Modern Lesbophobia and the Cotton Ceiling Fallacy

This episode tackles the critical issues facing lesbians today, including language, identity, and the ongoing fight against erasure and misrepresentation.

Read the full BBC Article HERE

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Transcript

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This is The Lesbian Take, a podcast for same-sex attracted women. I'm your host, MC. When I was growing up in the 90s and in the early 2000s, everybody knew what a lesbian was. Everybody knew what a gay man was. Everybody knew what a bisexual was. I'll bet back then, bisexuals, they really got some bad rep, which I'll say unfortunately it persists today. And up until about a decade ago, heterosexual was also not a definition to be disputed. The reality of biological sex was the foundation upon which sexuality was built upon, and it is the very foundation for the laws that protect same-sex attractive individuals today. But it seems to me that ever since the pandemic, the efforts to abolish biological sex from key definitions that inform the live reality of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and straight people, like it really ramped up to a degree that I could no longer just keep my head buried in the sand. I felt that I needed to speak up because the injustice was just too much to ignore. Now, lesbians, I get why some of you go along with the nonsense. I know I went along with the nonsense for a very long time. From a very young age, we are taught that our feelings, okay, they don't matter. The feelings of others matter more than our own. It's how we were socialized, okay? As young girls, we were conditioned to be nice. We are taught to anticipate the needs of others and react accordingly. We were punished and verbally scolded if we didn't conform to sexist stereotypes. We were called bitches, or maybe we were just labeled as difficult if we put up boundaries. And this narrative, when it's uh so baked into society, right, uh it's no wonder that women tend to champion causes that go against our interests. And lesbians, we're not immune. Right? We are women, we're not immune to this social pressure, but we need to quit being doormats if we seek to continue to exist, right? Because like they're trying to make us go extinct, man. And I bet some of y'all are listening to me and you're like, MC, you're being you're being dramatic, right? You may think that redefining lesbian to mean that anyone and anything can identify as lesbian and that's not a big deal, but it really is. Like language is the scaffolding for selfhood. Without a specific word to articulate our sexuality, we risk diving into self-doubt, questioning everything, and entering into relationships that harm us. If lesbian means nothing, we lose visibility along with the ability to organize, lobby, and advocate for our own special interests. This we already see happening. The lesbian action group in Australia currently finds itself taking on the Human Rights Commission who denied the group's request for an exemption so that they could run lesbian-only events. So this was denied. They were told, no lesbians, you can't organize. So, in other words, lesbians in Australia have been told, nope, you can't have lesbian events. And I can't even tell you the last time I've seen a lesbian-specific event that was out there and advocated because we can't have lesbian-only events anymore. And this is a part of the problem, and this is why language matters. Now, let's get one thing clear. Lesbians are one of the smallest, most marginalized, and hated groups. For the most part, lesbians, we were written out of history, okay? And then when our existence couldn't be denied any longer, we were labeled as crazy and shipped off to mental institutions to cure us of our mental disorders. And this wasn't even that long ago. This was less than a hundred years ago. This is what was happening to us. And now, with the invention and push to supplant sexual orientation with gender orientation, lesbians again find ourselves being told that we have genital preferences and that basically we are bigots if we don't consider the opposite sex for romantic partners. So they're trying to erase us again. This modern homophobia, it's being spoon-fed to the younger demographic lesbians now. And let's call the cotton ceiling fallacy out for what it is it's conversion therapy under the guise of inclusion and good intentions. And the fact that lesbians we even let ourselves get to a place like this, and maybe we didn't allow ourselves to get to a place like this, but the pressure's on us, you know, it speaks to how important it is right now, more than ever, to gatekeep and protect the lesbian definition. Because we are steering young lesbians down a path where they will feel obligated to date the opposite sex when we know those relationships will cause them harm and confusion. The be kind movement isn't kind at all if it means that one must abandon themselves, their right to identity, and happiness for the sake of others, especially when there's no reason, there's absolutely no reason for lesbians to concede to this. There's no reason for it. You know, LGBTQ community, they love to invent terms. They can invent a new term, right? But that's not what they're doing. They want anybody and everybody to be called lesbian, you know, and that is a special kind of homophobia and misogyny. Lesbians, let's be honest and real. The world has always wanted to erase our existence because we are the antithesis of queer