Male, Female, Lesbian? The Quest to Find a Label That Fits When Womanhood Is a Spectrum

By Katy Doolan 

Lesbian noun: 

A woman who is sexually attracted to other women. (Oxford Dictionary)

By definition, a lesbian is a woman. Therefore I, a lesbian, am a woman – I must be. The problem is, I didn’t want to be.

At 13, I realised that I was gay. I was a gay woman. I didn’t know which was worse. I spared no time letting everyone around me know this, too, since I thought things would be easier if I had fewer secrets to hide. Things were not easier. 

After telling everyone my not-so-secret secret, they all moved on. But I was still trying to figure out what to do with the information. I was like a toddler with a book; you can’t read it, so you either play with it or get frustrated. I chose the latter.

Internalised homophobia is difficult to overcome, no matter your age, but especially so if you’re a teenager and hormones are already making dealing with your emotions bewildering and laborious. I never dealt with my internalised homophobia well. I spoke about it to no one and spent most nights writing and writing about how much I hated being gay. I kept it all digital, though. On paper would be too real, wouldn’t it? I never told anyone how it felt due to not knowing a single other ‘out’ person for quite some time, and I knew that time was the greatest healer, so time is what I relied on for several years. 

Up until I was 17, my internalised homophobia was relentless and unforgiving. I couldn’t escape the voice inside my head that hissed that I’d never really be accepted for who I was, the voice that told me that I would be wearing a mask for the rest of my life. I wholeheartedly believed I deserved some form of punishment for who I was, though I had no idea why. I had never been homophobic before, so it seemed illogical that all these thoughts waited until I was sure I was a lesbian to pounce out and make me wish that I could hide in the closet again. It was too late for that anyway.

Once I finally felt that I had effectively dealt with internalised homophobia, having let time do its job, I finally relaxed. My identity was sorted. I was finally satisfied – and dare I say it, happy – with who I was and would be forevermore. Little did I know that this would not be the end of my story. Just as I had washed my hands of this crisis, another was waiting around the corner.

Gender had been something I’d been ignoring for a number of years by this point, and you’ll have to forgive me for that because I was having a really hard time with my sexuality. To be perfectly honest, I’d had no trouble with letting my discomfort simmer quietly while I dealt with the internalised homophobia. But when that battle was won, I had to confront this next challenge.

My shifting in my seat when I’d be referred to as a girl, the winces at ‘she/her’ pronouns, the dislike of my hair and chest all – this all accumulated to make one ineffable mess, possibly called ‘gender dysphoria’. But at the time, I wasn’t ready for that label yet. Why? Because my discomfort wasn’t confined to my gender and seeped into my everyday life. As well as the above, unrelated ‘symptoms’ like being unable to feel the ground beneath my feet or not feeling ‘there’ in the present moment affected me for some time. I was unequipped to cope.

All these dissociative feelings were a puzzle to navigate, and for a while I didn’t know if the potential gender dysphoria really was that or if it were merely incidental to the semi-delusional period I appeared to be experiencing. Could I really be nonbinary if these gender dysphoric symptoms seemed most apparent when paired with another set of ‘unreal’ feelings? Or was it that the other ‘unrelated’ feelings were part of gender dysphoria? I was uninformed on the matter and began to do my own research.

Gingerly, I read up on nonbinary lesbians, scared to do so, fearing I might identify with their experiences. My fears were confirmed: I did. Many described feeling that the line between their sexuality and gender seemed blurred. This resonated deeply. I’d previously thought of my gender and sexuality as separate. Now I saw that their relationship was a lot closer than I had initially realised. I wanted to describe my gender, too, as ‘lesbian’. It sufficed, given our unique relationship with womanhood. The capacity to define my gender for myself, in a way that made sense to me, was freedom.

Inevitably, there was a catch.

Was my gender discomfort a feminist or dysphoric issue? On one hand, being referred to as a woman felt wrong for me because I wasn’t one. I never felt the same as other women, being unable to feel confidently feminine, and I was certainly clueless when I saw trans women describe feeling like they belonged to womanhood. 

I couldn’t envision how womanhood would look for me, no matter how hard I tried – and believe me, I tried. On the other hand, my discomfort was because womanhood is too often associated with manhood. Be it through the label of daughters or wives, women are often without an identity independent of men. I was rightfully upset with this unwritten rule.

Then it struck me. I was looking in the wrong place; I wouldn’t find answers unless I was asking other sapphic women about their relationship with gender. Surely they would understand my dilemma. 

In actuality, I became no surer of where I stood in regards to my gender. To identify as nonbinary would be to ‘give up’ on being a woman – but freedom is a sacrifice. I used to think that defining myself would lead me closer to the truth, and it hasn’t. The box we check is the trap we set ourselves. Dictionary definitions won’t free us. We have to free ourselves.