On Returning from Women’s Land

Reflections on and gratitude for female space <3

Last month, I spent five days camping in the woods with 750 other women. By women, I mean female human beings. There were women of all different ages and walks of life. Many of these women were lesbians. Some had taken testosterone or undergone double mastectomies before accepting their female bodies. All of the women who flocked to the woods for the event did so with the intention of attending a solely female gathering. There was music, yoga, crafting, dancing, and discussion. I will not disclose the name or location of this gathering, because there are people who would seek to destroy it simply for the fact that it is an intentionally female space. I will not disclose the names of the women I met there because it is possible that doing so would threaten their careers and/or social lives.

I’ve been out as a lesbian for almost a decade, and yet I did not know about women’s lands or women’s festivals until a couple of years ago. When I began publicly exploring my questions and concerns about gender ideology on this Substack, I was deeply immersed in queer culture. I knew that sharing my thoughts would lead to rejection, but I could no longer function in spaces or relationships where I could not be honest about my experiences as a lesbian woman. While I anticipated rejection, I did not anticipate finding a secret underground community of like-minded lesbians. 

I remember the moment vividly. I was sitting under my favorite tree at the park when a woman who had been reading my work online reached out and asked if she could give me a call. I didn’t know this woman, and for a moment I was suspicious of her intentions, but I decided to take the call. 

“Okay,” she took a deep breath as if to steady herself. “Have you ever heard of women’s lands?” 

“Like, lesbian separatist stuff?” I asked. I remembered reading a bit about the lesbian separatist movement in college. I had learned that it was unsustainable and had died out decades ago.

“Sort of…” she said. 

Then she began talking a mile a minute. She explained that since the 1970s, women had been buying land and creating female communities. They built their own dwellings, managed their resources, and invited their friends to come live and gather on the land. In the 1970s, when being outed a lesbian could have dire consequences on a woman’s life and career, these communities remained private for the safety of their members. As the gay rights movement succeeded in gaining legal rights and societal acceptance for lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, these gatherings could be held more publicly. For a while, women who loved and wanted to gather with other women did not have to hide. There was a thriving lesbian feminist culture of music, festivals, and women’s spirituality.

However, the rise of transgender identification and medical transition in the 2000s changed things. Activists proudly proclaimed that “trans women are women”, and therefore should be welcome at women’s festivals and on women’s lands. While some women agreed with this concept, others did not. A rift formed in women’s communities, gender activists began protesting female-only spaces as exclusionary and discriminatory, and women’s festivals, gatherings, and organizations around the world were made to choose between opening their doors to males on the basis of self-identification, or facing intense backlash from activists. Some organizations changed their definition of “woman”, or opened their spaces and events up to anyone who identified with it. Others simply shut down, unable to manage the extreme backlash they faced when they chose to keep their events female. 

All of this was told to me on the phone as I sat with my back pressed against the trunk of a tall coniferous tree. All I could think was wow. I had not known this history. I had not known that female spaces, lesbian spaces had existed on such a wide scale and then been taken away. I had been completely unaware. The woman on the phone told me that while women’s lands and festivals had faced a lot of backlash in the last decade, they were not gone. They had simply gone underground, functioning through word of mouth and keeping their public presence as minimal as possible. She told me that if I wanted, she could vouch for me and connect me to a network of women who would welcome me into their gatherings and onto their land. I, of course, gratefully accepted her offer. 

The moment felt surreal. Just a couple of months previously, my girlfriend had attended a film screening of The Unlikely Story of the Lesbians of First Friday. She had come home gushing about how these lesbian women living in the Bible Belt in the 1980s had created a private and protected community through word of mouth. How this community had allowed women to accept themselves and live and love as they pleased even in a culture full of homophobia and sexism. I sat there under that coniferous tree thinking, it’s 2022 and yet here we still are. Here, in this modern era, in the very progressive city where I lived, lesbians were still forced to gather in secret out of fear for their safety. 

I visited my first women’s land that summer, attending a small but powerful gathering near my city. The land was beautiful, and there was a stunning octagonal dwelling on it, built and painted by women’s hands. I met many wonderful women there; we swam naked in the creek and sang Goddess songs under the stars on top of a low hill overlooking the property. I ended up moving soon after that, and did not return to women’s lands for a while. I focused on my education and my career. I shut down my Substack out of fear of cancellation and ostracization. I still spoke openly about gender at home with my girlfriend, but in my public life I learned to keep my thoughts and opinions to myself (well, for the most part). 

Last month, after two years away, I returned once more to women’s lands. This time I visited a different land and attended a much larger gathering. My girlfriend and I drove two days to get there, spending a night sleeping in our car as rain poured down around us and lightning lit up the sky. When we arrived at the land an older woman greeted us with,

“Welcome home, sisters.”

We looked at each other hesitantly. Sisters? Home? Within a couple of days, we would begin to understand what she had meant. 