theory and gender ideology. And, you know, before that, we were the antithesis to heterosexuality, which was the norm. But let's bring it back to gender theory and gender ideology, right? Our no makes their arguments fall apart. Okay. Because for us, for homosexuals, the body, that is what is relevant. And Western societies, you have to, you have to understand this, they have been lobbied. And a lot of these pushes and laws and everything, it's all been under the table. It's just we woke up one day and this was now the law. And that sort of tells society, okay, what is the new normal, right? But yeah, like this agenda, it it basically is trying to promote that our embodiment doesn't matter. And so now we are being told lies and that our sexuality is a preference that we can get over if we try enough. Give me a break, right? We need to reject this. We need to dig our heels in, we need to hold our ground and build a wall. Like, oh my God, this sounds a little trumpy too, right? We need to build a wall, okay? But yeah, we need a gatekeep. We need to be unkind to others, but kind to ourselves. We need to organize, fundraise, and rebuild community that's for us because the LGBTQ acronym, it has demonstrated over and over over the last decade that its interests, they're just not aligned with our own. GLAD, Stonewall, and other historically gay institutions, right? Like gay rights institutions, have begun treating lesbians and gay men like we're the problem, a glitch in the system that needs to be reprogrammed. This is what the younger generation of lesbians and gay men are being trained and being spoon-fed. And it's not right. It's not right. I didn't have to deal with this when I was growing up, and I sure as hell don't want the new generation of lesbians and gay men having to deal with this. But that's my intro, and I'm I'm kind of like done ranting. Let's move on to the core part of the show. Let's talk about the cotton ceiling fallacy. So, what is the cotton ceiling theory? Well, it's a term that was coined by transgender porn actress Drew DeVoe. In around 2012, 2015, the internet says different things about when it was coined. Um so couldn't really narrow that down. But it's meant to be an analogy to the glass ceiling, right? We all know what the glass ceiling is. But replace the ceiling for cotton panties. Like, I don't know, man. It's kind of perverted when you think about it. It is something to be smashed through. Or I would probably say, you know, since it's panties, the more accurate terminology is torn through. Frustrations with lesbians who would not sleep with DeVoe led to the creation of this fallacy that now guides and supports the harassment and coercion of lesbians who assert their boundaries. At the end of the day, I have no idea why DeVoe thought it was acceptable to try to date lesbians in the first place. Right? DeVoe was fishing in the wrong pool. Okay. And it's this kind of entitlement. You know, while it's in while it's totally mind-blowing, it's very much expected. Because women, as mentioned in the intro, we are expected to accommodate, even when it hurts us. But I'll say this about lesbians. For a very long time, at least when I was dating back in like 2025, right? Lesbians made it very clear who we would and wouldn't be dating. Okay. Uh, you know, around like 2014, 2015, too, like the hate on the the online dating platforms around like dating like Butch was like really bad too, right? But I think at the end of the day, like you can express your preferences. That's what dating's all about. But biological sex, when it comes to lesbianism, it's not a preference, right? Like, it is the single requirement of being a lesbian. You have to be female, you have to be a female who's exclusively attracted to other females. That's what a lesbian is. And it's kind of like you want to laugh at it, you you want to laugh right now and say that like this is a joke. Okay, like we have to be like in the twilight zone or something that we're living in an era where I want to say that like lesbians, it's controversial if lesbians won't date the opposite sex. Like, give me a break at the end of the day. Like, let's let's be really real here. At the end of the day, if heterosexual males, okay, who are who are trans identifying were pursuing pansexuals, none of this would be an issue. But you're fish you're fishing in the lesbian dating pool. Like, of course, you're not getting any hits, right? Because lesbians, like, we are not the sexuality to come to if if you're looking for somebody who's gonna date everybody. Okay. It's not about the person, it's about the body, as I said. And of course, it's like a tale as old as time. For some reason, lesbians, we find ourselves the targets of these hearts over parts campaigns. And it's so ridiculous. It's lesbians who are being booted from homophobic dating apps like her for expressing our sexual attraction. Like, you can't make this shit up, right? We're we're being called bigots right now for our sexuality. Like, it is ridiculous. You have to ask the question. Like, why is it that lesbians find ourselves caught in the crosshairs of this debate when it really has nothing to do with us? Like, why are we the target audience for this for this cotton ceiling nonsense? This has nothing to do with us. We're not gonna date you because we're homosexuals. But I'll tell you why. I'll answer this question. Once again, it's because lesbians know it breaks apart the spell and it really hammers home reality that sex does matter. And the entire goal right now