Comparing conceptions of gender, sexuality and lesbian identity between Baby Boomers and Millennials

Abstract

To answer this special issue provocation, Is Lesbian Identity Obsolete? we analyzed interviews with people who had identified at some point in their lives as lesbians, or as women/ femmes who were attracted to women -- some of them part of the Baby Boomer generation and some part of the Millennial generation. Participants from both generations rejected the gender binary. Nevertheless, we found a shift away from understanding gender as an oppressive category to an understanding of gender as a proliferating identity in which one may play with gender in an intentional and creative manner. It appears that participants across generations articulated their sexual identities strategically to express not only a sexual orientation but more importantly political and community alliances. For Baby Boomer lesbians, lesbian identity connoted an alliance with feminism, and for Millennials their sexual identity indicated a political alliance with queer and trans* movements. In order to sustain solidarity between lesbians of different generations, we suggest that narratives about gender should include both intrinsic and extrinsic components. We further suggest that the political project of ending the oppression of all lesbians/women who love women is fraught, but essential in a world that hates women.

This special issue begins with the provocation “Is lesbian identity obsolete?” As conceptions of gender and sexuality have shifted in recent decades, tensions over the constitution of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ+) identity have surfaced. As articulations of gender and sexual identity categories have shifted, some writers have framed lesbian identity as “disappearing” or “going extinct,”(Morris, 2016). Media accounts that conflate trans-masculinity with “lesbians in denial” (Herzog, 2020, Kiss, 2018; Serano, 2021) have positioned “lesbian” as an identity category in flux.

In this research, we examine the provocation “Is lesbian identity obsolete?” using qualitative interviews with LGBTQ+ participants living in the San Francisco Bay Area. For our purposes, we compared interviews with study participants from two generations: “Baby Boomers” (born between 1946–1965) who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and “Millennials” (born between 1981–1996) who came of age in the first two decades of the millennium, with dramatic gains in the social and legal inclusion of LGBT people in the US. An example of some of the legal and social inclusion can be found in the 2003 US Supreme Court invalidation of anti-sodomy laws (Lawrence et al. v. Texas, 2003). National polls indicate that in 2013, for the first time most people in the U.S. supported the rights of same-sex couples to get married (Silver, 2013), and in 2015 the US Supreme Court approved same-sex marriage (c.f., Ben Hagai & Crosby, 2016, for a review). Given the shift in social and legal inclusion, we are interested in how people of different generations understand gender and sexual identity. Specifically, how do conceptions of lesbian identity differ for people who came of age before and after these social shifts?

Our interview sample focused on participants who either (1) identified as lesbians or women/femmes who are attracted to women at the time of the interview (In response to a multi-select question about their gender, these participants selected the option “woman”; two selected an additional category, ex. “genderqueer”), or (2) had identified as lesbians in the past (ex., a trans man who described an earlier period of lesbian identification). We used the resulting set of 24 interviews to explore how these participants understand their gender and sexual identities.

Our investigation does not aim to represent the attitudes of all Baby Boomers and Millennials who have identified as lesbians at some point in their lives. Instead, we offer an empirically-grounded account of how these Baby Boomer and Millennial study participants – all with direct personal experience of the narrativization of lesbian identity– articulated their own narratives of gender and sexual identification. Rooted in a constructive paradigm that understands identities as historically constituted, socially contested, and always in flux (Balzer Carr et al., 2017; Foucault, 1978; Seidman, 1996), we foreground the role of feminist, queer, and transgender political movements in the construction of participants’ narratives. We juxtapose articulations made by these movements with psychological frameworks on gender and our interviewees’ voices. Our aim, in this brief article, is to offer an empirically grounded account of how participants of different generations narrativized lesbian identity in their own lives and understood their gender and sexual identities. By illuminating different approaches to gender and sexuality among people of different generations, we hope to increase understanding and reduce friction and alienation in LGBTQ+ communities.

The framing of sex/gender in the 1970s feminist and lesbian movements

At the root of lesbian movements of the 1970s was an understanding of gender as an oppressive category that disenfranchises women (De Beauvoir, 1949/2010; Firestone,1970/ 2003; Wittig, 1980). Radical lesbian feminists argued against compulsory heterosexuality and for the political importance of lesbian identity and intimate relationships between women in the battle against oppressive gender norms. In a famous manifesto the Radicalesbians group writes,

What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society - perhaps then, but certainly later - cares to allow her… She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society--the female role.

