On Be-ing Lesbian and Feminist

Apr 09, 2025

Below is a copy of my comment written in response to Anna Wharton’s post “It's Time To Be More Madonna...”

“Thanks for your enthusiasm and support for women as creative change makers. Anna. One day I hope I can get up early enough ;-# to join with you and the other couragous women writing about change in your monthly workshops.

I feel moved to offer a glimpse into my life is a tiny example of how women have excelled in reinventing ourselves for survival into a new sense of Be-ing. My story is one of relative privilege as a white woman in an industrialised so-called advanced country. Yet I know from my life experience and research that women of all social, cultural, economic and geographical sectors can be inspired to follow and be pathbreakers and leaders simply by reinventing ourselves, saying 'No,' whatever the cost, to what is being forced upon us.

I'm a Boomer aged 76 years, a survivor of the Swinging 60s, Beatle mania, flower power optimism, and huge socio-cultural change, such as the counter culture, civil rights and lesbian and gay liberation movements. Then, in the early 1970s, I and the rest of my generation had a rude awakening with the inflationary crisis, the oil crisis and political and economic instability of the early 1970s (sound familiar?). Change was forced upon us, as it is today. As a woman in Australia in 1972, I seized an opportunity to reinvent myself through personal tragedy and idealistic values in education, after I lost my sense of being and identity, as a healthy wife and future mother.

But that was also when Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister and his feminist wife supported his Labor government in bringing in radical reform that revolutionised women's lives. This allowed droves of 'mature age' women like me, too poor and with too little belief in myself beforehand, now to enter university and even be paid a small stipend to study!

It didn't take long for the forces resisting his changes to undermine Whitlam's government. About this same time, though, I had come to believe even more in myself, enough to reinvent myself into an aspiring Research Scientist in the new and exciting field of genetics. About four years and another reinvention later, I became politicised as a postgraduate into another reinvention--to translate my personal changes into a new, dynamic sense of agency and be-ing, as an academic studying and teaching about scientific, technological and socio-political change. A few more years of political growth (and the maturity that comes from the aging process) brought me to feminism and profound personal change in claiming a new reality of Be-ing as a lesbian feminist. As Mary Daly has described, it is 'the Ultimate/Intimate Reality in which we (all creatures) participate in by be-ing ourSelves' (Amazon Grace 2006, p.48) I have never looked back since then.

Those and subsequent socio-political, economic and techno-scientific changes have brought enormous personal changes for me and many other women--both losses and gains, whether in our relationships, employment, economic positions, status, disillusionment with corporatised education, not much in the way of a formal career but so much more in many other valuable life experiences.

Even my feminist lesbianism has been rejected by feminist claims I am 'really' bisexual. But our conflicting views depend on whether or not one believes in biologically determined sexuality. I don't believe that's a scientifically provable 'fact', just as I don't believe in gender identity as a 'fact'. I do believe in the power of political persuasion, whether it applies to the positive ideology of lesbian feminism or the destructive power of gender identity deology that is attempting to destroy our hard fought for rights as women, whatever our sexuality. I am, of course, willing to admit to a different (unquestioned) past heterosexuality that I have soundly rejected in a long-term unchanging reinvention of myself as lesbian and feminist. I refuse a 'fixed' yet 'fluid' bisexuality, somehow freefloating outside a context of time and agency and political choice.

The Expanding Universe of Be-ing

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