As a queer person, I’ve interacted primarily with online queer spaces — a rookie mistake. Every year, I am subjected to the exact same debate about identity politics that they were having on Tumblr circa 2017. While the target of each discourse cycle varies, the common thread is its exclusionary nature and reliance on prescriptivist definitions of queer identity. 

Prescriptivism is an idea about language that suggests that there are distinct correct and incorrect ways to use it. In this specific context, I’m using it to describe the idea that queer labels have strict definitions, and if someone uses that label in a way that contradicts that definition, they are using it incorrectly and must be corrected. For example, a strict prescriptivist might see a butch lesbian identifying as a man and using he/him pronouns, and tell him that he is incorrect or not actually a lesbian for doing so.

I am, staunchly, not a prescriptivist. What I am instead is a descriptivist, (in this context) meaning that I believe that queer identity is nuanced enough that no given definition for a label can 100% apply to every single person who uses it and that labels are better used as a tool for describing identity.

Being queer is a wonderful thing. When I realized that I was a lesbian, my life came crashing into a focus I had never known before. Being a lesbian meant that I wasn’t alone in my identity. There was a community that had existed long before I was born of people who I shared enough commonalities with that I could understand the depths of my identity. 

Unfortunately, I have long been resigned to my fate of having hot takes on internet discourses, which means that I have been subjected to enough lesbian discourse that I’m sure I’ve lost a good couple of years off my total lifespan. Most recently, the discourse was about lesbians who are also trans men.

One facet of lesbianism is a complex and nuanced relationship to femininity, womanhood and masculinity. In the current patriarchal structure of society, women are defined by their relationship to cisgender men; how attractive they are (to men), whether or not they’re in a romantic relationship (with a man). If a woman is exceptional, her achievement is given the modifier “for a woman.” Misogyny, like racism, is so baked into the current cultural identity that nobody living in our current society is untouched by it in some way.

Gender identity is so much more complex than what is assumed by the cultural zeitgeist. It’s not a built-in fact of life. Judith Butler talks at length about it as something that is entirely performative, conceptualizing a person’s gender as something they build themselves. Babies assigned female at birth don’t come out of the womb with bows in their hair, after all, and babies assigned male at birth aren’t born in blue onesies. Biological sex is a reality, but even that is incredibly nuanced and built by social norms. The number of people who are intersex is comparable to the number of people who are redheads, but we accept ginger as a perfectly viable hair color to have. 

Lesbians have historically been simultaneously hyper-masculinized and hyper-feminized. Attraction to women is seen as inherently masculine, which allows exclusionaries to cast doubt on the identity of transfeminine lesbians, who have always been the backbone of lesbian communities. Lesbianism doesn’t involve cisgender men, but cisgender men all-too-often feel entitled to lesbianism as a concept. There’s a reason that most lesbian or sapphic characters in popular media are indistinguishable from straight women aside from their attraction to women and why butches are so under-represented as anything other than jokes.

Cis-men have too long gatekept manliness and masculinity. They are no more or less men than anyone else who identifies with the label, and I’m tired of pretending they own it. Lesbians are allowed to be men, because not all men are cis-men, and it’s an arbitrary marker that goes along with specific types of gender performance. I’d go so far as to say that butches, studs and trans men have more claim to the label of man than cis-men because there is an intentionality there that isn’t present in most cis-men’s performance of gender. 

More than that though, I’m tired of internet discourses feeling entitled to dictate the language other people use for their own experience. One person’s gender identity doesn’t invalidate another’s, and the prescriptivist side of the debate is filled with bad-faith and bioessentialist arguments. The world would be a much better place if we all let each other describe ourselves with the language that feels right. 

After all, a lesbian, by any other name, is just as sweet.