(Radicalesbians, 1970/2020 p.41).

Following the Radicalesbians manifesto, lesbians are understood as women who reject social imperatives to conform to feminine gender roles. Motivated by an “inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society… cares to allow her,” lesbian rejection of traditional feminine roles is a political act. Although lesbians are othered and policed through homophobia, their marginalized position affords them more awareness of women’s oppression (Rich, 1980). Both radical lesbians and gay liberation activists argued that the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality are only possible in societies with rigid sex roles that foreclose desire between people of the same sex (Wittman, 1970). Liberation for women is grounded in rejecting the compulsory heterosexuality that separates women from one another and turns them into objects of desire for the male gaze (Rich, 1980). In this formulation, the creation of strong bonds of intimacy and love between women can liberate women from their subordinate roles in a society dominated by men.

A foundational assumption of these lesbian and feminist movements was a conceptual separation between sex and gender (Bem, 1993). The gender category “women” was regarded as cultural, whereas the sex category “female” was understood to be based in biology and common to women universally (De Beauvoir, 1949/2010). Biological sex (understood as natural, intrinsic and relatively unchanging) is the background from which arises gender (understood as cultural, extrinsic and relatively dynamic). Patriarchal domination is reproduced through the gender roles and stereotypes that construct women as passive, domestic and weak, compared to the construction of men as agentic, public and strong (Bem, 1993). Feminist psychologists focused on understanding how these gender roles become internalized by children as they develop (Bem, 1981; Maccoby, 1999; Markus et al., 1982).

Psychological research on women’s sexuality, and in particular lesbian sexuality, has suggested that within patriarchal society the objectification and sexualization of women, propelled by billion dollar cosmetic, clothing, and porn industries, constrain women’s sexual agency (Kitzinger, 1987; Kitzinger & Wilkinson, 1995; Rothblum, 1994; 1999). For many women, sexual identity is not necessarily in congruence with their sexual desire and or romantic attraction (Diamond, 2008). For instance, Carla Golden demonstrated that some lesbians understood their sexual identity as determined by biological and innate factors whereas other lesbians saw their erotic attraction as a conscious choice. While some lesbians experienced their orientation towards women at a young age and felt that this orientation was immutable, others experienced their erotic attraction as fluid and variant across contexts and people. These women identified as lesbian yet experienced their romantic attraction as bisexual (Golden, 1987). Because research on lesbian identity suggests enormous fluidity and diversity in lesbian sexuality, in this study we included participants who described their sexual orientation as shifting between lesbian and bisexual and/or between lesbian and queer. (We did not, however, include participants who did not identify themselves as lesbians at some point in their lifetimes.)

Queer thought and the transgender revolution

In the late 1980s and 1990s queer movements arose in the wake of governmental neglect of the AIDS pandemic ravaging gay communities across the US (Schulman, 2021). Queer scholars who were part of ACT UP and other radical queer activist groups (e.g., Queer Nation) critiqued the scientific, literary, and popular discourses constructed around the logic of the heterosexual matrix (Seidman, 1996). They argued against the assumption, prevalent among feminists of previous decades, of the biological origins of sex differences. Specifically, Butler (1990/2011) argued that sex differences are seen through the lens of culture. The historical and social processes that cast men and women into binary and hierarchical positions shape how scientists understand gender differences. As such biological sex is not separated from but intertwined with cultural genders. To explode the sex/gender binary, queer scholars called for a proliferation of gender identities that they believed would render the male/female gender binary nonsensical (Butler, 1990/2011).

Transgender scholars who were part of the first wave of trans studies, such as Lesley Feinberg (1992/2013), Kate Bornstein (2016), Sandy Stone (1992), and Susan Stryker (1994), also argued for the propagation of “gender outlaws” and their inclusion under the transgender umbrella, a joint political identity and political force including “transvestites, transsexual, drag queens and drag kings, cross-dressers, bull-daggers, stone butches, androgynes, diesel dykes or berdache—a European colonialist term” (Feinberg, 1992/2013, p. 5). In addition to creating a political force around gender deviances of different kinds, transgender thinkers have highlighted the manner in which an individual’s sense of self and/or identity can be attached to a particular gender formation. As such gender is not only a force of oppression but also a productive force (Bornstein, 2016; Stryker, 1994).

