[EN] "Lesbian Uprising": Our statement on the Dyke March Hamburg on 5 August 2022
The Dyke March Hamburg 2022 was preceded by the announcement that Markus "Tessa" Ganserer, a man married to a woman, father of two children and member of the Bundestag, who has in the past attracted attention for misogynistic behaviour, would speak at the Dyke March Hamburg.
Accordingly, one of our signs:
In the end, Markus Ganserer did not show up at the Dyke March despite "full solidarity" from Hamburg's mayor Katharina Fegebank.
This time, the march was accompanied by a group of so-called parliamentary observers, i.e. MPs whose job is supposed to be to keep an eye on the police in case of police abuse of demonstrators (this will be important later).
The group of four parliamentary observers consisted of Farid Müller (far left in the image) from the Green Party Hamburg, who is also spokesperson for queer politics, Miriam Block from the Green Party Hamburg (centre), who sees "queer feminism" as one of her main topics and who herself has contributed to the fact that the Green Party's women's statute potentially includes every man: "The term 'women' covers everyone who defines themselves in this way."1
On the far right of the picture is @ruthannover. We could not find any more details about her. We assume that she is a friend of Ms Block. Dr. Carola Ensslen, queer policy spokesperson of the Left Party in Hamburg, spokesperson for Refugees and Migration, Constitution and Queer, member of the Committee for Equality and Anti-Discrimination, is not in the picture.
Mr Kost is in the background of the picture.
The Dyke March started and was moving unusually fast. We decided to gather in the closing square to display our signs and banners, but the procession was so fast that it caught up with us and passed us by.
In the process, a group of policemen accompanying the march saw us in the side alley. The policemen approached us and asked us what we were doing here.
We were told that we had already been warned. On our assurance that we would behave peacefully, as always, we were allowed to participate in the regular way and the group of policemen led us into the demo.
As it turned out, which we didn't know at the time, we were led towards the "enby:galactic + trans:tastic" block.
The first hostility was immediate: a woman said to us "Brah, fuck off the demo, you fucking cunts" and pushed a lesbian from behind.
We didn't walk for long. A few metres further on, we turned into Danziger Straße. Immediately afterwards, the waggon leading the train came to a halt further ahead in the street and thus stopped the train.
The longer we stood, the more aggressive the trans activists surrounding us became.
"Cornelia" Kost, a man and Green Party member, gave a speech behind us over a megaphone in front of the "enby:galactic + trans:tastic" banner.
Also on site in the "Transblock" was "Maya", a man who calls himself a "lesbian" and a "mother" and who has already attracted attention online for statements like this:
The following assault was described by Miriam Block, a parliamentary observer present, in an interview with "enby:galactic + trans:tastic": "There was a little moment where a [sic!] person from the fringe tried to take a flag away from the people who were going into the demo and that was the moment when the police surrounded them [the real Dyke March]". (Minute 10:11).2
How "small" this moment was is subjective, but in any case it was brief and brutal.
About five people attacked the front of our group together in a coordinated manner, including two men who, as a woman from our group who was standing at the back saw it, came from behind and held two of our women from behind.
They tried to destroy our big black banner. One woman came from behind, yanked the banner down and tried to break the bamboo sticks holding it, but they did not give way. She twisted the black banner as if to wring it out. While her accomplices were already running away, the same woman scratched a lesbian woman who had been standing behind the banner, first on the arm and then punched past her face, so that the attacking woman hit the lesbian's lip.
We had only a few seconds to gather ourselves again. The crowd surrounding us now began to yell "TERFs go home!", steadily swelling.
The police then surrounded us and pushed us off the road. This was accompanied by the jeering and applause of outsiders. We were taken out of the demonstration like aggressors by the police, even though the police must have been watching the assault closely because they were near us the whole time and even detained one of the attackers.
A 79-year-old lesbian who was part of our group was brutally pushed several times by the police and got scared. When we reached the side, a policeman shouted "Against the wall!". Finally we stood at the side while the police surrounded us.
We had to hand in our identity cards. A woman who had forgotten her identity card was searched. Two young women who saw us standing to the side asked the police what we were being held for, to which they replied that we had the duty to register as a gathering, although we were participants in the demonstration and had received explicit permission from the police to take part. Moreover, we were "disturbing" the demonstration.
A group of boys around 13 years old told us that they had observed everything closely and if they could serve as witnesses. They also asked why we had been attacked.
We also had to register a spontaneous demonstration at the place chosen by the police (the alternative would have been prosecution for an unregistered assembly). Despite the spontaneous demonstration, we were told by the police that we would have to wait until the train had completely passed and that we were not allowed to show our signs and banners until then. We were also not allowed to enter Danziger Straße until 7pm, the end of the demonstration.
At 7pm we asked the police for permission to hand out flyers at the end place. We were allowed to do this as long as we did not show or hold up our signs and banners. The police at Karl-von-Ossietzky-Platz were informed by radio.
So we went as a group to the final square. There were still a lot of people and a lot of police gathered there.
We tried to hand out flyers. Most of them were torn up and we were shown the middle finger.
