The Story of The Lesbian

The Constant Push to Broaden, Blur, and Dissolve Lesbian Identity

I have known myself to be a lesbian as long as I can remember, no transitionary phase, no incessant rumination over my lack of male attraction. I simply slid out of the womb and knew what I wanted. Though I always felt my sexuality was different from other lesbians as it held a different sort of essence, carried an almost foreign cadence. I loved women, love women, in a way that the blood ran through my veins, effortlessly, subconsciously unaware of the act whilst simultaneously aware that if it paused for even the most transient of seconds, I, as I knew myself, would cease to exist.

And yet womanhood? Oh, womanhood. The neutral ignorance I afforded her was unexplainable to my psyche. I couldn’t understand my troubled relationship with womanhood, with femininity, with being called a girl but the discomfort that ensued whenever I was made aware of her existence that somehow shrouded my own was undeniable even as a little child. But as I grew older, I began to realize: she didn’t exist.

You see, I’ve always viewed womanhood as a shifting current, a tide rocking back, forth and to, fro again. Never permanent, never quite in reach. Ephemeral molecules slipping through my fingers. I’d scoop it up, and it would go. Scoop it up, and it’d leave. Scoop it and realize it was unstable—always shifting, always contested. I’d raise my palm and peer closer, but never a fixed reality there to grasp.

Womanhood was made. Whether with painstaking precision, sinister motives, or the unintended consequences of the long history of humankind, I cannot be sure, but it was made. And if it was made, it can be unmade, remade, redefined, co-opted by anyone and wherever. Femininity is a battleground, womanhood the fool's prize, and this is why lesbianism, being so deeply entangled with womanhood, cannot truly ever be autonomous. Not in our lifetimes. Not for a very long time. The label always under siege, the label always up for debate, the sexuality forever something others feel at liberty to reshape.

"One is not born, but becomes a woman," said Simone de Beauvoir. I believe her. I know her words to be the truth, a truth that sinks in, shameful, when I wake in the mornings and see my vanity standing in the soft, first light of dawn. The world was not made for the female who wakes up naturally, but for the idealized woman—a version crafted to fit into structures built by men. She is created with every brush of makeup, with perfumed soaps that dry the skin, drawing womanhood through its cracks.

Remember the ease that follows your day when you have made yourself beautiful. Think of the discomfort, the erasure, when you haven’t groomed enough, when you haven’t shaped yourself to fit that ideal. The world was not built for the woman who simply wakes. That woman must first be made.

After the female, lesbianism is womanhood’s inescapable victim. The tainted roots of fluidity and instability that choke womanhood seep into lesbianism, contorting and reconstructing it as an undeniable subset of womanhood—becoming just as vulnerable to external forces reshaping it as womanhood has always been. When the foundations of womanhood tremble, so too do the roots of lesbianism, each changing and adapting as one reshapes the other, until neither can stand without the influence of the other. The uncontaminated version of female homosexuality remains elusive, lost in a universe where females have not suffered to the extent we have. What true lesbianism would look like is as impossible to comprehend as one’s nonexistence. We are all we have ever known. Never has a world without patriarchy been seen, and never will it be recognized if it were. Every lesbian relationship ever formed has existed inside the heterosexual world, within a framework built by men, around men, for men. To the point that we have been reduced to non-men loving non-men—the tributary of the default loving the other sad tributary of the default, of the core.

This raises a question then: Is it even possible for lesbianism to exist in its “pure” form? What is it pure form? What does the string of words mean? Or by nature, is it something that can only ever exist within the cracks of a patriarchal world—something that is always being shaped by the very thing it’s attempts to escape?

Anyone could become a womanhood as womanhood is a social position, a costume, a role, a grip on the mind, braided into the neural pathways of every brain that has wondered. In this age, hardly a radical claim socially speaking. The issue is, however, who decides whether lesbianism is tied to innate biology of the female or womanhood as enigmatic concept? Who will rewrite? Who will reinterpret? Expand and contract the allusivity it holds? And why is it that every time lesbians’ struggle to define themselves, here arrives immediate push to dissolve and soften? To broaden those definitions?

If I take the logic scattered in the works of De Beauvoir, Dworkin, and Butler to their pessimistic, bitter end, the only way to understand what "real" lesbianism could have been is to imagine a world where women were never forced to bear the weight of oppression. A world where the gendered hierarchy was never created, never sustained, and never inflicted. But I can’t. We can’t. That world, like so many others we dream of, is not ours to claim. It has never existed, and so we are left with this. All we have is what lesbianism has become—distorted, reshaped, and weathered beneath the relentless pressure of heterosexuality. This is what it has always been, and in a way, this is all it will ever be. A fragmented truth of what could have been, twisted into something we can only try to recognize amidst a world built to make us invisible.