Transgender writers have theorized about ways in which cisgender people may fail to recognize gender identification as an internalized awareness that can be incongruent with sex assigned at birth. For instance, Julia Serano describes the cognitive dissonance that can result when an individual experiences a subconscious sense of gender that is not affirmed by others (2016):

By this time, I was already consciously aware of the fact that I was physically male and that others thought of me as a boy. During this time, I experienced numerous manifestations of my female subconscious sex: I had dreams in which adults would tell me I was a girl…I had an unexplained feeling that I was doing something wrong every time I walked into the boy’s restroom at school.” (p.78)

In this model, complex genetic, hormonal, neurological and environmental processes are associated with the emergence of subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation. Although hetero- and cis-normativity enforce dominant alignments between each of these components and dimorphic sex traits, they are independent of one another, and can be static or dynamic to different degrees for different people (Serano, 2016).

To further account for gender variance, current transgender inclusive psychological models deconstruct gender into several components, facets, or dimensions. For example, Charlotte Tate’s (Tate et al., 2014) Gender Bundle Model suggests that there are five components of gender that come together into a gender identity bundle. Following empirical research on gender variant children and adults, these components include: (1) sex assignment at birth, (2) the gender a person feels they belong to or identify with, (3) the extent to which a person understands and follows gender role behavior, (4) gender presentation and (5) how people evaluate their gender ingroup compared to outgroups. In psychology, Sari Van Anders’(2015) Sexual Configuration Theory reiterates previous distinctions between sexual attraction, sexual behavior, and identity while further accounting for variability in the extent to which people may be attracted to a particular kind of gender/gender expression/sex (ex., masculine men, nonbinary people, butches or femmes), or have a more fluid disposition that is not specifically oriented towards a particular gender/sex.

Method

In this article, we conduct an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (Eatough & Smith, 2008) of 9 interviews with Baby Boomers and 15 interviews with Millennials, which are taken from a larger dataset of interviews that were conducted in 2016 on sexual and gender identities as well as stigma and smoking. (Some of the interviews used in this study were also used in a study on LGBTQ identities more generally; see Ben Hagai et al., 2020.) Participants were recruited through announcements circulated via online media and in person through LGBTQ community centers and organizations. Trained qualitative researchers conducted semi-structured interviews (typically lasting for one hour) featuring questions about gender and sexual identities. Interviews began with the question “In your own words, please tell me a little bit about yourself. How would you describe yourself to /someone who doesn’t know you?” and included questions such as “How do you identify your sexuality?” and “How do you identify your gender?”

Our sample of 24 interviews comprises participants from this larger dataset who:

1. met age criteria for either Baby Boomers (born between 1946–1965) or Millennials (born between 1981–1996), and

2. identified as lesbians and/or as women who were attracted to women at the time of the interview, or who described having identified as such in the past.

Notably, the resulting sample is not comprised solely of women or solely of lesbians. Because we were interested in lesbian identity across lifetime trajectories, the sample includes, for example, a trans man and a bisexual woman who described a period of lesbian identification in their lifetimes. Individuals who did not indicate that they were lesbians at present and who did not describe this experience are not included. Given the fluidity of gender and sexual identity described by some participants – as well as the dynamic nature of “lesbian identity” posited by this issue’s framing question – we believe that the narratives of people who have moved through a period of lesbian identification can be especially illuminating. However, most participants in our sample (22 out of 24) did select both “woman” in response to a survey question about gender, and “lesbian” or “queer” in response to a question about sexual orientation.

We note here that participants were asked a multi-select survey question that allowed them to select more than one gender descriptor or write in their own gender descriptor. Participants were also asked if they identified as transgender or had been assigned a different gender at birth. As our analysis illustrates, individual narratives do not always mesh neatly with answers to survey questions. For consistency, however, we will introduce participants’ narratives using a standard combination of their responses to these questions. Thus, a participant who indicated that they are a woman, genderqueer, and not-transgender is introduced as a “genderqueer cis woman”; a participant who indicated that he is a man and transgender is a “trans man”; and a participant who indicated that she is a woman and not-transgender is a “cis woman.” In general, we use “women” (without “cis” or “trans” modifiers) to refer to a group of women, and we specify “cis women” or “trans women” as a group where relevant.

