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The Power of Names — Our Definitions

Dyke: We use this term for the most Lesbian-identified of Lesbians. It’s important to remember that it was originally used only for Butches.

Lesbian: A female who loves and falls in love with other females, makes love only with females, and never relates sexually to males or injects semen into herself. When Lesbians are single and celibate, we’re very different from celibate het women, who are still sexually, emotionally, socially, and culturally focused on men.

Lesbianism is far more than a “sexual preference” or “sexual orientation.” It is a choice of women loving women. Everything we feel and do in our lives we do as Lesbians. Our political and creative work is Lesbian. Our friendships are Lesbian relationships.

No male can become a Lesbian. “Transwomen” are simply men perving, fetishizing, and caricaturing women and Lesbians.

Female: The term we use for our sex, since it’s not age-specific and is less identified with heterosexuality than “woman.” Also, it’s a reminder of our link with other female animals on earth, who are generally called “female,” rather than “women.” And, as Julia Penelope said in The Mystery of Lesbians, “female” is derived from the French “femelle,” with no connection to the word “male,” while (crediting the writings of Monique Wittig and ideas of Ariane Brunet and Louise Turcotte) “woman” comes from “wif” (wife) and “man.”

Woman, Womyn, Wimmin, etc.: For many of us, “woman” has meant heterosexual — a “real” woman by men’s standards. It’s a male definition imposed on females and isn’t our natural state. The many feminist variations are closet terms for “Lesbian,” and we refuse to support that trend. When we say “Lesbian,” we mean it. It’s understandable that Lesbians in unsafe situations use a code name like “womyn” to make contact with other Lesbians, but when Lesbians use those terms instead of “Dyke” or “Lesbian” among ourselves, it weakens Lesbian identity. “The womyn’s community” is het-identified, not Lesbian-identified.

Some Lesbians embraced “woman” because that term is denied to many females, especially Lesbians. Men call us “girls” to demean us. However, some Lesbians prefer the term “girl” to “woman” for other reasons. For some African-descent females, poor and working-class females, Lesbians who came out before the Women’s Liberation Movement, and young females, “girl” is a familiar, affectionate term. After all, we’ve all been girls for a long time, while “woman” is a term laden with images of “adult” females who are heterosexually active, wifely, and motherly. For many of us, girlhood was the time when many girls we knew were most clear about loving other girls and rejecting boys. We support girls who call themselves “girls” as a statement of pride, and we support adult females who call themselves “girls” as part of their culture and heritage.

We also don’t call ourselves Gay women since that associates us with Gay men. That term has been a dividing line between Lesbian Feminists and non-feminists or Lesbians who felt afraid to use the term Lesbian.

(Some snippets from pastor, sheriff, and anti-LGBTQ screamer Grayson Fritts.)

…For roughly an hour, Fritts, who is also a detective with the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, railed against members of the LGBTQ community –– referring to them as “sodomites,” “freaks” and “animals” –– and called on the government to carry out the proper punishment for the “capital crime.”

….“They are worthy of death,” he declared in a video originally released by the church that was later shared on social media.

…“I’m sick of sodomy getting crammed down our throats,” Fritts said at one point in the video, drawing attention to Taylor Swift’s recent efforts to fight anti-LGBTQ bills going through Tennessee’s state legislature.

“It’s infecting our culture, people,” he continued, later insisting that American culture had changed but the Bible isn’t “outdated.”

Fritts argued that the Bible demands that gays be put to death. And throughout the sermon, he spoke passionately about how it is the responsibility of the government to enforce those supposed teachings, not individual Christians — unless they are also police officers.

“God has instilled the power of civil government to send the police in 2019 out to the LGBT freaks and arrest them and have a trial for them, and if they are convicted, then they are to be put to death,” he said, earning approving murmurs from the crowd. Fritts later added that the “Bible says that sentence should be carried out speedily.”

These days, Fritts said it would be easy to spot a member of the LGBTQ community. They’re in grocery stores and your neighborhood Lowe’s being “flamboyant” and “walking around like a bunch of Twinkies,” he said. And then, there are the Pride parades.

“Man, hey call the riot team, we got a bunch of them,” Fritts said. “We have a bunch of them we’re going to get convicted because they have all their pride junk on, and they’re professing what they are, that they’re a filthy animal.”

One week later, LGBTQ people appeared to still be on Fritts’s mind as he dedicated another hour to delivering a sermon titled, “Sodomite Reprobates,” which he kicked off by griping about people “trying to mischaracterize our stance on homosexuals.”

“What I believe about homosexuals is straight from the word of God,” he said last Sunday.

…“The world looks at it and they’re like, ‘Oh, there’s Pastor Fritts. There’s that lone wolf . . . that one guy, that one Baptist pastor that’s just a lunatic, that’s just crazy,'” he said. “Guess what, there’s a lot of people that believe exactly like I believe.”

The problem now, Fritts said, is that all his “Baptist brethren have put their heads in the sand” because they don’t want to deal with the widespread criticism he’s facing.

“They’re weak, they’re spineless, and you know what, if the Bible says it, you need to say it. You need to preach it,” he said as people in the crowd could be heard saying “Amen” and “That’s right.”

But his words did little to quell the outrage as many continued to accuse him of “inciting violence” against the LGBTQ community and labeled him a “bigot.”

…“I’m not calling anybody in here to arms,” he said. “I’m not calling anybody here to violence. I’m saying it’s the government’s responsibility is what I said.”