Lesbian Is My Gender

What makes lesbianism so much more than just sex.

I wrote this essay to go with an interview by

Lesbian Literary Library

. Interview here.

Priscilla and Regina. Brooklyn, New York. 1979; credit: JEB (Joan E. Biren)

Men Versus Heteronormative Women Versus Lesbians

For the record: I do not hate men.

To replace misogyny with misandry is simply to replace oppression with a set of stereotypes. To justify the categorical hatred of a person based simply, preemptively by a part of their identity, their gender or the color of the skin…that hate makes a statement that says: go ahead, decide a person’s intrinsic qualities, their worth and moral character not on the content of their character but their gender, the color of skin, their sexuality or class or immigrant status. Reversing stereotypes and prejudices is not progress; it’s reactionary.

If the oppressed gain power over their oppressors, would they not become oppressors themselves? Shouldn’t we instead look to end inequalities, domination-based thinking, and worlds that valorize oppressing others as a form of power.

Few things fit into binaries. People rarely do — we’re too complex.

As a lesbian, I don’t neatly fit into the sexuality and gender binary. Categorically, I am a woman. And yet, there’s a divide that separates me and other lesbians from the heteronormative woman: she does not understand my world. She does not even understand that she doesn’t understand it, so wide is the gulf. She doesn’t know how I feel. More often than not, if I say something about how I feel that she doesn’t like, she will end the conversation.

Too often, the lesbian is a curiosity, fetishized and feared in near-equal measure by far too many well-intentioned people.

There are so many heteronormative women proudly declaring their love for popular lesbian singers (yes, Chappell Roan), or telling me how much they love literature about lesbians, that “sapphic themes” are their favorites. I question how much of this outpouring of love of sapphic literature by non-sapphics is a combination of that aforementioned curiosity, sexual titillation, and using lesbians to declare themselves to be open minded and not a bigot.

I experience this with my non-lesbian/gay/trans friends. Before I started my Substack, I spent about six weeks on a lesbian literature Instagram and saw this again. Like my Substack, my audience was primarily women. Looking back now, that experience forecasted my Substack¹.

It was fall 2024, and Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep was the hottest bit of lesbian literature offered for the single white lady and happily-married-to-men mothers of two or three loved of #booktok and #bookstagram to love.

It ended up on diversity lists — tokenized. There are numerous thinkpieces on the lack of diversity in literary online spaces. There’s at least one research paper on the lack of diversity — both people of color and LGBTQI+ of booktok reader choices².

“I learned so much about sapphic relationships!” was a sentiment I read more than once. “So hot” was one I read over and over. My god, the continual salivating over the sex scene in the book.

The same women who rolls her eyes at men watching so-called lesbian porn think they’re so uniquely different when it comes to written sex between people who categorically face greater discrimination than they do. Think that it’s no longer gross and not fetishizing because of their gender. That the same action and thought process that is vilified when a man does it is justified when a woman acts that same way. Think it’s alright because I should understand that they’re women, we’re women, and we all know that women can do no wrong, do no evil.

I disagree. My feminist and survivor advocacy isn’t a statement on the inherent goodness of women. Women are human, and to advocate for them is to acknowledge their beautiful imperfection, to say that women too deserve a world free from sexist oppression without asking them (us) for perfection first.

I want no part of the type of womanhood that doesn’t acknowledge intersectionality, that doesn’t acknowledge that a diversity of perspectives brings strength to all and that a lack of willingness to acknowledge all means the most marginalized are further silenced.

One woman began to message me daily, sometimes sending 10+ unanswered messages a day. “Anora should have been directed by a lesbian!” (um, okay) “Can you please tell me more about why you don’t like The Safekeep”. I didn’t say I didn’t, I merely said it’s alright and it isn’t a good introduction to lesbianism — nor does it claim to be. It’s entertainment, read something else if you want to learn about lesbians. “Chapter [whatever chapter that sex scene] was so hot!”

I waited too long to block her. She wasn’t the only person who got upset with me for saying that a suspenseful romance novel isn’t the best place to learn about lesbianism. I was blocking a few people a week. And then I eventually deleted Instagram altogether — not a bad thing because I signed up for Substack instead, and fell in love with writing here.

The reason I deleted IG because they blocked #lesbian and #lesbianliterature for months. Meta eventually said it was a technical error. Sure, and fairies and elves are real.

I’d really like to drive home the point that a bunch of heteronormative women find this scene hot, had extended conversations in comments sections about it; and that heteronormative women finding lesbian sex hot, declaring their love for very explicit lesbian novels makes me feel like they’re objectifying lesbians — dehumanizing us by reducing us to entertainment and titillation. Perhaps my repetition will drive home the point: I didn’t like it when men objectified me when I looked “more straight” (had long hair). I don’t like when heteronormative women objectify me or put me in a box now.

And just as heteronormative women complain at length about how men make them feel…well, then perhaps you can understand where I’m coming from with this. You understand, I’m sure, because of your experiences and oppression by men. Sure, you don’t carry the constant threat of sexual/physical violence for me, but that sense of being objectified and unheard, of being second-class is still difficult. Each incident means little, but death by a thousand paper cuts results in death nonetheless.

