Quit Calling Lesbians Queer

A large number of lesbians and gay men reject queer ideology and the queer label. On this episode, we're talking about why that is and how umbrella terms obscure rather than clarify lesbian and gay sexuality. 

Link to IPSOS Pride Report Poll

A New York Times article that also touches on the frustrations lesbians and gay men have with the queer label. Read: I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters

Listen to the findings of the Don't Call Me Queer Report in this video

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:10

Quit calling lesbians queer. So in this episode, I'm going to talk about all the reasons I have a problem with the word queer, queer theory. And yeah, it's probably going to be a little bit of a rant, but the last time I checked, the Q was four letters after the L. And for a lot of lesbians and a lot of gay men, we still view queer as a slur. And we never agreed to be grouped under this queer umbrella. We never reclaim this word. It's also important to note that queer is a very vague word that anyone who's looking to adopt a popular and quirky label to separate themselves from straight, they can use this label. It has absolutely nothing to do with lesbians and gay men. Our sexuality is not elastic. Our sexuality is not a political movement. Our sexuality is static. Whereas queer, it's more of an aesthetic observed by pastel hair colors, a myriad of facial piercings. What about me as a philosophy and a desire to be special? Gays, we don't want to be special. We just want to be left alone. Where sexuality is concerned, lesbians and gay men, we have absolutely nothing in common with these folks. Okay? I don't want to be grouped with these people. They stand for everything that I have an issue with, like the erosion of gay culture and community. They are loud, they are violent and entitled in a way that lesbians and gay men, we just weren't. Right? Lesbians and gay men, our goal with gay rights was to be able to integrate with society and just be able to be left alone, right? We wanted to love who we wanted to love. We wanted to be able to keep our jobs. Okay. We wanted to be able to get houses, and we just wanted the North American dream. That's all we wanted. We weren't asking for anything additional. We were just asking for to have the same rights that everybody else did. But that's not what queer wants. Queer is making demands on society. Queer wants to dismantle it entirely. Now, me, I'm I'm a lesbian. I have no choice about it. I am exclusively same-sex attracted. I'm a woman who just wants to not be harassed. And for the most part, I could say that that happens, right? I've never actually encountered any issues with the people that TQ Plus swear up and down are my enemies. Nope. Straight white people don't have a problem with me. They either leave me alone or they're polite. The people that I actually get harassed by, and the people that lesbians and gay men tend to get harassed by, are the queers. The hypocrisy of the TQ is evident when lesbians and gay men reassert our boundaries. Every time I make it clear that I want absolutely nothing to do with a word that I view as homophobic, the immediate reaction I get is that I get dogpiled on. These people try to educate me on a word that I probably know more about, like the root of queer and where it came from and the history than they do. They tell me I must accept it. And then in the same breath, they want to turn around and expect me to respect their preferred pronouns when gender ideology is something that I don't believe in and it goes against actually everything that I believe in. Me, I believe that we are our bodies. I believe that women can be masculine and men can be feminine. Me, I believe that the full abolition of sexist gender-based stereotypes is what is needed to build a world that is truly equitable for both sexes. And my beliefs are progressive. My beliefs are about unshackling women and men from expectations. And for the record, I am a woman who has been perceived as the opposite sex for a really large part of my life. So there was a period of my life where I even avoided women public restrooms because I looked so much like a little boy. And one of my earliest memories as a kid was I was at the Toronto Zoo and a woman dragged me out of the washroom. And ever since then, like I just haven't used them until I got my my dreads. And so now I look a little bit more like woman. Like people might still give me a double take sometimes, but for the most part, I'm left alone, you know. But I am a masculine presenting woman. It isn't an act, it isn't a choice. I am just this way. I've always been this way. My interests, how I dress, how I act. None of that, however, takes away from my womanhood. I was born female and I was socialized as a girl. When I grew up, I experienced puberty and all the unpleasantness that comes with that as a girl. And I am gonna be completely honest. I hated for a very long time that I was a woman. I had a lot of internalized misogyny. I hated that I could never love a woman the way the world told me was the right way to love a woman. I hated that I was gay. I hated a lot of things, but you know what? I grew up at a time where I had a very clear identity, and that was lesbian. I grew up in an age where I was able to sort through my feelings and learn to love myself. There wasn't all this noise and confusion. And so I was able to really point a finger at the real source of my discontentment, and that was sexist stereotypes. Once I realized that my sex wasn't holding me back from anything, once I realized that I was free to be who I wanted to be, I loved myself. The problem was stereotypes. And so what really grades my gear is this fervent embrace of queer theory in institutions and by the LGBTQ acronym that has made it so impossible for young lesbians