Can Men Be Women? Some Lesbians Think So!

DYKE Magazine on the rise of 'male lesbians' in 1977

In 1977, the editors of DYKE A Quarterly of Lesbian Culture and Analysis were starting to catch wind of male transsexuals “invading the women’s movement,” in their words. So they decided to run a feature called “Can Men Be Women? Some Lesbians Think So!” to explore the issue.

Editors Liza Cowan and Penny House were clear about their stance at the outset, writing:

We don't think that cutting off his genitals makes a man a woman, and we do not believe that a woman can be born into a man’s body.

They continued:

We thought at first that the doctors in the gender identity and transsexual field believed that women could accidentally be born into male bodies, and that by operating on them they could correct this mistake of nature. This is the line that is being used by transsexuals and being bought by the straight press and some Lesbians. We read several books by well known "authorities" in the gender and transsexual field… It becomes clear reading the case histories of transsexuals that they themselves know that they are really men, unless they have completely gone off the deep end.

Oh, how things have changed! Not only does a good portion of trans-identified men really believe that they are literally women today, but a good portion of “authorities” in the field push this narrative as well. Hormonal and surgical intervention to make a person’s body match their “gender identity” is now seen as correcting a mistake of nature as well. One has only to look to California which, as evolutionary biologist Colin Wright points out, reclassified normal breasts as "abnormal structures of the body caused by congenital defects" in gender-dysphoric females.