A Word of Our Own: Ch 20 Last Lesbian Standing
What is the matter with dykes? Is it Stockholm Syndrome that we can’t acknowledge we have needs, too, are faced with misogyny, with hate (even from our own community) unless it’s beating our heads in?
Welcome to A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
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CH 19: …Message after message declared that I was the problem. A transphobe. Nothing but a fucking TERF. If I was important enough to have a reputation, they would have destroyed it. If I wasn’t unemployed and unemployable, they would have tried to get me fired. Their logic escaped me, though. If I was a transphobe for denouncing (only) those trans rights activists who advocated for the rape, torture and murder of females, wouldn’t that make trans rights activists, pro-rape, pro-torture, pro-femicide? Is that who we are, now? The community once known as gay? Were we always?…
20. Last Lesbian Standing
Even though some of that happened later, the name TERF was already circling me when I slumped on the couch obsessively googling lesbian, scrolling past the porn and the dusty Wikipedia definition, reading article after article by millennial girl journalist declaring that no one used the word lesbian anymore, not because of stigma, Oh no, they would never concede to that, but because queer was so much nicer, better, so terribly inclusive, that it had room for everyone, especially men.
They assumed that that was the goal, to be inclusive, to be nice to be generous and good. As if women ever benefitted from that. As if words by their very nature didn’t exclude. Too bad. Kelly means me. Not you. Thyme is that spindly plant on my windowsill that has seen better days but is still so fragrant. Oregano, though, is the thing nearby with rounder fatter leaves, and a bullying tendency to manspread in the planter, crowding out the sarriette, the winter savory. The mint here has a funny yellow border. Once you call it mint, you can’t call it oregano, but it doesn’t mind. It only wants the oregano to stay in its spot. The name is the thing. And homos are not hetero. And whites are not blacks. And male is not female when it comes to producing gametes, or there would be no such people as transmen and transwomen. And lesbian by definition and by desire excludes males. So what?
One day, it will be morally neutral again to say it. Like acknowledging that the category of apples excludes pears. It’s nice to have more than one word for fruit. It’s even useful, for instance, that even though both have four legs the word dog excludes table. Where would we put our plates if the surface kept scratching itself and howling?
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