repeats

"I've had someone saying they would rather kill me than Hitler," says 24-year-old Jennie*.

"They said they would strangle me with a belt if they were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent, just because I won't have sex with trans women."

I missed the follow-up: BBC Article Sparks Backlash Against Survivors of Assault

"When asked to comment on this pattern of coercion and assault, Stonewall’s CEO compared same-sex attraction to racism."

The article quickly gained traction on social media. It received hundreds of letters, in support and complaint. Caroline Lowbridge, the journalist behind it, received so much abuse that she was forced to delete her Twitter account. And the backlash didn’t stop there.

When asked to comment on this pattern of coercion and assault, Stonewall’s CEO compared same-sex attraction to racism. “Nobody should ever be pressured into dating, or pressured into dating people they aren’t attracted to,” Nancy Kelley told the BBC. “But if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of color, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.”

Stonewall was founded as a gay rights charity. Yet its most senior figure disregarded lesbian survivors and likened being gay to a form of bigotry. Kelley’s homophobic remarks raise serious questions about Stonewall’s claim to stand for “acceptance without exception.”

Novara Media editor Ash Sarkar echoed Kelley’s comments. She compared lesbians saying they don’t want penis-in-vagina sex to racists not wanting relationships with women of color:...

Columnist Owen Jones described the testimonies of these lesbians as “conspiratorial hate.” He did not acknowledge their experiences of sexual coercion and rape, instead framing a group of survivors as the oppressor: 

“It’s beyond belief that the BBC published such unbelievably appalling journalism, based on no reliable data and the testimonies of anti-trans activists. You’d expect to find this sort of conspiratorial hate on the darkest recesses of the internet, not on the BBC.”

And Dr Finn MacKay, a feminist researcher and activist, Tweeted that it’s “…outrageous that the BBC has produced a lengthy, anecdotal, opinion piece that headlines with, & promotes the idea that, trans women specifically are a rape threat & particularly to lesbians.”

“I was one of the women interviewed for this article,” responded Kat Howard. “You can choose not to believe my ‘anecdotal evidence’ but myself and two other lesbians were all assaulted by the same transwoman at university, and we were targeted BECAUSE we were lesbians. That is a problem, I’d say.”

Lesbians are accused, but not gay men. 

...if only you knew this fantasy's charms, if only you could understand what one experiences from the sweet illusion of being no more than a woman! incredible inconsistency I one abhors that sex, yet one wishes to imitate it! Ah! how sweet it is to succeed, ... 

Lesbians are accused, but not gay men, or heterosexuals.