GC Coming Out Day: a personal take

by Lauren Black

Today 19.12.2021 is #GCComingOutDay and I’ve been asked to write a few words about it and tell you a little bit about why I am in this debate.

My name is Lauren Black. I am a butch lesbian, and I am an activist in Northern Ireland. I would not have thought these would be controversial things to say in 2021, but I will explain below why they are.

I was never interested in Twitter. My wife got me into it. I thought I might find other lesbians, make a community. As time went on, I found some solidarity, and started to promote lesbian visibility. I found a sisterhood of women with dysphoria who I identified with, and with whom I could discuss my condition.

Very quickly, I worked out that there was a storm brewing. There were two fronts. One front argued for the application of reason, logic and science and stated that biological sex is immutable. Many people called this the Gender Critical movement, although some people disagreed with this name.

The other front advocated for the dismantling of sex-based terminology and laws, the promotion of gendered identities based on feelings and the medicalisation of mental health conditions like dysphoria. They thought that people like me needed to be given hormones and surgeries to make our bodies somehow “match” what is going on in our heads.

I watched these two fronts collide. I watched not just rows erupt, but women being reported, chucked off Twitter, verbally abused, doxxed, losing their livelihoods, threatened with death and rape. I watched with horror what happened to JK Rowling when she spoke up for Maya Forstater.

So I stayed anonymous. I joined secret groups and secret chats and began to discuss with others how we might counter some of the issues that I felt needed to be tackled. I was involved, anonymously, with work around the lack of exclusively same-sex attracted LGB spaces, around the erasure of sex-based words in Irish law, and the erosion of single-sex spaces in education and elsewhere, to name a few.

In October 2020, my wife and I were asked to set up the LGB Alliance Ireland. Like all of our committee, we remained anonymous to start. But as time went on, and as trolls doxxed our Sky servers to London, we discussed coming out in our own names and what that might mean for us. Our decision was, we had to tell the truth. We had to be brave.

My wife was more sure than I was. I will never forget sitting on my back step with her at home. The sun was going down and I worried aloud, “what if they come for us?” She put her red hair over her shoulder in the light of the setting sun and as it flashed in her eyes she resolved, “let them come.”

We came out in our own names the next day.

She made me braver. Since then, we have left the LGB Alliance Ireland for a variety of reasons, mostly that we want to do our own activism in our own names and in our own way. The LGB Alliance tends more towards a formal approach, and we tend more towards the personal. That’s alright. We need those different approaches.

We are creating spaces for LGB people and we are joining networks to preserve the rights of women and protections and safeguarding for children. We are working with politicians and education providers, charities and business owners and we are amplifying voices, particularly of women, where we can. We are speaking out and talking to anybody and everybody who will listen.

It has not all been plain sailing though. My wife and I have been threatened in the same way as many others - with rape, death and sectarian violence. My wife received a DM including a photograph of the front of our house and a message detailing the gruesome ways in which the sender wanted to harm her. The police were informed and they did nothing but record it as a “non-crime hate incident”. My wife’s jobs have been doxxed too and she has been reported to the police by, among others, a man with a track record of using the police as his own personal enforcement arm.

So would I ever recommend “coming out?”

I don’t think I would without fully understanding the risks involved in doing so. It is your calling or it is not and both of those are okay.

I don’t want to scare people off with my account either. I just want to highlight that it is not an easy decision to make and it is not one you should take lightly. Attacks against GC people are overwhelmingly on women in this debate so know your boundaries and your limits.

There are also many things you can do and many actions you can take without revealing your identity – join groups, leafleting, social media activism, sign the Women’s Declaration, encourage more to speak up, talk to people in real life about the issues.

Every action counts.