Lambrini Girls hit back at TERFs: "Have fun on the wrong side of history"

Yesterday afternoon, musician Louise Distras was featured in the Daily Mail in an article which discussed what it's like being cancelled for being "on the frontline of the gender debate war", and standing against those inciting violence against women, which is ironic considering she is now at the centre of an attack against both journalist Emma Wilkes and the band Lambrini Girls – among whose members identify as gender-fluid.

Promoting the Daily Mail feature on her X (Twitter) account, she wrote: "I'm in the @MailOnline today with these brilliant courageous women! I don’t care if people think I’m transphobic, if men wanna claim to be women there's always gonna be a clash when it comes to defending our hard-won rights."

This came a day after she attacked Lambrini Girls for speaking out against TERFs in a recent interview with Kerrang!. Quote-tweeting a pull quote in which guitarist Phoebe Lunny said: "I will scrap any TERF, any day, in person, with my fists", she said: "Once upon a time @KerrangMagazine was the world's biggest rock weekly. Today it's the mein kampf of the music biz full of female chauvinist pigs inciting violence against women. Teenage me dreamed of being in this mag but now I'm ashamed my face was printed on its pages. Vile!"

Responding to this, Lambrini Girls wrote: "The fact that a topic like transphobia can be discussed in a large music magazine in 2023, without censorship means: Actual Feminism - 1 Terfs- 0. Have fun on the wrong side of history".

Terf Twitter is going for our @KerrangMagazine spread (which was to be expected lol)

The fact that a topic like transphobia can be discussed in a large music magazine in 2023, without censorship means:

Actual Feminism - 1
Terfs- 0

Have fun on the wrong side of history x https://t.co/mQlGTtF5Gh

— Lambrini Girls (@Lambrini_Girls) September 21, 2023

Journalist Emma Wilkes, who wrote the Kerrang! feature, took a moment to share her own thoughts on the discourse. "As a cis woman, I will never know the level of hatred and violence the trans community experience. From the sidelines, I am outraged for them. But what also outrages me is the way the right wing media has manufactured a divisive, false moral panic around trans people that not only endangers them but tears the rest of us apart with only baseless, propagandist hate as a justification," she wrote.

Speaking out on being accused of condoning violence against women, she continued: "What struck me was that this issue is something I care massively about - it’s also hugely ironic that elsewhere in my Lambrini Girls piece, women’s safety in the music industry was a big topic of our discussion," and notes that of course, the TERFs in question didn't bother to read the entire interview.

If they had, maybe they wouldn't have come out all guns blazing: "On that front, Louise and I would have something in common. How sad is it, then, that the false narratives propagated about the trans community mean that feminists aren’t fighting a united front, but are instead fighting each other?"

Journalists like @emmabwilkes who have fought for a platform in the industry to be able to give Women and Queers in music a voice, is inspiring. Bigotry can’t stop positive change being incited through journalism.

Big slay on her statement below - love and respect always x https://t.co/11EuLhuMHP

— Lambrini Girls (@Lambrini_Girls) September 22, 2023

As Wilkes points out, there is a bigger issue at hand, and perhaps it's better to look at the similarities in things that you're fighting for, as opposed to focusing on the differences and using that to channel hatred.

In a previous interview with Kerrang!, bassist Lily Macieira discusses the balance between being an activist and an artist: "The only thing you can do when you’re dealing with things like that is to have your personal boundaries and to try and remember that you can’t fix it all. Once you start to get really passionate about something it’s like, ‘Oh my God, but there’s so much I need to fix,'" she said. “The best thing you can possibly do,” she continues, “is get conversations going and to just do something, with whatever your resources are.”