Picture it: United States, 2015. Gay marriage was legalized nationwide in June, and it was then legalized in Ireland in November of that same year. It had been legalized in England, Wales, and Scotland the year prior. For a lot of LGB westerners, it was like a weight had been lifted off their shoulders. This is what we’d been fighting for: The right to marry the consenting adult of our choosing, the right to be protected from discrimination, harassment, and public ostracism, the right to be honest about who we love and what we love about them when asked. Personally, I was 8 years old, and I was thrilled, though I wondered why it had ever been illegal to begin with (it seemed like such an odd thing for a free country to restrict, especially with separation of church and state as a core principle). I marched in my first ever pride parade that year, blew kisses at homophobes, with my openly bisexual mother holding my hand and leading me through the crowd as lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (of all labels) admired my little innocent displays, my acceptance of them, something they never thought they’d see in a little girl (little did they know, we were one in the same). Acceptance was here, and we honestly thought the dark days were over.

That same year, in Uganda, activists documented 89 verified cases of violence against LGBT people the year prior, with 47 of those cases perpetrated by state actors. In Nigeria, only 30% of randomized poll respondents agreed that LGBT individuals should have access to basic public services, such as education, healthcare, and housing. In Ghana, a later report (2019) stated that 89% of Ghanaians strongly or somewhat disliked LGBT individuals, the highest level of dislike for any group in the country. In Russia, “promotion” of LGBT identity had been illegal for two years prior, and five years after that, Vladimir Putin constitutionally banned same-sex marriage. Of the countries that have adopted Shari’a law, 10 of them (those being Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Somalia, UAE, Qatar, Pakistan, Mauritania, and Afghanistan) formally instate the death penalty for consensual same-sex relationships, all using official interpretations of Shari’a. Other countries that implement Shari’a law criminalize homosexuality, though they do not see it as a capital offense. And yet the Western left kept singing, kept partying, and eventually moved on.

The Western progressive left loves to paint itself as a globalist, moral-bound force of change, with its biggest credential being that of Western LGBT legalization and liberation, but does it deserve its high praise? Does it truly stick to its morals in the face of injustices? We’ve seen how they rallied behind the famously anti-gay Hamas in the Israel-Palestine conflict, excusing their terrorist behaviors and systemic oppressions of the Palestinian people to “stick it” to the IDF (whose behavior is still inexcusable, though not worthy of defending Hamas for). But even coming back to the West, the left has abandoned the LGB cause in favor of the TQIA+ lobby: declaring “genocide” at restrictions on the medicalization and sterilization of gender non-conforming (and often buddingly homosexual) children, painting the concerns of normal homosexuals about same-sex attracted spaces being invaded by opposite-sex people claiming to be gays and lesbians as “transphobia” and “pearl-clutching”, painting (majority homosexual) detransitioners as “TERFs”, “traitors”, and “conservatives”, dissolving the societal importance of biological sex (which means a lot to a majority of people) using intersex conditions as a shield for their post-structuralist, meaningless definitions of formerly clear terms (such as “Man” and “Woman”) that are vital to the way homosexuals are classified and identified. They seem to have abandoned everything they supposedly stood for in just a decade and have entirely changed their tune.

This leads us to the current state of affairs: for the past few years, anything even remotely woman-exclusive has been up for debate in the public eye, stoking long, heated debates around what it truly means to be a woman, who can be one, who’s a bigot and why, and lesbianism (a term meaning exclusive female homosexuality) has taken a massive hit. Lesbian spaces are now required to include males, and with them have come opposite-sex attracted women who call themselves “lesbians” for liking their males effeminate. The left applauds this and chastises any homosexual woman who dares to miss having spaces exclusive to female homosexuals. It’s clear that they now firmly stand against homosexuality, viewing any exclusionary identity (which all meaningful identities exclude specific nouns. “spoon” is not an inclusive term: it excludes knives, forks, strainers, plates, and bowls) as inherently oppressive. To them, any rejection based on any innate characteristic is oppression, and sexuality is first-come, first-served. Everyone is intrinsically entitled to your sexuality if they want it. And this attitude is enforced primarily on lesbians, though gay men and heterosexual women have begun seeing the run-off effects of this ideology as well.

The picture is grim: the left only helps the West, only until a significant (but incomplete) victory occurs, and feels entitled to complete compliance with all further ideologies they choose to support once they’ve helped your cause. The Eastern gays are still scared underground; no one is coming to help them win their freedoms, and the Western gays were only helped to purchase compliance from us. Either way, none of us are truly free, and female homosexuals, now being forced out of our historic label (lesbian) and into a new, stigmatizing, and degrading label (“gynosexual/gynophile”), are forced to ask if we’ve truly sold ourselves to a lobby for a chance in the sun. If it was worth it. If we even deserve these rights, knowing our lesbian sisters abroad are struggling, dying, being assaulted, with no one to help them, no ideology to help explain things, and now being associated with a new ideology unrelated to the majority of us.

They never cared about us. They left our sisters high and dry. They abandoned and betrayed us once they were done using us. They feed us conversion therapy rhetoric in fishnets and bad wigs. They let our sisters die, be assaulted, and be alone. They distract us with their nonsense and use us as argumentative human shields when someone calls them out. They change our label to mean nothing, attempt to leave us with no way to find each other, and attempt to stamp out any exclusive place we make for ourselves. They try to stop us from speaking publicly, and they make it known that praise or silence is the sound they prefer from us as props. But we won’t take their attacks silently. We won’t give up on our lesbian sisters across the globe. Now is the time for the lesbian exodus.

We are going to speak for ourselves, as women, as lesbians, as sisters, as daughters, as citizens, as neighbors, as elders, as people. For the first time in a long time, our voice will ring louder than the chorus of babble associated with an acronym having little to do with us. And we are going to make one thing VERY clear: a lesbian is, has always been, and always WILL BE a female homosexual. And we fought for our rights ourselves; we do not owe transsexuals our alliance. This sentiment is the primary objective of the Defendbians Collective- to allow female homosexuals to speak for ourselves, to define ourselves, and to advocate for those of us who live under harsh penalization. We are The Defendbians Collective: For lesbians, by lesbians, about lesbians.

• by Imogen Doyle, a women’s rights advocate and founder of The Defendbians Collective.