The average age of Baby Boomer participants at the time of the interview was 56.33 (4.38) and ranged from 50 to 62. In response to a survey question about gender, of the 8 Baby Boomer participants who identified as women, 1 indicated that she was a trans woman, and 1 indicated that she was a genderqueer woman. In addition, 1 Baby Boomer identified as a trans man (who described his experience of having previously identified as a lesbian). In response to a survey question about sexual identity, 1 participant identified as queer, 7 as lesbian, and 1 woman identified as bisexual. In response to a survey question about race, 5 Baby Boomer participants identified as White, 3 as Black, and 1 as mixed race.

There were 15 Millennials in the sample. Their average age was 24 (3.03) and ranged from 19 to 30. In response to a survey question about gender, of the 14 Millennial participants who identified as women, 1 indicated that she was a trans woman and 1 indicated that she was a genderfluid woman. In addition, 1 Millennial identified as a genderqueer femme. In response to a survey question about sexual identity, 8 identified as lesbian and 7 as queer. In response to a survey question about race, 9 identified as White, 1 identified as Black, 1 as Latinx, 3 as mixed race, 1 as Asian.

Our analysis of the interviews followed the procedure of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (Eatough & Smith, 2008). We first familiarized ourselves with the Baby Boomer interviews by reading and rereading. We wrote memos and conducted initial coding focused on groups of 3 interviews at a time. With each iteration, we compared codes across interviews and developed and refined a list of themes. We followed the same process moving from initial notes to codes. The first and second author met on a weekly basis to discuss codes and themes. Special attention was given to delineating reoccurring themes across generational groups. The first author created a document that was used as a theme table. The second author checked the themes based on their own coding and added additional notes. The third author checked the final list of reoccurring themes.

Findings

The reoccurring themes identified in our Baby Boomer sample were: 1. Understanding gender categories as constraining one’s humanity; 2. Finding resistance within lesbian and feminist communities; and 3. Framing Lesbian identity as dynamic sexual orientation and as political category. Reoccurring themes that emerged from the Millennial sample included: 1. Understanding gender as potentially both intrinsic and extrinsic, multifaceted, fluid, and context dependent. 2. Adopting queer identity as part of an inclusive community identity, and 3. Using sexual identity terms strategically to avoid stigma. To protect confidentiality, the names used below are pseudonyms chosen by the participants.

Baby Boomers’ understanding of gender categories as constraining one’s humanity

Baby Boomer participants often described their early sense of gender in the context of constrictive binary gender norms that foreclose women’s agency and position them as socially derogated compared to men. This was especially true for Baby Boomers in our sample who discussed being “tomboys.” For instance, Bebop (all names are pseudonyms), a 50-year-old Black, lesbian, cis woman, explained:

I think I’m the one who should have been a boy, because I love – I was always getting in fights with boys and stuff… they called it a tomboy. I played football, basketball, everything.

Like many tomboys Bebop wished she were a boy and saw herself as breaking traditional gender norms in which women and girls are expected to support others rather than compete with them. Similarly, Gertrude – a 62-year-old White, lesbian, cis woman who saw herself as “a boy spirit” and tomboy in her youth –elaborated on an early aversion to traditional gender roles that position women as caregivers:

…My dad came home with a baby doll, and in my head, I actually said, “I’m not buying into the role. I’m not--- “ I actually used the word, role. Even, I must have been eight or nine, and I just looked at this thing, it was like, I’m not doing that role… I think a lot of tomboys go through that.

Seeing oneself as different because of a rejection of traditional gender roles was also important to people in our sample whose gender identification shifted or who went through gender transition. For instance, Andrew, a 61-year-old White, queer, trans man who identified as a member of the lesbian community for several years, also described himself as a youthful “tomboy” who had rejected the traditional gender roles assigned to him early in life:

I was a tomboy and I did not conform to sex and gender norms. I didn’t like dresses. When I was going to be baptized, my mom – and I don’t remember this, but my mother told me, she said, I had you all dressed – I guess I was two or something and she said, you came out and you didn’t have your dress on anymore and you had your cowboy boots on and you announced that nobody was going to “assitize” you. You know, for “baptize”…

Other Baby Boomer participants who did not describe themselves as former tomboys also experienced the traditional gender roles assigned to women as oppressive. Rachel, a 58-year-old White, lesbian, cis woman who described herself as more “feminine” observed:

I remember encountering sexism. I don’t even remember what the incident was, but I remember being told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. And my immediate response, just boom, was, well then, I’m a boy! Now did I actually ever think I was a boy? Absolutely not. But really, the response was, no, you can’t tell me I can’t do that… So, I have actually never wanted to be a boy, but I sure as hell wanted the privilege as a little girl.

