Lesbian Is A Gender

Constantly defined by their relationship to men, to everything they are not, ‘a woman is someone who isn’t a man’, to be a woman who loves women is to resist the patriarchy. It’s to be defined by our relationship with other women, instead.

This is what my womanhood is intrinsically tied to…
My love for other women.

Being queer, I don’t feel the need to conform to society’s expectations of what it means to be a woman (what does that even mean) because I am not preoccupied with ensuring that I am attractive enough for men.

The same beauty standards that exist in straight relationships do not apply in queer relationships. We are free to make our own rules, the overarching one being that there are none.

When society at large finds women who are not attracted to men unimaginable, lesbians by virtue are, according to such (il)logic, similarly unimaginable.

They’re doing it to appease the male gaze.

Subverting normativity as a woman in a relationship with another woman, what is a woman if she is not on the arm of a man?

Many people find it hard to comprehend how a relationship could possibly exist without a man to head it, a perspective which has made living a life within which men are so decentred feel like a revolutionary act.

When a central part of womanhood is male attraction (i.e., being attracted to men and only men), many lesbians have spent their whole lives feeling a deep-rooted sense of isolation, unable to work out where they ‘fit’ in life.

‘Honestly, as a lesbian, I do sometimes feel excluded from womanhood, because so many things have to do with dating men and all of that stuff.’

Feeling uncomfortable around men, the very same men who love to sexualise us, and not quite fitting in with women either based on such a big part of a woman’s identity (or so we are told, loving men) being absent, this is why so many lesbians have historically felt isolated when it comes to determining their gender.

I wasn’t a woman, but a lesbian, an identity so powerful it’s the closest thing to a gender I have.

With so much shared history and community around the term and its opposition to the patriarchy, there’s just something about the word lesbian that feels like home.