Diaspora Dyke Manifesto

To mark Lesbian Visibility Week 2024, we’re proud to launch our Diaspora Dyke Manifesto as part of our Who is Welcome: Gender, Queerness and Migration.

In the UK and in many parts of the Western world, attacks against marginalised people have increased. Whether this is by rolling back on trans rights including reducing access to healthcare and legal recognition, or detaining and deporting people seeking asylum, the UK is an increasingly hostile place for us. Our experiences, identities, and systems of oppression, are seen as separate.

But our fights are the same fight. Through dyke politics we can resist and tie our struggles together against imperialism, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, lesbophobia, transphobia; against the border.

Liberation will only be achieved by seeking liberation for all.

Dykes against division 

Just like the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of colonisation in decades and centuries before, systems of oppression are aided by segmenting marginalised populations into separate and opposing groups.

Trans people are pitted against lesbians by TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) by acting as if lesbians are at constant risk of violence by trans women. This discourse incorrectly constructs trans women as an oppressor, despite the fact they are more likely to experience harm economically, socially and physically.

Migrants are often imagined as racialised. This means usually Black or Brown and almost always Muslim, who are constructed as violent and backwards, espousing violent misogyny and homophobia. This is a classic colonial hangover. It feeds into the White supremacist narrative around “White men saving Brown women from Brown men”, which has been weaponised against migrant men for decades.

In both these constructions of a ‘threat’, lesbians are seen as neither trans nor a migrant; they must be White (racialised lesbians are largely migratised), cisgender, feminine (cis, masculine lesbians are often portrayed as aggressor), citizens. These narratives work to obscure the structural violence that all of these groups face, under transphobic, racist, homophobic and xenophobic systems of governance, regardless of, but especially if, people experience multiple forms of oppression.

Together, united

Amid this rhetoric, trans migrant and migratised lesbians, particularly when racialised, disappear, or at least only visible when we can be weaponised against our communities, held up as a token of Western ‘progressivism’ against Global South ‘primitivism’. This conditional belonging is dehumanising and still normalises the narrow mainstream portrayal of lesbians as ‘like you (White, cishet, citizen, economically productive member of society), but gay’.

What is missing from this, then, is that we are all affected by the same systems, even though it is those of us at the intersections affected most by these overlapping systems of violence. Even if we try to tackle transphobia in the UK, for example, transphobia is still woven into the global system of borders.

Instead of reducing the net of who we consider to be marginalised, we should aim to break the net that strangles us all. In fact, the net has only grown as the Hostile Environment targets racialised citizens as ‘foreigners’ (and therefore not deserving of rights) and deprivation of citizenship legislation expanding who is a ‘potential foreigner’, i.e. diaspora born with British citizenship.

As those lesbians who are trans and are migrants or migratised, we reject the weaponisation of any aspect of our identities, of our communities, against others. This can look like resistance to pinkwashing, where queer identities are weaponised to justify violence against imperialised communities.

Towards dyke politics

Moving forward, we propose a ‘dyke politics’. Grounded in abolition and liberation for all. The term ‘dyke’ is a political identity from which we move to justice from the position of lesbians marginalised by multiple systems of oppression, especially bordering and transphobia.

Sara Angevine defines ‘The Dyke’ as a ‘queer political identity’ grounded in feminist, anti-capitalist ‘resistance to the neoliberal nation-state’. This Dyke is visible through the Dyke March, which challenges the liberal assimilation, White-centrism, corporatisation, and cisgender patriarchy that is visible in mainstream Gay Pride. The Dyke March is ‘a site for visible resistance that centres dykes, lesbians, and queers’ through intersectional mobilisation.

Dyke politics is therefore not one of division, like lesbians in the TERF movement or the cishet powers-that-be that pit us against each other. Instead, it is one of unity towards liberation, without gatekeepers of the means of survival, of transition, of access to and belonging in this country. It smashes the metaphorical barriers that try to separate our communities to fragment our resistance- the ones that divide us in a hierarchy of belonging based on our citizenship, our background, our sexuality, our transness, our (dis)ability, our race, and the literal ones that keep migrants away from communities such as borders, prisons, detention centres.

Dyke politics doesn’t settle for sensitivity training. For those who enforce the border or for ‘guidance’ on how to assess our queer siblings’ asylum claims – the border itself is homophobic, transphobic, racist and ableist. It is a colonial relic that structures access along these exclusionary lines.

Not gay as in happy, dyke as in no borders.

Download the Diaspora Dyke Manifesto here.

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