Baby Boomer participants like Rachel described their understanding of their gender in relationship to the oppression of women and privileging of boys and men in society.

Finding resistance within lesbian and feminist communities

Organic to the rejection of women’s oppression and traditional notions of femininity in the narrative of several of these participants was their participation in women’s and feminist movements of the 1970s. In these movements, participants found a safe haven and collective support for resisting gender role constraints. For instance, Rachel described her search for community growing up in Missouri:

[My mother and I] were close. So the fact that she clearly thought that the way I looked, my lifestyle issue, as she described it, was disgusting – it was painful…. When I came out in high school, I got actively involved in the women’s community and the lesbian community in Kansas City. Kind of sneaking around so that my parents didn’t know exactly what I was doing.

For Rachel, gender deviant attraction to women was embedded in feminist and lesbian communities, the praxis of consciousness raising, and the political agenda of women’s liberation. Like Rachel, a teenaged Andrew also experienced feminist and lesbian communities as a refuge from certain gender constraints:

I was gonna transition – I told my mom I was going to transition when I was 17. Right about that time is when I discovered feminism. And I looked at that and I thought, maybe I don’t need to be a man. Maybe what I want is to live my life the way that men are entitled and are allowed to live their lives, and take the power, as a woman, as a female. Stand up, take what I want from the world and be who I am and that’s enough. I mean, feminism, yeah go! So I went off on this trajectory of being very involved in the women’s movement, and oh my God, doing that in 1970–71, ‘72, is fabulous. I mean, feminism was just exploding, and I read books, and the consciousness raising groups, and I met some of the most fabulous women ever.

Although Rachel and Andrew’s experiences of gender are categorically different, each found some support in feminist movements for the ability to live “the way that [similarly situated] men are entitled.” At the same time, Andrew found that feminism was not enough; he needed to transition. Mainstream feminism may have been inadequate to addressing intersectional contexts of power and entitlement. For example, Corinne, a 50-year-old White, lesbian, trans woman, experienced feminine gender expression as “mortifying” – devalued and shameful, as Baby Boomer feminists have observed -- but also as a privilege not afforded to her as a trans woman.

Framing Lesbian identity as dynamic sexual orientation and as political category

Some Baby Boomers discussed their sexuality as based in a sole attraction to women. For instance, Rachel explained “I have always been interested in women. Before I knew there was such a category as lesbians, I consistently had crushes on other girls and on women.” Other Baby Boomers who identified as lesbians, such as Nome, Gertrude and Joey, discussed the fluidity of their attraction or bisexual attraction. For instance, Gertrude recalled her first attraction to a woman:

I was convinced I was straight, on the outside. But I had this massive attraction to my friend’s piano teacher, for some odd reason. I mean, I just couldn’t wait for my friend to have her piano lessons. And you know, it was only in retrospect that I understood what was going on…And then, in high school, I had a mad crush on my friend, and I actually had a mad crush on her boyfriend too. So, I was equally attracted to both of them.

Destiny, a 58-year-old bisexual, Black, cis woman, described herself variously as “lesbian,” “bisexual” and “gay” in her interview, centering the rejection of heterononormativity in her use of sexual identity terms.

Although Baby Boomer participants discussed the fluidity of their attraction or their experiences of attraction to men, early lesbian identification was often understood as a political act grounded in the rejection of racism, sexism and/or heteronormativity. Considerations of cisnormativity, however, were largely absent or secondary. For instance, Nome, a 54-year-old Black, lesbian, cis woman, framed her racial and sexual identity as political: “my Blackness is a political term just like … I call myself a lesbian, is a political term.” However, Nome also observed that some political terms were less available to her generation, commenting that “I see myself as transgendered as a kid, but I didn’t have the language, I didn’t know what that meant.”

Like other Baby Boomers, Nome grew up with little access to language – or a collective political framework – for challenging cisnormativity. The relative lack of collective support for trans identities is further evidenced in Andrew’s path as an older trans man who believes his identification as a lesbian woman earlier in life was a mistake. Contrary to narratives that frame young trans men who love women as “really” lesbians, Baby Boomer participants such as Nome and Andrew highlight the complexity and variability of individual experiences of gender in relation to collective social support.

