Lesbians are fighting back in Australasia, too

Speech

21 Mar

Written By Spinifex Press

Dr Susan Hawthorne

Asking Questions about Lesbians

UN NGO CSW Forum 69/Beijing+30

21 March 2025

Session: Lesbians are fighting back in Australasia, too

Asking questions about lesbians

Today, I am speaking to you from Djiru Country in Far North Queensland where I live and work and respectfully acknowledge their custodianship of the lands and waterways. I also acknowledge the many women throughout history who have fought for women’s freedom and the freedom of lesbians, often at the cost of their lives.

I am beginning my talk today with some quotations from lesbians who have been subjected to violence, including corrective rape, torture, forced pregnancy and forced marriage, imprisonment and the ultimate punishment, murder. I honour all these lesbians for their strength, for their resistance and for their love for lesbians. And I raise questions on behalf of them and all lesbians.

I am presenting this material which comes from research I have carried out since 2003. If you want to read more, these stories and more are told in:

Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy (Spinifex Press, 2020) https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781925950168 and

Lesbian: Politics, Culture, Existence (Spinifex Press, 2024) https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781925950984

Now to the words of lesbians

In Sierra Leone, on 29 September 2004, FannyAnn Eddy was found dead after being repeatedly raped. She had testified at the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2004 just a few months before her death.

Silence creates vulnerability. You, members of the Commission on Human Rights, can break the silence. You can acknowledge that we exist, throughout Africa and on every continent, and that human rights violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity are committed every day. You can help us combat those violations and achieve our full rights and freedoms, in every society, including my beloved Sierra Leone (Eddy 2004).

She had been working in the offices of the Sierra Leone Lesbian and Gay Association on the day she was murdered. What action was taken by the UN Commission of Human Rights then? What action is being taken now?

I ask, could we try to be horrified about what has happened to lesbians? (Hawthorne 2020, p. 106).

In 1976, under the Pinochet regime in Chile, Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes was tortured and later fled to England as a refugee.

… no training session prepared me for this intense pain … my pain … the one I did not choose … all this alienation, this empty vacuum …, my body, my mind, my pain … this is not happening … I am a little speck in the universe … which universe? … the world is not anymore … I am … disintegrating … bit by bit … yell by yell … electrode by electrode … The pain … all this pain here and there, down there in my vagina … the agony … where am I? Where is my I?
(Rivera-Fuentes and Birke 2001, p. 655; italics and ellipses in the original).

“Where is my I?” asks Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes after her experience of torture. She is also asking where is my lesbian I? Where is the centrality of the experiences of lesbians recorded and recognised? Where is the recognition that the violation of lesbians goes on day after day, and no one speaks of it

An unnamed lesbian refugee from Iran says of her experience:

In Kashan they tied me to a car and pulled me across the ground. What should I say, who should I say it to? … Why doesn’t anyone listen to us? Where is this ‘human rights’?
(Darya and Baran 2007).

Or, as an unnamed Peruvian lesbian says:

When I speak of my right to my own culture and language as an indigenous woman, everyone agrees to my self-determination. But when I speak of my other identity, my lesbian identity, my right to love, to determine my own sexuality, no one wants to listen.
(ILIS Newsletter 1994, p. 13)

In Zimbabwe, mid-1980s, Tina Machida says:

They locked me in a room and brought him every day to rape me so I would fall pregnant and forced me to marry him. They did this to me until I was pregnant.
(Machida 1996).

In my book, Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy, I also document the murders of lesbians in South Africa (yet, sexual orientation is a protected characteristic in the SA Constitution) as well as murders of lesbians in the US (see Brownworth, 2015; Gartrell, 2023).

What are the elements that go together to make it so difficult to have successful campaigns on behalf of lesbians?

Here are some dimensions and features of how lesbians are treated and how oppression plays out in lesbians’ lives.

