The Washington Post: The latest form of transphobia: Saying lesbians are going extinct. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-latest-form-of-transphobia-saying-lesbians-are-going-extinct/2021/03/18/072a95fc-8786-11eb-82bc-e58213caa38e_story.html

By Lynne Stahl Lynne Stahl is the humanities librarian at West Virginia University. Her research and teaching span popular culture, gender theory, and critical information studies. March 19, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. EDT Transphobia is surging through the United States with a record-setting number of anti-transgender legislative bills, many of which pit vulnerable communities against one another. Proponents of a bill in Tennessee, for example, say that allowing trans children to participate in youth athletics would “destroy women’s sports,” casting cisgender women as the victims in a disingenuous claim to a feminist politics. Others attempt to exploit divides in the LGBTQ community. Leaders of the British group LGB Alliance warn that lesbians are “going to become extinct” as individuals increasingly identify as trans, a fear echoed both by trans-exclusionary groups and by lesbian feminists who in other ways advocate for trans rights. Feminist writer Aimee Anderson frets about “the extinction of an entire people,” and Cherríe Moraga worries that butch lesbians, self-actualizing as transmasculine, might “become a dying breed.” Tomboys, too, have become a point of contention, seen by some as a “rarer and rarer species” that is “going extinct” as more tomboyish children identify as trans and/or nonbinary.

All of these labels have valuable uses, but they also have limitations: They suggest we have, or should have, fixed categories of being that perfectly fit a group of people whose needs and interests compete in a zero-sum exchange with those of other groups. I am a cisgender lesbian. Claims to identities like my own — at the juncture of queerness and womanhood — play an important role in the struggle for equality. But when we become too attached to our labels, we risk prioritizing our sense of identity over the principles that underlie it and that apply equally to people wearing a different label. In the process, we may lose sight of the concerns that necessitated activism in the first place: the rights we demanded and the bigotry we opposed. Perhaps the most immediate source of today’s transphobic anxiety is a recent Gallup poll, which revealed that more Americans than ever identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. While this increase would seem to provide grounds for celebration among LGBTQ advocates, some high-profile cisgender gay men and women don’t see it that way. On Twitter, for instance, journalist Glenn Greenwald attributed the rise in trans-identified individuals to a purported decrease in lesbian identification. The poll actually indicates a significantly higher percentage of Gen-Z lesbians (1.4 percent) than millennials (0.8 percent) or Gen-Xers (0.7 percent). But even the absence of corroborating data hasn’t stopped the panic, as writer Katie Herzog shows in her essay “Where Have All The Lesbians Gone?,” published on conservative gay pundit Andrew Sullivan’s Substack. Herzog draws a direct line from disappearing lesbian bars to the extinction of lesbians themselves, even as she admits that her evidence is far from conclusive: “There’s been no clear polling on the shift from ‘lesbian’ to ‘nonbinary,’ and so my sense that the lesbian is endangered is purely anecdotal.” In an identically titled essay in the Spectator, Sullivan alleges that “queer theory and peer pressure” are leading tomboys to transition rather than grow up as lesbians.

As a lesbian researcher of tomboyism trained in queer theory, I find claims like these at once absurd and frightening. Extinction anxieties have long fueled nationalist, fascist and white-supremacist movements and often beget eugenicist agendas. Indeed, tomboyism as we know it arose in concert with eugenics. Fears about potential White extinction in the United States proliferated in the second half of the 19th century amid emancipation and waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as Eastern Asia, as scholar Michelle Abate observes. Child-rearing manuals began advocating for exercise and comfortable clothing, instead of the restrictive and harmful corsets then common, as means of making White girls fit to produce healthy White offspring. The degree to which some girls embraced these empowering options, however, prompted a backlash associating tomboyism and homosexuality. Lesbians face daily adversity on political and cultural fronts, but attributing our fears to the growing trans population dangerously redirects attention from the institutions that actually harm us. Anti-trans groups are simply repurposing the rhetoric of extinction and contagion that drove 20th-century homophobia. Moral panics over the “threat” posed to children by gay men, for example, fed homophobic campaigns built on sensationalistic claims of a “gay agenda” to seduce boys into “the gay lifestyle.” The contemporary notion that lesbians are being “seduced” into transmasculinity similarly reflects a belief that individuals can think their way into trans identification and should therefore think their way out of it. In this view, that is, gender identity is “just a phase” — a dismissal every LGBTQ person is sadly familiar with. We’ve come full circle: The same bogus ideas that queers have spent decades fighting are now promulgated in our names, and sometimes from our mouths.

This new dread also conveniently forgets how exclusionary thinking has chronically plagued gender activism: White suffragists’ anti-Black racism; Betty Friedan’s description of lesbians as the “lavender menace”; White lesbian separatists’ exclusion of women of color and trans individuals. The present instance is all the more disturbing for its many precedents.

The newness of trans identification, too, is damagingly overstated. Though we’ve only recently come to think of it as an identity, it’s the terms that are novel, not the ways of being that they describe. The sensation of being “a man trapped in a woman’s body” that characterized author Radclyffe Hall and others in the early 1900s tends to be interpreted as an archaic conception of lesbianism based on the “inversion” model of homosexuality advanced by sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. However, Hall largely went by “John,” and the notion of having the wrong body aligns with the contemporary understanding of gender dysphoria. Scholar Jay Prosser and others, moreover, have interpreted Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” as a trans narrative, though it long predates the term.

Broadly speaking, change is a constant in the realm of gender and sexual identity, and sexual identity as we conceive of it didn’t even exist until the late 1800s. Indeed, terms such as “tribade” and “sapphism” competed with “lesbian” or “lesbianism” throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, sometimes rivalling them in prominence. Today those terms are obsolete, but the practices that gave rise to them aren’t. And how many now identify as “homophile,” “invert” or “female husband”? Identity categories fall by the wayside continuously as understandings of gender, sexual orientation and the relationship between them changes. And while the Gallup data gives no indication that cisgender lesbians are trading in “butch” for transmasculinity, what if some were? Misogyny and homophobia still exist, and both still harm all women and lesbians. Advocacy for everyone who identifies within these groups is essential, including trans individuals who identify as lesbian or bisexual. Lesbians are not a species, and we feed existing racist, ableist and homophobic agendas when we invoke extinction. For me, “lesbian” still fits — but I recognize that it doesn’t, or never has, for others. And if fewer people call themselves lesbians in the future, it’s not necessarily a loss for lesbians, so long as we’re all free to move through the world as we want to and be called as we ask to be called. If anything, the increasing number of transmasculine individuals indicates that different forms of self-actualization are now more readily available than they have been. That’s cause for celebration.

Theorist Judith Butler advocated for such fluid understandings of identity categories in a 1991 essay that helped revolutionize gender and sexuality studies, declaring a willingness to “appear at political occasions under the sign of lesbian” with the proviso that it remain “permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies.” By this, she meant that identity categories like “lesbian” are useful, since they’re key to securing civil protections and other rights that are tied to minority groups. But by the same token, she argued, those categories are too static, never truly capturing or describing the many individuals who use them. After all, knowing someone’s sexual identity — lesbian, straight or otherwise — tells us very little about that person except the gender to which they’re generally attracted.

Butler, who has done as much as anyone to advance lesbian and feminist causes, now identifies as nonbinary and uses she/they pronouns. She, like many others, appears to see the limits of rigid identity politics for gender and sexuality. Its categories are rightfully dear to us, but what we’ve fought for — the freedom for people to define themselves and love whom they love — transcends them.