The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Lauren Levey's Talk, "Choose Lesbian"

From 2025-05-24 Feminist Question Time at Women's Declaration International

So, I've been noticing that terfs seem to be winning. One sign is that the media blackout on issues involving gender identity has mostly lifted, even in the u.s., and even in legacy media. I've noticed that especially since the most recent u.s. national election, and since the u.k. supreme court ruling that sex is real under the equality act. By the way, I am especially proud of the lesbian intervenors for their crucially persuasive arguments in the case. I'm not surprised that lesbians played a leading role, and I am so proud of my u.k. lesbian sisters. Meanwhile, the u.s. supreme court is expected to rule in the u.s. versus Skrmetti, which is essentially about medically disguising the sex of minors, also unavoidably about gender identity in general. The decision is expected sometime in june. WDIUSA submitted a wonderful amicus brief in that case and we are actually feeling kind of hopeful. You can read our brief on our website.

So it looks to me as though women, including lesbians, are about to get some of our spaces back on both sides of the atlantic. If that is true, lesbians might consider what we want to do in those spaces that serves our collective lesbian interests. Th members of the WDIUSA lesbian caucus have been engaging in wide ranging discussions about why patriarchy on both left and the right continues to outdo itself in obsessively trying to erase, denigrate, and vilify not just feminists but lesbians in particular. Our discussions have been fantastic, and along with writings and talks by Sheila Jeffreys and others, those lesbian caucus discussions have informed what I am planning to say here today.

But to be clear, I am speaking today strictly as myself and not for the lesbian caucus.

So now after a long and distracting hiatus made necessary by the trans campaign, radical feminists, including lesbians may soon be able to get back to our main task, of pulling down the pillars of patriarchy, and radical feminist lesbians in particular can perhaps now get back to the uniquely lesbian task of modelling what free women might look like, and what love relationships might be like when they are based on equality, liberty, respect, and dignity. Now I am going to focus on what is known as political lesbianism.

The term itself has acquired the properties of a powerful taboo whose mere utterance stirs up so much anger, scorn, division, and sheer panic among all demographics that there is a temptation not only to avoid talking about it, but especially to avoid using the term political lesbianism. So, I've just said political lesbianism three times, and now I'm going to finish opening that box, and attempt to shine some light on its contents, and I invite you all to come along.

Apparently and maybe in reality, for patriarchy to endure, it must not be seen as possible for women to escape heterosexuality. Meanwhile, heterosexuality is unavoidably unequal because it is structurally impossible to equalize the role of heterosexual wife-mother within a patriarchal system. Increasingly I see women understanding this. I see women regretting their straightness on social media all the time. It goes something like this. A woman will tell a horrendous personal story about how she had a terrifying date with a man, or a disgusting date with a man. She says she feels lucky to have escaped safely. And then she'll follow up her story with a familiar script of utter helplessness. If only I weren't heterosexual, if only I could have been born a lesbian. The next three slides are a variety of screenshots of comments on recent instagram posts and the names of the posters have been blacked out.

I think in my hardwiring I am more straight than gay. But because of the experiences I have had I am becoming less and less into men and more and more into women. A lot of men repulse me, very few women do. Someone else says, My attraction to men fades more and more each day. So, the first woman here makes two contradictory statements, first she refers to hardwiring, meaning she thinks she's innately straight. But then she observes that she is becoming less into men and more into women. So, she's becoming more lesbian. And she thinks the change is due to her experiences rather than her nature. I am going to guess that the bit about hardwiring is something she felt obliged or even pressured to say, and the rest is actually honest exploration that makes her quite vulnerable.

RAGE and doing what I can to make myself gay. Turn myself gay. I hate being straight for real if anyone has any tips I'm all ears. I was straight for like twenty-two years, youtube helped me a lot. You know, I think we may want to make more youtube instructional videos on how to become a lesbian. I grew up exclusively attracted to men, but have tremendous amounts of trauma because of them and have found myself gravitating to dating exclusively within the NB/trans community. I cannot look at a male body and be attracted anymore, I'm not sure if it it's because I'm finally allowed to explore my sexuality or if it's because of the trauma or both. I think it's both to be honest. As someone who went from bi to lesbian, a lot of my sexual preference is due to feeling so deepseatedly unsafe with men that I am incapable of feeling romance or sexual chemistry. Even men I love, they are brothers to me. So there are two more women who are fairly clear that their sexuality has changed.

There does seem to be some confusion here about whether hating men means you're a lesbian. Clearly it doesn't, since these nominally bi and straight women sound as though they hate men way more than most lesbians do, which makes sense, since straight women have much more intimate involvement with men than lesbians do and therefore I would say more hatred-inducing experiences. But let's be clear that being lesbian means exclusively loving women. It doesn't require any particular feelings about men. So why don't more of these straight women take the obvious step and become lesbians?

I see two reasons. First, we're in a socially regressive era at the moment, so it's hard to choose what's now being framed once again as sick, evil, deviant, and simultaneously innate. And second, many lesbians are currently suspicious and unwelcoming of newbies. My friend Loraine Nolan, who created WDIUSA's black women's caucus, recently wrote on her substack,

It blows my mind that women are the only class that is compelled to form relationships with their primary oppressor. That has to change. I cannot tell you how many women I have spoken to on and off the internet who have lost their attraction to men, some who still desire men wish they weren't attracted to them. There are even women who claim they chose to be lesbians.

She continues,

Any household that is successful and fatherless by design is a threat to patriarchy. That includes lesbian households. This is why 4B is a valuable option for women, not dating, sleeping with, marrying, or having children with men, needs to be normalized.

Well said, Loraine. So, I'd like to look more closely at all of instagram comments and some of their assumptions.

