Lesbian Visibility Day Manifesto 2020

One more year, today April 26 we claim the Day of Lesbian Visibility. We demand visibility, because lesbians continue to live in a reality in which we are systematically invisible.

However, this year, we are immersed in a health emergency, which leads us to live a very difficult situation with many implications for many of us. A sanitary crisis, but also an economic, political, social, climatic crisis, to which we add machismo, lesbian-phobia, racism and capacitism on a daily basis, and other forms of discrimination and violence.

As lesbians they make us invisible because, as women, we are out of many spaces of decision and participation on equal terms, and because, as lesbians, our sexualities are minimized, infantilized or eroticized from an androcentric and cisheterosexist vision. In short, they make us invisible because our existence represents a challenge to patriarchy, because they do not want us free, autonomous and happy.

On a day like this we want to claim our stocks, our realities and our rights. But we also want to claim that this will only be possible in a world free of machismo, and, ultimately, free from the patriarchal system. A patriarchy that wants us at home, submissive, behind, in a second or third plane, invisible and silent.

We find machismo and structural lesbophobia that translates into something normative and everyday in all spaces, and makes us invisible. Invisibility leads us not to re-know our reality or our needs. Therefore, we ask for spaces, studies and research designed, also, by and for lesbians, in all their diversities and that take into account all our realities.

We demand to have a voice and to be present in all areas of daily life in a real way and with effective participation. We do not want our reality to be assimilated from other nearby realities, since we live in specific, different and exclusive situations. We ask that invisibility not be normalized.

The health field is probably the one where the lack of knowledge and recognition of lesbians is most palpable, especially in relation to sexual and reproductive health, where the androcentric and heteronormative vision makes it difficult for us to access sexual health services and, above all, receiving adequate care that guarantees our sexual rights.

We therefore need health care free of machismo and lesbophobia. But not only health, but in reality, we need an education that includes and makes us visible, a means of communication that explains our realities and our history, a job market without harassment or discrimination, a culture that leaves us room to exist, and so in all areas of life.

In addition, lesbians live lesbophobia and we live machismo, but also transphobia, transmitogyny, racism, classism, capacitism, ageism, etc … Because lesbians are diverse and we experience many oppressions that intersect. And in the face of these multiple oppressions, lesbians (in the plural multiplier of pride) react with an infinite number of individual and collective responses, and we do so not only by pointing out the forms of discrimination but also by providing daily, collective and political responses. We do all this from our transfeminist perspective, going to the causes of inequalities not only to reverse the consequences but also because they stop happening.

For all this, on April 26, 2020, we want to be more visible than ever. We are proud to be who we are. We claim who we are, what we do and the spaces we want free of lesbophobia from our rooms or houses, from balconies, windows, networks, from all possible places in this confinement caused by a biological virus so that those other viruses social that are sexist violence and lesbophobia are also eradicated.

*Obligatory

Adhesiones al manifest

Associacions i col·lectius adherides:

Xarxa de dones Per la salut
Ca la Dona
GENERA
Fundacio Àmbit Prevenció
Fundació Aroa
InOutRadio
Ca l’Enredus
CooperAcció
Associació trans* Generem!
Lunes Lilas navarra
Coop4equality
Associació Forgender seal
Furia Bollo Teatre de les Oprimides
Plataforma LGTBIcat
GAIS POSITIUS
TAMAIA viure sense violència sccl.
CooperAcció
Associació Atzavara-arrels
GRUP LGBTI UGT CATALUNYA
Associació LGTBI Gay Sitges Link
Tamettut
Entrepobles
InOutRadio
Associació Stop Sida
Grup LGTBIQ+ espiritual
Beyond Binary
Comissió Gènere Col•legi de professionals de Ciència Política i Sociologia de Catalunya
TOT PER TERRASSA
Trans*Baixpower & Roses de Sant Feliu