I love looking up the name of a lesbian from the 1700s who disguised herself as a man in order to fight in wars and marry a woman, and getting results like:
Or looking up Amelia Robles, lesbian colonel who fought in the Mexican Revolution, and finding this:
He also behaved like a man in intimate circles! Proof: he sustained romantic relationships with several women!
Okay but what happens when you search “Amelia Robles” + “lesbian”, with quotes, to make sure you only find the stuff you’re looking for?
The full sentence is “Some lesbians might argue that she was a woman who identified as a man so that she might do the things that men could do, including “courting a girl.“”
From the same book:
So now, searching for “historical lesbian’s name” + “LESBIAN” will give you the result: “Some lesbians might argue that she was a lesbian, but they’d be wrong. Today we call this transgender.”
3 things:
1. Some of these books were published in 2004 or 2006. That’s very early, transgender politics-wise. Academics positively jumped on the opportunity to turn all historical lesbians into straight men in a progressive way.
Also, anyone who’s ever read a book about lesbian history knows academics are always SO insufferably timid and prudent and apologetic when they call a historical lesbian a lesbian. There’s so much handwringing over the complicated, fluid meaning of the label “lesbian”, and reassurances that we can never know for sure how she would have identified. Meanwhile everyone is so unapologetic and confident when it comes to claiming that a historical lesbian would have identified as trans had she lived today.
2. Even if these women had spent their entire lives telling everyone they met “I’m really a man inside” and punching in the face anyone who used a ‘she’ pronoun - how would that be proof of the reality of their “identity” as trans men rather than proof that they were perfectly aware of what would happen to a lesbian in 1700s Germany or 1900s Mexico? Even if we had rock solid proof of how they ‘identified’, how would their aggressive clinging to a male identity be anything but an aggressive claim to their right to have relationships with women and wear male clothing?
3. Of course it’s very convenient to turn a huge, hard-to-solve, ongoing worldwide problem of female/lesbian hatred into an easy-to-solve individual problem where a handful of people are “born in the wrong body”. Liberal homophobes are delighted to have found a non-problematic reason for lesbians to reject their femaleness and homosexuality as being “born wrong”, where the solution only involves politely switching the pronouns of lesbians living in this century and those of long-dead lesbians, rather than reflect on the reality of lesbophobia and how little it has changed since the 1700s.
The reality of these women’s lives is that they were female and homosexual. They were lesbians. Referring to them as men and insisting that this “identity” was genuine, internal, innate, and must be respected, implies that there was no conceivable external reason for a lesbian in history to cling to a male identity. It means erasing lesbophobia from the historical record, and giving more legitimacy to the male identities of 21st-century lesbians. It means people are more comfortable arguing that most lesbians, today and throughout history, are born hating themselves, than acknowledging that everyone else hates lesbians.