He/Him’s can be Lesbians?

LGBTQ+ community, or “the queers”, “the alphabet people”, and many other names have been used to describe our community. We tend to have this want to be all inclusive. This drive to be completely open to everyone, and as someone that’s been labeled a “conservative queer”, perhaps I’m sitting with the older crowd with some topics but there is a large amount of toxicity in the community and I think we have all seen it at one point or another. Excusing physical boundaries because “we’re all gay here anyway”, or rampant biphobia, and even the appropriation of race related cultural identifiers as well as the “MAPs” and “transtrenders” that steal from the credibility of the community for twisted benefit. So I suppose maybe I’m already old in gay years but I think we need to talk about something that’s been discussed time and time again.

He/him lesbians and bisexual lesbians.

I’m sure if you follow enough queer people or creators you’ve seen snipits of discussions surrounding identifying as a he/him lesbian or bisexual lesbian. But with a character limit and the wrath of The Twitterverse, it’s hard to have real in depth discussions about these topics. Most people might defend their stance but after three replies it seems to turn into memes or attacking grammatical errors. If you haven’t seen this, you are probably already trying to do the queer math of if this identity works. That part of me that wants to be all accepting wants to ignore this and just say they’re fine, but if I’m being real, I don’t think it is.

By definition, being a lesbian means being a woman or identifying as a woman, that is sexually and/or romantically attracted to women and only women. In short, women loving women. By definition, he/him lesbians are fundamentally incorrect. You are identifying yourself as a man, automatically pulling you out of the equation for making a lesbian. But this runs deeper.

Commonly known in history as he/him lesbians, was a subgroup of women that would dress, act and deceive society, mascarading as a man so that they and their lady lover might not be killed (or worse, expelled). The catch is, that it was a mascarade for survival, wearing trousers and a tailcoats doesn’t make you a man if you personally don’t identify as one. These women were women that paraded as men to survive. If they personally identified as men in the home and to their partner this would make them transgender, but they weren’t. They were women sacrificing what society had deemed femininity so they might scrape together a semblance of happiness. Those women, brave pioneers, are part of lesbian history. But we are no longer in those times in certain percentage of the world. I am approaching this from a first world, American bias, where we no longer have to dress as men to survive in typical society. I’m not saying every town has a gay positive atmosphere, homophobia is still a huge problem, but we aren’t illegal - not here anyway.

By allowing “he/him” to be a pronoun and identity allowed under the lesbian identity we are fundamentally changing what it means to be a lesbian and harming those that are lesbians that identity as such. As a lesbian, I use the term because I am a woman that is sexually, romantically, emotionally, physically and everything else you can think of attracted to women. I do not have these feelings for men, so to think that people identitying themselves as men can pirate the term feels invalidating, rude and wrong. This is like gay men saying they are a she/her gay man. It’s inherently incorrect. By saying men can be lesbians we are harming actual lesbians, ones that by definition are lesbians are now losing the label of their identity. Things evolve and change, and society has evolved to a point where he/him lesbians is an invalidating attack on the lesbian community. Butch, stud, chapstick, lesbians will all tell you they are women, no matter their clothing and presentation they identify as women. Having women that identity as men say they are lesbians because they may be genetically, originally female is incorrect. It’s not survival, it’s - to me - slanderous towards the lesbian community as well as the transgender male community.

Synonymously slanderous is the idea of bisexual lesbians. Being bisexual means the person is at least attracted to cis gendered men and cis gendered women. As discussed before, women that are lesbians are not attracted to men, so fundamentally the entire identity is a juxtaposition that attacks and harms both communities. Because now you have the bisexual community being invalidated as well, if bisexual women wanted to identify as lesbians they would, but they are not because clearly there are other playing fields of attraction to the opposite gender. Choosing to identify yourself with a gender changes the accessibility one has to black and white terms like lesbian or gay (man). Some may wonder about They/them lesbians, which, not to be rude, is also incorrect but is more correct than he/him. They/them, gender non-bianry indemnities are generally seem as not having one gender or identifying with both genders which would qualify them to be under the lesbian label. But honestly that is a separate discussion completely because it’s more case by case. Choosing a gender is not case by case, you are joining the collective.

The idea of he/him lesbians harms many communities on many levels: lesbians, men, trans-men, gay men even. As much as we want to be accepting we also have to respect the actual identities that were created to represent a group, we cannot continue to invalidate standing communities in this marterous effort to be all inclusive. So yes, it may be a mouthful, or untraditional, but identifying against the core of a community because of the commodity of having the title is ignorant and harmful. So I may be a “conservative-queer” but I feel that we all have a right to defend our communities. We identify ourself through these words of gay, lesbian, bi, pan, trans, non binary, Demi sexual and so many more, and honestly I think we worked too hard to just let it be stripped away from us.