to have the same realization that I did. There's far too much noise. It is chaos. And I swear that you would think that we would be making progress on this, but now there is an even bigger importance placed on sexist stereotypes in 2026. Queer theory is what caused this confusion. It's been very destabilizing to sexual identities. And it is the young lesbians and gay men who are finding themselves more lost as a result. The last thing we need as we're figuring out our sexuality is to be bombarded with all of this noise that's telling us that we're wrong. And so I think it's just so important for more lesbians, the older ones like myself, to speak up and reject queer. I know many of us don't like it. This is why, if anyone goes to Pride right now, they probably will not meet a lot of gay men and lesbians at Pride, because a lot of us have distanced ourselves from the LGBTQ collective because it has embraced queer. And we know the harms of queer. Like biological men now feeling emboldened to call themselves lesbians, like young lesbians and gay men being medically sterilized, like the destruction of our culture and the rewriting of our history. Once again, like what? We have gay rights because of gay people. You know, for lesbians, the harms of queer theory, they have been crushing. Butches, where are they? They've gone extinct. And femmes, they're left partnerless crying about it. I can't tell you how many femmes have come and cried to me about the fact that they can't find any butches. Lesbians, we have nothing for ourselves anymore. We aren't able to gather without being harassed. We've been muzzled. We're being erased. This is all a byproduct of queer theory and trying to push us all towards an umbrella term. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about why queer theory I find is problematic after the break. Let's talk about Judith Butler. Judith Butler is perhaps one of the most well-known queer theorists, and her core argument is that sex and gender are a performance. Right? Like this is a key foundation to all the chaos we see today. Dismissing sex, relegating it to a category of meaningless deconstructs stable lesbian and gay identities. How can homosexuals exist if sex does not exist? But that's the point, right? Queer theory's core thesis is that sexuality is fluid for everyone. I can tell you it's not fluid for me. So I hope you're seeing now that at its core, queer theory is homophobic. It implies that lesbians and gay men, we don't exist. It implies that exclusive same-sex attraction doesn't exist. It implies that heterosexuality doesn't exist. So it's also discriminatory to straight people. Right? Like not everybody's bisexual. The world's not all bisexual. It's so insulting when you really, really think about it. In the early 2010s, I can tell you this, it would have been laughable for anybody to walk into a lesbian party and proclaim that lesbians are anything but exclusively same-sex attracted women. Back then, it was recognized by all that pansexuals were the people who cared about the person and not the body. But now, we're in 2026, lesbians, we find ourselves being the core targets for hearts over parts propaganda. Like what? We're told homophobic rhetoric that we are same gender attracted. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. There is no world where I would be anything other than a friend with the opposite sex. And we are bullied, right? We're we're bullied, and we are told that we're bigots if we will not date the opposite sex. This is homophobia, and it is absolutely unreal. This is regression. This is not something that I foresaw coming. And frankly, it took almost a decade for me to come to terms with the fact that people who claim to be lesbian allies are actively trying to erase us from existence. I saw this beginning in 2015 and I had problems with it. Like I was like, this is wrong. This is kind of cringy. And when I saw the Elware Gen Q, I can tell you that I didn't finish watching it because, you know, it really unsettled me what they did with Shane. But I still wasn't ready at that time to call it homophobia. But once you see it for what it is, once you see the homophobia for what it is, like you can't, you can't just turn that off anymore. Like, it is so pervasive, the messaging that we're getting, like this homophobic rhetoric, it is so pervasive and it's so saddening. Like, I don't even know, man. The goal of queer, it really seems bent on bucketing us all together with no care for our differences and giving us absolutely no means of organizing with people who share unique lived experiences. Like, have you noticed that there are no lesbian-specific parties anymore or events? Have you noticed that there are no books being marketed as lesbian anymore? Have you noticed that everything is queer or a sapphic or some other umbrella term that erases our individuality? Everywhere you look, it's a razor. And it started with the control of language. It started with queer. What you can and what you cannot say until over time, lesbians started being told that even the word lesbian isn't inclusive enough. But let me get the fact straight: lesbian was never meant to be inclusive. Lesbian is an exclusive label for homosexual women. And we need to stand our ground on this. Young lesbians need us to stand our ground on this. It is very important to have a word that speaks to our experiences. Okay, it is very important to have a word that speaks to exclusive same-sex attraction between women, and that word is lesbian. So, no, I'm not queer. Lesbians are not queer. There's nothing strange or odd about us. Our sexuality is not fluid. Sex is not a performance, it's not an act, it's a biological fact. Homosexuality is natural. Lesbians, the real ones, we are born gay. From a very young age, we knew we were different. And as we developed into women, that that