Millennials’ understanding of gender as potentially both intrinsic and extrinsic

Compared to Baby Boomers, Millennial participants tended to invoke an understanding of gender identity situated in a sense of intrinsic or felt gender. Whereas Baby Boomers tended to focus descriptions of their gender on a rejection of traditional gender norms as manifestations of sexism and heteronormativity, Millennial participants had more access to collective support for their sense of internal gender identification. Along with centering their felt sense of gender, Millennial participants often used multiple categories to describe their gender and rejected the centrality of sex assigned at birth in describing gender identity. For instance, Ana, a 20-year-old White, queer, non-binary trans femme person, explained,

In a way for me, a lot of my gender identity is a choice. Which also makes it sound strange, but I don’t – I make decisions every single day about how I want to present and gender’s performance, or, gender being performative. But I think for me specifically, I very much choose to present as femme.

Another participant, Kimmy, a 30-year-old Black, lesbian, cis woman, highlighted the intentionality that she felt towards her femininity, “I like being a woman, I’m really into femininity. I’m intentional about being feminine.” S.B., a 24-year-old White, queer, cis woman, also framed her gender in intentional terms that highlighted an internalized sense of gender identification as distinct from gender “perform[ance].”.

I don’t consider myself trans. I’m a little genderqueer. And how I square that is I don’t need any trans resources. I don’t experience dysphoria, which you don’t need to be, to be transgender. When I see the word queer, I’m like, that’s me. It resonates. And when I see trans, I don’t get the same experience. So, although I don’t consider myself transgender, I consider myself a little gender weird. I just don’t perform -- I’m gender nonconforming. So, I like to tell people I’m probably like 80 percent female, 20 percent filler.

For several cisgender Millennial participants, using the word “cis” before their gender marked their recognition of gender identification as distinct from sex assigned at birth. For instance, Violet, a 26-year-old Latina, lesbian, cis woman, explained what being a cis woman means to her. “I’m a cis woman. I’ll explain what that means to someone who doesn’t know, you know, being assigned at birth as a female, feeling like a female my whole life.” In addition to the use of “cis,” Millennials highlighted the fluidity of gender. Because gender was not framed in rigid biological or social categories, fluidity in expression was highlighted by several of the participants. For instance, Ruby, a 23-year-old White, queer, genderfluid woman, discussed gender fluidity in their life:

Gender fluid… for me, it’s kind of like, Today, I feel like kind of being more tomboyish, and other days, I’ll put on more makeup and maybe wear a skirt or something… it’s more really on just how I feel as a person for that specific time. And so for me, it’s just not something that’s set in stone based on your genitals or biological.

Along with deemphasizing biological sex and assigned dichotomous categories, Millennial participants emphasized a sense of felt gender as well as the fluidity of gender and the ways in which not only gender presentation, but also gender identification, may change across space and time. Some participants who rejected the stability of gender also expressed disidentification with gender itself as a concept.

Adopting queer identity as part of an inclusive community identity

Among Millennials, some participants who identified consistently as women (i.e., not genderqueer or genderfluid). such as Jane, Lisa, and Nikki, discussed their identification with lesbian identity. For instance, Jane, a 19-year-old White, lesbian, trans woman explained, “I’m a woman,” or, “I’m a girl,” or, “I’m a transgender girl,” but “what I really identify as is a lesbian, but I feel hesitant to tell most people that, because people--- I have this fear that people will think it’s a joke.” Despite increased affirmation of transgender identities compared to prior generations, in Jane’s experience the rejection of assigned gender roles was still perceived primarily as an indication of “outlaw” sexual identity rather than gender identity. As Jane explained:

A big part of my identity in growing up has been questioning my sexuality, just since it’s always been kind of questioned for me since I was in fifth grade… I couldn’t find any answers until I got to college… I realized I was transgender… and realized I wasn’t a gay man and really had no attraction for men.

Many Millennial participants discussed a strong identification with the queer community. For instance, Janet, a 25-year-old Latina, queer, cis woman who was organizing the San Francisco Dyke March explained,

You’re a part of the queer community… there’s all of these things that fall under queer, and that’s why I like it so much. That’s why I identify with it, ‘cause it’s like, it doesn’t have to be something specific really. Queer is queer… And you can be gender queer and queer at the same time, or I can be queer and not gender queer, and that’s fine too.

