Lesbians take on the UN

This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 33, Summer 1996.

The issue of lesbianism was one of the most contentious at both the official 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and the Non-Governmental Organisation Forum . Jill Radford talks with Margaret Page — a former worker in Hackney Women’s Unit and now a freelance action researcher, including a study of UK participation at Beijing — about the struggles at the conference and how lesbians need to think about ‘bringing Beijing home’.

Jill Radford: Perhaps the first question is what made you decide to go to go to Beijing?

Margaret Page: I heard about the train that was going to Beijing from Helsinki. That really captured my imagination: the idea of several hundred women going on a train with three weeks to get to know each other through organised workshops and discussions, and stop overs with women to greet us and have round table discussions. I love trains and I love to travel and I really got stuck on this idea. But for lots of reasons I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t until I met up with other lesbians planning to go, at a preparatory meeting, that I actually decided to go.

I still did feel envious of the women who had experience of the train journey though. As I predicted, at the Forum they all knew each other, and although they didn’t necessarily do things together, they were already more acclimatised to this huge event by the time they arrived. They had a sort of transitional time to get tuned into the idea of working with women from all over the world.

Jill: You went as an individual woman rather than representing a group?

Margaret: I went as an individual woman, but I had up my sleeve membership of the lesbian caucus and membership of the older women’s caucus. Help Age International had accredited me for the conference and I wanted to contribute something in return. Also one of my good friends was there in an initiating role in that caucus. As a member of the National Women’s Network for International Solidarity, I sent email messages back from the Forum for the bulletins they were producing while the event was going on. So I was loosely connected to several different groupings. I didn’t want to be all the time in the lesbian tent or the older women’s tent. I wanted to be free to move around in different workshops, and get an overview of the process. In particular I was interested in how women at the Forum would influence the Conference. That felt to me like the most exciting part of the event and I wanted to play an active part in it.

Jill: Can you explain how the two parts of the conference connected — the NGO (non-governmental organisations) Forum and the official government Conference at Beijing?

Margaret: The Forum was like a gathering of women’s groups who were active in areas related to the 12 areas of critical concern included in the Draft Global Platform for Action. The Forum was held at Huairou. In contrast the governmental Conference in Beijing was a more formal and very task orientated event. Its goal was to arrive at an agreed language so there would be an agreed Global Platform for Action. The Draft Global Platform for Action had been put together through preparatory regional Conferences held under the auspices of the five UN regional economic Commissions. NGOs organised their own forums at each of the regional conferences.

Jill: Were you able to attend both the Forum and the Conference in Beijing?

Margaret: Yes, to attend either involved a lengthy process of registering and waiting for registrations to be accepted. The Conference was a separate process of registration. You had to be accredited by a national or international NGO. I managed at the last minute to get a place through Help Age International — they were allocated five places as an international NGO (national ones were allocated three places). They had not been able to use all five places and they sorted out my documents for me. I was able to get a Conference Pass without any trouble — which was terrific.

Because of the geographical distance between the Forum and the Conference — it was an hour and a half journey on a shuttle bus — it wasn’t possible to take part in both at the same time. You really had to be based at one to be able to understand and take part in what was going on. I divided my time between the eight days at the Forum at the beginning of my stay and then another ten days at the Conference.

That meant in terms of lesbian activities, I was able to take part in some events at the Forum, in the lesbian tent, which is where we were based and also to take part in the lesbian caucus at the Conference itself and follow some of the progress of how it went and how success­ful we were in terms of influence.

Seeing the world through women’s eyes

Jill: We heard a lot about practical difficulties. I have also heard that women from the South thought some of this was the ‘preciousness’ of some of the Northern women. I’m interested in your perception of the extent to which the difficulties intruded upon or obstructed events.

Margaret: This is a fascinating thing to discuss. We all reacted very differently. This is probably explained by our different cultural expectations about the quality of accommo­dation we would have, the quality of the food, toilets and basic facilities — things we can laugh about, but are really important if you are in a strange place with 30,000 women. It’s quite a shock to your physical system as well as your emotional system. The Forum for example was very dispersed. It was physically demanding to get around. You needed a map of where the workshops were. There were 400 different workshops a day, held in tents, old school buildings, hostels and conference centres. There were 10,000 yellow T-shirted volunteers, men and women, mostly Chinese students. But they didn’t always have map reading skills and we found the maps were wrong sometimes. Imagine feeling very tired and jet lagged, not having the food we are used to, pouring over this telephone directory sized programme the night before, carefully selecting the workshops you wanted to find, setting out early in the morning to find the workshop, then several hours later having to give up.

