Gender’s Troubled: The Men Who Precede the TQ+: Straight, Gay, and Bisexual Male Culture's Woman-Hating and Forced Teaming of Women & Girls

A Series on Male Supremacy & Sex-Based Stereotypes

Are Women Hyper-focusing on Specific Trees, While Ignoring the Forest?

Sometimes it feels like conversations about gender’s troubles hyperfocus on gender ideologies that come from the men who call themselves “queer,” “transgender,” and “non-binary,” while trying to minimize or condone the gender ideologies that come from the straight, gay, and bisexual males. Discussing the TQ+ of the LGBTQ+ gives us only part of the story of male supremacy and gender’s oppression. We should absolutely discuss ALL forms of sex-based oppression, and the case I hope to make is a need for more women to examine ALL the letters of the sexual orientation alphabet, be comfortable saying #YesAllMen as a neutral fact, and to see the common experiences of ALL women. Gender’s oppression precedes the TQ+; it’s infested female sexual orientations and female culture, and it is borne from all males - in the S ("Straight”), G, B, T, and Q+. I hear the term “forced teaming” used to describe TQ+ initiatives, but I feel like I’ve been forced to team up with the S, G, and B males my whole life, whenever it’s convenient to their endeavors. But unlike them, I don’t have access to the entitlements of male supremacy. So that leaves me putting my body on the line for males who don’t do the same for female liberation. I’ve also been forced teamed by European American men and women to put aside my skin color and experiences with racism in the name of “the mission.” I share this as a reminder that forced teaming isn’t unique to gender’s oppression; it’s a tool of manipulation that’s used across social structures. There are times when we can point to similarities, and other times when we need to point to our differences. But male culture has us comparing apples to oranges so that dissent is destroyed and forced teaming can proliferate.

Blind Solidarity: “We Are All One” isn’t Accurate or Sustainable Logic

For many years, I felt pressured to go along with men who told me we needed to be a united front. Despite my gut, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, hoping to see more males fighting to change male culture and dismantle male violence. But after years of reflection, I now see the shortcomings of “we are all one” thinking. This mindset is blind solidarity and leads to muddled conclusions. And if community organizing has taught me anything, it’s that solidarity is only meaningful if we hold firm boundaries of respect for our differences while acknowledging bridges of similarity. We are not all one, and that is vital to admit. We might have similarities, but we are not all “in the same boat.” If we don’t admit this, we end up in our current situation of silencing those who point out our specific differences and divergent needs. We end up fulfilling the goals of male supremacist ideology that lives and dies by in-groups, out-groups, and hierarchies. Forced teaming ends up stifling discourse, and under male supremacy, it stifles women and girls completely.

Fifteen+ years ago, when I would matter-of-factly say that “drag” is misogynistic, it was gay and bisexual male friends, acquaintances, and coworkers who got angry with me. They told me I needed to understand them, because “we are all one.” They created this idea that we needed to be a team, referencing the alliances of our lesbian, gay, and bisexual elders. It’s eerily similar to all the leftist/liberal males who convinced me that economic class connected us all, and erased my feminist analysis at every turn. When I try to pinpoint the beginning of gender’s troubles, I realize it’s connected to all male culture. And in 2025, those male supremacist ideologies have infiltrated Straight, Lesbian, and Bisexual women’s lives. Yet somehow, women get blamed for all of it, even though we are the targets. Gender is like a virus that keeps mutating, and the only way to kill it is to pull it from the roots. The infection of gender doesn’t equally affect males and females, despite how many times anyone says, “patriarchy hurts us all.” That platitude might sound great as a sound-bite or on a t-shirt, but it malewashes¹ women and girls’ distinct experiences. The reason root-cause analysis is so important is that it helps us to understand the full picture of how we get from A to Z. The root of our gender troubles started with the men who call themselves straight.

All Men Gain Power & Control through “Gender”, while S, L, and B Women Suffer

Straight males created gender, tied it to their mysticism/religion/spirituality, claimed themselves as “normal” or “default”, projected “otherness” onto the rest of us, gave us letters, and then proceeded to dehumanize us (including their fellow males). Straight males didn’t need protests, parades, and remembrance months to fight for their sexual orientation to be seen as human. The only reason the LGB was protesting is because the S said we are subhuman. But even in those early protests, we see that male supremacy was in full force. The overtness might not have been as blatant as today, but it was always there. It was the G and B men who promoted things like drag and BDSM gear at public pride events “back in the day.” And there were plenty of those S men supporting both drag and BDSM in public space. The common factor? Males.

