The World Hates Lesbians and Gets Celebrated for It

The Cost of Refusing to Center Men, Why Lesbian Boundaries Are Treated as a Problem.

As a lesbian, it has always been hard to understand my sexual identity.

I was born female, and because I was born female, society socialized me to become a woman. And because society socialized me to become a woman, it expected me to become a reproductive machine.

The problem was that I had no attraction to men.

I also had no attraction to having children.

And for some reason, that made me fascinating and undesirable at the exact same time.

It was a strange position to be in.

Women constantly told me they wished they were lesbians.

I heard it growing up.

I hear it now.

“I wish I was a lesbian.”

“I wish I didn’t have to deal with men.”

“I wish I liked women.”

Yet despite hearing that over and over again, I never felt celebrated for actually being one.

That contradiction always stood out to me.

Women often say they wish they were lesbians, but when they meet actual lesbians, they don’t necessarily treat them well.

I remember always thinking about the idea of the “gay best friend.”

The gay best friend was always a man.

The gay best friend was never a lesbian.

That stood out to me because lesbians are looking for women too.

But women rarely seem interested in building community with lesbians the same way they are interested in building community with gay men.

When women want gay men around, it is often friendship.

When women want lesbians around, it often feels sexual.

Experimental.

Curious.

Entertainment.

But rarely community.

As a lesbian, it was difficult to understand my sexuality because society taught me to sit and wait.

Wait for a man.

Wait to be chosen.

Wait for attraction to arrive.

So I waited.

And every man who approached me, I didn’t like.

At the same time, society taught me not to like women.

Not for any logical reason.

Just endless criticism.

Too confident.

Too loud.

Too skinny.

Too fat.

Too feminine.

Too masculine.

Too much.

Not enough.

It didn’t really matter what the woman was.

There was always a reason I was supposed to dislike her.

But that never connected with me.

Women were beautiful.

Women were interesting.

Women were powerful.

I always liked women.

I just didn’t realize my attraction to them was sexual until much later.

When I first came out, I was still heavily socialized as a woman.

I followed social expectations.

I dressed feminine.

I wore makeup.

I dressed in ways that people recognized as feminine.

And the world still did not believe I was a lesbian.

I was constantly told I was too pretty to be a lesbian.

Too feminine to be a lesbian.

Too attractive to be a lesbian.

Nobody celebrated me.

People simply refused to believe me.

As I got older, I started understanding my gender differently.

I realized I was more non-binary.

More masculine.

I wanted my outside to match my inside.

So I started dressing differently.

And that is when I noticed something that changed my understanding of the world.

People say society rewards masculinity.

But I learned that society rewards masculinity in men.

Not masculinity itself.

Because once I became visibly masculine, I lost access to many of the protections femininity had given me.

When I was feminine, people would at least pretend to care.

They would pretend to listen.

Pretend to acknowledge me.

Pretend to help.

If I needed assistance, they would at least perform concern.

Not because I was fully respected.

I was still a woman.

But I was visible.

Once I became visibly masc, that visibility disappeared.

I became harder to see.

Harder to hear.

Harder to care about.

And that realization was terrifying.

Because the violence became more visible too.

I called an ambulance once because my girlfriend was having an asthma attack.

She had to lose consciousness before they finally took her seriously.

The EMT then argued with me and would not allow me into the ambulance.

Another time, I was nearly jumped by three women in a bathroom.

One woman was trying to talk to me.

I wasn’t interested.

I told her I wasn’t interested.

That should have been the end of the interaction.

Instead, the situation escalated.

When I later went to the bartender for help, he ignored me.

When I called the police, they ignored me too.

Those experiences stayed with me.

Because they made me realize something.

Lesbians often have nowhere to go.

Not outside the community.

And sometimes not inside it either.

Outside the community, lesbians are frequently treated as a joke, a fantasy, a threat, or an inconvenience.

Inside the community, there is often a hierarchy nobody wants to talk about.

People often act as if masc lesbians hold the most power.

But that has never matched what I have observed.

In my experience, femmes are often more believed.

More protected.

More centered.

More trusted.

While masc lesbians are often viewed with suspicion before they even speak.

