The Wires We Share: Building Lesbian Coalition Across Identity

This article was written for Jill Magazine and reproduced here with permission. To subscribe to Jill, go here: https://jillmag.weebly.com/

Marilyn Frye’s metaphor of the birdcage in The Politics of Reality (1983) remains one of the most powerful descriptions of how oppression works. A bird can fly around a single wire. It cannot fly through many wires arranged together.

We may give the cage different names. We may disagree about what holds its wires in place or how they should be dismantled. We also give ourselves many names in response to confinement and the desire to fly. Some identities may bend a few wires. Some may change how others perceive us inside the cage. But can a change in identity or social recognition alter every relationship to the wires—or only some of them?

I returned to graduate school with questions like these in mind. I began my MA by reviewing research on the material conditions of transmen’s lives: income, poverty, housing, homelessness, and violence. What I found complicated the assumption that identifying or being categorized as male necessarily ends a person’s exposure to forms of oppression rooted in sex, female masculinity, or prior social location.

Research has repeatedly found high rates of homelessness, economic insecurity, and violence among transmen. One Toronto study reported that many transmen avoided shelters because they feared being harmed in men’s facilities (FTM Safer Shelter Project Research Team, 2008). Other studies have found strikingly high rates of sexual and interpersonal violence (Abern et al., 2023; Closson et al., 2024). Although prevalence estimates vary across studies and cannot always be compared directly, several have reported sexual assault rates approaching one half among transmen. These figures are broadly similar to those reported among lesbian and bisexual women in population-based surveys (Chen et al., 2023).

I then took up the question qualitatively. Through feminist narrative inquiry, I examined transmen’s accounts of sexual assault and found that their experiences remained strikingly legible within feminist frameworks of violence against women. Across the narratives were familiar patterns involving female sex, gender nonconformity, same-sex attraction, economic and familial dependence, religious regulation of femininity, and violence by men. Transition sometimes changed how participants moved through the world, but it did not necessarily sever structural continuities.

Those findings lead to the next question. My PhD research will examine the social mechanisms producing sexual violence against transmen more broadly and ask how those mechanisms can remain visible when survivors are categorized primarily through gender identity. The words and categories available to us shape which patterns of harm can be named, compared, and explained.

Out of these questions, I also began a small experiment under the deliberately ironic name the Lesbros Project. Rather than organizing around a shared identity label, we organize around shared vulnerabilities, histories, and patterned experiences.

The group includes butch lesbians, transmen, transmasculine people, and other masculine women whose relationships to labels have shifted over time. Some have stopped taking testosterone. Some continue to take it. Some understand themselves primarily as lesbians; others prefer the word transman while still understanding their sexual orientation as lesbian. We do not all use the same identity language, but we share one central commitment: each member understands themselves to be female, whatever pronouns they use or social role they occupy.

That common ground does not require us to interpret transition in the same way or adopt a single political account of our lives. What holds us together is a willingness to examine how sex, female masculinity, same-sex attraction, and social conditions have shaped our histories—and to build friendships across our differences.

Lesbros is organized around several forms of connection. Our book club reads and discusses texts together, and we record those conversations for YouTube (@LesbrosProject) so that others can engage with the ideas beyond the group itself. A Discord server provides space for ongoing informal discussion, while online “pub nights” allow us to gather socially without requiring every interaction to become political or theoretical. The project is at once a reading group, a public conversation, and a community space.

When we talk, patterns become visible. Continuities emerge.

It is not just me. It is not just you. It is not merely personal. It is political.

Our labels may change while many of the same wires continue to constrain us: punishment for female masculinity, homophobia, sexual and interpersonal violence, misogyny, family rejection, poverty, medicalization, and the loss of community. We examine those continuities without requiring agreement about how each person should describe or interpret their life.

To say that transition does not alter every relation to power is not to say that it alters nothing. Nor does recognizing structural overlap require us to collapse different lives into a single identity, word, or explanation.

For some members, especially those who are younger, identity labels carry enormous social weight. They shape belonging, recognition, friendship, and access to community and services. Instead of treating their language as the problem, we turn our attention toward the conditions that make labels so consequential to belonging.

As we read works such as Sarah Lucia Hoagland’s Lesbian Ethics, Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating, and Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, we repeatedly return to questions of obligation, community, and female resistance. What do we owe one another when we share vulnerabilities but not identities? What forms of community become possible when disagreement does not cancel mutual obligation?

We also ask where we appear in the old stories. What happens when we are neither the princess nor the prince, but are tired of being cast as the witch, the monster, or the dragon?

These questions are easier to understand through some of the people who have chosen to take part in Lesbros.

Frankie

Frankie now describes herself as a transmasc butch lesbian, although the language she has used for herself has changed over time. She survived sexual abuse in childhood and was later groomed into pornography while living as a transman. Following a violent confrontation with the man who had abused her, she was incarcerated in a men’s facility, where she was placed in situations that left her exposed and vulnerable.

Her experience shows the limits of treating male social recognition as equivalent to male privilege. Being perceived and institutionally classified as male did not protect her from exploitation or violence; in some circumstances, it placed her in settings that failed to account for her vulnerability.