But history itself is always force teamed to sprinkle in S, L, and B women, despite us being at the metaphorical bottom of the S and LGBTQ+ hierarchies. Many lesbian women broke off from their supposed gay and bisexual “brothers” because of all the lesbophobia. Even the attempt to remember the L by switching from “GLB” to “LGB” in the US is a reminder that all male culture is considered the default, regardless of sexual orientation. It’s nearly impossible to escape male supremacy’s message to women and girls that we have to force team with males because separately we don’t matter AND that we’ll only ever be a subhuman afterthought. Women were being coerced to capitulate to male supremacy long before TQ+, and I want to remind sisters of this fact. Don’t fall too far down one rabbit hole, or you will miss the connections. Don’t #NotMyNigel your way out of sound logic just so you can hold onto cognitive dissonance about the males that you happen to like.

Photo Credit: Malcolm Michaels Jr. (Marsha P. Johnson) and Ray Rivera (Sylvia Rivera) co-founders of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), participating in the 1973 Gay Pride March, Source: Netflix/Leonard Fink

Photo Credit: A group of men dressed in leather fetish clothing ride in a truck at the intersection of 32nd Street and Fifth Avenue during the annual Gay Pride parade in New York City, c. 1980. Leo Vals/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

The S males have been the main ones pulling the strings of sexual orientation and gender discourses, but all other males follow suit. Gender is a tool of oppression used to perpetuate sex-based stereotypes targeting the female sex-class. Men created gender for a plethora of reasons, but the overarching one is to cope with their own self-loathing and inferiority complexes. These men use gender with all their sexual orientations - straight, gay, and bisexual. Some men even factioned off the weapon of gender and created new forms known as “queer”, “transgender”, “non-binary”, and then pushed the idea that gender could be reappropriated from weapon to shield. SGBTQ+ men completely erase female sexuality and co-opt the conversations around lesbian, bisexual, and straight women. They see the power of female-specific sexual orientations and cultures that expose male supremacy, so they stamp them out of the collective consciousness. Male historians describe lesbian and bisexual women as asexual beings who lived sexless lives, and even when they were in lifelong romantic relationships with women, they were called “friends.” This shit carried on for centuries, and only very recently are lesbian and female-only bisexual women collectively pushing back and reminding the world that our female sex-class and female-only sexual orientations are ours alone. We also have to remind the world that L and B women don’t just face disgust toward our homosexuality (the similarity that our G and B “brothers” push us to connect through), we face disgust for being female and for being sexual at all (just like our Straight sisters do). S, L and B women all face the oppression of male supremacy that says womanness is subhuman. And if womanness is subhuman, then lesbianess is subhuman. No matter what sex-based stereotypes our male counterparts face, they are male and members of the oppressor class. These are the simple facts. Their color, creed, and culture don’t erase their male sex-class.

“I’m not like other boys!”

Members of the male oppressor class typically want to distance themselves from such truths, particularly if they are simultaneously part of an oppressed demographic. For such males, they rely on oppression hierarchies to gaslight everyone into believing they don’t have access to male supremacy. L, G, and B women and men share some threads of similarity, but forced teaming has wholly erased the reality that all men and boys perpetuate and benefit from male supremacy AND that women and girls are distinct, material human beings with our own female culture. There’s a reason leftist/liberal males point to color-based colonialism as the root cause of our world problems, aka "white supremacy" which is more accurately called, "white male supremacy." This allows them to distance maleness, and deny that the real root is the male colonization of women, girls, and female culture. There’s even a concerted media effort to push the propaganda that white women have access to male supremacy. I know my share of racist-ass white supremacist women and even have developed specific triggers of distrust because of white women and girls who have harmed me. But not once did I ever think their color was gonna save them from the violence of male supremacy. They can only ever tap into the white power of white male supremacy, not the male power. But the trope of the white male supremacist woman works as a shield for white males, and by extension, all males. White males use gender to effeminate white women in order to say they’re “the same” as white men. This trope helped to build “Karen”, a weapon created by white males so that all males have a backdoor to woman-hating. “Karen” is now used against women of all colors, and it fully cements the goal of separating maleness from supremacism, as well as intimidating women from speaking their minds. Without that, males of all colors who say they can transcend sex would be without a foundation for their argument of being “more oppressed” than women. White males would also be without a foundation to openly harass every white woman who acknowledges the material reality of sex. This is the power of having full access to white male supremacy, black male supremacy, and brown male supremacy. White males and males of color constantly create bridges of solidarity in the name of male supremacy. But their PR campaign knows to play that shit down.

The “who has it worse” argument is a favorite amongst all S, G, and B males. they all seem to say they have it worse under male supremacy than S, L, and B women. According to whose scale, though? I hear this same logic in my rape culture work, where males say they have it “so much worse” than all women and girls under rape culture. But who created that rape culture? What lies beneath these sentiments is the entitlement of male supremacy; a belief that even within a system of their own making, everything is worse for males because they shouldn’t have to suffer, whereas they see femaleness as insufferable and requiring suffering. As I get older, I’m starting to move away from supposedly sex-neutral terms like “homophobia” and choose to use “lesbophobia” to counter the male forced teaming of our lived experiences as homosexual women and men. Inevitably, homosexual males colonize the entire narrative of homophobia because of their male culture. Women can’t do sound analysis on our experiences of homophobia if we’re perpetually forced to think through a male lens. This rings true for bisexual women as well; when their experiences of biphobia get lumped together with males, their reality gets distorted. Question when you use the words “homophobia” or “biphobia,” do you actually mean sexism, misogyny, lesbophobia, or anti-female biphobia? Decolonizing male supremacy from our language gets women closer to being able to finally, truly study our reality.

