Lesbophobia is real. Itâs the prejudice, bigotry, and oppression that exists at the intersection of homophobia and misogyny. Let me say it again: Lesbophobia is real. Hate for lesbians is real.
However, it is essential to acknowledge and understand that the term lesbophobia has been co-opted by a loud and growing contingent of LGBTQ women in communities that share troubling ties and ideology with factions that exist inside the alt-right movement â worse, the dangerous dogma thatâs attaching itself to word the lesbophobia has found a new home at AfterEllen.
I first encountered the word lesbophobia in response to the post I wrote called Queer Women Take Over The 2016 Emmys. Her Story got a revolutionary nod for Outstanding Short Form. Kate McKinnon took home a trophy for Saturday Night Live. Sarah Paulson won for The People vs. O.J. Simpson. And Jill Soloway scored another victory for Transparent. On social media there was a small outcry that I hadnât chosen the headline âLesbians Take Over the 2016 Emmys,â despite the fact that Kate McKinnon was the only winner who explicitly identifies as a lesbian. (In fact, Sarah Paulson is on record saying, âI refuse to give any kind of label just to satisfy what people need.â) The reasons the handful of dissenters gave for my decision to call the Emmys queer was that I am a lesbophobe, an espouser and executor of lesbophobia.
To be very honest with you, I shrugged it off. The most unwinnable battle we have at Autostraddle is labeling LGBTQ people in a way that satisfies everyone. Itâs such a constant struggle, we laid out an explanation about labels in our official comment policy. Recently on a Pop Culture Fix, I wrote about the new queer characters coming to The Good Wife spin-off. One of them will be a lesbian, according to the showâs writers; the otherâs sexuality has not been labeled. So, I said, âThe Good Wife spin-off will prominently feature two lesbian, bisexual, gay, homosexual, or otherwise queer-identified women.â Just to cover all my bases because it was almost Christmas and I was tired and I didnât want to have to argue about labels. And yet, the cries of lesbophobia came in again. I got a couple of emails, a dozen or so tweets. Essentially: âLesbian is not a dirty word! Saying queer is lesbophobic!â
So, on December 26, I tweeted something I think is a true, fair, and accurate analogy:
Yelling âlesbophobia!â when someone says âqueerâ is like yelling âwar on Christmas!â when someone says âhappy holidays.â Come on, y'all.
A couple of days later, AfterEllenâs official Twitter tweeted at me and said: â@theheatherhogan oh, agreed. Itâs like yelling âbiphobia!â and âtransphobia!â when someone says lesbian.â
To which beloved Autostraddle cartoonist Dickens replied:
âAfterEllen is three weeks shy of transforming their website into an online support group for victims of wyt lesbian genocide. This is honestly the most ridiculously entitled white lesbian coated petrified bullshit I have seen in a long time. And if you donât think white supremacy has reached out its dirty little fingers and touched a few groups of marginalized white folks, well. Keep an eye on their feed here and there. Keep an eye on their former writers. They arenât just trying to Make Lesbianism Great Again⌠They are asserting their strength. They are erasing the visibility of the defectors. They are sliding their salty little asses into spaces and feeds where they must know they are clearly not wanted or cared for. I was never a fan of AE but this new image theyâre building for themselves is a little too Nazi-adjacent for my galaxy Blaaaack aaaass.â
Dickens was, of course, correct. And her point was proven once again the very next day when an article blasted out to the 125,000 followers of AfterEllenâs official, verified Twitter account cried: âLesbian Spaces Are Still Needed, No Matter What the Queer Movement Saysâ. It suggests that trans women and bisexual womenâs desire to be included in queer womenâs spaces is to blame for the decline of lesbian-specific spaces, which lesbians need to stay safe from trans and bisexual women.
That kind of rallying cry feels very much like the âSave Our White Neighborhoodsâ rallying cry of the alt-right, so I went on a deeper dive to try to find the origins of what I called âthe lesbophobia movementâ on Twitter. And what I found was more horrifying than I ever imagined.
A few weeks ago AfterEllen â which everyone presumed dead after the company that owns it effectively fired everyone, including longtime editor in chief Trish Bendix â announced it had acquired a new editor named Memoree Joelle. In October, Joelle, tweeted a Change.org petition that sheâd signed called Take the L Out of LGBT. The petition is a direct response to a previously failed petition that called for GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, HuffPo Voices, The Advocate, etc. to Drop The T from LGBT. The most popular supporter of the petition is a guy you might know called Milo Yiannopoulos. He signed it, tweeted about it, and dedicated 3,000 words to it in a post on Breitbart. Thanks to Miloâs urging, Matthew Hopkins, one of the main perpetrators of Gamergate, wrote a post called âWhy #GamerGate Should Help the âDrop the Tâ Campaignâ on his personal blog. Hopkins called it âone of the most politically important campaigns of our generation.â
In addition to signing and tweeting about the petition, Joelle commented her approval. When former AfterEllen writer Elaine Atwell brought Joelleâs support of the petition to light, Joelleâs comments disappeared from the petition, and so did Elaineâs byline from the hundreds of articles she wrote over the last five years at AfterEllen.