seems to be to abolish sex from everything, you know, and sex is one of the few concrete binaries that exist in the world, and they're trying to do away with that. Now, I would like to say that, you know, this was only an issue that arose recently, but I've come across many accounts from lesbians going back even as far as the 70s, where trans identifying males were I were harassing lesbians for telling them no. But here's the thing: it used to be a very infrequent issue, but now it's become the norm. And we really need to call it out and put it to bed because lesbians we don't need to deal with this homo homophobic nonsense. We already have too much on our plates to deal with. Everything is like, as you know, everything's just a little bit more hard when you're you're gay or when you're lesbian, dating, settling down, building a family, and navigating a world when, you know, a significant proportion of the general public thinks something's wrong with us or that we just haven't met the right man yet. And support for us, I think this is really important. Support for lesbians and gay men is going down because we've been force-teamed with a lot of these really unpopular policies. So we'll see what happens. I I'm gonna be honest, I'm a little terrified about the backlash that is brewing right now. And, you know, we are not immune to it. When that backlash comes, because a lot of boundaries have been crossed, and you know, speech is being compelled, it might be really ugly. And, you know, it terrifies me. Like we could we could lose everything in a snap. Like, you know, we could lose everything in a snap. Nobody thought Brexit would happen. Nobody thought Trump would be re-elected. Like, you never know what's gonna happen. And this entitlement, I don't know. We'll we'll see, we'll see what happens because it's not just lesbians that are being affected. Um, I think that we right now are one of the groups that is the most impacted and that we face the most adverse impacts right now because we sit in a very, very interesting intersection between misogyny and homophobia. So I think that we are set up to be, you know, harmed more. But when the backlash, we're gonna be part of that too. So I don't know, I'm a little bit worried. But I want to talk about a BBC article that I came across during my research for this episode. It was published October 2021. And I'm gonna link it in the show notes so you can you can read it. But it speaks to some of the harassment lesbians face because of our exclusive same-sex attraction. Uh, and so in the article, there's a lesbian quoted saying, you know, I've had someone say they would rather kill me than Hitler. They said they would strangle me with a belt if they ever were in a room with me and Hitler. That was so bizarrely violent just because I wouldn't have sex with trans women. So this is a quote from that article. And, you know, this lesbian is later quoted saying that she's been called transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert, and also a turf. I would love to say that her experience is unique, but you know, I have also personally been subjected to harassment, threats for being a lesbian. I have been told to go hang myself. I have been told I am a Nazi. I have been told I need to suffer the worst death imaginable, and that I do not deserve love. All because I'm a lesbian with boundaries, and I will say no. You know, I will say no. I'll tell people no because it's not right what's happening. And I have morals, I have beliefs, and I hold on to reality more than anything. I have had these people slander me on the sapphic book Reddits and Facebook forums. On Goodreads, there was a time in May 2026 where a flood of fake one-star reviews uh came in for slow cook feelings. And what made the situation like really actually creepy was that whoever was leaving these fake reviews, they did so under the names of like some of my friends. So like it tells me this person's been like following me for some time and whatever. And it's just like really, really creepy, you know? And it's tactics like this, right? It's tactics like this, why a lot of lesbians keep silent, because there is a very real risk to our personhood for speaking up and and being like, no. So how can we even say this is our community, right? This is why I'm just I have I'm not part of the acronym. Leave me out of it. Okay, because we're not a community. If you're gonna threaten me for my sexuality and go tell me to hang myself, give me a break. Like, in what world is it okay to tell a black lesbian to go hang themselves because they're a lesbian? And they say, no, I'm a homosexual woman, that's what lesbians are. Like, give me a fucking break. Look, like I've said it a million times now. Like, I don't care, you know, and I don't think a lot, uh like a large majority of lesbians care if somebody wants to identify as trans, like you do you, right? Like you do you. If that's what makes you comfortable, if that is what you need to make the world hurt a little less, is identify as trans. Like you do you, right? Like we could even be friends. But the moment a biological man tries to claim the lesbian label, I will become deeply offended because no, they're not a homosexual. They do not know what it means to be a homosexual. There isn't a single way their lived experience can mirror my own or that of any other lesbians. It's a razor and it's insulting. And I'm sorry, I'm not gonna accept that. I can't accept that lesbian is anything other than a homosexual woman because it is a fundamental violation