Great article CB, I am in agreement with you about the, frankly obscene, trans and queer movement's invasion and destruction of lesbian culture. Lesbians truly have not a thing in common with trans queers. Worse, the trans queers are a menace to us, their ideology is opposed to us and harms us. I want to see lesbian culture completely sever any ties to the trans, queer, non-binary cult and re-establish our lesbian only community. The new app The L Community is great (you might already know it). Here in Australia we do have a group of lesbians deliberately forming a lesbian only community. It is expanding and, pleasingly, more and more young women are joining. They young women seem very relieved and happy to have escaped the ubiquitous queer community and come home to lesbian space. It is surreal how irrational queer ideology is, and how dogmatic and authoritarian it is. It is actually a homophobic movement. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised how swiftly after marriage equality was achieved, homophobia returned. But this time not from the right, but deep in the heartland of the left.
I’ve done an insane deep dive into trans. I’m 47 and had tuned out. Everything negative I heard sounded like more of the same from the right. I saw a key word, truscum, and that lead to an obsessive sociological project. I was horrified by everything I saw. The way trans people who believed gender dysphoria was a criteria, aka the real trans people, being excommunicated. Everyone and their dog calling themselves lesbians. The odd demand that trans be in the menu. Everything was transphobic and everyone who had anything you didn’t like to say was a TERF, which meant, shut up, bitch. The young women who were parroting it like a mantra to keep the devil away. I’ve been a supporter of the trans community, until I found out what it had become. A cult who rabidly enforced thought norms. An army who not only didn’t care about women but attacked any who dared disagree with death, rape, violent threats, loss of employment and social shaming. The part that broke my support was the women being raped in prison by men who were pretending to be trans women. The ACLU “zealously” defended SB 132 in CA after two women had been raped by a man who said he was a woman, changed and I to a Y in his name and that was it. Kept he/him pronouns, no other changes. I have shared that with multiple, multiple people who were “pro-trans”. Not one of them cared. Not one of them was willing to do a Google search with the key terms I provided. Each one informed of how rare it was for a trans woman to rape a woman. How they were going to get raped by the prison guards anyway, did I know how many women were raped by cis men? Not one ever showed any compassion or concern about women or girls being hurt by policies. My heart has hardened. I will do nothing to harm the trans community but I will also not hell.
My deep dive plus a decently strategic mind leads me to believe that in the US there is going to be hell to pay for the trans community. The Democrats have stood idly by while Rep Mace shouts the t slur on video. They are silent and will stay silent with exceptions of some false mumbling of disapproval. They need the Republicans to crush the trans movement because it is an albatross on their neck. Completely toxic with everything g verified and hanging out on the internet just waiting to be compiled.
I remember in my 20s when we knew to be aware at closing time to be on the lookout for men in trucks hunting gays to beat up. I’m afraid those days are around the corner. This is a direct reaction to the insanity of the trans rights activists. If one were to plot out a great civil rights movement and then do the exact opposite, you would have what we have here. I don’t wish any harm to the trans community, I fear it. I’m scared for them and frustrated because they are incapable of listening to anything anyone says if it isn’t on the pre-approved thought list. It is a cult and a domestic terrorist organization and I want nothing to do with it.
I would be delighted to just be the L. The G is perfectly fine on its own. We can have potlucks or something. We don’t need each other for political strength. We could come together if it was needed. It might be to get the divorce approved. I’m tempted to begin advocating for a LGB Alliance like they have in the UK.
I too am saddened to find us betrayed, sold out, demeaned as women. The hatred of women pours out of that community.
You and I are the same age. Growing up lesbian in Australia was easy for me during the 90s/2000s. A sweet spot. But now, for young lesbians, there is no true lesbian community to become part of. It's all queer and trans. I agree with everything you've written. The trans queer stuff is dangerous, homophobic, anti feminism and completely inincoherent and irrational. I'm a member of LGB Alliance Australia. I think America has one? It is a gr
eat organisation. Trans ideology is a cult. Thought police, reporting of disobedience, re-education, apologies on demand if someone doesn't stay on script, indoctrination, the list goes on. I am meeting more and more lesbians who are appalled by the queer and trans ideology. I think/hope a rebuilding and renaissance might be beginning.
I lived in Sydney 1989-1991, very much in a lesbian and then increasingly queer community. Shared a house with the founders of Wicked Women for a year. One of them transitioned and that was part of the increasingly queer emphasis. At the time it seemed cool and preferable to the 'gay women' who went to the Cricketers.