Woman-Hating Connects all Women, Regardless of Sexual Orientation

Comparing the 90’s sitcoms Ellen and Will and Grace is an accessible American example of how S, G, and B men try to force team S, L, and B women. Ellen was pushed off of TV because of her lesbianess, but the preferred male narrative is that it was all because of low ratings and poor writing. Meanwhile, Will, of Will & Grace, was celebrated very soon after for depicting gayness (he’s straight, he just plays gay on TV). That show went on for years and was a major hit. I remember how I used to love it. Even though Will is the main character, Jack being gay in real life makes him a better comparison to Ellen. He was a beloved character and never faced the treatment Ellen did. When you scratch the surface, it becomes very clear why Jack was loved and Ellen was hated. Ellen’s story as a woman and a lesbian woman is disgusting to the male supremacist gaze. And since she wasn’t willing to perform the lesbophobia of fetishization, there was no path left for her show to go on. It was during the late 80’s and early 90’s that “lesbian” commercial sexual exploitation aka “lesbian pornography,” was becoming mainstream within male culture. Ellen was a representation that was antithetical to the lies of filmed prostitution. Actual lesbian stories don’t include males and their culture, so it was the beginning of the end for Ellen’s sitcom when she came out.

But Jack’s story as a gay man could still be written for the male supremacist gaze. Male culture could get over Jack being gay because at least he had male entitlement. Male audiences could be comforted knowing that he had a penis, even if some were disgusted by how he was using it. Jack’s character worshipped phallocentrism, and that was all his male audience needed to know. He was sellable to them, and his character arc explicitly included sexism and misogyny. Jack was gay, but he had the familiar hominess of male culture. SGBTQ+ men ate that shit up. To this day, I’ve never forgotten the running anti-woman and anti-lesbian jokes in that show. I remember how gender performance was correlated to the level of lesbophobia a female character had to endure. Will and Grace was one of the many small moments that reminded me to stay deep in the lesbian closet, along with what happened to Ellen. Jack’s hatred of lesbian women was a featured punchline because it was so relatable for a male audience. I was desperately hungry for any representation that I always put that to the side, along with all the rampant sexism and misogyny against Grace and other women characters. I felt forced to make my true feelings take a back seat. I was attached to the poorly-written women characters of the show. I just wanted to imagine myself somewhere in the mainstream. I tried to tell myself that if gay men were accepted, then one day lesbian women would be too…and that maybe then it would be safe to come out of the closet. All these years later, and that day still hasn’t come. The forced teaming was working well for G and B men only. When you compare the access to power that G and B males have versus L and B women, well, I’ll let you do the math. The state of lesbophobia and anti-female biphobia against women has only grown worse over time. The sexual exploitation of our female sexual orientations, the reduction of our sex lives to “not real,” the dismantling of our female-only spaces don’t even register as homophobia within male culture. As the term gay continues to mean male and then everyone else, the term lesbian is being written out of communication more and more. It’s hard to tell where anti-womanness ends and anti-lesbianism begins, because both are wholly intertwined in their roots of hatred. Anything that is exclusively female receives the pinnacle of hate from males...ALL OF THEM. Even recently, I shared a note addressed to women about men who don’t have our backs, and a “gender critical” male shows up in my comments telling me not to “divide the community.” My blog says “female-only” all over it, it’s called “female.liberation”, yet without fail, males want to infiltrate the space I’m trying to create. They comment, they follow, they subscribe, and I take it all as a reminder of how the bar for female-only space is sitting in the core of the earth. I know I can’t regulate who accesses my work on Substack, but by saying this is a female-only space it becomes a test of males’ ability to respect my boundaries and consent. I don’t interact with these males when they show up, I don’t respond to their comments, but like everywhere else in life, there they are, taking up my space. Some of these very males pretend to be on my side, but they can’t listen to the only boundary that applies specifically to them. This is why I say #YesAllMen, because they play small and big parts in pushing forward the ideologies of male supremacism. They’re the original colonizers who have been in that position so long that they can’t even see that it exists. I’ve yet to meet a male who doesn’t deny his access to male supremacy; they always have some excuse. TQ+ is just the latest mutation of a long history of male denial and exploitation.

