Wow that’s so crazy that someone would think you were a lesbian.

 

 

Gen Z loves a label. We’re more than happy to endlessly box ourselves into tighter and tighter categories—are you more of a soft girl or a clean girl? Are you deer pretty or frog pretty? Are you more of a mob wife or a tomato girl? Are you really just bisexual or are you a big fat dirty lesbian?

 

 

These are all questions that take up more space in my silly little brain than they really ought to. I was twelve the first time someone called me a lesbian. I didn’t really know what it meant, but I knew it was bad. I even managed to connect the fact that my staunch refusal to start shaving my legs and propensity for feminist declarations had something to do with it.

 

 

‘I’m not a LESBIAN!’ I retorted. The boy who’d shouted the insult looked me up and down and laughed.

 

 

‘Well so what if she is?’ my best friend piped up. ‘Why do you care?’

 

 

I don’t remember the rest of our back and forth, but I do remember how it made me feel. I was confused. Distressed. Did my friend think I was a LESBIAN? I needed a definitive answer, and I needed one now. It only took a quick google search to discover that there were, luckily, some extremely helpful tools at my disposal. I thought ‘Are you a LESBIAN quiz? 100% ACCURACY guaranteed!!!’ looked like my most reliable option.

 

 

I spent the next couple of minutes answering ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Maybe’ to nuanced and insightful questions like ‘Have you ever wanted to kiss a girl?’, ‘Do you feel an inexplicable urge to go rock climbing?’ and ‘Do phallic objects distress you?’

 

 

I didn’t know what phallic meant, but my result definitely distressed me. It distressed me enough that I decided not to think about it for another three years, when I finally did kiss a girl for the first time.

 

 

Fast-forward a bit. I’m 18 and sitting on my best guy friend’s floor after a night out. We’re still half-drunk and clutching cups of tea. He thinks he might be gay.

 

 

‘How did you know you were a lesbian?’

 

 

I look down at my tea. ‘I don’t know if I’d use that word.’

 

 

‘Well what word would you use?’

 

 

I didn’t know. But I knew I didn’t like that word. Not much had really changed since age 12—I didn’t have any urge to go rock climbing, but I was still distressed by phallic objects.

 

 

You’d think that someone as patently distressed by phallic objects as I am, would have no problem describing themselves as a big fat lesbian. But I do. And it isn’t because the priest from Fleabag is objectively hot in a way that transcends sexuality. Besides, I’m not the only one.

 

 

While there’s little to no empirical evidence on the subject, there’s a wide anecdotal consensus that the term ‘lesbian’ has been on the decline for a while now. There’s been a slow but steady cultural shift away from saying ‘lesbian’ to saying ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ instead. I even conducted my own extremely scientific research (in the form of a cringey Instagram story asking people to tell me how the label ‘lesbian’ made them feel). Not only was this an excellent way to discover some dormant lesbians in my life, I also discovered that I wasn’t the only woman-loving-woman who found the label off-putting.

 

 

Why do so many of us feel more comfortable describing ourselves as ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ than ‘lesbian’? Calling yourself a lesbian feels like crossing the sexuality Rubicon. It feels definitive in a way that just saying you’re gay doesn’t. The word feels loaded, like a sort of magic and definitive incantation.

 

 

It’s an interesting word—as far as markers of queer identity go, it’s one of the oldest terms we have. It’s also embroiled not only in decades of LGBTQ+ and feminist history, but also in one of the defining culture wars of our time: gender. Portrayals of lesbianism are often so intimately connected with the performance of womanhood, so who gets to be a woman is an important prerequisite to who gets to be a lesbian. Some of the world’s most ardent defenders and gatekeepers of the term include the likes of Kathleen Stock.

 

 

But ‘lesbian’ is also unique in that it’s a noun as well as an adjective- the word can stand on its own. Rather than attaching a descriptor—I’m queer, I’m gay—that allows the subject to partially detach its personhood from the label, you are a lesbian. It’s much more all-encompassing, and therefore feels more ‘othering.’ In many ways, it’s not a label at all—labels imply a descriptive quality. The use of the definitive article means that there’s no invitation to use language that centres the person, or some other aspect of their identity. In fact, when other queer descriptors are used in the same way that ‘lesbian’ is, it feels derogatory. A gay, a transgender. No no no, the radical woke left liberal elite cries. A gay person. A transgender person. Person, person, person. But that is a lesbian—‘lesbian person’ feels clunky and wrong. Lesbians are not afforded the same ‘person-first’ language, meant to signify respect, that other queer identities are. The fact that it’s a stand-alone noun invites the idea that lesbians are different beings altogether, separate from just being women, or women who are gay. Of course, we still have a few queer identifiers that are nouns. They rhyme with rag and bike.