Now with much hindsight I'm quite horrified at some of the things I just let go. I was never involved in anything very dodgy, but it was there☹️
I've heard about the Wicked Women women, and that one of the founders ended up taking testosterone. Lesbians taking testosterone always looks like self loathing about being homosexual, and/or conforming with the myth that lesbians are "really straight men".
I had a lot of conversations with them about what was going on. I honestly can't remember what their motivation was🫤. There were lots of ways that I thought their thinking was effed up, but at the time not that, I guess because it was a personal choice about their own life.
Totally agree. I was and am still shocked by the Republicans being right about something. Rep Nancy Mace is going hard against it here. It is the first time a politician here has tried. I said I would never support a Republican but the Democrats are neck deep in it. Thanks for the info on LBG l, I’ll check it out.
It is the same here in Australia politically. It's women in the conservative party who are standing up for women. Although I would say their most vocal supporters are probably old lefties, but nevertheless, it's the right wingers who are doing all the talking. It's a positive to see women working across the aisle on this issue. And in Britain Kemi Baddenoch is a Tory yet she's is very articulate and outspoken on women's rights. As a previous Greens voter it is new for me to be agreeing to strongly with conservative MPs. I'm grateful for these women.
Hi CB, Great start. Guess you know about the Lesbian Project & Podcast? Like minds in the UK. Also Amanda Kovattana’s Substack & book: The Unexpected Penis: conversations on the gender trail.
Tofu, please define “gold star” and what it means to you.
Mostly I’ve heard to used to refer to lesbians who have been attracted to, and only had sex with other women their entire lives.
Sometimes, I’ve heard it used to mean lesbians who have only had sex with other women since they came out, at some point in their lives as adults - sometimes as older adults - but who, looking back, realized that they’d always been attracted to women but had hidden it.
And sometimes I’ve heard the term used as a litmus test, a barrier against women who formerly had sex with, and been in relationships with, men, prior to discovering the lesbian feminism of the 70s and 80s - and who fell in love with a woman, and, equally, with lesbian culture’s radical redefinition of women, sexually, and all the other ways a woman can center women in her life and her work. That would be me, for 43 years now - I’m 70.
It’s also many thousands of women like me - women for whom lesbianism and feminism together forever changed our relationships with women, men, politics, the work we do, and the patriarchal world at large (and I do mean large). We are equally a part of the work of those foremothers whose lesbianism was always known to them.
I’m writing this with anxiety, having been viciously told a number of times that I’m not a lesbian - worse, that I’m polluting real lesbians. My credentials, as it were, are void, because I’m a “political lesbian”, not a real one. I’ve been called a faux-bian, a homophobe, a lesbophobe, a pathetic invader into real lesbians’ space.
The fact that I’ve been called these things by a cohort of younger lesbians, who’ve been alive and on the planet for decades less time than I’ve been exclusively with women, and been a lesbian feminist activist, grieves me. It seems to me that that part of the lesbian community is villainizing the very elders whose collective knowledge and experience is of great value to them.
That’s why, Tofu, I’m asking you to clarify your terms. Thanks.
I wanted to add that I am in 47, and I feel enormous gratitude to women of your generation. It is because of you a lesbian community came to exist, and that women my age had such a safe and easy time coming out and getting to meet other women. My generation benefited greatly because of the work your generation put in. Not just for lesbians, but also for feminism in general. My mum had to fight to go to uni. For my generation of girls it was taken for granted we could go. The very young lesbians I know, ie around 20, seem amazed by the community that once existed and wish for us to recreate it. Your generation showed us how to make a lesbian community. Due to the peculiar queer movement we will have to recreate that community over again. But the foundation you laid is still there, and we will rebuild.
Thank you so much for saying this, Emma. Yes, the trans/queer (TQ) rewriting of biology, sociology, medicine, law (as regards girls’ and women’s need for private spaces, separate from invasive males), etc, reversing lived female experience, insisting that we are their oppressors, and then calling that whole misogynist paradigm “feminist” has done enormous harm.
And I believe that the broad successes of 2nd wave feminism, and lesbian feminism at its most radical, are the source of this “The Patriarchy Strikes Back!” backlash.
Which is why it’s especially painful when a cohort of young lesbians trash us elders as insufficiently pure to belong in lesbian communities, and - worse - to say we deserve to be written out of the lesbian history/herstory which we helped to bring about. A great number of feminism’s greatest thinkers and creators, like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lourde, and Joanna Russ, were married to men whom they loved and were committed to, and who discovered, through feminism’s centering of women - to ourselves, and to each other - that women could mean more to each other, and more deeply, than men ever could.
