Is lesbianism dead ?
Lesbian started as a word to distinguish gay women from men. Now some would rather be called fags

‘Vagina’ and ‘lesbian’ both sound like diseases,” laughs Skylar Rocket, 23, who, together with partner Embrun Rocket, produces the queer performance night Genderfukt! Organizing the event and performing at it put both partners at the heart of a growing wave of young bio-girls who are identifying less as lesbians or dykes and more as queers and genderfuckers. This at a time when the lesbian-based hit show The L-Word is entering its fourth season. “I don’t know any lesbians,” says Skylar. “I know people, women that like women, and I know people that are woman-bodied that only sleep with or date people that are woman-bodied.” Skylar asks, “What do you call someone who is woman-bodied, doesn’t totally feel female, that mostly dates boys that are born girls? What do you call that?”

Gay men might well ask, “Do queer women really talk like that?”

Yes. And with good reason: Lesbianism is out – excuse me, female-identified lesbianism is out. Genderqueerness is in. In other words, language is struggling to keep up as gender lines in the younger queer bio-women’s community are blurred with greater frequency and to a much greater extent than in gay men’s culture.

Compare a typical drag king show to a typical drag queen show.

“Every show, there’s at least one piece that [is] two boys getting it on with each other,” says Skylar of drag king spectacles like Genderfukt! But when Skylar says “two boys,” that means (in this instance) two bio-girls, dressed as gender-boys, acting like a couple of fags onstage. “They’re making out, humping each other. It’s hot.”

Can anyone imagine Sofonda and Heaven Lee Hytes grinding onstage in full drag and sticking their tongues down each other’s throats? Does anyone want to? And would anyone consider that remotely dykey?

Things are more nebulous in the chromosomally XX queer community than ever before. Before the feminist movement of the ’70s there were essentially three options: closeted, butch or femme. There was even some question of whether femmes were lesbians at all. In Ann Bannon’s 1962 lesbian pulp classic Beebo Brinker, the title character ponders what makes a feminine girl gay. Beebo asks, “Why does she love other girls, when she’s just as womanly and perfumed as the girl who goes for men? I used to think that all homosexual girls were three-quarters boy… And that they were doomed to love feminine girls who could never love them back.”

Even when I came out five years ago, I was told that wearing lipstick made me less gay. I didn’t wear makeup for a whole year because my friends told me it was a tool of the patriarchy. Lesbian historian Lillian Faderman observes that part of this anti-femme sentiment grew out of the 1960s and 1970s, when butch-femme relationships were judged harshly within the lesbian feminist movement and perceived to be mimicking straight relationships in “an unfortunate emulation of hetero-sexuality.” In the 1970s and 1980s, feminine androgyny and mullets became the acceptable middle ground.

James Miller, a University of Western Ontario professor and founder of Western’s Pride Library, notes that in the ’90s, post- AIDS epidemic, lesbians joined gay men in queer rights organizations like Queer Nation with a new stress on queer, rather than women’s or gay men’s, rights. Thanks to the involvement of academics in queer groups, words like “identity politics,” “genderqueer” and “gender fluidity” became commonly used and understood in the bio-women’s community.

Such words have not stuck with gay men’s culture, which remains gay men’s culture, not bio-men’s queer culture. But for bio-women’s queer culture, there’s still a trickle-down effect from academia. Part of a woman’s coming out process today is learning the correct use of these words from her peers, some of whom may be academics or may have taken women’s/gender studies courses.

But beyond drag king performances and academic lectures, how do these identity games play out in the “real” world of coworkers, grocery shopping and bio-family dinners? In an ideal world, Skylar prefers the pronoun “ze” over “he” or “she” But Skylar admits that getting the entire English-speaking world to adopt “ze” is not a likely proposition, and people will continue making assumptions about others’ genders, even if they don’t know whether someone identifies as male, female or neither.

And it can get confusing. After all, with large breasts and long hair down to hir (as opposed to “his” or “her”) shoulders, Skylar could easily be called the femme in hir relationship with the boyish Embrun, who’s got shaggy/messy hair and sports a dark blue hoodie during this interview.

“We look like a butch-femme couple, but our identities are exactly…” starts Skylar. “Pretty similar,” interjects Embrun, adding: “I’m just growing my hair out now. It’s been short for seven years. That’s what dykes did. And there weren’t so many words. I feel like there are more labels, more choices.”