We set up our small, two-person tent in the woods around hundreds of others. Women hung flags with slogans like “Cultivate Lesbian Joy”. Someone set up a mini-tent with two (lesbian) Barbies inside. One tent resembled a log cabin, with stone masonry and logs painted on the canvas. All around the land, poems by female writers were hung on trees. The showers were open-air and communal, with women of all ages and body types chatting pleasantly in the sun as they bathed. 

I spent the next five days surrounded by women (and some children). I practiced yoga under a tree called Grandmother Oak, sang “My Body is a Living Temple of Love” in sacred women’s circle, and attended workshops like “Misogyny, Internalized Misogyny, and the Disappearing Butch”, and “The Internet Sucks”. 

One night, around the fire pit, an elder offered to teach us harvest dances that she had learned from an elder in her time. We bared our breasts to the flame and danced, imitating the tilling of the soil, the planting of the seeds, the growth and the harvesting. It was unlike any experience I had before. I felt in my body the knowledge that women had been dancing around the fire like this for longer than recorded history. It felt completely right.

Joining a group of young women, I attended a film screening of the photography and videos of a lesbian photographer who had come out in the 1970s and been blacklisted by the FBI for being homosexual. She captured sweet and loving moments between herself and her lesbian friends in an attempt to show that despite society’s prejudice against gays and lesbians, they were loving, wholesome, and joyful people. As the photographer described her friends and the community they had built together, tears came to the eyes of many of the young women present. 

“They look just like us,” someone cried!

In the “queer community” I often hear young people lamenting the lack of “queer elders”. I understand the sentiment. Meeting women who had been out and part of lesbian community for decades was incredibly healing and inspired great hope in me. At this festival, I was struck by the realization that our elders are here, in the woods, gathering in female community. Queer ideologues struggle to find and connect with their elders because many elders do not want to be called “queer” and do not identify with a word that, to them, is a violent slur. Not only that, but they see the world very differently than young queer people do. To them, woman means female, and lesbian means female homosexual. They lived through a time period where they faced discrimination for being female and homosexual, so these words are meaningful and important to them. 

At one workshop titled “Younger Women Speak, Older Women Listen”, an older woman began to cry. She was about five feet tall, thin with short white hair. Some younger women had been proclaiming that they didn’t care if trans women entered the space, and that using language to define sex and gender was colonial and oppressive. I pushed back, stating that all cultures use language and define words, and that while some women’s spaces could certainly include trans women, it is also important to honor the need for female-only gatherings. Near the end of the discussion, this older woman raised her hand. With tears in her eyes, she pleaded, “Can us ‘terf’ people have our spaces?”

I was struck by the realization that this small old woman, probably in her seventies or eighties was the evil “terf” that young queer and trans “activists” vowed to punch and to murder. This woman, who simply wanted to gather in the woods with other women, was the person who was called a nazi. She sat there with tears in her eyes and a waver in her voice, not trying to do harm to trans people, but simply trying to express her desire to gather in female space. Simply asking, can we not have a space of our own? I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment. I wish I could share it with all of the young “queer” women who have been convinced that their elders are their enemies. 

In addition to the many wonderful older women that I met that week, I also met some younger women who were like a breath of fresh air. As we sat around the fire one night, a young butch woman I had recently met struck up a conversation about gender ideology, 

“So, were you lost in the sauce?” she asked. “How’d you get out?” 

“I don’t know,” I told her, “I just started…thinking. Asking questions. Noticing things that didn’t make sense.”

She laughed, “sorry I’m a genius!” 

I started laughing too. Then she told me that she had begun to question gender ideology when she noticed a pattern of “trans women” brushing their genitals up against her in queer spaces. This had happened to her not once, not twice, but multiple times. 

“They see butches as something to be conquered,” she said. When I heard this my laughter died and I began to tremble with rage.

I had many conversations like this with the young women I met. Everyone I spoke to had at one point believed in gender ideology. Some had identified as trans and medicalized that identity to varying degrees; others had dated trans women despite a lack of attraction because they had been coerced into believing that sexual rejection was discrimination. In all cases, they were saved from situations that were harming their minds and bodies by their own critical thinking and their ability to discuss these issues with other women. I am so grateful to each and every woman who shared her story with me that week. 

This is what happens when women gather and speak in private. We share experiences and find common threads. Often these threads point to male domination, manipulation, and sexual violence. We heal each other. The older women provide examples of happy, fulfilling lesbian lives. The younger women provide hope that the movement for female and lesbian liberation continues on. We women need each other. We need to be able to gather in female community because the felt sense of safety that it provides is unlike anything else. When we feel safe we can speak freely, form loving relationships, and examine the painful wounding that must be addressed in order for a woman to heal. There is a reason that private female gatherings in nature have been demonized since the witch trials (and likely even before that). There is something magical and powerful that happens. Something that is only for us.