“Lowkey, Keep My Community's Label Out of Your Mouth”
by irene Dumas (she/her)
instagram: @ireenedumas
tiktok & substack: @ireenspleen
Artist Bio
Irene Dumas (she/her) is a 19 year old Dublin-based writer who joined the Dirty Dyke Magazine team last August, and since then has done work as a writer, interviewer and graphic designer. She is originally from Spain, but moved to Ireland at 18, where she’s currently getting her degree in Criminology with Psychology at University College Dublin.
She uses her writing as her creative outlet, and makes sure to reflect her identity in everything she writes. Everything she does, she does with every ounce of her being, and she is extremely dedicated, authentic, and politically aware. She wears her lesbianism with pride, and couldn’t be happier about working in a magazine where lesbian voices are the priority.
Tell us a bit about the piece you're submitting:
“I was inspired to write this piece after reading Malavika Kannan’s article titled ‘Lowkey, I Chose To Be a Lesbian’. If I’m completely honest, I started writing in hopes of being able to calm down my concerningly high levels of anger that arose upon reading the article. After I had regained my composure slightly, this piece became something of a political statement defending my community, and I dived into the beautiful rabbithole that is lesbian politics and scholarly journals to support my anger.
I am nothing if not a believer that identity doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but the person who lives it. Especially within lesbianism, where the stakes are so high and the world so relentlessly male-centered, the intimacy and self-knowledge that go into claiming “lesbian” are sacred, so yes, reading the statement: “Lowkey, I chose to be a lesbian” felt like acid being poured directly onto my skin. The community’s insistence on authenticity is exactly what makes it powerful. That is precisely why I refuse the idea that lesbianism is a choice. Hatred of men, refusal of patriarchy, disgust at heterosexual gender scripts? Those can be choices, practices, even evolving politics. Lesbianism is not. I have four main points to make, and I have made sure to include all articles and books I read to back them up, and I want to make it absoloutely clear that this is NOT an attack on identities outside of lesbianism, this is standing up for my own identity that is consistently challenged and questioned by an exhausting amount of people.”
Sexuality is NOT A Lifestyle Choice
Firstly, let’s talk about how reintroducing “choice” into definitions of sexuality is SO dangerous. We’ve been here before. The old New YorkTimes/CBS poll asked if homosexuality was something people “choose to be” or something they “cannot change,” as if those are the only options. That question is soaked in heterosexist logic: if it is possible to change, and if we assume any “reasonable” person would change to straight given the option, then not undergoing that change, or not being ABLE to undergo that change becomes a moral failure on your part, and proof that you’re “choosing” deviance. “Choice” and “change” get set up as opposites, and we get trapped on their terms. When we only argue that it’s not possible to change, we leave intact the underlying assumption that it would be desirable or necessary to do so. In that frame, homosexuality is acceptable only if it is not chosen, which means it stays stigmatized, illegitimate, deviant. In 2017, John D’Emilio wrote a journal article called “The Tensions between Gay Politics and History”, where he made a statement which really ignites power in the definition of homosexuality:
“...at a psychological level, there is something dreadfully wrong about basing a political movement on individual and collective helplessness. Do we really expect to bid for real power from a position of "I can't help it"?”
And that helplessness, by the way, has always been androcentric. Many queer people in the U.S., for instance, describe their sexuality in determinist terms: “born this way,” not chosen, and when we cling to “born this way” as the only legitimate story, we let the straight world set the terms of the debate (Whisman, 1996).
However, none of this controversy justifies flipping to the other extreme and calling lesbianism itself a lifestyle choice. That is not liberatory! It simply hands our enemies the old script back, with a fresh coat of progressive paint.
Lesbian ≠ Man-Hater
Secondly, and I don’t know how many times this must be repeated: lesbianism is not synonymous with hating men. It never has been! Being a lesbian is about loving women, and woman-adjacent and nonbinary people; about orienting your desire, intimacy, and commitment toward us. Turning lesbianism into a conscious decision to “decenter men” keeps the entire conversation glued to men! It is analytically lazy and deeply lesbophobic to define us by what we refuse in men rather than what we desire and build with each other.
