I have a new piece over at UnHerd:
These days, a woman who calls herself a lesbian invites suspicion. Over the past 20 years, bars, bookstores, and festivals, once set aside for women attracted to other women, have rebranded themselves as “trans-inclusive” or “queer”, shut down, or gone underground. Lesbian playwrights such as Carolyn Gage see their plays shelved. Lesbian role models such as Ellen (now Elliot) Page come out as transgender. Even gender-nonconforming girls and women from the past fall victim to the new gender creed. Joan of Arc — the subject of Gage’s cancelled play — has undergone a posthumous transition nearly 600 years after she was burned at the stake.
This month, media organisations and mega corporations will bend over backwards to find an LGBTQ angle to cover. But what you won’t see or hear is the underside of Pride: a culture of intense social and sexual pressure that’s pushing some lesbians back into the closet and encouraging others to identify out of womanhood altogether.
And my mom—my most faithful reader who always has notes—sent me edits on yesterday’s post, offering a stronger analogy (and she’s right, of course): “That's not a treadmill. You can get off a treadmill. That's an iced bobsled track.”
Your mom’s cool.
I'm commenting here because I don't see a way to comment on Unherd (perhaps they require registration).
I am a gay man. It has always been hard for Lesbians to meet each other because they don't seem to exist in the same kinds of numbers as gay men, but I didn't know that their community is under assault as badly as what you say in your article. I can, however, attest to the fact that gays in general feel pressure to accept trans people into our community, even though transgenderism is completely different from homosexuality. I don't see myself as LGBT. I see myself as LGB.
When I was young, there would sometimes be a drag queen in the bars that I would frequent, but usually not. The men there wanted men, not men who wanted to be women. Today, I can imagine that there are some trans men going to gay bars. I would avoid them, for obvious reasons: Whatever they have in their pants is not what I am looking for! You can be sure that I am very focussed on the real deal in that department. The whole idea that a Lesbian should be happy to make love to a woman with a penis is equally preposterous.
I am actually a little surprised that it has been so easy for trans people to disrupt the Lesbian community. I thought Lesbians were more self-confident than that. As a gay man, from a very early age I was confident about who and what I was, and I just assumed that Lesbians were similar. I never realized that so many of them are conflicted that some of them would become trans.
I want to thank you for putting the word "queer" in quotes. As a gay man, I consider that word to be a slur. It mortifies me that people in the gay and trans community are using it as if it didn't have a consistently negative meaning ("strange, weird, unusual, abnormal, odd"). I'm not any of those things.