The young lesbians I spoke to in this new podcast are the up-and-coming leaders of the lesbian community. Please invest in them.
Maia Poet hosts a show that’s the first of its kind - an intergenerational, international panel of lesbians discussing the impact of gender politics on our lives, with a vision towards rebuilding lesbian communities.
Check out the Reappearing Lesbian Podcast YouTube Channel here.
Episode 1 - The Pressure on Lesbians to “Trans”
Aaron, thank you so much for organising this fascinating conversation. So much resonates with me, as a heterosexual Gen X Jewish feminist struggling to guide two young adult daughters.
I think that these definitions of "femininity" and "masculinity" can be very limiting for everyone, whatever your sexual orientation. I think about me and my husband and how we balance each other, partly in that he has always been the one to take our daughters to buy make-up as I have no interest in that sort of thing. I am the one who fixes things when they break, does the garden etc. I am the maths person, and he is the humanities person. Yet we are on surface a standard heterosexual orthodox Jewish couple with three kids!
I think it is just easier for heterosexual people to be "gender nonconforming" without it being an issue, at least not to the degree that it can lead one to seriously question one's "gender". Stable heterosexual marriages in which you produce children are very grounding - you realise what it means to be a man or a woman in the purely biological sense without needing to resort to identities or make-up.
When I think of myself when I was a teenager, I did not like socialising with girls my age, as I found them judgmental and superficial - always concerned with attracting boys, make-up, fashion. They bored me. Boys were more interesting and liked having arguments, were not offended when I was pushy or said the "wrong thing".
But unlike Maia, I was also interested in boys, and I looked feminine (despite no makeup) so they fancied me, which meant I could never really be one of them, no matter how much I craved being "one of the nerds". This meant that no matter how I might have imagined I had a "male soul" (I did think that at times), the physical reality of my (hetero)sexuality kept me grounded. At university, I started in a social group with a bunch of guys, but within three months there was a "winner" and I started to date one of them. I can really see how being same-sex attracted compounds the social challenges of a gender nonconforming personality.
I think that the big difference for heterosexual women is also that, as we get older, we can easily find other women who are also argumentative, pushy, don't wear make-up etc. because heterosexuals are the majority, so there are so many of us. Life is not high school. It must be so much harder for lesbians, as they are such a small minority of women - to find like-minded people, especially now when so many are going trans or nonbinary and spaces are being invaded by men.
Thank you again and I look forward to many more fascinating conversations!
Lovely. Where can I find the RSS feed for this Apple Podcasts?