Rejecting patriarchy is not the same as decentering men. To be a lesbian is to refuse the patriarchal stamp we’re ambushed with from birth: the script that says our value is as wives, as girlfriends, as emotional support staff for male lives. That refusal is about reclaiming our own subjectivity, it is NOT about punishing men, reforming men, or even thinking about men at all. Straight women can and do harbor anger at male violence, resentment toward their own oppression, and still be straight. Hatred of your oppressor is not a sexual orientation (Védie, 2021). Collapsing lesbianism into “misandry” just repeats the old move of mapping sexuality onto submissive/oppressive gender roles: women as objects, men as subjects, lesbians as defective “man-haters.” Why must our existence be tethered to men even in frameworks that supposedly reject them?
That conflation is not just wrong; it’s historically weaponized. The stereotype that lesbians are “man-haters” has always been used to justify lesbophobic violence and discrimination. The label “lesbian” itself has been hurled at feminists as an insult, a threat, a warning: you’re a man-hater, therefore your demands are illegitimate (Calhoun, 1996). This is transitive stigmatization: smear feminists by associating them with a group already framed as deviant. In 1970s French feminism, for instance, some feminists even participated in stigmatizing lesbians to secure their own respectability and inclusion as “normal women.” Anti‑feminist rhetoric doesn’t always name lesbians, but it absolutely leans on the same idea: that feminists are driven by “unnatural” passions such as hatred, frustration, hysteria, violence, that women are not supposed to feel. Following Butler and Scott (1992), you can see how “man‑hater” works as a discursive device that marks certain bodies and voices as abject, as non‑subjects, so they don’t count. Misandry, real or projected, is used to build a category of “deviant” women (lesbians, angry feminists, any woman who refuses male entitlement) whose grievances can easily be dismissed.
So when people casually fuse “lesbian” with “man‑hater,” even in the name of politics, they’re actually recycling a stigma that has been used for decades to silence us. Feminists have long had to navigate this: what do we do with the word “misandry”? How do we address real rage at patriarchy without reinforcing the idea that our very anger makes us less than human? These are strategic questions about language and survival. What they are not is a definition of lesbianism.
Non‑Lesbians, Stop Defining Us
Thirdly, there is a bizarre, persistent pattern of people who are not lesbians feeling entitled to define what lesbian means, and, pardon my french, but what the fuck is that about? This is not an identity you can cosplay, borrow, or “try on” as a cute political outfit. If you are not a lesbian, the word does not belong to you, and adopting a label that isn’t your own is harmful.
The infamous “lesbian master doc,” written by a non‑lesbian, did real damage by presenting rigid, prescriptive (and often false) criteria for who “counts” as a lesbian. It narrowed our possibilities, pathologized bisexuality, and handed straight people more stereotypes to wield against us. That document’s authority came, in part, from the same arrogance we’re seeing again: outsiders deciding they can systematize an experience they do. not. live.
Then there’s the rise of things like calling your boyfriend “spiritually lesbian” because he’s not overtly misogynistic. Think about how absurd that is. A man clears the bare minimum bar of “doesn’t hate women,” and suddenly he is “spiritually” part of an identity historically stigmatized, brutalized, and materially disadvantaged for refusing men (Lorde, 1985)? That’s not cute; it’s grotesque. Now we have people identifying as “political lesbians”, or using “lesbian” to mean “I’m a woman who hates patriarchy”, as if the word is just shorthand for a vibe, not a specific orientation to desire.
This is obsession masquerading as solidarity. It is also BLATANT theft. When non‑lesbians declare that lesbianism is a choice, or a policy, or a political mood, they flatten the lived, messy, embodied realities of lesbians into a metaphor straight and bi people can wear (Silber, 1990). And let’s be absolutely clear, we do NOT hate straight people or bisexual people, or anyone ELSE with a different sexuality to ours. Not wanting our identity, and our existence to be ERASED or misrepresented by people who don’t and can’t understand it doesn’t equate to being biphobic, or heterophobic! Is it too much to ask to NOT turn our community into your symbol? You cannot “claim” our label to make a point about your politics, your boyfriend, or your discomfort with patriarchy. You’re welcome to hate men. You’re welcome to critique heterosexuality. You are not welcome to colonize “lesbian” to do it!
Why Are Lesbians Always The Ones On Trial?
Finally, there is also an asymmetry we need to name: lesbians are constantly questioned, dissected, and theorized in ways gay men almost never are. Our existence is relentlessly challenged. Are you really a lesbian if you ever liked a boy? If you had sex with men? If you’re not “politically” aligned enough? If you don’t perform gender in the “right” way? We are told to produce narratives that make sense to straight people, to science, to feminism, to everyone but ourselves (Ferguson et al., 1981).
