A recent Gallup poll found that the number of Americans identifying as LGBTQ has risen sharply, up from 4.5 percent in 2017 to 5.6 percent in 2021, a 24% increase in just four years.  Well, knock me over with a feather boa.

Several lesbian feminists were troubled by the survey results, as the number of Americans identifying as lesbian remained roughly the same, while the number identifying as bisexual or transgender skyrocketed.  They believe that many young people who would have identified as lesbian in days of yore are now coming out as nonbinary or transgender.  Egad!

The belief is that many masculine lesbians are now "transitioning" to "men," causing the lesbian community as a whole to shrink.  Aimee Anderson apparently saw this phenomenon coming and stated so in an article she wrote in 2015, titled "The Death of the Lesbian."  Anderson laments the loss of "old-school" lesbian culture and ominously proclaimed, "I care about the extinction of an entire people: lesbians."

First the dinosaurs and now lesbians.  Life on Earth is tough.

Katie Herzog joins Anderson in her fond remembrance of the lesbian yesteryear utopia.  Herzog penned a piece called "Where Have All the Lesbians Gone?" in which she wrote: "For older lesbian activists, there is something deeply sad about generations of females who don't want to be lesbians or even women."  She recalled how an elderly lesbian once said to her that someday in the future, people will be saying: "We heard about these creatures called lesbians," adding, "They'll dig up our bones.  But the bones, of course, cannot talk."

But West Virginia University humanities librarian Lynne Stahl disagrees.  Stahl, in a piece published in the Washington Post, stated: "As a lesbian researcher of tomboyism trained in queer theory, I find claims like these at once absurd and frightening.  Extinction anxieties have long fueled nationalist, fascist and white-supremacist movements and often beget eugenicist agendas."  She accused those who are concerned about the loss of lesbian culture of "transphobia."  Stahl opined that "attributing our fears to the growing trans population dangerously redirects attention from the institutions that actually harm us.  Anti-trans groups are simply repurposing the rhetoric of extinction and contagion that drove 20th-century homophobia."  She noted, "Lesbians are not a species, and we feed existing racist, ableist, and homophobic agendas when we invoke extinction."

Stahl also contests the idea that today's otherwise would-be lesbians are being "seduced" into transmasculinity, saying this "reflects a belief that individuals can think their way into trans identification and should therefore think their way out of it. In this view, that is, gender identity is 'just a phase.'"

But that is precisely what the notions of transgenderism and gender fluidity are based on...that one can think one's way into becoming the opposite sex, and that one day a person might identify as a male, the next a female, and so on, thinking one's way into overcoming or altering obvious biological and physical reality.

There is no greater amusement than when various woke identity groups turn on each other.  (As opposed to turn each other on.)  Last year, a transgender rights group at the University of Michigan filed a bias complaint against a lesbian arts and crafts group called "Lez Get Crafty" for excluding men.  In the complaint, a disgruntled male student wrote, "It is my belief that students should not be subjectified to discriminatory language of groups such as 'Lez Get Crafty.'"

It is my belief that no one should be "subjectified" to the inane/insane ramblings of an army of indoctrinated queer robots who can't even spell "subjected," and who are simply robotically regurgitating their leftist mentors' most tragically hip talking points.

You know you've reached a cultural tipping point when you're yearning for the good ol' days of traditional, garden-variety, stodgy, old-fashioned, Main Street, conservative lesbianism.  Today, apparently, even the term is considered outdated and problematic, whereas "queer" is celebrated as hip, edgy, inclusive, and exciting.

What's next (a question I've asked myself frequently in recent months)?  Will we soon hear of people saying they don't want to bring children into a world devoid of classical, conventional lesbians?

CRISIS!  We're running out of (cis-gendered) cis-lesbians!  There may be none left by the year 2100!

Of course, the planet will have burned up by then...so maybe it's a moot point. 

Image: Two women by Külli Kittus at Unsplash.

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