After a few days I realised this was not the way to go about things. I decided I needed to slow down, unwind and just go with whoever I happened to meet. Because all the time, you were walking alongside women from different countries, different languages, and I would say ‘Where are you going?’ — ‘To a workshop on structural adjustment programmes led by Gabriella from the Philippines, a fantastic feminist group organising on sexual violence and prostitution’. So I’d just go along.

This particular workshop — like all the ones I attended — was highly organised, with very sophisticated and highly articulate speakers from all regions of the world talking about the real effects of structural adjustment programmes on women’s lives at a grass roots level com­bined with micro economic analysis.

I found it inspiring at a very deep level to witness women from every corner of the globe, speaking about every subject you can think about, completely rubbishing the idea that women are only interested in ‘women’s issues’. It really was seeing the world through women’s eyes. And as you walked along, you were seeing women of different races speaking different languages, different national dress all together. Some African women were wearing robes made out of amazing cloth, printed for the Conference, with beautiful head-dresses. I felt very inade­quate in my Stoke Newington shorts and T-shirt! It was a very energising experience.

There were issues about security which did focus on certain areas, certain groups. For example the lesbian tent which was constantly videoed, with security men constantly coming in rifling through the leaflets, looking at the notice boards, training their cameras on women coming and going and also on women sitting there for our 5.00pm meetings. Whilst that was quite unnerving, it was only one small part of what was going on. It would be a mistake to see it as something that prevented us. It didn’t prevent us, it was more an irritation. If you were from a country where there was more political surveil­lance, obviously it was more significant than it was for me for example. Tibetan women in exile who had managed to get in on foreign passports were harassed and followed — it was a great deal more serious for them than it was for us.

We were all worried about security before we left Britain. I was too scared to bring with me the lesbian leaflet written by one of the international lesbian and gay human rights organisations. They were very good leaflets which just explained in basic terms what it means to be a lesbian and it was translated into Chinese. I deliberated but in the end, I didn’t bring the leaflet, I felt ashamed, when I saw that others had brought those leaflets in and hadn’t been deported.

The lesbian leaflet was being distributed and used in the tent very successfully. When I was on the Great Wall with Jamal, a woman who I met from Nepal, she at one point got out the family photos and we sat on the Great Wall and looked at them. I said I hadn’t got any with me and also I was a lesbian. I explained to her as best I could what a lesbian is and she said ‘O, are there a lot of lesbians in London?’, I said: ‘Yes, and especially Hackney!’ We went off on a different subject. At the end of the walk, she asked if I had any sisters. I said ‘No’ and she replied ‘Oh, now I understand why you are a lesbian! In our country there are lots of things you can’t tell your husband but you can tell your sister’. There were lots of occasions like that. I wished I’d had that leaflet to press into her hands. But a lot of the leaflets were given out and a lot of links were made with Chinese women who may or may not have been lesbians.

Jill: Regarding the event as a whole, one woman described it as ‘less a world conference on women, more a women’s conference about the world’.

Margaret: Yes, I would agree with that. It’s why it was so different from the other UN conferences in the series, the Social Summit in Copenhagen, the Human Rights Congress in Vienna or the Conference on Population and Development in Cairo.

Lesbian activism

Jill: Can you tell us a bit more about the lesbian tent. Was it fully international or predominantly western women?

Margaret: The lesbians who were running activities were mostly members of established networks. The two other lesbians from London were constantly in the tent running activities, welcoming women and there were women from the SE Asian networks and Latin American lesbians who seemed to be there a lot. There was a rota for anyone who wanted to volunteer to be there in the day. At 5.00pm every day there was a briefing meeting to share what we had done during the day or to share any plans. There were lots of workshops, a couple of parties, and one evening several hundred lesbians went off to a disco in Beijing with several hundred police! We organised a demonstration at the Forum, and a demon­stration at the official Conference which was a far more risky affair. Several lesbians managed to go into the plenary which was in constant session with a banner which they unrolled which said ‘Lesbian Rights are Human Rights’ — that was on Human Rights day and photo­graphed in the media. We also held press conferences at the Forum and at the Conference. There were a lot of strong public statements that we made as well as less obvious lobbying and the contacts we made. We were very busy, with a full programme of activities at the lesbian tent — 20 workshops on lesbian issues were run as part of the Forum programme at other venues. One of the most dramatic moments was at the Human Rights tribunal when a young American lesbian testified about her incarceration in a psychiatric unit for ‘gender identity disorder’. Her testimony got a standing ovation.