Janet, like other Millennials in our sample, preferred the word queer because she felt she was part of the queer community, and she embraced “queer” as an inclusive term that endorses both gender queerness and queer, i.e., not straight, sexual attraction. Some participants further identified with queer, as opposed to lesbian or bisexual, because it encompassed their attraction to people who did not identify exclusively as either women or men. Queerness allowed them to remain open to different gender configurations. For instance, Violet explained,

I’m allowing the door to be open to many genders and not just women…Just calling myself a lesbian can’t feel really true, because I wasn’t just dating cis women… and I wasn’t just dating trans women either. Like, it was very much like a range of genders that I started to date, at least in the last couple of years. So, it was, it just didn’t feel real.

Violet added that the term lesbian “felt outdated, and the stigma was pretty intense too.” In the Bay Area, she further explained, “it feels like queer is an identifier for people who are progressing, and any other term that you have, whether it’s gay or lesbian or bisexual, those type of terms are starting to go obsolete because they’re not all-encompassing of different genders.” Millennial participants like Violet who embraced the social construction, performativity, and fluidity of gender also described themselves as “open to many genders”, rather than attraction to “just women.”

Using sexual identity terms strategically to avoid stigma

Stigma around lesbian identity further reinforced rejection of the term “lesbian.” Kay, a 27-year-old White, queer, cis woman, echoed the endorsement of queer identity as more inclusive and less stigmatized. She said,

I don’t like the word, lesbian, ‘cause it’s been used negatively in my life around me, to me, about me. So, queer’s more just like, open-minded, I guess, and it’s the closest equivalent to like, not straight, that I have. And I dated this chick who was super closeted, but they were trans, and they were like, Oh, well, you said you were gay for a while. So, I was like, Oh, whatever… My mom sometimes still asks to say, lesbian, ‘cause she’s like, Well, you’re only ever going to be with a woman, and I was like, Nah, not necessarily. I’m not ever going to be with a cis guy, yeah, but I could still be with a trans man. Like, I’m not going to write myself off before I’ve even started. And I’ve noticed, when someone in the community calls me a lesbian, if it’s in a joking way, I’m actually okay with it.

The term queer allowed participants, particularly Millennials, to define their sexuality in a way that they felt did not exclude trans men and genderqueer people. Moreover, the term lesbian was associated with homosexual stigma, sexism, and othering not only from straight people but also within LGBTQ+ communities.

Although many participants endorsed queer identity because of the political term’s ability to include people of different gender and sexual identities, participants also used other gender and sexual identity terms. For instance, Kimmy explained:

I use “queer” if I’m referring to myself in relation to the rest of the community, just like the umbrella. Just to be clear, I fall under the umbrella. If I’m talking to people who I know are gay and also queer, then a lot of the time I don’t feel like being like, oh, I’m a lesbian, because we already know that someone is some shade of that. So just for the sake of the conversation or to not say like, LGBTQ or just queer people, queer this, queer that. That includes that. And then I don’t call myself anything in front of my family or my parents. I don’t say I’m lesbian or gay or bisexual. I would never say I was queer in front of them. I would not use that word. That is like, too much for them and then they also use that derogatorily too. So I don’t want to identify with that in their heads.

For participants like Kimmy, sexual identity categories were used strategically. In certain contexts they identified as lesbian and in other contexts they used the term queer.

Discussion

In this research we aimed to trace the meaning of sexual and gender identity among individuals who have identified as lesbians/women who love women in their lifetimes, comparing Baby Boomers and Millennials. Baby Boomers in our sample tended to understand themselves as gender nonconforming and as clashing with oppressive gender categories rooted in patriarchy. For these participants, feminist and lesbian communities offered a space to resist repressive gender norms. Similar to discourses rooted in the lesbian and gay liberation movement and articulated by feminist psychologists, gender was understood as a cultural category that should be resisted and rejected in order for humans to be fully free (Bem, 1993). As has been found in previous research, some participants adopted the term lesbian because throughout their life they were attracted exclusively or primarily to women, while others who were attracted to both women and men adopted the term because they saw it as a political category associated with a community they were part of (Golden, 1987).

