Why We Need to Stop Gatekeeping Lesbians That Aren’t Women From the Lesbian Community
By: Elysa Caso-Mchugh
Tags: History, Queer Theory, Nonbinary, Lesbian, LGBT

Why We Need to Stop Gatekeeping Lesbians That Aren’t Women From the Lesbian Community Elysa Caso-McHugh Follow Apr 21 · 8 min read

Leslie Feinberg, transgender activist and lesbian, author of “Stone Butch Blues”

EDIT 12/2/2020:

Hi, I did not expect this to get so much visibility from a large platform so, please bear with some errors in grammar or this not fully covering the breadth of this topic. I encourage you to do your own research as well. This is just one non-binary, butch trans masc lesbian’s take, and it also was written with ~lesbians~ in mind, ~not~ every single trans masc person because we don’t have a singular experience in regards to our gender or our sexuality. So, please keep that in mind, and recognize that Elliot’s sexuality is still something we don’t know. I’m not claiming he is a lesbian, or anything of the sort. It wasn’t about him, it was about non-binary people who ID definitely as lesbians. Just wanted to make some clarifications! :) thanks and have a lovely day.

Yesterday was the Lesbian Day of Visibility. However, as a non-binary lesbian scrolling through the comments of an Instagram post with dozens of cis lesbians saying non-binary lesbians aren’t real, I never felt less seen.

I have known I was attracted to women definitively ever since I was 14 years old. I thought for a few years I was bisexual, but in reality had some unlearning to do about compulsory heterosexuality and my senior year of high school I came out as a lesbian and not a bisexual, just in time for pride. It took me another year to discover I am non-binary, upon attending a historically women’s college and being surrounded by trans folk for the first time in my life, particularly non-binary people. Coming out as non-binary has already been a liberating experience, although I have already gotten my fair share of hate at this point in the game.

It is expected from cisgender heterosexual people (cishet), because as a queer person I have been taught to expect it. However, what I didn’t expect was to receive hate and vitriol from cis lesbians telling me that “he/him” lesbians and non-binary lesbians don’t exist. It is shocking and horrifying to me how quickly lesbian history has been erased by cis lesbians. I am aware that it is a testament to the great fight lesbians have fought for the past century to be recognized as women by society, and to not be seen as “other” or as sexual deviants by cishet folk.

Syd and Elena from One Day at a Time. Syd is non-binary and Elena is a woman.

It wasn’t long ago, though, that all lesbians were not seen as women by cishet society. Only 40 or 50 years ago, lesbians were writing about their challenges with their gender identity because of their sexuality. The world has never seen lesbians as a truly binary identity, so erasing non-binary lesbians is essentially erasing the fight and struggle lesbians have been fighting for the past century.

Lesbianism has never been something reserved for cisgender women and only cisgender women. In fact, many cishet people were firm in their belief that lesbians were not women and would never be women. This forced many lesbians to tackle their gender identity under the lens of a non-binary approach to gender. Lesbians were forced to identify not as women, but as lesbians, as late as the 1950’s and 1960’s.

A great reading by Joan Nestle, a lesbian historian who helped found the Lesbian Herstory archives, includes the line, “I was queer and fem, and a fem was not the same as a woman” (Nestle 338). Over time, cisgender lesbians claimed the right to the term women for themselves as an act of protest against the way they were perceived by straight society. But that does not and cannot erase the fact that lesbianism itself is not a cisgender binary thing. The way we are perceived by cishet people influences the gender of the people who participate in queerness, as Nestle, a fem, struggled with her own gender identity for a very long time as a result of being a lesbian.

Queer people who were attracted to other lesbians were not seen as women up until lesbians themselves shifted the narrative. Lesbianism meant you were not a straight person, and it also meant that you were not a woman if you were a lesbian. Womanhood has consistently been centered around the woman’s relationship to men, and when women chose and still choose to defy that expectation for themselves, they were and are defying what is seen by straight society as an integral aspect of what it means to be a woman. Up until recently, cishet culture saw lesbians as “other” and not as women, as a collective group.

The history of what it meant and what it means not to be a lesbian is very important, for a number of reasons. To begin with, it means that lesbianism has never been tied to womanhood fully. Only recently, as the perception of lesbianism has shifted, has it become okay to gatekeep non-woman lesbians out of the lesbian community. The new definition of lesbians as women attracted to women is a direct result of the way distinctly butch lesbians fought for the rights of all lesbians and for the right to visibility.