When colonisers conquer a land, their first reports back to empire usually contain something along the lines of “the natives possess no culture. They excuse themselves for conquering and dispossessing others. In the same way, lesbians are said to have no culture.
Denial of lesbian existence which is a way of breaking the spirit.
Destruction of lesbian knowledge and culture.
Imposed heterosexuality.
Isolation, a particular problem for young lesbians, lesbians with a disability and old lesbians.
Criminalisation of lesbians: punishments including the death penalty, long imprisonment, and torture including rape and humiliating sexual violence.
Murder, honour killings and persistent rape, so the lesbian becomes pregnant against her will.
Corrective rape by gangs of young men, prison guards and families.
Inferior medical services, such as partners not recognised as next of kin.
Treatment as second-class citizens, direct or indirect discrimination.
Government failure to recognise lesbians in law as a distinct group subject to discrimination.
If a lesbian manages to bring a case against a perpetrator, there is a high chance she will be forced to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. This results in the crime being made invisible as a crime against a lesbian.
Lesbians are shamed and expected to be heterosexual or to transition.
Shame creates isolation, ostracism can result in bullying, taunts and beatings. It creates what Indian writer, Maya Sharma calls “a discourse of catastrophe” (Sharma 2006, p. 38, cited in Hawthorne 2020 p. 176).
Lesbians are declared mad.
Lesbians who resist publicly are attacked both online and in real life.
If a lesbian becomes famous, she will be remembered either for her sexuality (in which case, her achievements remain hidden) or her sexuality will be hidden and her achievements remembered. These are the result of shame and makes documenting lesbian history very difficult.

Is it any wonder then, that lesbian refugees have to travel such a hard road in gaining refugee status?

In 1987, eleven years after she had been released from prison and Chile was apparently now under democratic rule, a trap was set for Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes. A policeman came to her workplace at the British Commissariat and told her she should come to police headquarters with him after convincing her she had nothing to fear. He took her through the building where she had been tortured and into a room where an officer sat at a table. The officer wanted her to have sex with his female lover. Consuelo realised this was a trap and she agreed to meet him in two weeks. Consuelo left Chile five days later. She had already planned to fly to the UK and was enrolled in a Women’s Studies course there.

Nigerian activist, Aderonke Apata, was not so lucky. It took her 13 years to gain asylum in the UK. One of the sticking points, according to Theresa May, who headed the Home Office at the time, was that Aderonke was pretending to be a lesbian to gain asylum. She was put in solitary confinement for a week in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in 2012. The accusation of pretence was because she was the mother of a child, and the assumption was, therefore, she must be heterosexual. As we know, there are many lesbians who are mothers. Some who have married because this was a temporary protection for them, or they were forcibly married. Likewise, if a lesbian does not have a (current) female partner, the question is raised, is she REALLY a lesbian? A lesbian without a female partner slips to the default position of heterosexual.

In Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya lesbians are put in Block 13 which is reserved for LGBT people. A group that is not necessarily safe for lesbians. Lesbians are routinely abused and suffer persecution within the camp. This resembles what happens to lesbians who are imprisoned. Christine, a Ugandan lesbian, was not only tortured by the guards but raped by other prisoners.

A lesbian refugee wanting to gain asylum in Australia faces a difficult path. There are an enormous number of hurdles. Among them endless documentation of the abuse and trauma a lesbian has suffered at the hands of family, community, religious groups, police and government. Some governments do not have an arm’s length distance between those assessing the claims for refugee status and those enforcing the criminal laws against lesbians. The result is that the lesbian claimant is vulnerable to punishment in the country from which she is attempting to escape. With a drawn-out bureaucratic system in the country to which she wants to move, her very existence is under constant threat. The legal costs of engaging an immigration lawyer are substantial (thousands of dollars) and each applicant needs letters of support that confirm the importance of this applicant’s need for asylum.

The word ‘lesbian’ is not mentioned by the Australian Government in its Ninth Periodic Report to CEDAW of January 2025. If the meaningless term ‘gender identity’ is used, how can lesbians with a woman-to-woman sexual orientation be protected under law or gain entry into Australia when seeking asylum as lesbian refugees?

Members of the Coalition of Activist Lesbians (CoAL), a tiny unfunded organisation, are currently engaged in trying to assist two lesbians wanting asylum in Australia. We are told that the waiting period is likely six years before a decision is made. See CoAL website https://coal.org.au/

