home, wherever everywhere, everywhere on the planet. But lesbians we're the only sexual orientation identity, whatever you want to call it, that specifically excludes men from our dating pool. And we are punished for that. It's outrageous of us. How dare we? Not only say we prefer women, but that we prefer women in all ways. Now, obviously, there might be some lesbians listening to this who think, well, I don't, I much prefer my male friends to my female friends, but I like lesbians sexually, physically, romantically, and I could never fall in love with a man. Fine, you do you. But generally speaking, lesbians elevate women above and beyond men. And that is not supposed to happen. Men are supposed to decide who we are, how we dress, how we behave, who we cave into, who we submit to. Now, this sounds like a very old-fashioned patriarchal world that I'm imagining here again, back to the 1950s, and of course, feminism has advanced that hugely in so many ways. So I'm not suggesting that all men that expect women to think favour them are Neanderthals, our cavemen, are sexist brutes. But none of us can escape our the messages that we get from from birth, the social education that we all have, whether we understand it to be that or not, the messages that are very persuasive about who's the most important, who's the most dangerous, who we should really look out for, or we might get into trouble. And for women that's men. So if you go to countries where women are treated particularly badly, you will find a very grim landscape for lesbians. If you're in a country where women have got legal and social rights, political rights, well, it used to be fairly straightforward to say that means that we have got more freedom to um not be cowed by men, to not be forced into marriage, all of those things that used to happen. And that's true in the UK and in other Western nations in particular. But where we are right now, of course, is transactivism has threatened all of that and taken the right of lesbians to live openly and freely away from us. Because it's now illegal. Well, it was until we fought the Supreme Court case and had it clarified that men cannot legally claim to be women and invade our spaces for all intents and purposes, that they cannot identify as lesbians and push their way into one of our events. But in Canada, lesbians have had the rights removed to for sexual autonomy, to social uh autonomy. And the same's happened in Australia, of course, as we know. So transactivism has set us back as lesbians um a really, really significant way. Lesbians are still free to in London walk down the street holding hands, to kiss in a bar that is not necessarily a lesbian bar, not that we're allowed them anymore, but ostensibly a queer bar. We have lots of freedoms, as you say, we have legal freedom to be civilly partnered, to be to be married, we have the right as next of kin with our partners, we have housing rights when we live together in social housing and one of us dies. All of those things really matter, we can adopt and foster children, um, and both be uh named as parents. But we can't move freely in our world anymore, as you mentioned at the beginning, because men are doing exactly what they did when I came out in the 1970s, which is push their way into our spaces and demand that they should be allowed to be there. When they did it to me in the 1970s, and I was sexually assaulted as punishment by men for this, I lost a job, I was kicked out of a flat that uh apartment that I lived in with my girlfriend. When that happened to me then by these misogynistic men, they they they were there in plain sight. They didn't pretend to be progressive, they didn't pretend to be a marginalized and victimized minority. They were just blokes wanting to show teach women a lesson. You fucking pervert lesbians. Now they're the progressives. They're the progressives that are attacking our spaces and making it impossible for us to have our own communities and who will bluster their way in. And now, and I understand this from good old Tranada, and I met groups of women in in Toronto, as you'll have seen in the book, who are meeting in secret.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Yeah, it's and you're advertising. Yeah, it's outrageous. Outrageous. We can't organize anymore because if we organize and we promote that, hey, this is a lesbian event, the moment the queer community finds out about it, why why is this only female same-sex only? And it's like because that's what lesbians are, and they will find a way to harass you, attack you. If it's that um, like I couldn't believe about the Australia lesbian, is it lesbian alliance group where like they were asking for a special exemption from the human rights commission and they didn't want to give it to them. So now they have to go to court, and now the the the court is saying, you interpreted this wrong human rights commission. And it's just like, of course you did. Like there's such a thing as as competing rights. And I I personally think that human rights organizations are failing women because they have a bias, and it really seems to me that they are treating some rights as if they are more important than others, and that is dramatically having an adverse impact on those other groups who we should all have, like like all rights technically are equal, but there's sort of this unbalance that I think that is just messing everything up. I don't know if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