The irony is that masc lesbians frequently become the public face of lesbian visibility.

We are often the people who visibly break social expectations.

The people who choose ourselves over social approval.

The people who listen to our instincts even when doing so comes with consequences.

Yet visibility does not automatically translate into power.

In many cases, visibility makes you a target.

What I have observed is that masc lesbians occupy a strange position.

We lose the protections that femininity provides.

But we never gain the protections that masculinity provides.

Because masculinity is rewarded when it belongs to men.

When it belongs to lesbians, it is often treated as a problem.

That is the contradiction I keep returning to.

People tell lesbians that masculinity gives us power.

Yet many masc lesbians move through the world feeling less protected, less believed, less supported, and less safe than ever.

So if masculinity automatically creates power, why does that power seem to disappear the moment it belongs to a lesbian?

And if lesbians truly hold so much power, why are we still fighting to simply be taken seriously?

The level of disrespect lesbians are expected to swallow is baffling to me.

One time, my aunt told me that all women are the same and that she just sees me as a woman.

And I had to tell her that that is exactly the issue.

I don’t want you to see me as “just a woman.”

Because when you see me as just a woman, you are also attaching all the expectations that society places on women.

You see me as a woman who wants a man.

Needs a man.

Or organizes her life around men.

I remember being in Grenada when my cousin’s car got a flat tire.

I’ve dealt with flat tires in Grenada before, so I immediately ran over to help.

A few minutes later, everyone else came over.

My cousin’s boyfriend had been there the whole time, but suddenly the energy changed.

They started pushing me away.

I couldn’t help because I was a woman.

He had to help because he was a man.

It didn’t matter that I had more experience.

It didn’t matter that it was his first time in Grenada.

It didn’t matter that I was already solving the problem.

What mattered was that he was a man.

He had to be empowered.

I had to be disempowered.

And I was expected to sit there and respect it.

That is one of the strangest parts of being a lesbian.

You are constantly expected to respect systems that do not respect you back.

Then COVID happened.

For the first time in a long time, lesbians started creating spaces where we actually felt comfortable.

House parties.

Word-of-mouth events.

Text message invitations.

Small spaces where people actually knew each other.

Not many people knew about them.

And for a moment, it felt like freedom.

As COVID restrictions eased, those spaces got bigger.

We supported them.

We spent money there.

We promoted them.

We wanted them to succeed because lesbian-centered spaces are rare.

And then something happened.

Men started showing up.

They were being brought in by bisexual women bringing their boyfriends.

I remember hearing someone say:

“Lesbians would rather have cops at their parties than someone’s boyfriend.”

And I remember thinking that completely missed the point.

Cops and boyfriends are not the point.

The point is that lesbian spaces are finite.

Bodies take up space.

Rooms have limits.

People want room to dance.

Room to breathe.

Room to exist.

Lesbians created those spaces because there were almost no spaces built for us.

Yet somehow, the moment lesbians ask for a space to remain lesbian-centered, the request itself becomes controversial.

The concern becomes a joke.

The boundary becomes the problem.

Instead of asking why lesbians created the boundary in the first place, people mock the boundary.

And that is another pattern I keep noticing.

Lesbian boundaries are rarely debated honestly.

They are exaggerated.

Mocked.

Turned into caricatures.

Then dismissed.

The conversation becomes about how unreasonable lesbians are rather than why lesbians felt the need to create the boundary in the first place.

What fascinates me is that when gay men say a space is gay-centered, people understand.

When any other community creates a space for itself, people understand.

But when lesbians do it, suddenly it becomes controversial.

Suddenly we are exclusionary.

Suddenly we are unreasonable.

Suddenly we need to explain ourselves.

And that feels like misogyny to me.

Not a new form of misogyny.

The same old misogyny.

The difference is that when it happens to lesbians, people often stop calling it misogyny at all.

They act like it is nothing.

The same thing happened at my store.

A group approached me wanting to host an event.

I loved the idea.

The only thing I asked was that somewhere on the flyer it mention that NOELENOELE is a lesbian-centered brand.

That was it.

I wanted lesbians to know they were welcome.

The organizer immediately pushed back.