Male supremacy never solely belonged to straight men, or the “cis-hetero-rich-white-able-bodied-men” as they’re called in American culture (I shudder to think how I once spoke like that). Male supremacy includes gay and bisexual “brothers.” Men of all sexual orientations want to be accepted into male culture, and anti-femaleness is their rite of passage. All men and boys are born into the entitlements of the world’s oppressor class, whether they admit it or not. Growing up in the nineties S, G, and B men made routine jokes describing their disgust of female genitalia. When the S males said this, women rallied together in anger. But when gay males said this, everyone laughed along, because somehow their homosexuality worked like a magic trick to erase the effects of their misogyny. Now in 2025, so many G and B men seem to have amnesia about their rampant misogyny and are rewriting history in the ways that serve them best, all while lambasting TQ+ men’s misogynistic rewrites. S, L, and B women need to be able to analyze and write our own histories, free from all men’s forced teaming and revisionist magic tricks. If women hyper-fixate on only one group of males as the source of the problem, then they will continue to fail at the goal of female liberation. Sisters, we must untether ourselves and stop making excuses to justify male supremacy in any form regardless if a man is straight, gay, bisexual or calls himself “queer”, “trans”, or “non-binary.” Centering women means putting aside the voices of all males so you can finally hear what you and your sisters have been screaming. Opening my own ears up has been life-changing.

Video Credit: Will & Grace, Season 3, Episode 4, “Girl Trouble, October 26, 2000, Universal Television, ScrambledWithNYC

Who’s Afraid to Say #YesAllMen?

Gender’s troubles are so much more than just the TQ+. Male supremacy is so much bigger than just one subset of men. It’s all men. #YesAllMen. All men benefit from sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy, whether directly or indirectly. The LGB and the TQ+ are filled with men and women fighting against the weapon of gender created by the S. It’s also filled with men and women fighting to hold onto gender but design it however they see fit, whether they be conservative or liberal. I’m curious if Judith Butler asks, “Who's Afraid of Gender?” precisely because she’s afraid of how unpopular it is to try to abolish gender. To an outsider, it appears that her strategy is to deconstruct sex as a pathway to reconfigure gender. In her philosophical word salad, is an intelligent woman playing the chess game of dismantling male supremacy in her own way. I think her way is wrong, convoluted, and dangerous, yet I think those who call her “stupid” aren’t doing enough critical analysis. They’re going for the cheap-shot joke. But it’s far more helpful to dig into why a woman with access to so much knowledge arrives at such absurd conclusions. Magdelen Berns said it best in her astute and concise way, “some people think so much until their brains fall out.”

When you accept that Judith Butler was forced to build her theories under the systems of male supremacy and she inadvertently capitulated to the very thing she aims to destroy, you start to see that “stupid” doesn’t say much at all. I see where fear informed her root-cause analysis, and she chose to stay on the safer side of males, thinking it was the only way she could bring down their empire. This is the danger of the “keep your enemies closer/fix it from the inside/we are all one” strategy. Before you know it, you’ve been brainwashed by the oppressor. Before you know it, you convince yourself the oppressor is inevitable, so then you try to refashion his weapons. Or worse, you think the oppressor can become your ally despite his male entitlement.

I’m hoping in the current discourses about gender and male supremacy that fellow women and feminists will reflect on the S, G, and B men more. We need to expand our vantage point so we aren’t overly hyper-focused on just one part. That’s how we see the interconnected web of sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy and how it manifests in all aspects of female life. I completely empathize that women are forced to focus on a few things at a time because so much is being thrown at us. I empathize that the dismantling of sex and the increased formalizing of gender is an extremely triggering manifestation of male supremacy, especially when mixed with the technological advancements of the 2020’s. But remember to see the forest for the trees. Remember that the female-sex class was targeted and disembodied through gender long before TQ+ ever existed. This is the inevitable conclusion of the actions of all males, no matter what letter they hold within euphemistic acronyms. We need to go beyond “getting the L out” and we need to get all sisters out so we can build theories free from male supremacy. It’s only then that we can truly decolonize male supremacy from female culture and the material reality and lived experiences of women and girls. That’s when we can finally learn who we really are. That’s how women get free.

✍️Journal Reflection Prompts:

• Do you see connections between S, G, B, T, Q, + male ideologies or do you view them as wholly separate? Why?

• Are there some forms of gender that you are attached to?

• Are you able to let go of gender, or does it comfort you?

• Does gender (sex-based stereotypes) play a role in your platonic relationships?

• Does gender (sex-based stereotypes) play a role in your romantic relationships?

• Who would you be if you let go of all sex-based stereotypes and stopped living according to how others perceive you? What would stay the same and what would change?

Footnotes:

1

Malewashing™️: A process of deception that runs information through a filter of male culture and erases, covers up, and glosses over female culture. The end goal of malewashing is to rewrite history, absolve males of wrongdoing and blame, and uphold male supremacy.