The first assumption is that women are helpless victims of their own sexual desires, that their fate is sealed by their own sexual desires. Their only choice it seems is between a cary man and a disgusting man. A related assumption is that sexual orientation is innate and not socially constructed. Lesbians are said to be born that way and there's no way either to opt in or opt out. Both of these assumptions are based on the familiar theme of femininity, that women lack agency over their own lives including sexual agency. Women don't choose, they get chosen, says the patriarchy both inside and outside of our heads. But in fact, there is no scientific evidence that sexuality has a biological basis. In fact there are plenty of women whose sexual orientation has changed for one reason or another and everybody knows it.

For several years during the 1990s I facilitated lesbian coming out groups. Women would come to the group for different reasons. The first reason was because she had been bisexual but had come to the realisation that she simply wasn't attracted to men's bodies anymore, possibly because she had discovered that men are frequently terrifying and/or disgusting, or possibly for no reason that she was conscious of. Second, because she'd always been straight, but suddenly fell in love or became infatuated with a woman. And now simply knew that she was done with men forever. And third, because she had always been straight and was still occasionally attracted to a man's body but because of life experience she no longer wanted to have sex with men. She didn't want that dynamic in her life anymore. Could she become attracted to women? Could she stop being attracted to any man? Could she make herself into a lesbian?

Today, under the dogma of born that way, the first two women might be accepted as lesbians, but only on condition that they rely on patriarchy's compulsory heterosexuality or comp-het, to explain the apparent change in their sexual orientation. In other words, the script goes, they had always been lesbians, born that way and all, but comp-het had hidden their innate lesbianism from them until the moment when they were no longer able to ignore it. Conveniently, this explanation is consistent with women's presumed lack of agency. It's consistent with the gender of femininity. They couldn't help themselves. As for the third woman, today she would be excluded as a lesbian by those who believe in born that way. She will be instructed by the born that ways that she has no agency in the matter, and that there's no shame in being a bisexual woman who chooses to have only female partners because bisexual is what she innately is now and forever. Conversations with exactly this content are on social media every day.

So women learn that if they hope to be accepted as a lesbian by lesbians, they need to get this script just right. The problem with the born that way argument, besides its political dysfunction, is that scientists have mapped the whole human genome and have failed to definitively identify a biological basis for lesbianism. Or for that matter for butchness or femmeness. There's a historical basis for born that way, but there's no known biological basis.

The history that I'm aware of is that early in the 1970s one of the early gay rights organizations in new york, I don't remember which, run predominantly by gay men, decided that the best chance for homosexuality to get legal protection would be to present it to the courts and to the public as being exactly like race. Race is something you're born with and it never changes, and black people had just recently, in the 1950s and 60s, had spectacular success arguing exactly those points. So the gay male lawyers decided that sexual orientation needed to be like race in order to argue convincingly for equal rights, meaning to those gay men: decriminalization, the right to marry, and the right to be custodial parents. In other words, the right to be fully enfranchised patriarchs. The radical feminist lesbians in new york at that time were not at all aligned with the goal of becoming fully enfranchised patriarchs.

These next slides date from the second wave. The text of the first slide was written by Rita Mae Brown. "I became a lesbian because of women. Because women are beautiful, strong, and compassionate. I became a lesbian." I love this one. "Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians." Okay, that was uttered by Pat robertson, a male christian fundamentalist who was no friend of women's liberation from patriarchy. But he was pretty sure that women can become lesbians and that doing so was connected with feminism. As women who understood patriarchy and who understood that lesbian sexuality was simultaneously erased and punished, radical feminist lesbians didn't want the superficial reforms that gay men wanted. Those lesbians wanted decriminalization of course, but they didn't see same sex marriage as desirable. What they wanted was the destruction and reordering of every institution and they understood that they needed political power to achieve that. But the gay men's agenda prevailed over time. Until now. So now, let's ask some radical feminist questions regarding the born that way doctrine.

Whose interests are served by having women think that it is impossible to become a lesbian? Or by having women think they're stuck being straight, like it or not? I'm not seeing how it's women's interests or lesbians' interests that are served. And why is being attracted to other women framed as impossible for some women? For the record, women are very easy to love if you're paying attention to them. Born that way dogma has inevitably escalated into a purity spiral. I have seen current narratives that the best lesbians or maybe the only genuine lesbians claim a biological basis for both their lesbianism and their butchness. And there are also "gold star lesbians" who have never been with a man. So much for ideals of equality and eliminating oppressive class hierarchies. Born that way marketing enhanced with this lesbian purity spiral traps lesbians into becoming a vanishingly tiny, politically powerless sexual minority, whose strictly defensive political agenda begins and ends with "would you please stop beating me sir?" We can do so much better.

Going back to my 1990s coming out group for a minute, some women from each of the three categories did become lesbians, meaning that they remained in the lesbian community for as long as I knew them and apparently functioned in every way as lesbians. And some women in these categories wh participated in the coming out group did not make the change. I don't know why, we didn't do any follow up studies and we weren't sociologists, but it seems to me that this much is probably true: that some women successfully chose to become lesbians and that probably our coming out group helped them to do that; that some women did not become lesbians probably meant that they didn't choose to. My next question is specifically about the potential power of political lesbianism.

What do you think might happen to patriarchy if every woman understood that there was a stable, well-functioning community of beautiful, skillful, ethical, women-centred lesbians, ready to accept new lesbians into that community? To put it another way, what if it was generally true, and generally known, that life as a lesbian is freer, longer, healthier, more egalitarian, sexier, and way more fun than straight family life typically is for women? We wouldn't even have to abduct men's wives and daughters as men might fear. I suspect that lots of women might come to us quite willingly and happily.