difference, I could tell you, it became even more clear. It made things very difficult for us. We had to grapple with coming to terms with our sexuality, right? We had to face it. And it wasn't the best thing I could tell you, you know, grappling with my internalized homophobia. It was very difficult. My family's Jamaican. You know, I grew up hearing songs about burning gay people, burn the Chichi man, you know, burn the batti man. It was always like about gay men, but you know, the messaging was clear to me growing up that being gay was sinful. I'm not religious, but back then, like I grew up in a very religious household, and I was told that I was wrong. So it was a battle to come to terms with that. And to be a woman who isn't attracted to men in any way, shape, or form in a world that revolves around men, it's an especially rare and unique experience that a heterosexual male, like they know nothing about and they will never know anything about it. I find it incredibly offensive that someone from the opposite sex thinks they know the first thing about what it means to be a lesbian. You do not know what it means to be a lesbian. Okay. You don't know. You don't know. It is absolutely insulting. And another issue I have with queer theory is how it adversely impacts women more than anything. Like misogyny is so in vogue now. Like you're not cool if you don't hate women. If a woman raises a concern about f fairness or safety, right? Western society, specifically the be nice crowd, has decided that it is okay to threaten these women, bully these women, harass these women. Now, I don't know about you, but it seems to me that if a woman voices a concern about unfairness, about male participation in female sports, for example, and the reaction is that hundreds of people go and tell her to hang herself. Well, it's no wonder that more women do not speak up. They're terrified. But the polls don't lie. Right? The polls don't lie. Okay. Here's some stats from a 2026 Ipsos Pride report. On average, across 23 markets, only 42% of people support companies and brands actively promoting equality for LGBT people. Now that is a huge dip from 49% in 2021. So that's like 7% lost. You know, and with respect to sports, only 22 of those who were surveyed supported that you know people could compete in sports based on gender identity. So this illusion that everybody is supportive of you know males in female sports, it is not true. It is absolutely not true. 78% of people, and I think it's even higher than that, it's probably in the 80s or the 90s. People don't want this because the whole point of sports is fairness. And so even in like let's say that, you know, hypothetically, it is fair for males to be in in female sports, right? Even in that case, just the illusion that it's not fair is enough to ruin the sport, right? Just the illusion of it. But we know it's not fair. The science has come back time and time again to show this. Males and females, we have completely different bone structures. The male bone structure makes it so that they right can can use more power when they are delivering a hit or running or whatever, because of their bone structure. Hormones is not gonna change that. And so, you know, I I think people need to like really, really wake up. Nobody wants anybody to live in a world where they can't play sports or whatever, but instead of bullying and harassing people, we need to move towards finding solutions. And the solution isn't bullying people into making decisions because we know what happens when people get really, really pushed over the edge. So but yeah, LGBTQ is losing a lot of support by the public, and I don't blame them. And as I said, knowing how history repeats, I'm actually really scared that there's gonna be a violent backlash because more and more people are fed up, and women who make up 50% of the world, they are especially fed up with being treated like lesser human beings. They are sick and tired of being told that they are people with eaterises, they're birthing parents, right? And they really, really, really hate being called cis. They hate it. But at the end of the day, we all know the truth. Sex is not a performance, sex is grounded in biological fact, sex is one of the very few binaries that actually exist on the planet, and nobody cares how somebody chooses to live their life, right? That is what is awesome about living in North America or Europe or Australia or any of the other societies in in the West. But people start to care when their speech gets compelled, when women find that their rights are being stripped from them, and when governments are forcing an ideology on the masses that like really disregard reality. It's not funded in anything that is rooted in objective fact. So that's sort of my rant on queer theory. It's just not for me. I think it's completely homophobic, and I think it has resulted in a rise of flagrant misogyny. I think the UK decision is one of many that will come because, as I said, language is the foundation upon which our laws stand and our language is being destabilized. And so I predict that there are going to be a lot more court cases, similar to the recent ruling by the US Supreme Court, where they upheld the right of states to have female-only sports. And now let's move on to the next segment of the podcast where I talk about some personal updates. So, an update for me. I'm still working away on level up Lex, which I'm like super excited about. I think this is my Magnum opus. I think this is going to be the lesbian uh RPG lit book of my dreams. Uh, for those of you who don't know what RPG lit is, it's essentially fiction that follows like game mechanics. So, like there are boss fights, there are there's leveling up, there's quests and like character upgrades. Uh, if you've ever watched or read uh what is that book called that I really enjoyed.