The comments on the Change.org petition mention lesbophobia multiple times and equate it with trans activism, as do the subreddits that discussed Joelleâs contribution to the petition. âPart of lesbophobia is hating us for our same-sex attraction, but another very big part of it is hating us for our rejection of men,â one user wrote on /r/GenderCritical/. (Trans women are almost always referred to as men on this particular subreddit.) Another Redditor on /r/actuallesbians decried the âmale entitlement and lesbophobiaâ of protesting the petition. âThe moment we talk about your rape culture or your male violence weâre âtransphobicâ or âbiphobic.ââ (The men in this comment are actually trans women and ârape cultureâ refers to the constantly espoused idea in TERF communities that trans women are male predators.) The lesbophobia tag on the blog GenderTrender is a deeply disturbing trip down an anti-trans rabbit hole. The lesbophobia tag on the website 4th Wave Now is horrifying; it equates allowing trans kids/teens to come out and live openly as their true gender with child abuse, ideas that are â again â shared with Breitbart and Milo Yiannopoulos. Reddit and Tumblr are absolutely flush with lesbians using the word âlesbophobiaâ to back up the ideas presented in these âDrop the Tâ/âThe L Is Leavingâ petitions.
These spaces that use the word âlesbophobiaâ to attack trans and bi women or people who use the word queer share more than than an ideology with Breitbart. Youâll find them saying things like âtrans women want to colonize the lesbian community.â Youâll find them using the phrase âSJWâ (meaning Social Justice Warrior), a pejorative term coined by the Menâs Rights Activist movement. And youâll find a lot of talk about how the correct âbiologyâ is the thing that allows people access to the protections of the majority. And lots and lots and lots and lots of just truly sickening propaganda leveled at trans and bi women. Itâs very much about creating an in-group and scapegoating an out-group through tried and true tactics that have been â Iâm sorry â utilized by Fox News and the alt-right for years.
I wrote about these things on Twitter, and you can read Dickens further unpacking them here and here. (You should read that last thread before you jump in here and call her âmy black friend.â)
Look, we didnât just wake up one day with an openly racist, openly sexist, openly xenophobic, openly ableist, openly anti-semitic president in the White House, appointing the leader of the most dangerous white supremacist website in history to his top advisor position. We watched blatant and unabashed white supremacist language and ideas slowly take over the movement from the inside. We watched the most powerful scapegoat the most vulnerable. We watched Fox News make heroes out of the white men who murdered unarmed black children and terrify people with their whole War on Christmas bullshit and equate all Muslims with terrorists. A Nazi didnât walk into the West Wing and have a seat; the slow creep of white supremacy laid the path for him.
Vox did a fascinating interview with former conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes earlier this year. He quit over Trump. But the whole interview is him agonizing about how, to him, the GOP had always been about fiscal conservatism and states rights and he believed in that ideological purity so deeply that he fooled himself into believing thatâs what the GOP was about to everybody, despite the fact that he saw the white supremacy and fascism slowly gaining power and momentum until it took over.
To realize, first of all, that youâre part of a movement that was not the movement you thought it was, that youâre aligned with people that you didnât really understand youâre aligned with, and to realize that everything that you thought about the conservative intellectual infrastructure was really piecrust thin. You thought you had this big principled movement and then suddenly along comes Donald Trump and you realize that it was just was just the pastry on top. So I think disorienting is a great term. Disillusioning is not too strong either.
To me, what weâre talking about with lesbophobia is a similar thing. Is lesbophobia a term some lesbians have rallied around to protest the prejudice and bigotry that exist at the intersection of homophobia and misogyny? Yes, of course. Absolutely. HOWEVER. I had to go searching for people using the word lesbophobia like that because my entire experience with the way the word kept popping up in my timeline and in my comments and in the comments sections of other websites was to decry the use of the word queer and to espouse anti-trans and anti-bi ideology. And that includes every single person who landed in my mentions on Twitter when I started talking about this. I did not click on a single profile without finding anti-trans, anti-bi language; or ask a single person if they believe trans women are women and have them say yes.
If you are a woman who is using the word lesbophobia to NOT do those things, and youâre more angry at me for pointing out that itâs happening than you are at anti-trans/anti-bi people who have hijacked its meaning, I ⌠I truly donât understand. Whatâs happening at AfterEllen is terrifying me. Maybe the website is technically dead, but it still has clout and power and itâs using it to push some really dangerous ideas about lesbian exclusivity, and those ideas are shared by a very loud group of people who use the word âlesbophobiaâ on their blogs, social media, Reddit, etc. to vilify the people (like me) who stand against them.
I donât want to cause anyone pain. I donât want to make anyone feel unsafe or unloved or unaccepted. I DO NOT BELIEVE LESBIANS ARE NAZIS. I AM A LESBIAN. If you truly think thatâs what I was saying when I unpacked these ideas on Twitter, Iâm sorry. It was not my intention.
I do think, however, that itâs imperative for you to open your eyes to how the word lesbophobia is being used to persecute and oppress trans and bi women in very vocal and influential spaces that have direct ties in ideology and language with the alt-right.
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