A word from Lesbians United

How postmodernism is to blame for today's fashionable homophobia

Lesbians United’s founder and National Organizer, T., is a former academic who spent over a decade fighting postmodernist homophobia in U.S. universities. She now lives as a housewife and donates her time to lesbian rights activism.

I’ve spent most of my adult life in academia, and I can say from personal experience that postmodernism is currently driving the homophobic hate movement in the U.S.

For those lucky enough never to have heard the term: Postmodernism is a school of philosophy that claims there’s no such thing as objective truth. Instead, each person experiences their own subjective—and equally valid—version of reality. According to postmodernism, it’s therefore impossible to tell what is true. No event can truly be said to happen. No object can truly be said to exist. Anyone who attempts to define a term has committed an act of violence, because they might be interfering with someone else’s subjective understanding of the term. And if definitions are violent, boundaries—which rely on definitions—are even worse.

If this is your first time peering into this particular rabbit hole, your reaction probably falls somewhere between hmm, weird and wow, that’s stupid.

In my opinion, postmodernism is equal parts interesting and stupid: interesting as a thought experiment, stupid when taken too seriously. But when it’s taken too seriously by too many people, postmodernism stops being stupid and becomes dangerous, precisely because it seeks to eradicate all objective reasoning, all definitions, and all boundaries.

It also tends to attract bullies.

Devotees of postmodernism generally claim to be progressives; they claim that they want to change the status quo. But if you’re a rational human surrounded by postmodernists, it pretty quickly becomes clear that “postmodernist thought” is a way of reinforcing the status quo by justifying and rebranding it. Postmodernist bullies like to claim that they’ve given up power, while actually retaining and abusing said power.

For example: A straight male colleague tells me that because I’m attracted to women, I’m probably not a woman myself. When I ask him to define the word woman, he tells me that definitions are violent. When I point out that he implicitly defined the word woman by excluding me from it, he loudly proclaims that he’s a “trans woman,” and that I, a “cis lesbian,” am his oppressor. The status quo—man talking over woman, heterosexual excluding homosexual—hasn’t changed. It’s just been given a makeover. The more self-righteously my colleague proclaims his womanhood, the more the status quo solidifies.

In academia, the status quo of homophobia has solidified into bedrock.

Postmodernism enabled more than one colleague to exclude me from the definition of woman. It also enabled my peers to exclude me from the definition of person because I’m not interested in men. It enabled a facilitator to remove me from a campus women’s group because my homosexuality and un-femininity, in her view, disqualified me from womanhood.

It enabled my PhD advisor to veto my dissertation because I didn’t have a “theoretical basis” for writing about lesbians instead of heterosexuals. It enabled professors to dismiss my research, and conferences to reject my papers on women and homosexuality—on the grounds that they relied too much on evidence and logic.

It enabled a university I attended to remove anti-discrimination protections for homosexuals.

It enabled heterosexual men to openly fetishize lesbians in seminars, in front of me.

It enabled anyone and everyone to call me by a homophobic slur more times than I could count. It enabled many of my heterosexual colleagues to openly compare homosexuality to perversion and pedophilia, and to justify their own worst impulses by falsely associating themselves with homosexuals.

Worst, the hostile environment these postmodernists created pushed every other lesbian academic I knew to self-harm with breast-binders, hormones, and/or surgery.

Most people who read this post probably won’t be surprised by the hostility lesbians face from heterosexual academics—sadly, hostility toward lesbians is nothing new. But the way in which my professors and colleagues created a hostile environment may surprise many of you. Academics now openly proclaim that they are irrational, disinterested in evidence, unable to define basic terms, unable to speak their own native language fluently. Some of them are stupid and proud of it; some of them are feigning stupidity to mask their cruelty.

Postmodernism has been trickling down from universities at least since the 1970s, which, not coincidentally, is when the concept of “gender” started to take off in the U.S. But people outside the academy are just beginning to see what it’s really like to live in a postmodernist world. In short: if you’re a minority, if you want to see the status quo change, or if you just want to live in the real world, the postmodernist prognosis isn’t good.

I spent years telling myself that academia could change, that my dream career as a research-focused, evidence-collecting, logic-loving professor could still be possible. I’ll be frank: giving up on that dream was the most painful thing I’ve ever done. But I had to do it, to make way for something new.

The concept for Lesbians United began when I left the ivory tower and sat down with a fairly new group of friends to kick ideas around. What could we do to get our community back? What could we do to help fellow lesbians who are suffering, and to prevent future generations from suffering the same? 

Our answer was to create an organization diametrically opposed to the postmodernist institutions that have done so much damage to the lesbian community. They revel in ignorance; we have reams of research. They refuse to define their terms; we use clear language. They lie; we tell unmistakable truths. They play purity politics to keep the public distracted; we’re a laser-focused, single-issue organization that takes lesbians of all stripes.

At this early stage, Lesbians United is all about the messaging. We’ve polished our website, and we’re working hard on a library of infographics, public information campaigns, and educational booklets to be released throughout 2022. This is my wheelhouse, and I’m glad to be flexing my academic muscles again. But more importantly, I believe that good messaging is the key to winning the political fight ahead. Postmodernists, absurd as they are, have so far been winning the messaging fight. Wouldn’t it be great if a ragtag bunch of lesbians beat them at their own game?

Here’s the thing about postmodernism: it’s an interesting thought experiment, but that’s all it is. Truth exists. Objective reality exists. The postmodernists can suppress information, silence people, and call for book-burnings until they’re blue in the face. But they can’t stop the truth from being true. If we keep telling the truth, loudly, persistently, and without letting them distract us, we will win this fight.

Once we’ve won, we can finally start to rebuild our community, for ourselves and for the future.

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Highlights from Social Media

This week, our Understanding Child Transition campaign covered some of the effects of artificial testosterone on girls’ bodies. On Tumblr, we delved back into the dangers of the affirmative model. And our YouTube channel took off with a handful of short, educational videos, perfect for sharing with friends or on social media.

Volunteer Opportunities

Lesbians United is seeking volunteers to help us continue the important work of fighting homophobia and rebuilding the lesbian community. At this stage, we are particularly interested in recruiting lesbians who fit the following descriptions:

• Social Media Experts who have experience with planning social media strategy, writing social media posts, using hashtags and algorithms, and attracting followers.

• Graphic Designers who can create and edit graphics for our organization’s future projects.

• Video Creators who have experience with filming, editing, and/or animating videos.

• Community Organizers who have experience with organizing online events.

To get involved, email us at info@lesbians-united.org, and we’ll send you a copy of our volunteer intake form. If you’ve already submitted an application, look out for an email near the end of February.

This post originally appeared here.