So, does that mean lesbianism is doomed to never be its “true” self? Do the number of groups that urge severance of lesbian attraction from female bodies prove unabashed that lesbianism is and must be inherently tied to womanhood? Do the online debates of the lesbian acceptance of male genitalia attest that this is a battleground for the identity itself. There is little pressure for gay men to be attracted to vaginas the way lesbians are being pressured to accept penises, but gay men are protected under holding the gender of the default. Womanhood must always be a willing victim to modification, negotiation, and reinterpretation in a way that manhood cannot be.

Lesbianism is not a reaction to heterosexuality but a rejection of male dominance and thus, deeply threatening to patriarchy. It is why you’ll find it constantly under siege. A form of desire, intimacy, and community that exists outside of men’s control. Historically, anything that escapes the male control is a problem that must be “fixed.” So here arrive these ideological shifts seeking to reshape lesbianism into a more palatable, more acceptable, more accommodating identity, like a beauty standard the ebbs in and out of style, lesbianism must follow suit. Detach it from biology, from vaginas, from the female body, and with that it becomes something that can be moulded into whatever the dominant ideology wants it to be.

But I also agree that the extremism we are seeing now is inevitable. An understandable and expected backlash against the deeply ingrained homophobia and sexism that has followed since the dawn of humanity. And history works in cycles—society overcorrects, swings too far, and then readjusts. I believe the readjustment grows tangible now. More and more push back against these ideological pressures, not just in secret but openly, because they’re realizing that no amount of political theory can erase basic reality: lesbians are same sex attracted. That’s what we’ve always been, and that’s what we will always be.

And maybe that’s how lesbianism ultimately becomes something independent—by surviving. By enduring. By refusing to be reshaped by external forces. If lesbianism has always existed under patriarchy, then maybe the greatest act of defiance isn’t dreaming for a utopian world where patriarchy never existed—it’s existing in spite of patriarchy. Maybe lesbianism’s true form isn’t something pure, untouched by history. Maybe its true form is the fact that, no matter what happens, no matter how much it’s attacked or co-opted or rewritten, it still persists. I persist.

There is no ‘returning’ to a ‘true form of lesbianism.’ We are not a reaction to heterosexuality, but as an assertion of a women’s different reality.

Take feminism, the ideology itself is under the same pressures of reinterpretation and dilution as lesbianism because feminism is tied to womanhood. This is why radical feminism, in particular, is seen as such a threat—because it insists on drawing a line around womanhood and saying, “No, this belongs to us.” But the very nature of womanhood, as something historically created and defined by patriarchy, means it can never be a closed category. It must remain open to be manipulated, reshaped, and redefined to suit whatever the dominant ideology of the time is. Because there is no real power in womanhood—only in how it’s controlled.

That’s why accusations of “exclusion” are always weaponized against feminists who assert that feminism should be about biological women. If womanhood itself is a malleable social construct, if it’s not rooted in anything inherent, then how can feminism be exclusionary? If womanhood is just a role, a costume, an identity, then who say who cannot wear it? And if anyone can wear it, then feminism, which is supposed to be about liberating women, ceases to have a clear focus at all.

Manhood is fixed, heavy, upheld by the weight of history. Womanhood is fluid, open, and constantly rewritten. Manhood can shift slightly—men may be a little softer, a little more expressive—but remains a stable category. Meanwhile, womanhood is something that can be entirely remade depending on what serves the dominant system at the time. That’s why gay men can freely say their preferences and yet lesbians are vilified for same sayings. Because homosexuality, for men, is something that exists within clear, defined boundaries. But lesbianism—like womanhood—is supposed to be open to modification, to interpretation, to expansion, to inclusion. The expectation is that lesbians should be willing to accommodate everyone, because that’s what women are expected to do. That is what womanhood is for. To serve and provide a purpose, not a way to existence. That was and is always for the man.

The idea of “womanhood” as it exists today—its expectations, its definitions, its limitations—was shaped entirely by patriarchy. Designed to serve male interests. And that’s what makes this conversation so complex and confusing to many. Because if womanhood itself is an artificial social position, then what does it even mean to fight for womanhood? What does it mean to exclude others from something that was never truly ours to begin with.

But then, what happens if we accept that womanhood is entirely a social construct? Do we just let it go? Do we surrender it to whoever wants to claim it? Or do we try to reclaim it, reshape it into something that does belong to us? I believe that is where radical feminism and gender-critical feminism split. One side says, “Womanhood is an oppressive category; we should abolish it.” The other says, “Womanhood may have been created by patriarchy, but it still belongs to us, and we won’t let it be taken from us.”

I’m not certain where I stand, but I do know this: regardless of all the questions and uncertainties, I am, first and foremost, a female. A lesbian second. And whatever womanhood may be, last. And if you believe lesbianism is tied to womanhood, then lesbianism belongs to anyone and everyone who practices any faint version of it. But if you believe lesbianism is tied to innate females, then it simply belongs to women like me.