It does, and we need to fight against it and we need to take them to court. And I can't believe that I'm actually fighting for single-sex spaces all over again, and this time we're fighting the so-called progressives for it that are all defending men in women's spaces. I was I came late to the fighting for single-sex spaces in the early days because I didn't get into the movement, as I say, till the very end of the 1970s, and we already had um laws in place to prevent, on paper at least, discrimination towards women and girls, and we already had the right to some single-sex spaces, the rest feminists fought for right through to the 80s and and and the beginning of the 1990s. So we got it. Um, we set up the women and girl only spaces, we built our lesbian communities and bars and supper clubs, whatever. And then we've had them all taken away, and here we are again. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

It's so disheartening because as I said, even 10 years ago it wasn't like this. So it's I was shocked.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

It was here. It was here. I mean, the war started here, so there was the build-up to it with trans activists going absolutely bonkers um at feminists who spoke out against them. By the time we get to 2012, um, there were some others speaking out. There were conferences that were being held where the um the location couldn't be disclosed from from feminists that were involved in fighting this, but really very few and far between. But then by the time we get to 2015, that's where the war kicked off. That's when the institutions all became captured. That's when we realized that in fact there was something called Stonewall law in operation. Stonewall, which is the transactivist group that used to be a lesbian and gay rights group, they were always very conservative, but you know, they were okay, I suppose, didn't really care much about lesbians, but you know, they were there and they were doing their equality thing. And they then turned transactivist, and Stonewall then decided the law is that men can self-ID to be women, and that that's it, and that they are women in terms of the law and how the law is applied. They were wrong, as we proved when the Supreme Court ruling became known. But the institutions from 2015 onwards started to be captured. It was like a pack of cards tumbling. All our criminal justice system, Stonewall ran what we call a protection racket, which was that they would mark the homework of all these big institutions as to how they were dealing with LGBT issues in the workplace, wherever. Some of these were public-facing institutions that we were paying for, such as the police and civil servants. And basically they told them all how to use pronouns on their sign-off, how to allow trans women to use women's bathrooms. They they actually developed the Stonewall law that was implemented and taken on by all of these institutions. And this was because in 2015, the then uh Tory government Minister for Women Inequalities, Maria Miller, decided that the first job she would do in her role would be to say we need to push self-ID through. It's undignified, it's cumbersome, it's expensive for trans people to have to have medical diagnoses and to live the, I think it was a two-year test where you have to live in the opposite sex. I mean, it was all nonsense anyway. But it was at least a little bit of a buffer between them just deciding they're women and being legally accepted as women. So she kicked off this huge culture war, which was those of us that were saying, absolutely not, were told, oh my god, you're being horrible to trans people. She just wants to be kind. She just wants to make sure that they have the same rights as women. No, we said, they want our rights. They don't want the same rights, they want to take our rights, they want to remove our rights. And then it all kicked off from there. And so we've had 11 years of war. Um, the soldiers are still fighting on the battlefield, not realizing that it's pretty much over. So the trans activists are now becoming more and more vicious and more and more potentially violent. I mean, there have been violent attacks on feminists. I I was physically attacked by a trans activist uh in 2019. Other women have been. But they really are. It's like the Japanese soldiers thinking that the war's still going on. Um and it the war's ended. But but they they are dangerous men. They are very dangerous men, and and God forbid uh that somebody's gonna get really badly hurt because that is definitely their next uh their next plan. We we see there's a group called Bashback, which is a um a direct action group led by a man um who was in prison for many years for attempted murder, kidnapping. And whilst he was in prison, he killed um his cellmate, castrated himself in prison, and is leading Bashback and they're threatening violence, and they've put windows in of conference venues where feminists have been meeting to talk about male violence. They have threatened all kinds of really, really serious stuff. And and I'm worried. I think that they will. Sarah Jane Barker, the the lead of Bashback and the founder, is a dangerous psychopath.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