of what I believe and know to be true. One, because I just don't believe in gender ideology. It's not a belief I hold. Similar to how I'm not religious and I don't believe in a God, it's not hateful or Big bigoted, right? It's not hateful, not bigoted in any way to not believe what someone else believes. You know, like you believe what you want to believe, I'm gonna believe what I want to believe. My beliefs come from objective truths, objective realities that I see, right? And that doesn't mean if we we don't we don't believe the same things that we can't be friends, like a lot of my friends are Christians or Muslims, Jewish, you know, we don't share the same faiths or beliefs, but we have mutual respect for each other, and that's how it should be, and that's how it used to be for the most part between lesbians and the trans community. Like I could tell you for a long time, right? Like lesbians, myself included, we saw ourselves as allies for the tea. Right. And the same for a lot of feminists, right? A lot of feminists back in the day, like they they saw themselves as allies for the T. We would stand up for them and we would shut down actual transphobia. And like I'll say this, like to this day, regardless of how the trans community has treated me, I don't think that the entire trans community should be vilified for the actions of some of them within their ranks. Like, I don't think a whole group should be villainized. My issue will and is about the behavior, right? I really couldn't care less how somebody chooses to present themselves. I really couldn't choose. Frankly, it would actually be hypocritical of me to be judged judgmental towards somebody, you know, because I am a very masculine female. And I've always been butcher stud, right? I've never conformed to sexist stereotypes. And I know that I personally hate it when I do face judgment for not fitting the mold. Right. So I want to make it very clear like I don't think that anyone should be harassed or discriminated against in housing, employment, and public services because of how they choose to express themselves, right? But at the end of the day, you you you shouldn't be causing harm to other groups. And no lesbians, like nobody has the right to pressure lesbians to have sex with them. No one has the right to try to redefine lesbians to include them. Lesbians, we are not tools for validation. Lesbians will never accept the penis as a female organ. You know, sometimes it's like the left has gone so left that they're right with some of what they're trying to push. And it's like you you you try to to bring us back to like common sense, and then they want to call us the megas. And I'm just like, I don't know about others, but I've never been, I've never voted conservative a day in my life. And I don't think I ever would. I've always been sent center leaning um a little bit to the left. But I'll be honest, for the first time in my life, I might not vote, you know, in the next election. Because, you know, if they're not gonna do something to sort of like protect lesbians, you know, that's how I I feel right now. I feel very strongly about this. Like, I'm actually at a point in my life that for the first time I'm like, there's no way in hell, like I'm not conservative, and you know, but I can't keep voting for an agenda that erases lesbians and erases who I am. So that's how I'm sort of feeling. But let me go back to this BBC article. It then goes on to like outline a very, very sad story that unfortunately happens way too frequently now. Uh, like I've heard multiple young lesbians on TikTok complaining about this, but uh the article it quotes uh Amy, who at the time of the article was 26 years old. She's a lesbian, and she read it repeatedly told a trans identifying male that she wasn't interested in them, but ultimately she kept getting pressured and was pressured into having penetrative sex. And she's quoted saying, I felt very bad for hating every moment because the idea is we are attracted to gender rather than sex, and I did not feel that, and I felt bad for feeling like that. Amy told the reporter this, and then she went on to say, the language at the time was very much trans women are women, they are always women, lesbians should date them. And I was like, that's the reason I rejected this person. Does that make me a bad person? Uh I'm not going to be allowed to be part of the LGBTQ plus community anymore. Am I gonna face repercussions for denying them? You know, so I actually didn't tell anybody. So oh my god, my heart goes out to Amy, you know, and I want to say that this is rare. I want to say that this is not happening. But I've seen too many stories, like you know, and I you know it's and I'm choking up right now. It's so ridiculous that we're going through this homophobia right now. Lesbians shouldn't be pressured like this in 2026 to be dating and having sexual relationships with the opposite sex. I can't believe this, you know. Lesbians, we need to put our empathy to the back seat and we need to put ourselves in the driver's seat because everybody in this so-called community they will bully us for being homosexuals. Like that is where we've gotten like to this place, and this is why I'm so supportive of missions like get the L out and the LGB alliance. But I do think that lesbians, we are very, very, very uniquely positioned at that intersection between misogyny and homophobia where I don't even think like gay men can be our advocates. I think we need to advocate for ourselves, like we need lesbian community. We're