Jill: Can we focus on the politics around lesbianism and sexuality at the official Confer­ence. I understand there were various resolu­tions in the Draft Platform for Action about sexual orientation.

Margaret: There were four references to sexual orientation in the Draft Global Platform for Action and we had them all on our publicity leaflets. Two of the references were in fairly generic paragraphs which listed areas of oppression and referred to categories of women. The other two were more specific, one referred to discrimination in employment and one was a call for legislation to protect lesbians from discrimination. Those four references were there because of lesbian input into preparatory Conferences and NGO forums which had taken place over two years before the conference in all five regions and at the final Preparatory Conference in New York. All of them were in square brackets, which meant they were open to negotiation at the Conference. The task of the official Conference was to remove the square brackets to make an agreed Global Platform for Action. This meant the role of legal advisors and lawyers was very significant at the Conference, because the wording and its implications were very important.

Jill: My understanding is that at the end of the day, there was no agreement on these points so all references to sexual orientation were removed from the Global Platform for Action.

Margaret: That’s right, at the end of the day, all references to lesbians were deleted from the document. One could either say it was a failure because all references were deleted. Or see it as a success in getting sexual orientation debated as a mainstream issue at an international conference of this scale. That is a major achievement. It was not a marginal issue, but one of the key issues that was a focus of the divide between the Muslim/Catholic coalition and other countries at the Conference. So it was being debated in the working groups and plenaries of the Conference, right up to the last minute. We did succeed in getting para 97 included in the document which was a signifi­cant advance even on the Cairo Conference.

Paragraph 97 talks about women’s right to decide free from coercion or control not in relation to ‘sexual orientation’ but ‘on matters related to their sexuality including sexual and reproductive health’. How it is interpreted will depend on testing, if not in courts, in terms of policy formulation by national governments.

Another illustration of the support, the positive result of the work we did, was that 20 countries agreed a statement of support drawn up by the lesbian caucus which stated that wherever the phrase ‘and any other status’ appeared in the document, they would interpret it as including sexual orientation.

Jill: Was the UK one of those 20?

Margaret: The European Union was — fortunately for us, the UK didn’t speak as an individual country. Of course the UK is also committed to implementing the ECE Regional Platform for Action which clearly defined the human rights of women to include sexual oritentation. We had one vote through the European Union and this meant more support than we could have expected from the UK government alone. Other countries which signed the statement included Canada, Slovenia, Latvia, Israel, Jamaica, South Africa, New Zealand, and Norway and the Cook Islands. What was striking was that it wasn’t a straight divide, north vs south or Islamic Countries and Vatican versus a united front of secular countries. There were countries from the South strongly support­ing sexual orientation as well, and not all Muslim or Catholic countries were part of the Muslim-Catholic coalition.

Jill: Where did the obstructions come from?

Margaret: The Holy See (the Vatican) suppor­ted by Iran, Egypt, Sudan and some other G77 countries. They tried to frame the issue as one of respecting culture whereas we were trying to frame it as a human rights issue. It was a coalition between fundamentalist Muslims, Catholics, Protestants with right-wing funda­mentalist Americans over family, religion, sexuality.

Talking us in or out

Jill: Can you tell us something about the processes of this discussion?

Margaret: The conference organised through a main committee which appointed two working groups. Their task was to find agreed language for the paragraphs they were allocated. To achieve this, working sub-groups had been set up. You can imagine the task, trying to arrive at agreement given the wide range of opinions on lesbianism — north and south versions of extreme fundamentalism to radical feminism.

One of the things a friend, who was a member of one of the sympathetic government delegations, and a lesbian, told me, was that she found many lesbians coming up to her from other govern­ment delegations to thank her for speaking up on lesbian issues, because they could not be ‘out’ to their government delega­tion. So there was a lot of hidden support for the lesbian issue, which could not be made explicit, but most have been important to how the discussions went.

It is also useful to understand that govern­ment delegations were made up not just of of government representatives but also NGO representatives. Who the NGOs were depended on the different mechanisms countries set up to nominate them. For example, the Canadians were careful to ensure the full diversity of women were represented, including lesbians and women of colour. In contrast the UK delegations had only two NGO representatives, both representing NGOs working on develop­ment issues for women.

Another issue was the position of the US delegation. They had previously been strong in their support for keeping sexual orientation in the document. But they weren’t able to be so up front about their support because of the Repub­lican influence. They knew when they got back they would be called to account because of the hostility within the US government to their participation in the event. So it is important to recognise the influence of political forces back home, for each delegation, on what they felt able to say and do on sexual orientation.