But as lesbian theorist Shane Phelan (1993) has pointed out, the urgent question is not which theory of lesbianism is “right.” The more useful question is so what? Instead of begging science, religion, or feminism for the capital‑T Truth about lesbian identity, we should be asking: why do we need to justify ourselves at all? Why does homophobia exist? Why is heterosexism so central to Western thought? Why is there so little tolerance for diversity in desire? What are the stakes of insisting everyone develop heterosexual attachments and desires? Why is homophobia virulent in some places and mild or non‑existent in others? These questions shift the focus away from lesbian identity as a problem to be solved and onto heterosexist institutions as systems to be dismantled.
That shift needs to happen because the other path, the current path, where we have to obsessively explain ourselves, traps us. It rests on what Barabara Ponse (1978) termed “principle of consistency” that straight culture uses: the idea that there should be a natural linkage between sex assigned at birth, gender role, gender identity, and sexual object choice. By that logic, any deviance from gender norms becomes “evidence” of latent homosexuality. Many lesbians (and many straight people) end up reading tomboyishness, or early experiences with girls, as proof of an already‑existing lesbian essence, while ignoring years of sex with men as somehow “not real” or “alienated.” But that narrative is too simple. What we often read as “signs of lesbianism” are just signs of nonconformity to sexist femininity. Tree‑climbing, short hair, hanging with “the boys”, these are rebellions against gender, not reliable predictors of desire.
When we conflate gender rebellion with lesbianism, we accidentally reproduce the same binary the straight world uses: “real women” (heterosexual, compliant) versus “lesbians” (deviant, failed women). That binary discourages women who have sex with men from aligning with lesbians within politics and reinscribes the heterosexual order in which lesbians exist only as scandalous exceptions (Walters, 1993) At the end of the day, lesbianism has one of the most powerful and liberating forms of expression of love, and our relationship with gender is intricate, beautiful, complex, and almost inexplicable to people outside the community. I love being a part of the queer community, and I will always be proud to say I’m a lesbian.
Ultimately, none of this means we as queer people shouldn’t tell our stories, celebrate our lives, or reflect on how we came to ourselves. It does demand humility and critical distance when we turn those narratives into universal prescriptions, especially when they edge toward telling other queer people, and in this case, lesbians, that sexuality is something you can simply opt into because you’re tired of men.
Question us less. Question heterosexism more.
References
Butler, J., & Scott, J. W. (1992). Feminists theorize the political. Routledge.
Calhoun, C. (1996). Must Lesbian Choices Be Feminist Choices? Journal of Homosexuality, 32(1), 7–20. https://doi.org/10.1300/j082v32n01_02
D’Emilio, J. (2017). Making and Unmaking Minorities: the Tensions between Gay Politics and History | N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change. N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change, 14(4). https://socialchangenyu.com/review/making-and-unmaking-minorities-the-tensions-between-gay-politics-and-history/
Faderman, L. (1981). Surpassing the Love of Men : Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. William Morrow and Company.
Ferguson, A., Zita, J. N., & Addelson, K. P. (1981). On “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”: Defining the Issues - ProQuest. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7(1). https://www.proquest.com/openview/b4125370e74348ede7efe42da140eec2/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1821038
Lorde, A. (1985). I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing across Sexualities. Kitchen Table--Women of Color Press.
Phelan, S. (1993). (Be)Coming Out: Lesbian Identity and Politics. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 18(4), 765–790. https://doi.org/10.1086/494842
Ponse, B. (1978). Identities in the Lesbian World: the Social Construction of Self (Controversies in Science). Praeger. https://archive.org/details/identitiesinlesb00pons
Silber, L. (1990). Negotiating Sexual Identity: NonLesbians in a Lesbian Feminist Community. The Journal of Sex Research, 27(1), 131–139. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/3812888
Védie, L. (2021). Hating Men Will Free you? Valerie Solanas in Paris or the Discursive Politics of Misandry. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 28(3), 305–319. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505068211028896
Walters, S. D. (Ed.). (1993). Theorizing Lesbian Experience. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 18(4). https://doi.org/10.1086/signs.10.1.3174232
Whisman, V. (1996). Queer by Choice : lesbians, Gay men, and the Politics of Identity. Routledge.