living in this new age of rampant homophobia and forces that are working to erase us and our ability to organize, which is why I started this podcast to talk about issues that matter to us and to build community for same-sex attracted women and our true allies. Okay, because that group, that acronym, is not our true allies. My heart, it just goes out to the younger generation of lesbians. I never had to deal with any of this because A, I was never chronically online when I was uh a teenager or in my early 20s. So I never stumbled down the home homophobic rabbit hole that was Tumblr. And me, you know, I I met my partners going out, and when I was partying back in the 2010s, like lesbian events were mainly attended by actual lesbians, and that just isn't the the case now. You know, everything has to be queer now, but you know, for me, like I'm like, don't call me queer. I'm a lesbian, I'm not a Q. I have nothing to do with the world, that word. Last time I checked, queer Q was what four places down the acronym from the L. We've we've really moved to the towards like this online dating scene environment. And there are no protections for lesbians to express our sexuality without being removed from the apps or being dogpiled on or bullied or you know, called names. And it's it's very sad. Like my heart, it it really goes out to the younger generational lesbians. I think they're really suffering right now and they're really confused. And my ideal hope, where I want to go with this podcast, is I'm hoping I get some traction and supporters to help back me because I want to really put on some in-person events for lesbians to come together. And I just think that would be so awesome. Anyhow, uh, the cotton ceiling fallacy is just that it's a fallacy, it's false, it's homophobic, and it needs to be deleted from our language. Okay, that is the definition that needs to go. But let's move on to the next segment of this podcast episode where I'm gonna talk about some of my personal updates. So, if you did not know this about me, I am an author of three very lesbian books. There's Born of Blood Magic, there's French Press Love, and there's Slow Cook Feelings. If you want to support me and my work, pick up a copy, enjoy the chaos that is my creative mind, and you can visit my website, mchudson.com, to check out my books. Anyways, at this time, I'm currently working on the lesbian RPG lit of my dreams. It's called Level Up Lex. And for those of you who are scratching your heads and you're wondering what is lesbian RPG lit? Like, what is RPG lit? Well, it's a book that follows video game mechanics. So think leveling up, gaining skills, completing missions, and battling bosses. And so I was really, really hoping to drop level up Lex this summer, but the story, it sort of took a huge turn. And now it's become a complicated beast of a book that's taken me a long time to work through. Um, but if you are interested in having an idea of what level up lex is about, I have a bunch of draft chapters up on my Patreon. And it's free. So like you can just go there and you can read a bunch of chapters to see what that book's about. I'm like super excited. I don't think I've ever been so excited about a book before. Um, I think this might be the book. Like, I think this might be my magnum opus that like explodes me to the stratosphere. Of course, though, you know, there there are there are a lot of people who hate me and will try to drag me, but I also have a very committed following who like they know my heart, they know that at the end of the day, you know, I care about all people, but lesbians, that's my tribe. And I'm always gonna back lesbians, right? On another note, okay, let's talk to something talk about something a little bit more fun. Okay. I'm personally obsessed with Sophia, or it said Sophia, but her name's Sophie. Sophie Cunningham, okay, not Sophia, Sophie, Sophie Cunningham, and her viral like pointing meme, you know, tall blonde women, usually not my type, but damn, she's so pretty. Like she's so pretty, you know, and I just appreciate that she's like just such a straight shooter, like she speaks her truth and the world loves her for it. Yeah, like she's being dog piled on, but I think that she has more supporters than she has haters. And I was just trying to like buy a pair of her new shoes because they just dropped, but they were all sold out. I was like, no, because I really, really want to buy a pair of her shoes, even though pink's not really my color. I wanted to buy them, but they were all sold out, unfortunately. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, remember to please like and subscribe. And if you can, leave a review because that's how this podcast will be promoted and pushed out to more people, is if more people know about it. And the only way the algorithms will push it out is if I have a lot of ratings and like you know, subscribers and stuff. So, like, if you could do that, you could do me a solid, I'd really appreciate it, you know. And I just want to let y'all know I'm sending all my love to the lesbians who are listening and the the true lesbian allies who are listening. You know, stay loud, stay proud, and talk soon. Thank you for listening to the lesbian take. To support this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review. If you want to support me, check out my books. I also have a substack where I write articles about lesbian issues. Everything I do is out of pocket, so every bit of support helps. I release new episodes every Monday. Thanks again.