I think this shows how important it is that we work hard to build coalitions and to work with a wide range of women’s groups, including straight women who may not have formally supported lesbian issues. The work that we did at the Forum was an example of this: having the lesbian tent; having 20 workshops outside the tent on issues like human rights, lesbian health, young lesbians, as well as the setting up of new lesbian networks in Africa and the Caribbean and possibly Central and Eastern Europe and the strengthening of existing lesbian networks in SE Asia. Every day hundreds of women came to the tent to find out about what it means to be lesbian. We did manage to strike up conversa­tions with Muslim and Catholic women who might be under pressure to be hostile. Our demon­stration on the Forum site was attended by over 500 women. It got a very good, very positive response. I felt really proud to be at that demonstration.

As the Forum went on there was a mood change from the intense workshops about what was wrong with the world, to emphatic demon­strations about what we wanted to put right in it, and then we went on to action planning. It felt psychologically important to me to have that demonstration, a real coming out: an assertion that lesbian rights are human rights; that lesbian rights are women’s rights; that as lesbians we are part of the mainstream, not some marginal group. It felt very important to be making these points and connections with all the women at the Forum. This is quite apart from the influ­ence we had at the Conference itself. All of that work will pay off now, I think, in follow up if it is to mean anything to us as lesbians. We will have to work with national governments, for us that means the Conservative government and through regional networks and structures within the EU, for example. So all that work we did making links with other women who came from the UK, straight women who might have formerly been hostile, through personal relation­ships we built as well as the political issues we raised, hopefully will now pay off. We must continue to build on and take this work forward.

Lesbians organised

Jill: Perhaps you could say a little more about the workings of the lesbian caucus at the Conference itself?

Margaret: We began each day with a morning meeting where we had briefings both from NGOs and UN officials about what the main negotiation issues were going to be on the day ahead and also what had been achieved the day before. This enabled us to know what the lobbying issues were. At the meeting we also had a briefing from one of the caucuses, including the lesbian caucus.

The morning meetings were organised by a group called the Ekipo made up of one represen­tative of each of the NGO caucuses and one representative from the CSW — UN Women’s Commission that organised the Conference. It was their job to set the frame for morning meeting. Some caucuses were what you could call identity caucuses — lesbians, migrant workers, refugee women, women of color. There were also five regional caucuses. Altogether there were about 30 caucuses, each allocated 1 hour meeting space per day in the official building allocated for NGOs at the official Conference site in Beijing.

Those meetings were extremely focused and task oriented. Particularly important was the experience of some of the women in lesbian caucus who had been active internationally before, who understood the workings of the conference, knew how to lobby and how to influence the proceedings. We would hear from them what had been achieved the day before, what the task was on the day ahead, who we should lobby.

We would also have very strategic discus­sions. One example was that at one point we had to decide whether to drop ‘sexual orien­tation’ and go for ‘sexual rights’. We had to weigh up whether there would be more of a chance of succeeding if ‘sexual rights’ was used in those four paragraphs instead of ‘sexual orientation’ or whether this would leave us open to being interpreted as being paedophiles and into bestiality which was some of the propa­ganda being put round by the fundamentalists at the Conference.

We were also able to secure one of the highly sought after NGO speaking slots, which enabled a representative from the lesbian caucus to address the UN Conference. Beverly Palesa Ditsie, a young black South African lesbian was the speaker chosen by the lesbian caucus. Caucus members worked on the draft of her speech with her. Its aim was to make maximum impact to counter the negative propaganda put out by fundamentalists, to educate government delegates about anti-lesbian discrimination and human rights violations, and to inspire govern­ment delegations to support retaining sexual orientation in the Platform of Action.

So that was how we organised at the conference. During the day we would lobby the EU, our own government or any other govern­ment — we could lobby any government we chose, just by standing around in the corridors or through the offices they have set up in their hotel on the Conference site. We would also attend some of the many other caucus meetings that were going on. There was the European lobby and one on alternative economics for example. So there was a lot going on in the Conference.

We had a lot of work to do with media to counter the very negative images that were being put out about the whole event. One of the problems we had was that the journalists didn’t want to hear about all the positive work we were doing. All they wanted to know about were the brushes we had had with the security or the fracas at the Forum when there had been some sort of bust up with the fundamentalists. They just went on and on at us to tell them about that.

Bringing Beijing home

Jill: What do you see as key things that came out of Beijing for us in the UK to follow up and develop?