Millennials in our sample tended to understand their gender identity not only based on an oppressive social construction but also as a term related to intrinsic feelings. Gender as an internal experience was understood as detached from sex assigned at birth. Some Millennial participants who had identified as lesbians/women who love women in their lifetimes saw their gender as shifting across contexts, and as a performance. Many preferred sexual categories such as queer or pansexual because these labels conveyed attraction to people of many genders (i.e., not just men and women, but also agender, nonbinary, etc.). This evolving understanding of both gender and sexual categories is in line with the politics of queer and transgender movements that argued for the proliferation of gender and sexual categories for the purpose of exploding the gender and sexual binaries of man/women and straight/gay (Bornstein, 2016; Butler, 1990/2011; Feinberg, 1992/2013). The gender categories and queer politics articulated by participants, particularly among Millennials, necessitate a more complex gender framework that accounts for facets including felt gender, expressed gender, and gender assigned at birth (Tate et al., 2020, Serano, 2016). It also requires a more complex theoretical configuration to account for the fluidity and specificity of sexual attractions (Van Anders, 2015).

Our research suggests differences as well as commonalities in the ways that people who have identified as lesbian and queer women in their lifetimes understand their identities. Many of the older participants, like the younger ones, rejected gender roles and binary genders. Many of the older participants, like the younger ones, saw their sexual identities shaped by political goals and social movements. As such their sexual identity was less like sexual orientation and more like a community or political identity.

Our research findings further suggest that sexual identities are fluid, used strategically, and associated with communities and political projects. When psychologists focus on identities and infer from them a distinct experience, they may essentialize differences while ignoring the overlap among people of different identities. For instance, a person who grew up in the 1970s or 80s may see themselves as lesbian, but if the same person came of age in the early 2000s they may call themselves queer, bisexual, or pansexual. When psychologists conceptualize lesbian, bisexual, or queer as dichotomous, nonoverlapping categories of identity, they ignore some of the similarities across identities and the political and community based aspects of identity. Our findings imply that researchers should approach identity categories in more critical terms, focusing on the ways in which social forces may lead people with a similar understanding of their gender and sexualities to use different labels.

This study has several limitations. First, since we sought thick, nuanced, and rich, textured description of basic narratives around gender and sexuality our sample is small. The findings from this study should serve as conceptual tools to understand shifts in the understanding of gender and sexuality among people of different generations. Since we didn’t use a representative sample, we cannot generalize the results to Baby Boomer or Millennials. Furthermore, while our sample was relatively diverse, we didn’t have a large enough sample of participants of different racial groups to analyze how, for instance, Black lesbians of different generations may understand their identities. Finally, since the data were collected as part of a larger study on stigma and smoking, some directed questions related to the aims of this analysis were not included. However, the interviews themselves were conducted to elicit thick descriptions of identities therefore facilitating this sort of analysis. Nevertheless, we were not able to ask our participants directly about generational differences among lesbians. Future research should examine how participants reflected on these generational differences themselves.

In terms of advocacy, our findings suggest that lesbian communities of different generations form around different political projects. Baby Boomers lesbian communities have tended to focus on the feminist political project, whereas Millennial LGBTQ communities have focused on a queer political project of affording space for a wide range of identities as well as transgender inclusion. These differences may lead to clashes and misunderstandings across generations. Nevertheless, these political goals necessitate a large movement that brings together lesbian and queer women of different generations to work in solidarity.

To create solidarity, a narrative should draw from intergenerational conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. An inclusive narrative that supports coalition between lesbian of different generations will expand the understanding of gender not only as an oppressive category, but also a personal identification (which at times does not correspond with physical signifiers). Sexual identity should be articulated primarily as community making identity and as a political project (as opposed to a personal disposition). The political project of lesbian identity should reject compulsory heterosexuality, support cis and trans women, and fight the oppression of women and people who do not fit within the gender binary.

Table 1:

Demographics of the Study Sample

	Baby Boomer participants n=9	Millennial participants n=15
Average age	56.33	24.03
Gender: Women	8*	14*
Genderqueer or gender nonbinary, gender fluid	1	2
Trans men	1	0
Trans women	1	1
Sexuality: Lesbian/Gay	7	8
Bisexual	1	0
Queer	1	7
Ethnicity: African American or Black	3	1
Latinx	0	1
Asian	0	1
White	5	9
Mixed	1	3
Income** 0–30,000	4	10
30,000–74,999	2	1
75,000 and above	1	3
Employment status**: Full time	0	2
Part time	2	6
Disability	1
Unemployed	3	6
Retired	2

^*Participants were able to identify as one or more genders

^**Some participants did not answer this question