Dyke March Vancouver
Lesbian Collective in the Vancouver Dyke March
Lesbians have been punished, labeled and institutionalized, throughout history. In the 1970s and 1980s gay liberation movement, lesbian voices were missing and Pride marches male dominated. In response, lesbians created lesbian spaces and culture, including Dyke Marches, to fight for the freedom and rights of lesbians, and center the experiences of lesbians.
Today, lesbian culture has been pushed underground and lesbianism is under threat. Lesbian culture consists of secret and private events like meetings and potlucks. Lesbians are pressured to use the inclusive term queer, told to accept males as lesbians, and medicalized and labeled as boys and men if they exhibit stereotypical masculine traits.
The Lesbian Collective of Vancouver rejects these pressures from heteronormative patriarchal forces and fight for the political, bodily and sexual autonomy of lesbians. One way we do so is through the Vancouver Dyke March.
For several years, we have participated in the Vancouver Dyke March to make a lesbian presence.
We have featured lesbian activists, symbology, experiences and opinions in our messages. We have shown support for lesbian activists worldwide who have faced backlash over their fight for lesbian autonomy and increased the visibility of lesbians who are being erased from our history. We have promoted lesbian feminism and mobilized other women to join us in solidarity.
Over the years, our participation in the Dyke March became bigger and bolder, and we experienced increasingly negative attention and backlash from the Vancouver Dyke March organizers and participants. The Vancouver Dyke March has chosen meaningless inclusivity over lesbian liberation and has allowed and encouraged trans activists to threaten and intimidate lesbian feminists.
The Vancouver Lesbian Collective continues to participate to assert our disagreement with trans activist and gender identity ideology, show our solidarity for lesbians around the world who fight for lesbian autonomy and reclaim lesbians.
Dyke March Vancouver 2016
August 2016 was the first Vancouver Dyke March that we attended as a Collective. We wanted to bring a lesbian focus back to the march and make the point that lesbians are female with some proud vagina and lesbian-related propaganda. We wore t-shirts stenciled with the word lesbian, letters to spell out the word vagina, and two of us wore vulva outfits.
We brought homemade vulva cupcakes, which we handed out to lesbians at the march. While the lesbians were mostly friendly and grateful - only a few dirty looks - it was obvious that the Vancouver Dyke March had become inclusive of everyone and was no longer organized to be about lesbians.
Men and straight allies made up a sizable part of the march attendees, and aside from calling it a “Dyke March”, and the presence of faithful lesbians attendees, the word lesbian, and all that means to us, was rarely mentioned or seen.
Dyke March Vancouver 2017
After our 2016 vagina cupcakes intervention, we thought that maybe our message had been a bit too subtle given the level of lesbian erasure going on. This year at the Vancouver Dyke March we wanted to make a bigger presence. We decided to create signs and mobilize our feminist and lesbian allies, about 25 joined us. We made signs with pictures and quotations from our lesbian (s)heroes.
Some of us experienced verbal harassment and backlash for these signs of lesbian pride. We found the backlash to our lesbian-loving presence to be obviously growing & the march organizers refusing to stand up for women’s basic rights to represent our lesbian lives.
Well, we were marching, when this trans woman who was obviously a volunteer or a marshal, came up to me and yelled at me. She said my sign was transmisogynistic (because it doesn’t include male anatomy). Essentially the uterus offended this person. So she yelled at me, but one of my sisters quickly came up and put her arm around me, indicating I wasn’t alone. I kept marching.
An account from one of the allies, originally posted at Purple Sage Fem
Dyke March Vancouver 2018
By this time, Vancouver Dyke March organizers were pretty aware of our pro-Lesbian agenda for the Dyke March. Unfortunately, they weren’t taking the message on board.
Instead, they were scared, especially after UK lesbians’ successfully took over the lead position in London’s Pride March earlier in the summer. Vancouver Dyke March organizers posted about a “growing presence of hate groups at LGBTQAI2S+ events internationally and locally”. They created “a response strategy” leading up to the march in 2018.
Because of this and our past experiences, we mobilized more allies and developed a more stringent safety plan. All this, so we could wear our t-shirts, bring our pro-lesbian messages, and participate as lesbian feminists safely in the Dyke March, which is supposed to be a celebration of lesbians in defiance of a lesbian and woman-hating culture. Well, instead, the march became an exercise in hating lesbians.
Our members attended the 2018 Vancouver Dyke March decked out in capes and costumes, carrying signs and slogans dedicated to our Lesbian (S)Heroes in an effort to honour lesbian herstory, heritage, and the women who paved the way for the freedoms we have today. We included quotes that spoke to women’s experiences regarding homophobia, sex-based oppression, and gender constraints.
Even before the march began, organizers told us our t-shirts and signs (or indeed anything containing the Venus symbol, or “XX” notation) excluded trans women, and would need to be removed if we were to join the march. When our group refused to put away our signs or T-shirts, and continued to peacefully walk in the march, organizers and “security” for the march, including some very large transwomen, harassed us, yelled at us, called us slurs, and physically herded us away from the rest of the march.
Despite the negativity and attempts to exclude us, a number of women quietly joined our procession, and we finished the march with a group of 50 women strong. Feminist Current published an article containing the full details of our group’s experiences of hostility at the March.
Following the march, organizers inaccurately described us as “a hate group” and told us, the Vancouver Lesbian Collective and our woman allies, that we are not welcome to attend future dyke marches
Lesbian feminists at the Dyke March 2018
Dyke March Vancouver 2019
This was an especially hard year for the Vancouver Lesbian Collective (and lesbians in Vancouver). Leading up to the Vancouver Dyke March, the organizers misrepresented us by referring to us as “TERFs”, “SWERFs”, “fascists”, and a “counter-protestor presence”. Vancouver Dyke March organizers and the Coalition Against Trans Antagonism (CATA) organized a number of “community meetings” prior to the march aimed at strategizing about how to keep us and our allies out of the march.
Based on the hostility we experienced in 2018, we agreed that we would need a group larger than 50 lesbians and women allies for our security. After an evaluation of what we would need to do for our safety and security, we decided that making an effective lesbian feminist presence wasn’t possible at the Vancouver Dyke March.
DYKE MARCH VANCOUVER 2020
While the pandemic has brought a whole new set of challenges for lesbians and other women around the world, it opened new possibilities to reclaim the Vancouver Dyke March for lesbians. Obviously, we couldn’t hold a gathering or do a march.
Instead, we created an art installation of lesbians in McSpadden park in East Vancouver, the normal starting point of the Dyke March. We did this to claim the Dyke March as ours and for lesbians. Our installation featured pictures and names of over 50 lesbians activists past and present. We included our website in the display to increase our visibility to those who agree with us, want to support us, or join us.
Over a week, the installation largely remained up along the park fence. The words Dyke March 2020 were removed quickly as was the name of our group, but not before we received several appreciative emails from lesbians who passed by. A few of the lesbian activists were also taken down, particularly those who are gender critical. However, the installation also received a lot of attention from many people passing by who likely hadn’t heard of many of the fantastic lesbians we featured. We made a video of our installation so that it can live on forever. Lesbians will never be erased!
Virtual Dyke march 2020
Lesbians from Vancouver and beyond joined the our virtual Dyke March. Together, even while we are at least 6 feet apart!