Margaret: There is an awful lot of work to be done to counter the negative news reports that were put out. Everyone here seems really surprised when I refer to anything positive about the Conference. They think that it rained a lot, there was a lot of mud, we had a horrid time. Then they switch to the Chinese human rights record and the surveillance. All of those things were true but every single woman I have spoken to, and this includes myself, came back with a really deep sense of commitment to working on feminist issues, from a feminist perspective. Speaking for myself, it has given me a much broader vision of what that means and also having witnessed and taken part in making direct links with women from other regions, especially the Southern regions, has been really important to me in broadening my view — that and the knowledge that women are organising and a loyalty to keep up with it.

I think that has even got through to the Tory women and civil servants who went to represent our government. I have noticed at the meetings I’ve been to since Beijing, there does seem to be a real determi­nation, even from the government delegation, to see that something comes of this. I am not under any illusions that they will make far-reaching changes to their policies or become feminist, but I think what we are going to see is a much clearer Tory agenda for women. We mustn’t lose the opportunity it opens up of working with them on certain defined areas where we can build on that. I think we owe it to each other and to women to do that.

For lesbians it means perhaps being prepared to work with women whom we perhaps otherwise wouldn’t have previously looked to for support — to make the point that we are not prepared to go back to just working with lesbian groups alone. Rather, from our base groups we will take our issues into the main­stream and not allow them to be marginal­ised again. All this would be incredibly hard work. I am speaking for myself here, but I think perhaps we need to become more strategic in identifying areas where there is a real chance of getting results, and being willing to put other issues aside, so that we don’t lose the chance to achieve results in what we may consider limited areas at the moment. But all of that requires some organised networks or groupings. This is what starts to make me depressed because I don’t at the moment see the spaces for doing this.

Jill: Were there any plans made by lesbians while you were in China to do that, to find spaces to meet again to maintain contacts either internationally or among the women from the UK?

Margaret: There was a commit­ment made to set up a regional East-West network, and this was to be discussed at a conference in Riga, Latvia in December 1995. A lot of informal links were made and renewed, for example, women from former Yugoslavia, some of whom were lesbians, and were able to speak about their work to link women across ethnic divides and those links will continue.

Here in the UK, there are a few of us who met before going to Beijing and worked together to publicise efforts to get lesbian issues onto the agenda, and are now working together to keep the issues on the agenda in discussions with the government delegation about implementation of the Global Platform. These negotiations will focus on interpretation of paragraph 97. We have noticed a great deal more open support for our interventions from other participants and from civil servants since we all came back from Beijing. We are now trying to find ways of keeping up the momentum and ensuring that our issues do not get lost.

Jill: Are there any plans in place for some sort of Conference or workshop for lesbians in the UK to receive some feedback from Beijing and to think about ways of taking things forward?

Margaret: The three of us who went to Beijing have already organised a follow-up meeting in London; ten lesbians came despite the snow and there was some interest in follow-up. All of us have spoken at various other meetings, for example the RADS group, an open meeting organised by LB Lewisham Equalities Unit, to students on courses on which we teach, as well as informal gatherings organised by friends. Besides this we try to raise the issues in workshops at the various follow-up conferences which continue to be held. But workshops tend to be on policy themes or the Critical Areas of Concern, and do not address lesbians directly.

I think we do need to think of ways of increasing lesbian involvement in the follow-up process, and we can do this both by organising specific lesbian information evetns as well as by publicising our existence at more mainstream events. A start would be for more lesbians to get onto the mailing lists for consultation about the implementation process, by using the address list below, and to invite us to come and speak at their meetings. We have got some wonderful photographs of the lesbian tent and the Forum and Conference, as well as of Beijing itself and the Great Wall!

Then we need to find ways of educating straight women who are committed to working for implementation of the Global Platform, and getting their support for our lobbying. We have got to make them see that we want paragraph 97 interpreted to include us.

Cheryl Gillan, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State and Minister responsible for co-ordinating work on women, has made strong statements of commitment to working in partnership with NGOs in implementation, and to mainstreaming gender within government policy making. This will be implemented through the Cabinet Subcommittee on Women, serviced by the Sex and Race Equality Branch of the Department of Employment and Education. We need to get involved in this process now, using our positions within the organisations for which we work if we can, and of course the campaign­ing organisations to which we belong, to put pressure on the government, and the Labour Party to tell us, for example, when they are going to repeal Clause 28; how they are going to implement paragraph 97, and their commitment in the Regional Platform for Action ‘to achieve by the year 2000 a more equitable… society, …based on the principle that the human rights of women… must reflect the full diversity of women, …and recognising that sexual orien­tation is an additional barrier.’