Two women were harassed by an aggressive man in high heels and a skirt on the end square of the demo (see video by Radfem Berlin). He pushed back the lesbian who was handing out flyers and also grabbed her over the chest in return. When a second woman turned her back to him, he aggressively approached her and yelled "HEY!", whereupon several bystanders ordered us to put our mobile phones away. A group of police officers approached us and the man but did not intervene. (See video by Radfem Berlin, or here in full length with English subtitles).
The lesbian, whom the man had just harassed, immediately approached the police. She was "polluting" and therefore had to take back all the flyers on the ground.
The man in the skirt aggressively asked us our age, our names and where we lived. ("How old are you?" "What's your name?" "Where are you from?").
"Are you loony to divide?"
"We're not dividing, are we? We want to have our own spaces."
"There's a conservative existence of femaleness/femininity here [note: "Weiblichkeit" can mean both]." "You're discriminating against me." "Just because I was born a man, I don't have the right to be here?"
This was followed by another request from several women to turn off our mobile phones.
A friend of the man in high heels with a grey cap also told the lesbian whom the man in the skirt had just harassed that the man in the skirt was "a thousand times more feminine" and "a thousand times more beautiful" than her, while the man in the skirt lectured about the "feminine feeling" he had inside him.
One trans activist woman very aggressively walked up to the small group of lesbians standing in front of the two men, pushed her way into the group, put her mobile phone in the women's faces and said "I can violate your human rights too."
The police now decided to clear the square, so we gathered and went around the corner. The group with the two aggressive men and the aggressive woman followed us. In front of a bar around the corner, the man in the skirt argued again with one of us, calling her "stupid" and "underdeveloped".
After a short break, our group set off in the direction of the main railway station. After a while, we noticed that the same people were standing there again in a group with some distance to us. In the meantime it had become dark.
We ended the day in a bar. Contrary to claims to the contrary, we did not get kicked out of any pub; however, the question arises as to how our meeting place was so precisely known. Apparently we were still being watched.
"Attack"
Several times it was falsely claimed, among others by Mr Kost, that an "attack" had taken place by us.
Each of us (except for the woman with the megaphone) carried at least one sign, many of which had to be held with both hands because they were very large or to protect the signs from being stolen, as has happened at other Dyke Marches.
Then a 79-year-old woman with a chronic lung disease was part of the group.
As always before and in the future, we behaved peacefully, which cannot be said of the other side.
State Violence
We criticise the role of the parliamentary observers because we see a fundamental danger of a violation of the separation of powers. It is striking that only members of parliament with trans-queer ideological views observed the Dyke March Hamburg.
We suspect that the parliamentary observers were given the task of finding us as quickly as possible and having us removed immediately by the police.
At the Dyke March Hamburg, the police had obviously acted in the interests of some groups, e.g. the Dyke March Orga, which was also observed discussing this with the police beforehand. We suspect that the police had been instructed to
portray us as aggressors as much as possible and
to prevent us from showing our signs or distributing material. It is quite possible and likely that the real Dyke March was portrayed to the police as "extremely dangerous" before the demo, in order to induce the police to act in a more extreme way.
The wording used to allow us to participate is also interesting, as we were told we would be removed if there were any problems; however, it was never claimed that the police would not also remove us if we were assaulted. So was the aim of the trans activists to stop the train until the aggression around us exploded and then have the police remove us?
"Against the wall!" on the part of the police is also seen by us as an attempt at intimidation.
How can it be that in a democracy the expression of a different opinion is restricted by or with the help of the police?
"Radical Feminists Wanted to Provoke Violence"
Once again, Georg "Georgine" Kellermann and the TAZ3, among others, accuse us of "provoking violence" or an "aggressive [...] reaction" or even "physical violence". And once again we point out that
this is an admission that there is a willingness to do violence to us. Apparently, we trigger a desire for violence in these people,
that being openly and loudly homosexual and standing up for homosexuality, being born exclusively attracted to the same sex and standing up for it publicly is a "provocation" to which it is appropriate to respond with violence, thus legitimising lesbophobic hate crimes,
that the language of abusers4 is used here.
The TAZ further claims that an escalation could be prevented. Unfortunately, there is no trace of this, as the attack on us shows.
Strangely enough, the attack on us is not mentioned with a single (!) word, although members of the "enby:galactic + trans:tastic" block stood behind us at a distance of a few metres, including Mr Kost himself and all bystanders, so they must have observed it.
All queer ideologically infiltrated associations, organisations and media seem to have agreed to "report" about us according to DARVO tactics:
Deny or conceal that attacks on us are taking place,
accuse us of violence,
accuse us of "misanthropy",
use political power and opinion-making to sell this inversion as facts.
In plain language, this means that lesbians who are inconvenient for trans-queer ideologues must expect to be blamed by the press and politicians for violence they have experienced. This is an extremely worrying development.
We demand a statement from all public eyewitnesses, including Lesben Gegen Rechts [Lesbians Against the Rightwing], Moritz Haberland and Eli Kappo in their positions as influencers, "Maya", the "Dyke* March Hamburg" organisation and Mr Kost about the attack and why it was not reported in the first place or not reported on truthfully.
We are also waiting for clarification from the LesbenRing e.V. and Dr. phil. Dominik "Dana" Mahr, who have uncritically adopted the "report" by "Maya".