When choosing to become a lesbian was a radical act

Sheila Jeffreys was once considered a radical, but her views on the hijacking of feminism by transgenderism have seen her attacked by her old side.

Sheila Jeffreys with Rosemary Auchmuty, both involved in the the Lesbian History Group of the early 1980s.

Sheila Jeffreys was in her early 20s when she decided to become a lesbian. And just so you know, she uses those words — she decided — very deliberately.

“It’s all different now, where you’re supposedly born gay, or born straight, or born with a certain gender identity,” says Jeffreys,

“We didn’t think that way. In the 1970s, feminists were out to recruit as many lesbians as possible.

“We understood that sex roles were pernicious constructions. We were trying to change textbooks, so John didn’t tinker with trucks while Jill did all the cooking.

Trigger Warning, the autobiography of Sheila Jeffreys.

“It made perfect sense that heterosexuality was not a free choice for many women. And when we pointed that out, we recruited lesbians in their thousands.”

Jeffreys is speaking on the eve of the publication of her new memoir, Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life.She has been writing about feminism and the lesbian experience for more than 50 years, and in 1991 became the first academic to offer a course in gay and lesbian politics at the University of Melbourne. The focus of her most recent work is her virulent opposition of gender politics and transgenderism.

Jeffreys — like JK Rowling and Lionel Shriver — does not believe that girls who do not fit the stereotype of girlhood should, or even can, become boys. She does not believe men can become women. She has been abused and harassed for holding these beliefs, more about which later. Her book begins not with anger or justifications but with a delightful account of her own transition from a straight girl with a live-in boyfriend to a feminist lesbian.

“Choosing to become a lesbian was a revolutionary act,” she writes. “The lesbian was free.” They did not have to have sex with men. They did not have to marry them or have their children. It was, therefore, the “only path to equal relationships, to self-respect and to the women’s revolution”.

Jeffreys’ first lesbian dalliance came while she was teaching at Downe House School in England in 1972. The object of her affection was a French matron, Danielle, who wore floral dresses and drove a tiny Mini. Jeffreys in those days preferred dark brown trouser suits with wide lapels and a kipper tie.

Sheila Jeffreys in a publicity photo for The Spinster and Her Enemies, 1985, in lounge of Putney flat.

“We might have looked like a role-playing couple, but I was not yet a lesbian,” Jeffreys writes, and this was, in part because she was nervous about how the sex was supposed to happen. But then, in Leeds, she “fell in love with a woman for the first time and discovered just how different this was from being involved with men.

“Heterosexuality is constructed around the rising and falling of the penis … lesbians may tumble about in joyful sexual communion for hours. The lesbian orgasm does not imply that sex has been done and come to an end … There was no ending to our delights.”

In time, she found her life companion, Ann Rowett, who remains by her side to this day. From the moment they became lovers, “I exited from the emotional hurly-burly of the lesbian feminist dating scene and gained a partner whose love and support formed the firm foundation of my political work.”

The couple moved from Britain to Australia in 1991, after Jeffreys applied to teach at Melbourne University. The job interview was done by phone and Jeffreys remembers one question: “Do you think that sexual intercourse is inevitably oppressive?”

“I can’t remember how I replied,” she says, but yes!

She moved with Ann into a Brunswick terrace, with Jeffreys committed to bringing some firebrand feminism to Victoria.

“I could not believe the things that were considered acceptable in Australia,” she says. “There were lic­ensed brothels on my street. I was told that prostitution was a woman’s choice, when it is the means by which men pay to sexually abuse women.”

She was curious about the alignment between lesbians and gay men, too. She recalls attending a drag show with a group of lesbians “in which a man had put balloons under his jumper in lieu of breasts. He approached our table and proceeded to lean over us and jiggle the balloons in our faces”.

Sheila Jeffreys.

She was appalled because “there is no equivalent in the form of lesbians mocking men so insultingly. But these days drag queens are promoted at story times performed in public libraries, where men, calling themselves sex industry names such as ‘Miss Beaver’, perform their mockery of women for toddlers. Lesbians are not, of course, invited into libraries to read to children in the same way.”

Across time she began tackling gender politics and transgenderism, which she describes as a movement in which “thousands are encouraged to take harmful drugs and undergo mutilating surgery, to make their bodies fit the old stereotypes … a child who ‘feels like a boy’ is told they are ‘really the opposite sex, and therefore need to have surgery’.

“It is wrong, so wrong,” she says. “And it is also not possible, in my view, to accept that a man who wants to wear a dress, and feels like he wants to be a woman, can in fact become a woman.”

Any number of transgender women have tried to explain to Jeffreys that their decision to change gender was not, as Jeffreys describes it, “having some floaty feminine feeling inside” but a disconnect so profound that the choice for them was between transition and suicide.

Jeffreys understands that her demurral is regarded as transphobia — “I’ve been compared to David Irving, the Holocaust denier” — and says she does not wish to appear dismissive or cruel, although it must be said, much of the commentary in her book is vituperative and extremely unforgiving of other points of view.

Sheila Jeffreys on the steps of the student union building at the University of Manchester in 1967.

She says she also feels harassed: in her final years at Melbourne University she became aware of a plot to “throw a cream pie into my face or glitter-bombing me”. The protesters got the date wrong, so she avoided being assaulted.

“But it was becoming harder for me to speak anywhere in public,” she says. Her book about gender politics was hit by a tsunami of one-star reviews and her talks got cancelled.

Jeffreys says feminism — the force behind rape-crisis centres, affordable childcare, and women-only spaces — has been swallowed by the “gender identity movement, with rights for women forced to give way”. But actually the Jeffreys brand of feminism long ago gave way to consumerism and narcissism, which she also finds pretty astounding.

“I became aware (in the mid-2000s) that women were feeling the need to depilate their vulvas,” Jeffreys writes. “I asked (about it) in my class and all but one of my 20 or so women students said that they did this. I was astonished.”

As a girl she had used “foul-smelling cream” to remove hair from her legs but gave it up when she became a feminist. She has no patience for the idea that depilation — like heels and lipstick and Botox and lesbian pornography — is a legitimate choice made by adult human females and therefore none of her business.

“Not when you understand the forces of the patriarchy,” Jeffreys says. “Women are forced into marriage and child-rearing in the same way. It’s about societal norms.”

By the late 2000s Jeffreys had become isolated, including on campus. Disillusioned, she decided after 25 years in Australia to return to Britain, where the debate about transgenderism is voluble and often unpleasant.

“But it’s absolutely necessary to have it,” she says, “even as they try to cancel people.”

The movement’s supporters include “many women, many mothers in schools and childcare centres and mother’s groups who do not believe that girls should become boys, or that men can become women. And we have been abused for holding these beliefs, which has convinced me, in a way, that my old life has joined up with my new life. Except I’m no longer too radical. Now I’m too conservative! But there has been one positive result: we have many new recruits to feminism.”

Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life by Sheila Jeffreys (Spinifex Press), published Sunday.