unknown 22:09

Um

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Well, there's Dungeon Crawler Carl, but there's also Ready Player One, was another really popular RPG lit. And there are none for lesbians. So I decide to write one. And I think that it is the most amazing book that I have ever written to date. I'm like super excited about it. On other notes, right? So if anybody follows me, you you know already that like the internet has tried to cancel me. The the queers have tried to cancel me a bajillion times for being a lesbian and advocating for lesbians. And you know, they're failing. Last month I sold over 600 audiobooks. So people are still buying my books and still supporting me. So that's nice to see. You know, uh, I write lesbian romance and I also have a lesbian urban fantasy. French Press Love is a mighty good time. Super, super, super fun and super real. And Born of Blood and Magic is a very complicated, strong, heavy world building, uh, a lot of action, might make you cry. A lot of people cry after reading Born of Blood and Magic. The audiobook is fantabulous. Okay. I was able to work with Laura Horwitz, who is very popular on TikTok, and she did a phenomenal job recording Born of Blood and Magic. So that like I have no words for the experience of listening to that audiobook for the first time because she did a really great job. And so, yeah, that's sort of like what I'm sort of working on right now is I'm working on getting level up Lex published. You know, I'm at a point in my authorship career where I kind of want anything that I put out to pay for itself. So I don't really want to put my my my own money into this endeavor anymore because it's been quite pricey, like to date. Like there was an article that came out the other day where a lady was talking about how she spent $40,000 trying to promote her self-published book. Now, I didn't spend that money promoting my book per se, but I have probably spent like $50,000 on my books, and I'm still quite in the red on that. But it wasn't just about like promoting my books. I haven't really spent much on marketing, but audiobooks are quite expensive, like really expensive. I think at this point, maybe French Press Love and Born of Blood and Magic, like they've made that money back. But Slow Cook Feelings, which was my most recent audiobook, that was very expensive. I'm nowhere near reaching that. I think like Slow Cooked Feelings probably like the cost of it was the price of Born of Blood and Magic and French Plus Love combined. Like it was so expensive. But it's also the longest book I've ever written, so there's that, right? I also like really try to make beautiful books, like with beautiful covers, that has a cost. So, you know, if you're somebody who appreciates what I'm doing here with the lesbian take and the podcast and everything, every bit of support helps. Like you could buy a book, I have a Patreon, you could help out on Patreon, you can become a supporter on Patreon, and it will help me get more lesbian stories out. So there's that. Thanks so much for listening to my rant on queer theory. Don't call me queer. I'm a lesbian. And I just want to say stay loud, stay proud, and talk soon.