Thank you again - and yes, we will win; and we have won, simply by living our lives as we’ve chosen to. Men will always invade what women make for ourselves; that’s how males have always operated. The TQ invasion, and reversal, of feminism is only the latest - and most bizarre - version of this. Thank you for helping me persevere.
Thank you so much for saying this, Emma. Yes, the trans/queer (TQ) rewriting of biology, sociology, medicine, law (as regards girls’ and women’s need for private spaces, separate from invasive males), etc, reversing lived female experience, insisting that we are their oppressors, and then calling that whole misogynist paradigm “feminist” has done enormous harm.
And I believe that the broad successes of 2nd wave feminism, and lesbian feminism at its most radical, are the source of this “The Patriarchy Strikes Back!” backlash.
Which is why it’s especially painful when a cohort of young lesbians trash us elders as insufficiently pure to belong in lesbian communities, and - worse - to say we deserve to be written out of the lesbian history/herstory which we helped to bring about. A great number of feminism’s greatest thinkers and creators, like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lourde, and Joanna Russ, were married to men whom they loved and were committed to, and who discovered, through feminism’s centering of women - to ourselves, and to each other - that women could mean more to each other, and more deeply, than men ever could.
Thank you again - and yes, we will win; and we have won, simply by living our lives as we’ve chosen to. Men will always invade what women make for ourselves; that’s how males have always operated. The TQ invasion, and reversal, of feminism is only the latest - and most bizarre - version of this. Thank you for helping me persevere.
I've only ever known the term "gold star lesbian" to refer to women who have only ever had sex with other women ie women who have never had sex with men. I think it is a shame that, even now, lesbian culture has not managed to shake off the trope of lesbians not accepting who they are during adoscence and that it's not just automatic lesbians ignoring the whole "men"/patriarchy crap from the get go. Perhaps lesbian culture was going to achieve this, but then transqueerbies invaded our culture and systematically began destroying it. I know lots of lesbians who are pushing back against the transqueerbies. And we will win.
Powerful piece, it hits hard but in a good way. Thank you for sharing with us!
Thank you for taking the time to read it.
Great article CB, I am in agreement with you about the, frankly obscene, trans and queer movement's invasion and destruction of lesbian culture. Lesbians truly have not a thing in common with trans queers. Worse, the trans queers are a menace to us, their ideology is opposed to us and harms us. I want to see lesbian culture completely sever any ties to the trans, queer, non-binary cult and re-establish our lesbian only community. The new app The L Community is great (you might already know it). Here in Australia we do have a group of lesbians deliberately forming a lesbian only community. It is expanding and, pleasingly, more and more young women are joining. They young women seem very relieved and happy to have escaped the ubiquitous queer community and come home to lesbian space. It is surreal how irrational queer ideology is, and how dogmatic and authoritarian it is. It is actually a homophobic movement. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised how swiftly after marriage equality was achieved, homophobia returned. But this time not from the right, but deep in the heartland of the left.
I’ve done an insane deep dive into trans. I’m 47 and had tuned out. Everything negative I heard sounded like more of the same from the right. I saw a key word, truscum, and that lead to an obsessive sociological project. I was horrified by everything I saw. The way trans people who believed gender dysphoria was a criteria, aka the real trans people, being excommunicated. Everyone and their dog calling themselves lesbians. The odd demand that trans be in the menu. Everything was transphobic and everyone who had anything you didn’t like to say was a TERF, which meant, shut up, bitch. The young women who were parroting it like a mantra to keep the devil away. I’ve been a supporter of the trans community, until I found out what it had become. A cult who rabidly enforced thought norms. An army who not only didn’t care about women but attacked any who dared disagree with death, rape, violent threats, loss of employment and social shaming. The part that broke my support was the women being raped in prison by men who were pretending to be trans women. The ACLU “zealously” defended SB 132 in CA after two women had been raped by a man who said he was a woman, changed and I to a Y in his name and that was it. Kept he/him pronouns, no other changes. I have shared that with multiple, multiple people who were “pro-trans”. Not one of them cared. Not one of them was willing to do a Google search with the key terms I provided. Each one informed of how rare it was for a trans woman to rape a woman. How they were going to get raped by the prison guards anyway, did I know how many women were raped by cis men? Not one ever showed any compassion or concern about women or girls being hurt by policies. My heart has hardened. I will do nothing to harm the trans community but I will also not hell.