Of course, this is by no means claiming that binary men or cis men are allowed to claim the term lesbian. But a lesbian’s fear of cis men claiming the term lesbian does not mean they can transfer that fear onto the way a non-binary person identifies.

Being a lesbian is not reserved for binary women, historically. For a very long time, in fact, all gay people, including people who would be seen as lesbian women today, were perceived as “Third Sex”, and not a man or woman at all, but an entirely different thing. From the very beginning of the circulation of the term lesbian, lesbianism was not a womanly thing to be. It is deeply concerning that cisgender and therefore privileged lesbians are so willing to dismiss this rich and complex history of being a queer lesbian, simply to adhere to a definition found in a dictionary written by cishet people. Gender is fluid, sexuality is fluid, and erasing the trans identity from lesbianism is erasing lesbian history itself. I don’t know about you, but frankly this terrifies me.

The desire to defend and shame non-binary people for claiming the term lesbian is dangerous and ignorant. It contributes directly to the new cishet expectation of queer people to fit into a very specific gender binary, and erases non-binary people entirely, even though we are some of the greatest victims of trans-misogyny from binary cishet folk and binary queer folk.

When binary women who like women create this narrow definition of lesbianism, it is a slap in the face to the butch women and even fems who came before them and fought against a narrow definition. Gender is a social construct. This can be seen in the way the definitions of what it means to be trans and cis has greatly changed over the past 100+ years. We use these terms such as cis and trans to define ourselves for the current cultural context we are living in right now. However, in our lifetimes, these definitions can greatly change, and they have greatly changed during many lesbian’s lives.

Radclyffe Hall, a lesbian and author of The Well of Loneliness.

I am a non-binary person who was assigned female at birth (AFAB). I use they/them pronouns and I am attracted to women and non-binary people. Thirty or forty years ago, there wasn’t even a definition of what it meant to be non-binary. I would have been seen as a butch lesbian and likely not seen as a woman either, but I would still be considered a lesbian. If we are going to rely on definitions of lesbianism based in history and facts, that allows for paradigm shifts which are inclusive of more people, and respectful to what it has and will mean to be a lesbian, we must begin to include non-binary people who identify as lesbians in our definitions.

If you don’t want to date us, fine. I don’t want to date a lesbian who doesn’t want to date me anyway. But I also reserve the right to bring it back to lesbian history, and to use a term which works for me and who I am. If a trans person who identifies as a certain gender outside of the gender binary tells you what their sexuality is, and you’re a cis person, you have no right to invalidate that. Being non-binary is complicated and how each individual experiences being non-binary is complex. Gatekeeping non-binary trans folk from using the term lesbian is rooted less in the history of the way the term has been used over time, and more in bigotry than anything else.

Cis lesbians have been able to come so far in gaining enough rights to dismiss non-binary folks’ identities because non-binary lesbians have fought for them. To exclude us is to further opress oneself by claiming that lesbianism must fit the binary when it historically never has. The fact that lesbians feel they can claim lesbian as a term is only for women is a direct result of the gay liberation movements and the inherent transphobia found in those movements. It is not an empowering thing to do, it is dangerous and reductive view on the queer movement itself. I hope that more and more cis lesbians will do research and work to learn the lesbian movement’s history, and to recognize the fact that being non-binary and lesbian is rooted in the fight that non-cis lesbians have been fighting and must continue to fight to this day.

We should not have to create a separate group for ourselves because binary folk do not understand the history of lesbianism itself. If we can be open and understanding and learn the complex ways that queer people have existed over time, we can have a much more welcoming community. It is also better to be inclusive than exclusive, and when we are inclusive we are able to gain new perspectives and make all queer people feel less alienated and alone, which is the goal for all of us, cisgender or not.

Expanding these terms to be inclusive of non-binary folk, and taking a radical approach to the gender binary itself, is a very empowering thing, whether or not you’re cis. It gives cis women the space to not conform to gender stereotypes they don’t feel comfortable with and frees them, and also creates safe spaces for trans folk where they otherwise would not exist. In the end, gender is a social construct. Basing everything off of the patriarchal binary view of gender when we begin to define sexuality is dangerous and more oppressive to cis lesbians than simply being more accepting is. Gatekeeping is more harmful than helpful, something which is proven by the way that lesbians have been able to gain rights as they were inclusive of gnc people, rather than exclusive. In the long run, just be kind, ask questions when you don’t understand, and be grateful for the people that fought for your right to exist as a lesbian woman, by letting them exist as who they truly are too. It wasn’t always that way for lesbian woman, let’s show the same respect for non-binary people too.