 

 

The suffix ‘-ism’ also makes it the only queer identity that can be viably turned into an ‘ism’ without making you sound like a complete bigot (no one left of Jordan Peterson would ever talk about ‘transgenderism’ in good faith). ‘-ism’ is usually used in the context of an ideology—communism, modernism, lesbianism. Importantly, ideologies aren’t something you’re born with. You may of course be raised to believe something is true, but your continued belief in something as an adult is a conscious choice. I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to Lady Gaga, but she’s pretty clear that queer people are born this way. This further delineates the label ‘lesbian’ as distinct in some way from other queer identifiers.

 

 

In some ways, it’s impressive that there’s even a conversation to be had about this. Until pretty recently, most normal people didn’t even know lesbians existed. Throughout history, societies that criminalised gay men almost never did the same for lesbian relationships. The UK, for example, has never had a law banning lesbian sex—gay men could be convicted of sodomy until 1967. Today, 40 of the 63 countries that criminalise same-sex relationships specifically target women. 19 of those 40 laws were only introduced after 2000, and only one was introduced before 1900 (excluding Shariah law). In fact, the term ‘lesbian’, at least in modern Western culture, didn’t even start out as describing women who had sex with other women—sexual activity had nothing to do with it. Sexologists in the late 19th century started using the term to describe women who simply did not adhere to the female gender roles of the time.

 

 

Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis were some of the earliest sexologists to categorise female same-sex attraction as a medical condition in the same way that homosexuality was categorised for men. Pseudo-scientific sexologists obviously didn’t describe gay men in the same way we would today—they were referred to as homosexuals, or sodomites. Few people would use either term as genuine self-descriptors today: you’d be hard-pressed to find a gay man seriously referring to himself as a ‘homosexual.’ The shift from ‘I’m a homosexual’ to ‘I’m gay’ makes sense: homosexual is imbued with prejudicial and medical connotations. Today, anyone referring to ‘the homosexuals’ is either being campy or bigoted.

 

 

Lesbians, on the other hand, are still expected to use a term popularised by people who were describing what they considered to be mental illness at best, and perverted social deviancy at worst. So, it isn’t really surprising that the term feels icky. Maybe the shift towards ‘queer’ or ‘gay woman’ is one that should be welcomed as a step towards achieving gender equality within the queer community. It’s also much more inclusive of nuanced and fluid gender identities.

 

 

Speaking of gender, it’s difficult to feel comfortable using a term that is so constantly weaponised by people espousing transphobia. While many lesbians (including this one) stand in logical solidarity with their transgender siblings, there’s a subsection of the TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist—think J.K. Rowling) movement that views the ‘protection of lesbians’ as one of their main goals. But if lesbianism really is an ideology, surely it must go beyond what’s in your pants?

 

 

Naomi McCormick, a feminist sex researcher in the 1980s, certainly thought so. McCormick’s theory was that lesbianism went beyond just sexual activity between two women. She argued that women’s sexuality is construed by men, and that it is men who define the lesbian experience as coming down to sexual experiences between two people with the same genitalia. Instead, she argued that the emotional and mental connections between women are so strong that they can replace sex altogether as the definitive feature of lesbianism. She advocated for the desexualisation of the word—you don’t need to have sex with women, or even be attracted to them, to be a lesbian.

 

 

There was a lot of funny shit going on in the eighties. I’m not sure that characterising every female friendship as lesbian will be particularly helpful to us as we navigate today’s so-called ‘gender wars.’ It also fails to recognise the very real fact that not all women want to have sex with each other, make babies in petri dishes and adopt seven cats. Lots of women love phallic objects. Identity labels are important for a reason: they allow communities of similarly marginalised people to come together and find solidarity and power by virtue of their shared experiences, while simultaneously celebrating diversity. But the problem with labels is that, for all the wonderful community they create, they can so easily feel suffocating and restrictive.

 

 

After my brief foray into lesbian history, I’m not sure that I feel any more or less comfortable with the term than I did before. I’m not even sure that it’s a term worth saving. For now, this queer woman has better things to do with her time.∎

 

 

Words by Kalina Hagen. Image Courtesy of Kalina Hagen.