My deep dive plus a decently strategic mind leads me to believe that in the US there is going to be hell to pay for the trans community. The Democrats have stood idly by while Rep Mace shouts the t slur on video. They are silent and will stay silent with exceptions of some false mumbling of disapproval. They need the Republicans to crush the trans movement because it is an albatross on their neck. Completely toxic with everything g verified and hanging out on the internet just waiting to be compiled.
I remember in my 20s when we knew to be aware at closing time to be on the lookout for men in trucks hunting gays to beat up. I’m afraid those days are around the corner. This is a direct reaction to the insanity of the trans rights activists. If one were to plot out a great civil rights movement and then do the exact opposite, you would have what we have here. I don’t wish any harm to the trans community, I fear it. I’m scared for them and frustrated because they are incapable of listening to anything anyone says if it isn’t on the pre-approved thought list. It is a cult and a domestic terrorist organization and I want nothing to do with it.
I would be delighted to just be the L. The G is perfectly fine on its own. We can have potlucks or something. We don’t need each other for political strength. We could come together if it was needed. It might be to get the divorce approved. I’m tempted to begin advocating for a LGB Alliance like they have in the UK.
I too am saddened to find us betrayed, sold out, demeaned as women. The hatred of women pours out of that community.
You and I are the same age. Growing up lesbian in Australia was easy for me during the 90s/2000s. A sweet spot. But now, for young lesbians, there is no true lesbian community to become part of. It's all queer and trans. I agree with everything you've written. The trans queer stuff is dangerous, homophobic, anti feminism and completely inincoherent and irrational. I'm a member of LGB Alliance Australia. I think America has one? It is a gr
eat organisation. Trans ideology is a cult. Thought police, reporting of disobedience, re-education, apologies on demand if someone doesn't stay on script, indoctrination, the list goes on. I am meeting more and more lesbians who are appalled by the queer and trans ideology. I think/hope a rebuilding and renaissance might be beginning.
I lived in Sydney 1989-1991, very much in a lesbian and then increasingly queer community. Shared a house with the founders of Wicked Women for a year. One of them transitioned and that was part of the increasingly queer emphasis. At the time it seemed cool and preferable to the 'gay women' who went to the Cricketers.
Now with much hindsight I'm quite horrified at some of the things I just let go. I was never involved in anything very dodgy, but it was there☹️
I've heard about the Wicked Women women, and that one of the founders ended up taking testosterone. Lesbians taking testosterone always looks like self loathing about being homosexual, and/or conforming with the myth that lesbians are "really straight men".
I had a lot of conversations with them about what was going on. I honestly can't remember what their motivation was🫤. There were lots of ways that I thought their thinking was effed up, but at the time not that, I guess because it was a personal choice about their own life.
Totally agree. I was and am still shocked by the Republicans being right about something. Rep Nancy Mace is going hard against it here. It is the first time a politician here has tried. I said I would never support a Republican but the Democrats are neck deep in it. Thanks for the info on LBG l, I’ll check it out.
It is the same here in Australia politically. It's women in the conservative party who are standing up for women. Although I would say their most vocal supporters are probably old lefties, but nevertheless, it's the right wingers who are doing all the talking. It's a positive to see women working across the aisle on this issue. And in Britain Kemi Baddenoch is a Tory yet she's is very articulate and outspoken on women's rights. As a previous Greens voter it is new for me to be agreeing to strongly with conservative MPs. I'm grateful for these women.
Hi CB, Great start. Guess you know about the Lesbian Project & Podcast? Like minds in the UK. Also Amanda Kovattana’s Substack & book: The Unexpected Penis: conversations on the gender trail.
What a breath of fresh air, friend! So delighted to be here. 💛
I’m reminded of Max Robinson’s Detransition: Beyond Before and After—If
you haven’t read it, I can’t recommend it enough.
Welcome! And thanks for the suggestion, I never heard of it, will have to check it out.
Thank you! 🌸
okay but are you gold star or not?
Tofu, please define “gold star” and what it means to you.
Mostly I’ve heard to used to refer to lesbians who have been attracted to, and only had sex with other women their entire lives.
Sometimes, I’ve heard it used to mean lesbians who have only had sex with other women since they came out, at some point in their lives as adults - sometimes as older adults - but who, looking back, realized that they’d always been attracted to women but had hidden it.
And sometimes I’ve heard the term used as a litmus test, a barrier against women who formerly had sex with, and been in relationships with, men, prior to discovering the lesbian feminism of the 70s and 80s - and who fell in love with a woman, and, equally, with lesbian culture’s radical redefinition of women, sexually, and all the other ways a woman can center women in her life and her work. That would be me, for 43 years now - I’m 70.
