The ‘non-binary homosexuality’ trend erases gay people

I once wrote that thanks to the excesses of the radical gender movement and its infiltration of the LGBT community, “we’ve been forced to watch the simple moral logic of non-discrimination be transformed into a self-parodic alphabet soup of invented identities.” Never has that line rang more true to me than this week, when I stumbled upon the Twitter trend #IAmNonBinary.

At first glance, the thread was filled with more the same kind of stuff common in non-binary discourse: Individuals claiming they identify as neither male nor female. But I began to notice an alarming trend of people describing themselves as “non-binary lesbians” and “non-binary gays.”

Sadly, most onlookers are too afraid of facing charges of bigotry and the potential wrath of a Twitter mob to point out the absurdity of such claims, but as a gay man myself I’m happy to say it: You can’t be a non-binary homosexual. The very essence of such an identity is contradictory, and it erases the actual experience of gay people, which is rooted in a binary, biological understanding of sex.

While this “non-binary lesbian” phenomenon certainly isn’t mainstream, at least not yet, it does exist outside the bubble of woke Twitter. For instance, the British LGBT media outlet Pink News, which claims to be the “world’s most read and watched LGBT+ digital media publisher,” put out an explainer video to educate us backwards bigots about the fact that you can indeed, be a non-binary lesbian, if you so please.

The video features three individuals who identify as non-binary lesbians, although several also start by declaring that they use “they/them” as preferred pronouns, not apparently sensing the contradiction that clearly presents. Their argument amounts to this:

“I think it’s sort of disingenuous to claim that you can’t be both non-binary and lesbian because you can definitely have an authentic lesbian experience as a non-binary person,” one said.

“My experience of gender is both woman and agender, I feel both of those things, so I have an experience of gender which is aligned to womanhood and I’m attracted to women, so therefore that’s a lesbian experience.”

“I think whatever label you feel comfortable with, you should be allowed to use,” another of the individuals concluded.

I think not. Words, language, definitions, and identities matter, and they must not bend to the whims of confused young people seeking validation and attention.

On their own terms, a non-binary person is someone who identifies as neither man nor woman, male nor female. Meanwhile, a gay, lesbian, or homosexual person is a man or woman attracted exclusively to members of their own sex. Definitionally, this means you cannot be gay unless you identify as a man, nor lesbian unless you identify as a woman—and that’s indulging the woke left’s precept that gender is solely subject to self-identity rather than biology.

So, no, you cannot be a non-binary lesbian. To claim otherwise is to erase the very definition of what it means to be gay, a definition that was fought for at enormous cost for decades to have it accepted.

And in the ultimate bit of irony, the individuals profiled in the video complain that lesbians don’t want to date them, detailing the struggle they’ve had in lesbian online dating circles.

“They want me to be more of a woman rather than someone who identifies in the middle … so they’re almost bullying me out of my own identity,” one person said.

Well, yes, they do only want to date women … because they’re lesbians. And there’s not a thing wrong with that, woke semantics be damned.

Brad Polumbo is Deputy Opinion Contributors Editor for the Washington Examiner. You can follow him on Twitter @Brad_Polumbo.