Lesbians are not going extinct.
There was no asteroid that struck the Earth that wiped out only the lesbians. There is no mysterious disease that is decimating the global lesbian population. Lesbians are not being pushed out of their ecological niche by inter-species competition and left to starve. Lesbians are doing fine. Thriving. Having their day in the sun. Living, laughing, loving, and lesbian-ing.
But that’s not what the transphobes want you to think.
Transphobes are getting creative these days, attempting to dream up ludicrous new ways to justify their bigotry. J.K. Rowling has begun attempting to convince people that blood is gendered, while Elon Musk has suggested that Taylor Swift is actually Napoleon Dynamite in drag. While these stances are outright hostile to the queer community, there exists a far more insidious method of manufacturing transphobia: pushing the myth that the existence of trans people is causing lesbians to go extinct. As a result, transphobes are attempting to use this bogus theory— along with the words of a handful of confused anti-trans people—in order to suggest that the queer community is somehow “against” transgender people as a whole. In fact, they even go so far as to say that the L’s, the G’s, and the B’s are attempting to remove the T from the LGTBQ+ acronym, replacing it with “LGB.”
This could not be further from the truth, and the polls prove it.
A recent poll of Britons shows that the vast majority of gay, bisexual, and lesbian people support the inclusion of trans people within the LGBTQ+ community. Any self-respecting queer person who is familiar with queer history knows that trans people have been an integral part of the community for as long as queer people have existed. The majority of gay, bi, and lesbian Britons use both LGBT and LGBTQ+ to describe their community, with a paltry 3% of queer Britons using the term “LGB” to do so.
As it turns out, 3% of Britons also think the Earth is flat. I’m sure there’s some overlap between the two groups.
Yet the myth persists. The British LGB community (all twelve of them) insists that lesbians are “going extinct” due to the rise of “transgenderism” in society, and media outlets are happy to give these bell ends a platform. “Feminist” writer Aimee Anderson has written about “the extinction of an entire people,” and Cherríe Moraga is concerned that butch lesbians will “become a dying breed” if they begin to identify as transmasculine. Others fear that “tomboys” are becoming a “rarer and rarer species” as more children begin to identify as trans and nonbinary.
Obviously, this is horsesh*t.
To state the obvious, “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “gay,” and “trans” are not mutually exclusive terms. The L, the G, and the B of “LGBT” refer to one’s sexual identity (i.e. who you are attracted to), while the “T” refers to your gender identity. What I mean is that even if all cis lesbians were wiped out by an asteroid in a theoretical “lesbian extinction event,” there would still be lesbians. Trans people can be lesbians. A transfeminine person who primarily dates women may self-identify as a lesbian, just a transmasculine person who dates men may self-identify as gay. Trans people can be straight, bisexual, lesbian, gay, pansexual, asexual, or any other kind of sexual because their trans identity does not automatically determine who they are attracted to.
The myth of “lesbians going extinct” is not only inaccurate, but the notion itself is flawed. More accurately, LGB bigots mean to suggest that “cis lesbians are going extinct,” but simply say “lesbians” because they do not believe that a trans person can even be a lesbian. The argument in and of itself is couched in transphobic thought and should be discarded outright.
The other damaging aspect of this argument is the claim that cis lesbians feel pressured to date or have sex with trans lesbians. Fringe lesbian groups such as Get The L Out— who are attempting to distance lesbians from the greater LGBTQ+ community— recently came out with a bogus survey that claimed that 56% of lesbians have felt coerced into having sex with trans people. Their sample size was only 80 people. And it’s laughably easy to refute. Why? Because any self-respecting trans lesbian doesn’t want to have sex with bigoted women. Why would they? Bigots are gross and deeply unsexy.
This idea that trans women are waiting in the wings to swoop down on unsuspecting cis lesbians only serves as a greater transphobic narrative against trans women. It’s the same bizarre narrative that falsely claims that trans women are perverted men in disguise, who want to use women’s bathrooms, sneak into women’s spaces, and have sex with gay women in order to satisfy some sort of sick kick. And that is … unhinged and absurd.
Why? Because sadly there are easier ways for men to sexually assault women than transitioning into one. Men have not needed to become women in order to hurt women, they simply use physical and social violence to do so (which is reinforced by the patriarchy and rape culture). Meanwhile, trans women— one of the most vulnerable demographics on the planet— are consistently scapegoated by both bigoted men and women in order to distract against very real problems of gendered violence in our society. Trans women may not want to have sex with bigoted cis lesbians, but there certainly are cis men who will.
Cis men have sexually fetishized lesbians for far longer and with far more devastating efficiency than trans women ever could (and that’s if trans women even wanted to in the first place). The widespread social rejection of lesbians who do not conform to social standards of thinness and femininity should serve as ample proof that the most harmful demographic towards lesbians is cis men who uphold these patriarchal standards.
And guess what? Those kinds of men aren’t fans of trans women either. The myth of trans “predation” on the cis lesbian community serves a ludicrous notion that somehow trans women and cis men are operating in ideological lockstep in order to oppress, debase, and assault cis lesbians. In reality, one peak into the hellish mirror dimension of “The Manosphere” would show that these types of men are not at all supportive of trans women, and arguably call for increased violence against trans women as opposed to cis women.
What TERFs and anti-trans queer people don’t seem to realize is that by rejecting trans people, they are fundamentally upholding standards of heteronormativity that actively oppress them as well. But considering that only 3% of queer people think this way, it’s safe to assume that they all met at a flat-Earth convention and are beyond saving.
(via The Washington Post, featured image: Valerii Evlakhov/Getty Images)