It’s also many thousands of women like me - women for whom lesbianism and feminism together forever changed our relationships with women, men, politics, the work we do, and the patriarchal world at large (and I do mean large). We are equally a part of the work of those foremothers whose lesbianism was always known to them.
I’m writing this with anxiety, having been viciously told a number of times that I’m not a lesbian - worse, that I’m polluting real lesbians. My credentials, as it were, are void, because I’m a “political lesbian”, not a real one. I’ve been called a faux-bian, a homophobe, a lesbophobe, a pathetic invader into real lesbians’ space.
The fact that I’ve been called these things by a cohort of younger lesbians, who’ve been alive and on the planet for decades less time than I’ve been exclusively with women, and been a lesbian feminist activist, grieves me. It seems to me that that part of the lesbian community is villainizing the very elders whose collective knowledge and experience is of great value to them.
That’s why, Tofu, I’m asking you to clarify your terms. Thanks.
I wanted to add that I am in 47, and I feel enormous gratitude to women of your generation. It is because of you a lesbian community came to exist, and that women my age had such a safe and easy time coming out and getting to meet other women. My generation benefited greatly because of the work your generation put in. Not just for lesbians, but also for feminism in general. My mum had to fight to go to uni. For my generation of girls it was taken for granted we could go. The very young lesbians I know, ie around 20, seem amazed by the community that once existed and wish for us to recreate it. Your generation showed us how to make a lesbian community. Due to the peculiar queer movement we will have to recreate that community over again. But the foundation you laid is still there, and we will rebuild.
Thank you so much for saying this, Emma. Yes, the trans/queer (TQ) rewriting of biology, sociology, medicine, law (as regards girls’ and women’s need for private spaces, separate from invasive males), etc, reversing lived female experience, insisting that we are their oppressors, and then calling that whole misogynist paradigm “feminist” has done enormous harm.
And I believe that the broad successes of 2nd wave feminism, and lesbian feminism at its most radical, are the source of this “The Patriarchy Strikes Back!” backlash.
Which is why it’s especially painful when a cohort of young lesbians trash us elders as insufficiently pure to belong in lesbian communities, and - worse - to say we deserve to be written out of the lesbian history/herstory which we helped to bring about. A great number of feminism’s greatest thinkers and creators, like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lourde, and Joanna Russ, were married to men whom they loved and were committed to, and who discovered, through feminism’s centering of women - to ourselves, and to each other - that women could mean more to each other, and more deeply, than men ever could.
Thank you again - and yes, we will win; and we have won, simply by living our lives as we’ve chosen to. Men will always invade what women make for ourselves; that’s how males have always operated. The TQ invasion, and reversal, of feminism is only the latest - and most bizarre - version of this. Thank you for helping me persevere.
Thank you so much for saying this, Emma. Yes, the trans/queer (TQ) rewriting of biology, sociology, medicine, law (as regards girls’ and women’s need for private spaces, separate from invasive males), etc, reversing lived female experience, insisting that we are their oppressors, and then calling that whole misogynist paradigm “feminist” has done enormous harm.
And I believe that the broad successes of 2nd wave feminism, and lesbian feminism at its most radical, are the source of this “The Patriarchy Strikes Back!” backlash.
Which is why it’s especially painful when a cohort of young lesbians trash us elders as insufficiently pure to belong in lesbian communities, and - worse - to say we deserve to be written out of the lesbian history/herstory which we helped to bring about. A great number of feminism’s greatest thinkers and creators, like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lourde, and Joanna Russ, were married to men whom they loved and were committed to, and who discovered, through feminism’s centering of women - to ourselves, and to each other - that women could mean more to each other, and more deeply, than men ever could.
Thank you again - and yes, we will win; and we have won, simply by living our lives as we’ve chosen to. Men will always invade what women make for ourselves; that’s how males have always operated. The TQ invasion, and reversal, of feminism is only the latest - and most bizarre - version of this. Thank you for helping me persevere.
I've only ever known the term "gold star lesbian" to refer to women who have only ever had sex with other women ie women who have never had sex with men. I think it is a shame that, even now, lesbian culture has not managed to shake off the trope of lesbians not accepting who they are during adoscence and that it's not just automatic lesbians ignoring the whole "men"/patriarchy crap from the get go. Perhaps lesbian culture was going to achieve this, but then transqueerbies invaded our culture and systematically began destroying it. I know lots of lesbians who are pushing back against the transqueerbies. And we will win.
Fabulous piece! I agree with every single word. Keep it up!
Thank you, Amanda. Appreciate your support!