Sarah Magliocco writes about a revived Dublin Pride march taking place this week, which aims to reclaim a word once used to harm lesbians.
As a teenager in the early 2000s, I witnessed a word thrown around as a casual pejorative, or in my later years as a word dripping with bigotry. It was then, and still is now, a word that can cause immense pain, discomfort, anger and hurt to those it offends.
When I was younger, the word was used to describe women - or girls at the time - who were not reciprocating the advances of lust-stricken schoolboys.
"She must be a dyke, so", if she dared to turn down the opportunity of a fumble behind the prefabs.
It's been used as a weapon towards my partner and me, shouted from a moving car as we held hands in the street or cropping up in a social media comment.
But away from the barbed intentions of its use from outside the LGBTQIA+ community, inside queer spaces, I saw the term carried as an insignia of pride and strength. It now feels as futile and inoffensive to me as saying the sky is blue or the Pope is Catholic, thanks to the reclamation movement.
The reclamation of the word has done wonders to make it neutral to me. But not everyone feels that way, and it still divides opinions, even in queer communities.
Terms carry tremendous power in the LGBTQIA+ community; a power that can't be overstated. It is up to each individual in those communities - not those outside of them - to decide where their comfort levels lie with certain terms, and it is not the case that one term fits all.
"A lot of people still are uncomfortable with the term dyke," explains historian Dr Mary McAuliffe, Lecturer in Gender Studies at University College Dublin (UCD). "It's slang, it referred to lesbians, specifically androgynous or butch lesbians, and it was a derogatory term."
While the word is nuanced, it has been reclaimed as a term for some members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and in Dublin, the second iteration of the Dyke March is here. This week, the revived march will take place as part of the city's Pride celebrations, and is aiming to embrace and take back the term.
Pride's roots are anchored in protest, and in the capital, the modern version of the Dublin Dyke March is preserving the junction of politics, protest and identity that hallmarked early queer rights demonstrations while lending a voice to the issues faced by the community today.
Lesbian visibility demonstrations have cropped up globally since the 1980s, but the first Dyke March that received international recognition took place in Washington, DC, in 1993, followed swiftly by one in New York. Ireland was not too far behind, with a Dyke March taking over O’Connell Street on June 26 1998, under the theme 'Lust for Power.’
In 2025, the march was brought back by activists. The modern revival was led, after a 27-year hiatus, by Alice Linehan, editor of GCN, Ireland's longest-running free LGBTQ+ publication.
After spending time in the GCN archives, which have preserved the activities of the queer community since 1988, she was inspired to spearhead a resurrection of the march alongside a committee of organisers. She hoped to create a community-driven initiative that led to a greater sense of belonging for and to stand alongside the Pride festivities that have hallmarked the month of June in Ireland and beyond.
"The [LGBTQIA+] community is very politically engaged and politically active, and obviously pride is still a protest, but not as much of a protest as it used to be with the inclusion of sponsors and corporations. I thought there was room to have a more grassroots community-led march alongside Pride," she told RTÉ Lifestyle.
In Ireland, the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act and the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalised sexual activity between men until 1993. Sexual activity between women was never legally outlawed, but the lack of a law against sapphic relationships never prevented stigmatisation or social shunning.
With decriminalisation achieved, pride demonstrations gained momentum across the island. McAuliffe notes that there was a swelling of confidence in the LGBTQIA+ community at that time.
"The idea that ‘we’re here, we're queer, and we're staying’ was taking hold. It really was a better period of time than the 80s. Pride was still very political, of course, but it was beginning to become more like a celebration rather than activism because acceptance of LGBTQ people in society was beginning to get better," McAuliffe explained.
However, lesbian-specific issues can feel overshadowed in conversations about queer rights and needs.
"I think it's because oftentimes women - and that is being inclusive of all women - don't feel included within gay politics or gay activism. As a historian looking at LGBTQ histories, mostly you know about the men.
"Not only are lesbians queer women, but they are also women living in a patriarchal society, so this is a very different thing to being a gay man living in a patriarchal society. As a man, your homosexuality may be the thing on which you are oppressed, but being a man gives you a certain privilege, whereas queer women are both oppressed for being queer and for being female."
For Linehan, use of the word dyke works to dismantle any shame associated with it: "I was aware of it as a word, and I knew it had a negative connotation. I didn't have negative experiences personally with it, thankfully, and didn't hear it too often, but I have definitely had to go through a process of reclaiming it and removing shame from that word, even in terms of how other people see it.
"Something that has helped me is to connect with that community and see how many people are proud to be aligned with it. People really do resonate with that word. I think it's powerful for people who are maybe more gender non-conforming, trans or non-binary. Sometimes other words don’t fit.
"Dyke can feel very strong and empowering, but I know it's an individual process. Some people have no issue with the word, and they're very comfortable using it, and for some people, it's more sensitive. Everyone has an individual journey and relationship with it, but I think it is nice to reclaim it. And it means a lot to a lot of people."
McAuliffe adds that words once used to stigmatise can be salvaged to create powerful self-affirmations of identity: "'Queer' was a derogatory term, and it’s back. Using these as self-identifiers or terms of pride is ensuring that its previous history as a slur is in the past, and so now proudly reclaim the word dyke.
"Reclaiming words, words used to hurt, to injure, to be derogatory. You reclaim them and say, 'yes, dyke, that's what these women are. This is a dyke march, this is dyke power.'"
The theme for this year's march is Resist and Persist, encompassing a number of key issues, including the opposition of war and genocide, countering the far-right, fighting for the rights of same-sex parents and advocating for a fit-for-purpose trans healthcare system.
"There are things happening in the world right now that we would stand strongly in opposition to, and that's the ‘Resist’ factor, and then ‘Persist’ [represents that] even though things feel crap sometimes, we have to keep going and keep standing strong and fighting for change. What a lot of oppressors want is for you to give up and quit, and by not doing that, you're putting the fight back up to them," Linehan explained.
In Ireland, the achievement of Marriage Equality in 2015 was a huge milestone, but simply having gay marriage legalised through popular vote does not herald the end to the pursuit of true equality and acceptance for queer people.
The LGBTQIA+ community has faced rising hostilities in recent years, with transgender people in particular facing undue scrutiny and systemic legislative challenges that seek to restrict or reverse their freedoms.
"Marriage equality was a high point; it was great, and I think a lot of people thought, ‘OK, that's done now. Ireland is a very liberal, secular place to live in, LGBT people are welcome, are safe and fully equal in society’, but of course, that is not true," said McAuliffe.
"There are still aspects of being queer that bring with it certain inequalities, and they're more invisible, so it's harder to campaign on them. That includes attacks, homophobic attacks, misogynistic attacks, and that is a very necessary thing to keep campaigning on.
"And with the rise of the far right in the last few years, we can see transphobia, homophobia, lesbophobia and biphobia are rising. I think there is a grave necessity for pride, number one, to become much more political, but also to focus on certain parts of the queer community that may not be so visible."
Linehan wants people to feel empowered by having a place in a community. "When you feel like you belong and you like you're part of a community, you get this fuel and motivation to live your life in the best way that you can and in an authentic way. That also gives you motivation to be politically active and to fight for things you want and fight for a better life for other people."
"I hope people have fun, I hope they make friends, meet people like them, have a dance. It really does fill you up on positivity, optimism and hope, and they're things that we really need right now."
The Dublin Dyke March takes place from 6.45pm at the Garden of Remembrance, Friday 26 June 2026. Details can be found on social media at @dykemarchdublin.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
