FFS Friday: Dr. Julia Long

July 11, 2025

FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable.

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Today’s FFS Friday honors Dr. Julia Long, an amazing radical feminist from the UK who has been sounding the alarm about the threats that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class for over a decade. Many US readers probably already know about her, but many probably don’t.

That short gif is from an event in 2020, where Julia questioned Lisa Nandy, a British Labour MP, about Nandy’s position on men being housed in women’s prisons on the basis of their self-identification as women. The entire exchange is available here.

Julia asks Nandy three questions, which boil down to, essentially: (1) should men’s sex crimes be recorded as though they’re women if they claim to be women; (2) should men convicted of sex crimes be accommodated in a women’s prison if they claim to be women; and (3) should women in the Labour Party be considered hateful if they ask such questions?

Side note: I have the same questions for my own party officials in the US.

Nandy’s response was essentially that some men are women if they say so, that their sex crimes should be recorded as though they’re women if they claim to be women, and that it’s fine for men convicted of sex crimes to be housed in a women’s prison on the basis of their self-identification as women. Julia had some raised eyebrows for that.

Thanks to Venice Allan for capturing the moment.

Julia Long holds a PhD on feminist anti-pornography activism from London South Bank University. She has a professional background in sex-equality policy, education, and HIV prevention and support, and she currently works for an organisation combating violence against women. Julia is a longstanding feminist activist and has been an active member of the London Feminist Network and OBJECT.

According to Lesbian Greens:

Long is perhaps best known for her attendance at Accenture’s Transgender Day of Visibility event in London in 2019 which turned out to be a visibility event of another sort. Julia and three other women bought tickets to the all-inclusive, all-welcome event and sat on chairs eating pizza, enjoying a glass of wine and nattering about lesbian things, all whilst waiting for the event to start … then, out of the blue, they were asked to leave. The organisers even called the police, seven in all, who watched while two security men lifted Julia and the chair and carried her out on the chair before tipping her off into the hands of male police officers who began to manhandle her out of the building. As she left the conference hall, Long said to camera, “I hope that any woman who hasn’t yet woken up to what’s going on, wakes up to this ridiculous sight.”

The act of sitting on a chair took on a life of its own. “Lesbians on Chairs” and of course Julia’s own X handle @onchairs have become emblematic of defiance.

I recall this event vividly, as I watched it live, virtually. It inspired a US-based panel titled “Lesbians on Chairs” in October 2019 in DC, featuring a British lesbian named Linda Bellos, who was in town for the oral arguments in the case that would eventually become Bostock v. Clayton County.

I have known Julia since 2018, when a bunch of us were planning for her, Kellie-Jay Keen, and Venice Allan to make a visit to the US to protest Twitter/X for cancelling Keen, Meghan Murphy, and others who were saying at the time that men aren’t women.

Long, Keen, and Allan came to the US in early 2019 for that very purpose, and we turned the visit into quite an affair. We went to Congress, where Long and Keen somewhat famously managed to confront Sarah (Tim) McBride in a public meeting room to ask him why the Human Rights Campaign (where he worked at the time) hates women. We protested the DC offices of both Twitter/X and Facebook. We had lovely parties, including one in my own apartment.

Julia is a force to be reckoned with. I have heard her at rallies singing the song, “If a person has a penis, he’s a man” (here’s that song being sung by Vanessa Vokey). I have also heard her articulate the radical feminist critique of “trans” clearly and unapologetically, from an academic standpoint. Here is an example from 2018, where she spoke about the importance of lesbian visibility and the lesbian erasure that results from the phenomenon of men claiming to be women. Speaking about a television series in the UK about women who call themselves men, she said, “We need to ask ourselves, ‘How is this possible? How is the amputation of a healthy woman’s breasts greeted with such a sense of triumph and delight?’ … A quotation keeps coming to my mind, over and over again, that I first heard from the rather wonderful radical feminist midwife and activist in the US, MaryLou Singleton. It’s a quotation from Voltaire, and he observes that ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’”

Julia is utterly uncompromising. Julia, today’s FFS Friday is for you.