Frankie has since left pornography, stopped taking testosterone, and begun rebuilding her life. She now works full-time in a physically demanding job and is learning to love herself as a “transmasc butch lesbian.” As she works through questions about her past and identity, what she values about Lesbros is having a place to belong where feminist theory can help her understand the structural conditions that have shaped her life without first requiring her to adopt any particular label for herself.

Her story is not only about what happened to her. It is also about survival, work, self-knowledge, and the difficult process of becoming at home in herself.

Aidan

Although being accepted as male has given Aidan passage into some male spaces, he does not experience that changed social position as equivalent to male privilege. Many of the constraints that have shaped his life as a female person remain present across professional and interpersonal settings. He still struggles to access female-specific healthcare and often finds himself taking on roles in work and family life that are traditionally assigned to women. His career has also been concentrated in feminized professions that offer relatively little wealth or prestige.

At the same time, Aidan’s masculine presentation has created a different set of expectations. Although past experiences have left him deeply fearful of men, the professional world often assumes that he is especially well suited to work with or care for men, including those who display misogynist or otherwise difficult behaviour. That expectation has left him feeling isolated. As he puts it, “I feel extremely trapped and alone with the sexism I experience from men, but passing has not made me invulnerable to its effects.”

For Aidan, passing can therefore function as both protection and erasure. “I have come to understand that passing as a masculine female can mean accepting a costly and pernicious invisibility as one’s only defence against misogyny,” he says. But that invisibility comes with a double bind. Being read as male can exclude him from lesbian and feminist spaces that might otherwise offer belonging and support, while his resistance to understanding himself simply as a man can leave him estranged from mainstream services and communities organized around that assumption.

What Aidan describes is at the very heart of Lesbros: “I hope that the space between feminist understanding and experiences like mine can be bridged with intention and community.”

Xen

Seven months ago, Xen felt as though she were losing her mind. After taking testosterone for almost three years and recently changing her documents to reflect the transman identity she held at the time, she began to feel that the risks of remaining on testosterone for life were no longer worth the effects she wanted to maintain. What followed, she says, was “an overwhelming period of identity confusion and ideological crisis.”

Although she still felt “like a man on the inside” and was read as male by others, Xen had begun to regret medicalizing and was starting to understand herself differently: not simply as a man, but as a masculinized woman. She did not know where to turn. She had already begun seeking out feminist literature on her own when she encountered my work and later found Lesbros.

For Xen, the group became a place where uncertainty did not have to be resolved immediately into a fixed political or identity position. “The club has since become a haven where I have the space and support to make sense of my unfolding experience without being ostracized,” she says.

Now seven months off testosterone, Xen is once again mostly recognized as female by strangers despite having changed relatively little about her presentation. Her own language has also shifted toward understanding herself as a gender-nonconforming woman. But she does not interpret that change as proof that her earlier identity was false. “I can’t say that I was inauthentic during my transition,” she says. “That has raised more questions than answers for me about identity and labels.”

The lives described here are not identical. Nor are the words we use for ourselves, the meanings we give to transition, or the conclusions we have reached about sex and gender. But across those differences, certain patterns recur: punishment for female masculinity, sexual vulnerability, estrangement, medicalization, and the pressure to make a complicated life conform to a single political story.

Marilyn Frye warned that the shared category “homosexual” could conceal the different structural positions occupied by gay men and lesbians. The reverse is also true: different labels can conceal overlapping positions within structures of power.

Lesbians, transmen, transmasculine and nonbinary people, and people who have detransitioned or remain uncertain. Those names matter. They can provide recognition, language, and belonging within particular contexts. But they do not, by themselves, tell us which wires continue to constrain us.

Lesbros makes room for us to compare histories, recognize continuities, and explore uncertainty without treating it as betrayal.

It is a modest experiment, and perhaps it will remain one. But our small group has already found friendship, honesty, intellectual growth, and forms of support that are difficult to build in spaces where agreement must come before belonging.

Coalition does not require us to become the same kind of bird. It begins when we recognize the wires we share—and decide that none of us should have to loosen them alone.

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* The members profiled in this article reviewed and approved their photographs and the descriptions of their experiences before publication.

Sources

Abern, L., Diego, D., Krempasky, C., Cook, J., & Maguire, K. (2023). Prevalence of sexual assault in a cohort of transgender and gender diverse individuals. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 38(5), 1331–1333. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-022-07900-y

Chen, J., Khatiwada, S., Chen, M. S., Smith, S. G., Leemis, R. W., Friar, N., Basile, K. C., & Kresnow, M. (2023). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) 2016/2017: Report on victimization by sexual identity. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/98137

Closson, K., Boyce, S. C., Johns, N., Inwards-Breland, D. J., Thomas, E. E., & Raj, A. (2024). Physical, sexual, and intimate partner violence among transgender and gender-diverse individuals. JAMA Network Open, 7(6), e2419137. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.19137

Dworkin, A. (1974). Woman hating. E. P. Dutton.

Frye, M. (1983). The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. Crossing Press.

Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Duke University Press.

Hoagland, S. L. (1990). Lesbian ethics: Toward new value. Institute of Lesbian Studies.

The FTM Safer Shelter Project Research Team. (2008). Invisible men: Transgender men and homelessness in Canada. Wellesley Institute. https://www.wellesleyinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/invisible-men.pdf