“Hetero feminists want our friendship for the cool points, but they have zero desire to learn from us”

Nicole N

commented something I’d written. To have these pointed out could be an opportunity to learn and correct. Too many of you refuse to listen to lesbians when we’re not writing entertaining, highly sexual books or making things “fun”….too many of you don’t like it when we try to tell you that something feels wrong to us and instead become defensive, too many of you fail when we make the conversation more difficult.

‘Our Own Romance’ by Jenifer Price [purchase print here]

Lesbian is my Gender

Sometimes, I commiserate with the lesbians of Substack. It’s sanity-making, because I’ve had several conversations to clear up that I’m not imagining or blowing this out of proportion. These sorts of notes always have at least one comment about how heteronormative women like the idea of lesbians, but don’t much like real-life lesbians. I’ll get at least a few comments that are more direct and strongly worded than my overly long, technical framings of, oh, everything, tends to be.

One conversation that I cherished was three of us talking about the expectation that many heteronormative women have that lesbians will treat them as men treat them. Will flirt with them. Want them. Are offended when we don’t, and aren’t. All three of us agreed that we’re broadly attracted to lesbians and not simply to women. Broadly, the heterosexual male gaze is not the lesbian female gaze.

What’s the difference?

It’s hard to articulate, but I’ll try. Lesbian is a mindset, a way of looking at and holding ourselves in the world, a sort of strength, directness, confidence, and self-assurance that’s necessitated by of our material conditions, forced independence through lack of dependence and protection of men, who hold the bulk of systemic and economic power. It’s not that I’m asking lesbian to become a legally recognized gender; it’s that there are differences that goes beyond who we choose to date and have sex with.

I had the idea of lesbian as my gender long before I read Monique Wittig or Judith Butler, though they both asserted that idea with such elegance. Wittig wrote:

For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside of) society³.

and

Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman a specific social relation to a man, which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation…a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or stay heterosexual.⁴

What makes a lesbian something that is definitely not a man and isn’t the same as a heteronormative woman is that we don’t fit into the binary. And for cis-heteronormatives…well, most don’t see how all society is structured around that. Gender roles. Gender expectations. Do you see how related to sexuality gendered behaviors are? The way women sort of lean into their male partners when navigating the world, and male partners hover protectively over their female partners, opening doors, doubling-checking crosswalks, and acting gentleman-like. It’s these smallest outward displays of an enormous force that drives heterosexual relationships in a misogynistic world: that many women are seeking male protection and male financial security from male violence and a patriarchy that results in one in three women experiencing sexual violence in her lifetime and making (on average) less money than men while working longer hours.⁵ This idea is one that lesbian radical feminist Andrea Dworkin explained beautifully in Right Wing Women.

In response to one of my notes, someone replied that they were tired of reading think pieces by feminists commenting on the unequal division of household and child-bearing/child-rearing labor between men and women. That these writers could learn from lesbian relationships on relationships that were more balanced. Given that the world we’re in is misogynistic, is it possible for male-female relationships to emulate the equality and lack of oppression in a same-gender relationship? I think the fix lies in fixing inequality, though fixing inequality isn’t all feminism seeks to do: feminism seeks to end oppression.

Back to the topic at hand: lesbians. In their book Gender Trouble, and through their work, non-binary lesbian Butler built off of Wittig and other philosophers…and they both advocate for the position that gender is construct, but also argue that bodies themselves are constructs too. If the body is a construct, then “biological sex” is a social construct too⁶. So, two concepts can be true at once: gender is a social construct, and the identification for women with sex should not per se be “a conflation of the category of women with the ostensibility sexualized features of the bodies.”

Butler believed that gender was a performance that is instilled into individuals through societal expectations, especially expectations of compulsory heterosexuality — Adrienne Rich’s idea that society compels people into heterosexuality. So what happens when those expectations don’t apply to you, because you’ve publicly reveal yourself to be a lesbian?

Before I read Wittig, I wrote this to conclude an essay of literary lesbian coming out stories:

The upside of not having male protection is that you are freed of expectations and conformity; there’s an inherent defiance in it. There’s the sexual freedom: to pursue with and have sex with as many or few women as you desire, without the labels of prudish or promiscuity that too often get flung at heteronormative women. There’s practically no risk of unwanted or accidental pregnancy, far lower risk of sexually transmitted infections³, dramatically reduced fears around date rape. It allows you to be a broke lesbian writer, if you chose that. You’re not asked to sacrifice or make your career secondary, in the way society all too frequently asks of women in relationships with ambitious men. It makes you an outcast, but being an outcast frees you from the shackles of expectation of feminine submissiveness. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which was asked in the Declaration of Independence and granted to men is more readily available to lesbians. That means you might fail, of course, but you’re free to fail. All of this allows you to look at the women in the world, and know what could be. It’s not that it’s all wonderful, but above all, you are free.

In a nutshell: you’re an outcast and you’re free. Even if I wasn’t attracted to women, I’d want to be a lesbian.

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1. When I first started this Substack, I moved my Instagram posts here and wrote about lesbian and other literature for the first few months.

2. De Melo, Alysia The Influence of BookTok on Literary Criticisms and Diversity. Social Media + Society, 10(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241286700 (Original work published 2024).

3. Wittig, Monique. One Is Not Born a Woman.

4. Monique Wittig in The Straight Mind. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). p 19.

5. By “working”, I’m averaging out-of-home/career and domestic labor — and stay-at-home moms work even more hours on average than outside-the-home working moms.

6. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York: Routledge, 1990). p. 8.