She was never sick

A review of ‘Kindred in Chaos: 19 Lesbians in the Age of Gender Identity’, edited by Tonje Gjevjon.

The same thing happens to nearly every woman in this book. She is young, she is a tomboy, she finds her way to other lesbians, and then one by one the women she loves announce they are men. Elisabeth from Sweden puts it best, and it’s worth quoting her at length because it sets the tone for everything that follows.

“Most of the women I’ve had romantic relationships with, now identify as men. It felt like an epidemic, as if some kind of virus was spreading through the community. Maybe I was the carrier, immune for some reason, but still infecting the women I slept with one by one, causing them to renounce womanhood.”

I have been receiving letters like this for years, even as the very earliest of my friends and colleagues were condemning me as a bigot. The first I remember was from a young lesbian who had a trans-identified male friend, a ‘transwoman’ in activist language, a transvestite in neutral speech. She thought they were friends, and for a while they were. Then one night, in a bar, he asked if she’d like a relationship with him. As gently as she could, she said no. He slapped her across the face and walked out. That told me everything about what was coming. The kindness runs one way. The instant lesbians say no, the ‘women’ demanding access to them remember they possess a right hook. I have been handed this story, in one form or another, hundreds of times. And here again, now, are nineteen more.

They come from a dozen countries, and most give only a first name. Saying this from inside the gay movement still costs enough to keep the surnames off the page. Tonje Gjevjon, a Norwegian artist who was investigated by her own police force for saying men are men, gathered them through the network around Women’s Declaration International, LGB Alliance and the Lesbian Not Criminal roadshow. The book is funded by Fritt Ord, the Norwegian free-expression foundation. The testimonies follow a loose template. Bullied at school. A few good years on the scene. The arrival of the word “queer”. The friends who transition. The peaking. The cost.

These women did not coordinate. They are in Norway and Mexico and rural New South Wales, describing the same decade from inside their own lives. By the time Aja in the UK, a name familiar to my UK readers, runs into the same young lesbian couple twice in one summer, both of them now bearded and calling themselves gay men, you have stopped treating any single story as anecdote. Nineteen similar stories from around the world make for a slim book, but the weight is in the experience they share of the worst crisis for gay people since AIDS.

Just like the AIDS virus, trans ideology turns the host against itself. Elisabeth describes waiting in the hospital for her girlfriend Mikaela to come out of surgery. “Two breasts gone, two healthy body parts.” Four words recur, here and again near the end of her piece: “She was never sick.” The first time, she finishes the thought. “Society was, demanding this bloody, grotesque sacrifice to adhere to norms that she never even believed in in the first place.” She marks, too, how the word “woman” was quietly mutilated while its opposite went untouched. “It’s woman with an asterisk now. Woman footnoted. Woman with exceptions. No one felt the need to alter the word man.”

Belmore, an American veterinary nurse born with a heart defect and a body she calls a “disabled vessel”, produces the most unexpected argument in the book. She watches healthy young women take testosterone and remove healthy organs while she needs a pacemaker to stay alive, and she reaches for her training. Zoochosis, she explains, is what happens to intelligent caged animals whose physical needs are met but whose minds are starved. They self-harm, often targeting their own genitals. A vet’s job is to find the stressor and ease the pain. “Yet, when a teenage girl shows up to a human clinic covered in self-harm scars because she wishes she could live a fictional life as a boy, why is it that we take up a scalpel and start cutting her? Why do we treat animals with more dignity than our mothers, sisters, and daughters? Why?”

Tania, from London, supplies the only laugh, and it curdles fast. She develops a crush on a feminist man who keeps insisting men aren’t biologically stronger, until he loses patience, yanks up his shirt and shrieks, “Look at my nipple!... Look how dodgy my nipple is!” The man is an eighteen-year-old lesbian with a double mastectomy. Two things collapse at once. The first man Tania thought she wanted is a young woman her own age with her breasts cut off, and the future being sold to lesbians like her is suddenly the body of someone she desired. She attempted suicide that night and couldn’t say why for six years.

Coercion runs through nearly every account. The “cotton ceiling”, the long-running demand that a lesbian who won’t sleep with a trans-identified male has something to examine in herself. Several of the women call it what it is, conversion therapy in a nicer jumper. It runs through the dating apps too, which quietly switch a woman’s “lesbian, women only” settings back and let the men in. I once took out a profile on the lesbian app Her Social to show that men really were doing this, in numbers, in earnest. People did what they always do and looked at my finger instead of what I was pointing at. The mechanism hasn’t changed since. Men go on these apps calling themselves lesbians, and when a lesbian complains, Her Social removes the lesbian. Grindr does the same to gay men who object to trans-identified women turning up in their results. The complaint is the offence, never the imposture. It is corporate homophobia, and gay men are only starting to feel now what lesbians have lived with from the beginning.

There are quieter through-lines. Magdalen Berns, whose YouTube videos turn up as the turning point in account after account, years after her death, doing more for these women than any institution that claimed to speak for them. And the spaces, the actual bars and clubs and magazines, which close and do not reopen. Gjevjon’s own preface tracks the loss precisely. The society that “once supported me, as a young lesbian, when I told men claiming to be lesbians to fuck off, now tells young lesbians to be inclusive, kind, and to ‘educate themselves’.”

This is not the first book of its kind, because the thing it records keeps happening. In 2018, I came across a young lesbian, Kitty Robinson, running a Facebook group full of women recovering from sexual abuse by trans-identified partners and friends. I couldn’t find a single journalist who would touch it. She went on to collect those accounts in You Told Me You Were Different, forty-three women describing the abuse and then the gaslighting that came when they tried to name it. This new book carries that work forward, and there will be more behind it.

A Generation X lesbian in Australia once gave me the whole arc in a sentence. “I used to get beaten up by queer bashers. Now I get threatened by people calling themselves queer.” Elizabeth, whose long, scrupulous account is its spine, understood the stakes exactly. Writing of the women who fought this without thanks, she says: “When it is over, history writers may pretend we were never there. Let them try. The record will remain, and the omission will be noted.” Nineteen women, refusing to be edited out of their own history, and reminding us that lesbians saw it first.