Lesbian Visibility Week 2025: A Personal Reflection – Staff Blog
- Heather Paterson
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
This week marks Lesbian Visibility Week, a time I’ve always valued as a queer woman. It offers a moment to pause, reflect, celebrate, and uplift the diverse voices and experiences of lesbians and other LGBTQIA women and non-binary people across the UK. But this year, that celebration feels bittersweet.
Just days ago, the UK Supreme Court within their ruling gave their definition of lesbian as being a biological female who is sexually oriented towards biological females, based solely on attraction to a person’s biological sex, not their gender identity.
We need to take the time to digest the full implications of the ruling and to understand what this will mean on both legal and practical levels. However, how it feels to myself, and many other lesbians I have spoken with in recent days, is that that narrow and exclusionary definition doesn’t include us and our own lived experience.
As a queer woman attracted to other women, including trans women, and some non-binary people, it feels like my identity is being attempted to be written out of the law, that someone else is saying that they get to define me. This definition doesn’t just erase trans lesbians or deny the existence of non-binary and intersex people; it also invalidates cis (not trans or non-binary) and endosex (not intersex) lesbians who are attracted to trans women or non-binary or intersex people, those who came out later in life after relationships with men, and anyone whose lived experience of love and attraction falls outside their rigid boxes.
The irony that this decision was handed down just before Lesbian Visibility Week is not lost on me. A week that should be about celebrating the full, messy, beautiful spectrum of lesbian identity now coincides with a legal ruling that appears to tell many of us we don’t belong.
It’s devastating that in 2025 we are still fighting for the basic right to define ourselves, to have our identities respected, our relationships recognised, and to be visible with our lives seen in all their complexity. This ruling is a stark reminder of how fragile progress can be, and how fiercely we must continue to defend it.
But here’s the thing: I’m still here. We are still here.
The community I know and love is rich in its diversity. We are cis and trans, femme and butch, non-binary and gender-nonconforming. We are people who love and live with courage. And we are not defined by court rulings or reductive definitions.
At Consortium, we work every day supporting our members to ensure that LGBT+ people, especially those from marginalised and underrepresented communities, are seen, supported, and celebrated. That work now continues with even more urgency.
Lesbian identity is not one-dimensional. It is fluid, expansive, and beautifully complex. And for all of us who feel erased or invalidated by this ruling: this week, I’m not just celebrating lesbian visibility. I’m claiming my space, alongside every lesbian who refuses to be legislated out of existence.
So, here’s to claiming space, telling our stories, and showing up for one another, today, this week, and every week.
You are seen. You are valued.
Our identities are real. Our love is valid.
Only we can define ourselves, and no court ruling will ever take that away from us.
Solidarity and pride,
Heather Paterson (She/her), Head of Partnerships and Development
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