When we called it "androgynous"

Letter submitted by PM

I was non-binary when we called it "androgynous". I remember when GL became GLB, then GLBT, then, finally, LGBT. Then we got the Q, the I, the A, the +, the LMNOP...

I'm sixty-one, and I'm a lesbian. Have to say, I never liked the word, 'lesbian', particularly. My woman and I used to say it sounded like something you'd only pick up with a pair of tweezers. Probably got that from some lesbian comic but I don't feel like looking it up.

I would much rather we were called 'sapphists' because it has so much better mouthfeel to me, and it would make people curious about Sappho, but that's another story.

More to the point, I was acquainted with some of the academics and others who were creating gender studies back in the late 80s/early 90s. I liked them. They were asking interesting questions. Although I felt somewhat intimidated by the academese, I still wound up reading and talking about gender and sexuality a lot.

Hell, they were lesbians, and there just weren't that many of us around. It was a small world. And lesbians were having a little bit of a moment. Lesbians were kind of hip. The L-Word and Queer as Folk rocked cable. No one was trying to erase women. Almost no one was telling lesbians they had a moral mandate to entertain men in their boudoirs. Almost.

But there were hints that this was coming. The Women's Michigan Music Festival finally died after wrestling with this issue of whether transwomen were allowed to be there for what, over thirty years? I remember reading about the controversy back in the late 80s. And being just as baffled and irritated by it then as I am now. I was not a camp-in-the-woods kind of lesbian, so I never went to the Michigan festival. But still, it meant something to me. I had skin in the game, so to speak.

Then as now, most transgender/transsexual people were just men wanting to dress/behave/be treated as what would commonly be seen as a woman. They weren't identifying women and lesbians as their enemies. Talking about being born in the wrong body was a metaphor for the deep discomfort they felt: not a statement to be taken literally. That is simply impossible: we are born, or we're not born. We cannot be born into a 'wrong' body. We can be unhappy with our bodies, and most women know all too intimately how that feels. I won't rehash all of that here. And transwomen share that with natural women, it's true.

Back then they weren't accusing lesbians of killing them with our violent words (disagreeing with something they said) and then threatening to bash our heads in. They didn't claim to have more authority about the female experience than natural women; they didn't have their birth certificates changed and their movie credits altered after they surgically changed sex.

There were of course women who were transitioning to men back then too, Annie Sprinkle's "Linda/Les" was a fascinating, intimate look at that. I was quite interested -- having never been happy with my body -- and thought about transitioning myself. A bit of pondering served to disabuse me of that notion. But again, it was a fringe thing, and no one was proposing to change medical terminology because of it. It was an outsider, fringe, demi-monde thing, and that was what made it interesting and attractive. FTM transitioners were small in number and didn't take over the entire lesbian community, although even back that friends were starting to talk about the erasure of butch lesbianism in favor of FTM transitioning.

Then something REALLY bad happened. Social media. That's when it all turned to sh*t. People are just not good en masse. Our opinions have gotten shrill, our moods truculent, we have become really stupid and tribal (in the worst possible sense of the word), and our capacity to think has gotten muted, to say the least.

So we need countermeasures. Like what your group is doing. We need to talk about what is real and what is not real. We need to acknowledge the very simple truth that there are two sexes. We need to be clear that there are innumerable genders. We need to be clear that everyone should be free to express themselves in whatever way they choose, and we need to be clear that sex-based human rights take precedence over gender-based human rights when it comes to the safety and well-being of women.

'Nuff said.