#24: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
#24: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Plus Glenn Greenwald and the case of the disappearing lesbians
Have you heard that the lesbians are disappearing!?
Just kidding, they’re not. But Pulitzer-winning gay journalist Glenn Greenwald thinks they are, and took to Twitter yesterday with a thread full of questionable math(?) to explain why.
I’m hesitant to even link to the tweets, because I personally feel dumber for having read them. But here’s the crux of his argument:
If your takeaway from this chart is, “but the percentage of people who identify as lesbians steadily increases with each generation!”, you are absolutely correct. But what Glenn takes issue with is that there are now more people who identify as either bi or trans (two things this survey apparently views as mutually exclusive) than lesbian.
Later in the thread, he links to an article suggesting that “the disappearance of lesbian culture is due to the encouragement which masculine girls receive -- from the society, therapists, health care workers, etc. -- to identify as trans, not as lesbian women.” What a wild take!
Fortunately, several hundred people have already responded to let Glenn know that trans people aren’t lesbians being pressured by society, and that actually it’s pretty ridiculous to claim that there is somehow more “societal acceptance” for trans people than other LGBTQ+ people.
Glenn also makes a point to put the word “bi” in quotation marks every time he uses it, and highlights that many “bi” self-identifiers are in opposite-sex relationships. This raises a few questions, but most notably for me… what do I need to do to move from mere “self-identifier” to legitimate bisexual?
Please let me know ASAP if you have any intel.
Otherwise, here’s a book rec.
— Becca
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Fiction, March 1985
Let me start by saying that I love an autobiographical novel, especially when it’s chock-full of details that would likely get the author sued if it were a memoir. Now, let’s compare this book’s description:
Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial north of England. Her youth is spent embroidering grim religious mottos and shaking her little tambourine for Jesus. But as this budding missionary comes of age and comes to terms with her unorthodox sexuality, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household collapses.
with the author blurb:
Born in Manchester in 1959 and adopted into a family of Pentecostal evangelists, Jeannette Winterson studied at Oxford University…
Going so far as to give her character her own name is BOLD and I respect the hell out of it.
Anyway, as you may have guessed, both book Jeanette and real life Jeanette are lesbians. As you also may have guessed, that does not go over so well with the Pentecostals.
But the other thing I love about autobiographical novels is that we know from the start the author more or less makes it through whatever it is that they’re writing about. Before reading any of her work, I knew Winterson was a wildly successful author with tons of awards and a beautiful kitchen. It’s nice to have that knowledge in the darker parts of this book.
Plus, for a story about a traumatic childhood, it’s also quite funny. When a woman is ungrateful to Jeanette’s mom for a tin of black cherries, for example, Jeanette writes that “she was furious, and crossed Nellie off her prayer list. My dad put her on his instead, so she didn’t miss out.”
I love this brand of passive-aggressiveness.
Queer points:
+6 for Jeanette’s description of men as “something you had around the place, not particularly interesting”
+8 for liberal use of the phrase “unnatural passions”
Buy it from your favorite bookstore on Bookshop (or check it out from your local library)