She would rather bow out than acknowledge the lesbian-centeredness of the space she wanted to use.

And that never made sense to me.

Why approach a lesbian-centered brand if lesbian-centeredness is the thing you are uncomfortable acknowledging?

When I later explained how I felt, she told another lesbian that I had attacked her.

That is the part that keeps standing out to me.

She told me she understood what I was saying.

Then she reframed the interaction as an attack.

Now a mutual lesbian is angry at me.

Now a mutual is cursing me out.

Now the conversation has become something else entirely.

And that is the pattern I keep noticing.

The original issue disappears.

The lesbian raising the concern becomes the issue.

The conversation shifts away from what happened and toward managing everyone’s feelings about the lesbian who spoke up.

And somehow, by the end of it, the person who raised the concern is the one left defending herself.

I think this dynamic also exists inside lesbian communities.

People often talk about masc lesbians and femme lesbians as if one group has power and the other doesn’t.

I don’t think it is that simple.

What I think happens is that patriarchy creates a divide-and-conquer system.

Masc lesbians are punished for visibly disrupting gender expectations.

Femmes are rewarded for appearing closer to those expectations.

And because of that reward, femmes sometimes receive privileges that masc lesbians do not.

They are more likely to be believed.

More likely to be seen as harmless.

More likely to be protected.

More likely to move through straight spaces without immediate hostility.

But that does not mean femmes are actually protected.

It means they are conditionally protected.

Their protection exists only as long as they remain close enough to straightness, femininity, and patriarchy’s expectations of women.

The moment they stop doing that, those protections disappear too.

So the hierarchy is ultimately fake.

Patriarchy hurts both groups.

But while it is hurting both groups, it convinces one group that they are safer than the other.

And that is where the divide begins.

Masc lesbians end up with almost no space at all.

They are often distrusted outside the community.

And inside the community they are frequently portrayed as having more power than they actually possess.

So they become hyper-visible but unsupported.

Visible enough to be blamed.

Not visible enough to be protected.

Meanwhile, some femmes mistake conditional privilege for actual power.

And because they are more likely to be believed, they can sometimes participate in the same systems that harm masc lesbians without realizing it.

The result is exactly what patriarchy wants.

Not strong lesbians.

Not connected lesbians.

Not united lesbians.

But lesbians arguing with each other while the system that created the hierarchy remains untouched.

The conclusion I keep coming back to is that misogyny does not disappear when someone becomes progressive, queer, feminist, or inclusive.

Misogyny simply changes shape.

And when it comes to lesbians, I think it often becomes harder to recognize because people assume it cannot be happening inside communities that claim to support women.

A lesbian’s existence challenges one of patriarchy’s oldest assumptions:

That women should organize their lives around men.

Not all lesbians are activists.

Not all lesbians are feminists.

Not all lesbians think the same way.

But the simple fact that a lesbian does not center men in her romantic life already disrupts a system that expects women to do exactly that.

So what I keep noticing is that pressure gets applied to lesbians from every direction.

From straight men.

From straight women.

From families.

From institutions.

And sometimes even from people inside LGBTQ spaces.

The message changes, but the goal often feels the same:

Make the lesbian smaller.

Quieter.

Less specific.

Less visible.

Less lesbian.

That is why I don’t think what I am describing is simply homophobia.

I think what I am describing is misogyny colliding with lesbian existence.

Because a lesbian’s existence refuses one of patriarchy’s core demands.

And when something refuses patriarchy, patriarchy does what it has always done.

It tries to discipline it.

Correct it.

Shrink it.

Mock it.

Sexualize it.

Erase it.

Or make it serve someone else’s needs.

And what I have observed is that anti-lesbian behavior is often rewarded.

People gain social approval for dismissing lesbians.

People gain access to lesbian spaces while arguing that lesbian spaces should not exist.

People are celebrated for redefining lesbians, speaking over lesbians, correcting lesbians, and explaining lesbians to themselves.

Meanwhile, lesbians are expected to be grateful for whatever space remains.

That is why the title of this chapter is not “The World Disagrees with Lesbians.”

It is “The World Hates Lesbians and Gets Celebrated for It.”

Because the hostility is not what shocks me anymore.

The applause is.