It's wild when you really like think about it. The deeper I learn, it's like, what? You know, I I I finished Hella Joyce's book, and there was just so much I didn't know. And I was like, wow. And I do want to move on to like talking a little bit more about uh your book. Uh and something that struck me that I I thought was a little bit interesting is you did mention that you think there should be an amicable divorce between lesbians and gay men, but I I was just wondering for because I I agree, right? Um, what do you think that actually looks like in practice? And if lesbians are trying to advocate for our own interests, how do we do that in this landscape where so many lesbians seem to be very swept up in queer ideology?

SPEAKER_01 37:57

Yes, well, they might take some time to come around to the idea that lesbians uh have vastly different needs than do gay men. We're almost on the opposite of each other. And in fact, the only thing we have in common is that we are same-sex attracted, and sometimes the same people come after us, but not even hardly at all. In the UK, we've had only one piece of legislation that targeted both lesbians and gay men, uh, and that was clause 28, which gay men act acted as though, well, as one of them said in an article that he wrote, This is the road to Auschwitz, which was a deeply offensive, completely outrageous analogy as to a piece of legislation that effectively said to school teachers and other local authority workers that you can't talk about same-sex relationships in a positive way. So clearly discriminatory, but the road to Auschwitz, please. That was in the 1980s, that was the only time that gay men realised, apart from those that had been through the terrible time during the AIDS crisis, um, that there was any discrimination towards them at all. These bourgeois gay men that really hadn't noticed that any of them were oppressed, that were actually doing the oppressing themselves by promoting porn, featuring very vulnerable young men and prostituting very vulnerable young men for their own sexual desires, demanding the right to have sex in public places because that's what they used to do before that was decriminalised, not noticing that lesbians were having our children taken away in the family courts because we had left men to become lesbians. That didn't matter to them. It was a forced teeming when it became lesbian and gay in the early part of the queer movement in the early 90s. We didn't want that. Lesbians always saw that we had very opposite needs to gay men. And whether gay men wanted it or not, it didn't matter because they were always on the top of any tree when it came to lesbians and gay men. Of course they were. Their needs were always met before ours, if ours were met at all. And then, of course, it grew into a ridiculous acronym that we have now. Uh, we have LGBTQ plus, I know you have two spirit on the end of that. And we need to stop saying we are part of the queer community, we are part of the LGBTQ community, or I am an LGBTQ person. No, you're not, you're not a lesbian, bisexual, gay man, trans, and queer and questioning at the same time. No, you're not. What are you? It just doesn't make any sense. So how do we do this? Well, feminists obviously are a key role in this. Some of us are lesbians, some feminists are lesbians, some aren't, but feminists should be campaigning for the rights of all women, including lesbians. And that means that we need to not be seen as some kind of niche, separate subgroup of women. We need to be seen as an important integral group of women that have really suffered disproportionately in many ways than other women. So let's just stop pretending that we need to fight for political and legal and social rights with gay men when they want vastly different things to us. And still be friends, still come together on the basis of need, if and when we we wish. You know, I've got gay male friends and I value them. And they are the ones that stand up for women's rights. They they definitely came late to the party, but many of them are doing some fantastic work. And I'm glad that they're there, whether it's late or not. It doesn't matter. But we can't continue with this false team, false teaming. It's it's just a joke. And the acronym is beyond ridiculous at this stage.

SPEAKER_00 41:28

Yeah, I would agree. I I think that lesbians, like, we clearly like we are very different. And we're such a small segment of the the population, too. And we do have very, very unique needs that are very different. I think this dovetails really well into like my next question for you, which is about why feminism still matters, especially for lesbians. So, how do we actually get the message through to younger lesbians who don't think feminism speaks to them anymore? Because I do think that you also touched on it earlier about, you know, a lot of us are middle class, we're sort of separated from the issues that make feminism important. But I'm just wondering, do you think there's a strategy that can make feminism relevant again or make the younger lesbians feel that it's relevant to them?