Skylar certainly believes that’s the case when it comes to biowomen with a m a s c u l i n e streak. In the past, “butch was encompassing all the people who were not femme and now there’s a lot more leeway for those people to be androgynous but still female, to be masculine-identified, to be a man, to be transgender… [to] not actually go through physical changes but still go through life being identified as a guy.”

So what do you call a woman who’s into women and who’s dating a female-to-male transsexual? I ask a friend who’s in this situation whether she feels the term “lesbian” applies to her. She replies, “As long as I don’t have to sacrifice my identity as a femme/queer/dyke, then I don’t foresee [my boyfriend’s] transitioning becoming a problem… But I’ve heard more than one lesbian proclaim they wouldn’t date someone who is trans.” In the gay community, who would ever be considered gay if they were dating a t-girl? As one t-girl put it, “I’m sorry, I don’t have sex with gay guys.” But for queer biowomen, trans is part of the community, and some even feel it’s starting to dominate the discourse.

“There’s only three lesbians left in the city,” laughs one femmeidentified woman in her 30s. Everyone else seems to be in some state of transition. She did not wish to be named because she feared that her comment might be interpreted as anti-trans, and that she might be ostracized from the bio-women’s queer community because of it.

“There are no more dyke girls,” says one transboy. Anyone visiting Tango on a busy night might disagree. This transboy concedes, “Well, there are. But everyone seems to be getting on the [trans] bandwagon. I know six people who recently started transitioning.” He was also leery of being named in this article.

“People might be pissed off because trans identity is something to take seriously.” Calling it “‘jumping on the bandwagon,’” would be seen as dismissive by “people who are really struggling with gender identity.”

So why are so many young bio-girls going boyish – even those who don’t want to transition – and how is this different from butch?

It’s difficult to get someone to go on the record to answer this question. As one anonymous transguy says, “Everyone’s talking about it, but no one wants to own it.” The fear? Talking about “why” opens up lots of other questions in the emotionally charged arena of the feminist body politic. Making it very clear that he was speaking only for himself, drag king Sabastien Cognito says many younger members of the queer bio-women’s community would, on a visual level, blend well with bio-boy gay twinks. Sabastien has trouble self-labelling as a dyke. Even though Sabastien doesn’t identify as trans, if forced to “choose between butch or femme, I’d rather be a fag, maybe ’cause I’d rather be a guy.”

This raises interesting and potentially disturbing questions. Is there an element of internalized sexism within the desire for a woman to become a man? Does the desire to transition develop in part because hormones and treatments are now available in a way that they weren’t available to butches in the past? Among those who aren’t trans and don’t want to transition but who groom themselves to look boyish, does the use of testosterone shift the bell curve on boyishness, just as the curve of the gay male physique shifted, as some argue, with surging steroid use to counteract muscle-wasting from AIDS? HIV-negative gay men began using steroids when they became more available and more acceptable, and steroids became a must for some men just to keep up with the new status quo.

For bio-women, is there also a mystique attached to male power and privilege that plays into current genderqueer trends, even if it only leads to feeling more powerful? How do transboys take up room in traditionally women’s spaces? Can a critical dialogue take place about how women’s spaces will change due to a growing number of transguys without it being reduced to (or dismissed as) transphobic paranoia?

“There are a lot of conversations happening within the trans-men’s community about the line between ‘I hate being a woman’ and ‘I hate women,’” says Ayden Scheim, coordinator of the Trans Fusion Crew at Supporting Our Youth (SOY). He laughs when asked if he can be quoted. “I’ve been in fab far too many times.”

“There is a difference between the men who stay in the dyke community and the ones who leave,” he says. “Transmen who identify with the history and experience of women, those people have a better understanding of sexism… Transmen who strongly feel they have always been [men], why should I expect them, in a society of men who are really sexist, not to be [sexist]? But for myself, I have higher standards.”

These are questions that gay men generally don’t have to ask about t-girls, unless you count those who feel t-girls shouldn’t take part in drag competitions because of a perceived unfair advantage from estrogen and implants. Shemales at Remington’s strip upstairs one night a week for a separate and much higher cover fee, and for a different clientele, than the gay boys (and straight dancers) on the ground level. And as Scheim points out, “there’s a group that gets ignored, the transmen who are sexually interested in gay men and go to Woody’s.” Drag king events are clearly more inclusive, and now DKs often share the stage with female-formed burlesque dancers. Young queer bio-women’s culture seems to be much more intertwined with shifting gender than gay male culture, to the point that the word “lesbian” is becoming obsolete, and “butch” just doesn’t seem to work with this pan-gendered generation.

Christy O’Connor is an Editorial Intern at fab.