Mick Hartley

Julie Bindel's latest book – Lesbians: Where are we now? – is published next month. Hadley Freeman interviews her for the Times:

If anyone wants to make a documentary about lesbians in Britain over the past half-century, they should get Julie Bindel to tell her life story. Bindel, 62, a writer and radical feminist, is like a lesbian Zelig, present at pretty much all the key events, from marching with radical feminists in 1970s Leeds to joining the anti-nuclear women-only protests at Greenham Common in 1981 and onwards….

From Bindel’s perspective, trans rights go against everything feminism and the gay rights movement represent. “It’s an ideology so wedded to gender stereotypes that its actual flag is pink and blue,” she writes. Yet in 2015, Ruth Hunt — then the CEO of Stonewall — added the “T” to the LGB acronym, mashing together very different groups with conflicting rights, given “LGB” is about sexuality and “T” is about gender identity. “I texted Ruth saying, ‘Why have you done this? This is in complete contradiction to everything Stonewall stands for,’ ” Bindel says. “She just wouldn’t engage at all.”

Bindel became a target for gender activists. “It’s had a profoundly life-changing effect. I went from thinking of myself as someone who fought for women and girls to wondering if I was a bigot, like they said. But I know a man can’t be a woman.”

Just like when she was a teenager, Bindel found solidarity among other lesbians (plus a few of us straight birds). Yet not all lesbians agree with her: Hunt, as well as a few other high-profile lesbians — including the Labour MP Angela Eagle and the broadcaster Sandi Toksvig — have insisted there is no conflict of rights between trans people and women. Why does she think that is? “Because they’re classic liberals, not feminists, who saw the writing on the wall and went along with it to be liked and be kind.”

Many gay men have also turned against her. “When gay men needed us, like during the Aids crisis in the Eighties, we were there. So the way they abused lesbians in the name of gender activism has been a terrible betrayal,” she says.

In 2020 the LGBT online newspaper PinkNews claimed that a prominent lesbian journalist and a “powerful network of international lesbians” had “groomed” young women to be sceptical of gender ideology. Everyone who read it knew that the article was referring to Bindel, she says, “mainly because there aren’t that many lesbian journalists who are publicly out in this country”. Rowling told Bindel she should sue the publication for libel. “Jo said, ‘If you want to take them to court I will help you.’ ” In 2021 they settled and PinkNews apologised. “I always said they were seething misogynists,” Bindel says.

Bindel has a plane to catch: she is going to visit Vancouver Rape Relief, the centre she wrote about back in 2004 — which, she says, has stayed firmly women-only. She is looking forward to talking to the young lesbians who work there now “because it can’t just be us old ’uns fighting the fight”. When she comes home there will be more women to protect, more fights to fight. “It never ends!” she says cheerfully. Where are the lesbian heroes? Here is the lesbian hero.

She's stuck to her guns throughout. Before all the gender nonsense I think it's fair to say that she was seen as something of a fringe figure on the radical feminist left. An unapologetic Andrea-Dworkin-quoting lesbian? Hmm, not so sure about that. Now though…well, the article comments are full of praise…brave, principled, a hero. The times have caught up with her.