Guidelines for officials interviewing lesbian refugees

Some women might be persecuted because of their association with men who are under threat. If they are lesbians, their level of risk may be increased.
It should not be assumed that a married woman cannot be a lesbian. In some countries marriage is the first level of protection a lesbian might seek.
Lesbians seeking asylum are likely to be politically active, but even lesbians who are not politically active come under threat in some countries.
Do not assume that because a woman does not use the word lesbian to describe herself, that she is not a lesbian. It may have been too dangerous for too long for her to be able to speak the word lesbian (or the equivalent in her language) out loud.
Do not assume that because there is no word for lesbian in any particular language that there are therefore no lesbians in that society or linguistic group.
Do not assume that if a woman comes from a country where it is not illegal to be a lesbian, that she is therefore not able to claim having been tortured or in danger of torture or other external harm to herself.
Do not assume that your interpreter is open to her experience. The interpreter may be hostile to her claim.
Lesbians who have been tortured will find it difficult to speak of their experience. Speaking to a stranger is difficult, speaking to a strange man might be impossible. Uniformed men may precipitate reliving the experience of torture.
As a result of trauma, some lesbians may be unable to relate the experience at all or may appear detached and emotionless. This should not be read as evidence of fabrication.
Lesbians who are refugees might also be in danger from their families, in particular from the men in their families. Her confidential interview should not be shared by asking questions about her sexual orientation of other family members. (See Hawthorne, 2020, pp. 164–165)

If violence against lesbians is a matter of indifference, and lesbians remain outside the scope of social justice reform, then everyone’s civil and political rights remain in jeopardy. The most difficult political reforms to make are, in the long run, the most important, because they give us a clue as to the limits of our preparedness to live an ethical existence. If we are unable to be concerned for the lives and well being of those who are most different, then we are incapable of defending justice for all – even at the most basic level, that involving freedom of association, freedom to love (Hawthorne 2024, p. 141-142).

I would suggest that when lesbians become victims of attack, they are a signal. They are the canaries in the mine. And if the perpetrators get away with it, then other attacks will follow. So, we need to be protesting every attack on lesbians, because it is a sign of hatred in the social system. If lesbians are not protected, then people who don’t fit some other social dimension will not be safe from attack either. Keep your lesbian sister safe and watch the effect it has on society (Hawthorne 2020, pp. 171-172).

References

Brownworth, Victoria A. 2015. ‘Erasing Our Lesbian Dead: Why don’t murdered lesbians make the news?’ Curve. http://www.curvemag.com/News/Erasing-Our-Lesbian-Dead-510/ (Accessed 17/7/2015).

Darya and Baran. 2007. ‘Interview with Iranian Lesbian in order to convey her protest to the world’. p. 2. Iranian Queer Organization. Translated by Ava. <http//irqo.net/IRQO/English/pages/071.htm> Accessed 17 August 2007.

Eddy, FannyAnn. 2004.. ‘Testimony by FannyAnn Eddy at the UN Commission on Human Rights. Item 14 – 60th session, UN Commission on Human Rights http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/10/04/sierra9439.htm

Gartrell, Nate (June 14, 2023). "'The most depraved crime I ever handled': Transgender activist gets life in prison for murdering Oakland family". The Mercury News.

Hawthorne, Susan. 2020. Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy. Mission Beach: Spinifex Press.

Hawthorne, Susan. 2024. Lesbian: Politics, Culture, Existence. Mission Beach: Spinifex Press.

ILIS Newsletter, 1994. Vol 15, No. 2.

Machida, Tina. 1996. ‘Sisters of Mercy’ in Monika Reinfelder (ed.) Amazon to Zami: Toward a global lesbian feminism. London: Cassell, pp. 118-129.

Rivera-Fuentes, Consuelo and Lynda Birke. 2001. ‘Talking With/In Pain: Reflections on Bodies under Torture’. Women’s Studies International Forum. Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 653-668.

Sharma, Maya. 2006. Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Underprivileged India. New Delhi: Yoda Press.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Committee and members of the Coalition of Activist Lesbians (CoAL) for their responses and suggestions to this presentation. Particular thanks to Viviane Morrigan, Deborah Staines and Barbary Clarke. Thanks to Sand Hall for history, to the members of Lesbian Action for Visibility Aotearoa (LAVA) for their fighting spirit, and The Feminist Legal Clinic for going into bat for lesbians in Australia. Thanks to Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes for friendship and to lesbians facing the bureaucratic hurdles of seeking asylum. Thanks to lesbians around the world who continue to resist the horrors of violence and to fight for those whose lives have been directly affected by violence.

CoAL (Coalition of Activist Lesbians) Inc Australia

A Lesbian Feminist U.N. Accredited Human Rights Advocacy Group

Address: 81-83 Campbell Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010

Email: admin@coal.org.au

Website: coal.org.au

Featured