Welcome to a very special edition of GCN. With International Women’s Day on March 8, we decided to celebrate the female identifying members of our queer family with a host of interviews, features and opinion pieces.

Our, it has to be said, utterly glorious cover this month was shot by the uber talented Hazel Coonagh and features the effortlessly regal Pillow Queens in an homage to the The Favourite. Continuing on a musical note, we were graced with an interview from the ultimate frontwoman - Skin from Skunk Anansie, as her band celebrate 25 years in the business.

We have a fantastic look at lesbian nightlife in the ‘90s, while writer and director Kate Dolan stops by to talk all things horror. There’s an urgent and essential piece about the treatment of women in online spaces and a hard hitting report on LGBT+ killings in Brazil.

We take the opportunity to highlight the inspiring new queer wave of people from the Irish student movement and we hear the voices of our community speak across a range of topics.

In this issue’s Inside Out, our monthly interview with a notable and fabulous member of our community, we speak to Ellen Murray, the trans rights and disability rights advocate who founded Belfast’s trans youth group, GenderJam NI, and has just started in her new role as Policy And Research Officer with TENI.

With such a female identifying focus, we need to talk about those who feel they get to decide who can and can’t be part of the female community - TERFs. Or Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists.

In the wake of the Prime Time debacle, where the producers of the RTÉ television programme invited contributions from folk such as He Who We Are Tired Of Naming and a UK based TERF, we were delighted to see the protest outside the studios in Donnybrook from a community who value every single letter of our acronym and don’t presume they can pick and choose who belongs in the community while pretending at the same time to stand for the rights of others.

In February, GCN itself organised a protest outside the gates of the Russian Embassy in Dublin to draw attention to the imprisonment, torture and murder of LGBT+ people in Chechnya. By those who would deny their existence.

Standing side by side at the event were groups with representatives from across the queer spectrum.

Groups that think in terms of community. In terms of ‘us’. Not ‘us’ and ‘them’. Groups who were telling their community they had their back, they would do all they could to help.

Because that’s what a community is.

To all those in our LGBT+ family to whom it applies, we would like to say - Happy International Women’s Day.

THE GCN TEAM