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Yeah, and feminism's relevance has never been so clear as it is today. And therefore, I want young women, young lesbians, young, just young women, to recognize that how we fought again for their rights to use a single-sex bathroom, have single sex sports, competitions, and all the other really important things, such as hospital wards if they need them, such as refugees and rape crisis centers if they need them. I need them to know, so they need to look at their history. There need there needs to be something on the school curriculum about modern-day feminist history rather than this Judith Butler nonsense, that feminism is their only hope. That feminists got them their rights, they've got their their mum's and their gr their grandmothers' rights. If they think that they've got their rights and they're secure and they've got the right to abortion if and when they need it, that they've got the right to be treated with respect if they have to report a sexual assault, if if they that they're going to need all of these things and they need to know that they can be rolled back, that nothing's permanent. We've seen this with some of the abortion rights legislation in the US, which has rolled back some of it. And young women need to know that they cannot sit on their laurels and just decide that that we fought for their rights, the old ones, the dead ones, the ones from before fought for their rights, and we've got them now. So they need to have a look at the landscape right now. Look at the trans activists, look at the misogynistic trans rights movement, look at the way that all of the institutions cave to them. Literally saying to men that claim to be women that they have way more rights than do actual women and girls. And in fact, we're losing our rights. It's not just that they've got more rights in order to get their so-called rights, because they already have them, as men remember, to get their so-called rights as trans women, they have to take ours. We have no more rights. So feminists are key to changing the current misogynistic landscape and getting us back on track. And as long as they recognize that this is the way forward, if they choose not to do it, that's fine. But to please stop calling us old, irrelevant, bigoted, laughing at the fact that we're saying we need our rights back, that's unforgivable ignorance. And the information's out there, they just need to open their eyes. We are there for them. The feminism that I subscribe to and the feminism that I've tried to practice all my adult life is you start with the women in the basement. You do not look up to the glass ceiling before you do anything else. You do not prioritize the women that are being paid a million dollars a year compared to her male counterpart who's being paid a million and a half, right? Yes, that's sexist discrimination, but we do not prioritize that. We do not do lean-in feminism. We do the women at the bottom of the pile, we do the prostituted women, we do the indigenous women who are being told that they're murdered and missing sisters do not count. We do the women who need us the most without patronizing or looking down or otherizing them or calling them ordinary women, but we look at the women who literally have next to nothing. And that's what we need to focus on and prioritize on. Because the rights that those women deserve and need, all women deserve and need them. But you need to recognize right now we're in a landscape, a hellish misogynistic landscape, and we can turn it around again.

SPEAKER_00 45:50

Yeah, I have my fingers crossed. Like the UK seems like it's on a good path. But I just want to say, like, Julie, I am very mindful of your time. I want to thank you so much for making the time out of your very busy schedule to chat with me. Just wondering where's the best place to learn more about you and support your work?

SPEAKER_01 46:09

Well, you can subscribe to my Substack if you just look for my name. It's spelt Bindle, B-I-N-D-E-L. It rhymes with Swindle. Um, and that's the easiest way to remember. It's not Bindle or Double L or Double L E or whatever. And if you look for my Substack, it's the only one with that name, so you'll find it easily. And I'm on X as Bindle J. Don't send it to J Bindle because poor John Bindle gets so much grief on it. And you can find me on Instagram easily. Um, I don't use Instagram very prolifically. I'm on Facebook and I always post my work um and sometimes thoughts on social media. So, you know, just have a look. I don't argue on social media. Um, I don't do that whole backwards and forwards thing, but I'm always, you know, very willing to engage in constructive uh criticism and conversation. So please do um, you know, get onto my Substack. You can even be a free subscriber. And if you like it a lot, you know, you can even take out a paid sub, but you're not required to. And you'd be very welcome. Thank you so much again, Julie. This is my pleasure. Thanks so much. It's been fantastic talking to you.