Jordan Peterson May Not Believe in Lesbians, but I Believe in Jordan Peterson

Dissecting a flippant comment

On a recent podcast where he interviewed Michael Shellenberger about the bombshell WPATH Files, Jordan Peterson said that he doesn’t believe in lesbians. It was a quick, offhand comment that hasn’t even received all that much attention on social media, mostly because it was edited out of the version posted on YouTube. I heard it when I listened to the version on the Daily Wire.

(The interview was excellent, by the way, and you should absolutely watch it if you haven’t already.)

I’m actually somewhat miffed that the lesbian comment has been edited out of the YouTube interview because the thought of Peterson bowing to potential cancel pressure is disappointing. But I think the more likely reason it was done was that he probably felt it was too flippant to accurately represent his views, and it probably wasn’t worthwhile to risk having such an offhand comment take attention from the important topics the interview was about.

This is why I want to start by saying I have no problem with Peterson and, when I heard the comment, I chuckled. I’m a huge fan, I think he would be interesting to talk to about the topic, and the last thing I need is external validation. I won’t cease to exist if Peterson’s assessment of my sexuality doesn’t line up with my own.

But, he did say it, and it brought up a lot of thoughts for me that I want to address. I want to use his comment as a jumping-off point for discussing the general view that lesbians don’t really exist, which he is certainly not alone in holding.

First, I do agree that male and female sexuality, and therefore male and female homosexuality, are very different. This was basically what Peterson was getting at when he said:

I don’t really believe in lesbians, by the way. I think the evidence that male homosexuality is a permanent part of the human condition and biologically predicated, I think it’s quite strong.

That’s all he said, and I don’t want to put any more words into his mouth or thoughts into his mind. But I think Peterson expressed a common enough sentiment and I understand where it comes from.

I think a great starting point for this discussion is the fact that many cultures throughout the world have had a social category for same-sex attracted and effeminate men. This is the category that today’s woke revisionists call a “third gender,” but that is a modern (or postmodern) overlay on a category that everyone up until about five minutes ago understood was essentially for homosexuals.

For more information on this topic, I highly recommend the work of Paul Vassey, particularly his appearance on the Transparency Podcast. Vassey also wrote an excellent article titled Stop Imposing Western LGBTQ+ Identities on Non-Western Cultures. It's Gender Colonialism where he explains:

Gender diverse individuals from non-Western cultures are routinely marshaled as evidence that the panoply of transgender phenomenon we see in the West has existed everywhere since time immemorial. In reality, the vast majority of gender variant individuals living in non-Western cultures are a particular "type." Almost invariably, their sex-atypical behavior emerges in early childhood, and as adults they are exclusively same-sex attracted, underscoring the very real developmental connection that exists between sex-typed behavior and sexual orientation regardless of culture. In contrast, very different types of non-homosexual, adolescent-onset transgenderism tend to predominate in the West.

Now, almost invariably, this “third” category was for men, not women. When I was a teenager, somehow I ended up with hundreds of PDFs of papers from the 1800s and early 1900s about Native American culture from the American Museum of Natural History. As I was checking them out, I noticed references to berdaches, which the papers used to refer to homosexual males who adopted a more stereotypical female role in their societies. Today, if you google that term, you will be redirected to “Two-Spirit” and find endless references to transgenderism.

Because I had just come out as a lesbian myself, I was curious if there was any equivalent role or category for women. I remember reading one section of a paper where researchers asked the members of a tribe whether that was the case, to which they laughed and basically said “No, absolutely not, our women don’t do that.” I was a little disappointed.

But I see it differently now, and I understand why this would have been the case.

No, I don’t believe that the lack of traditional social categories for homosexual, gender non-conforming women when compared to men is because lesbians simply aren’t real. I think this is what many assume when they look at the anthropological evidence, but I think that’s a mistake. Often surprisingly, the mistake is made by people who insist, rightly, that men and women are different and that they therefore fulfilled different roles in society throughout history. They’ll often add, and I agree, that this was not a bad attitude born of oppression but a logical attitude born of necessity.

And yet, when it comes to the disparity between who could and who could not opt themselves out of reproduction, commentators seem to forget this basic reality. It’s a big blind spot.

These third categories for men were created because cultures across the world recognized that sometimes young boys display highly gender non-conforming behavior and that many of them grow up to be homosexual. It is a mistake to think that the inverse doesn’t happen with girls: that some aren’t more masculine leaning from the moment they pop out of the womb and grow up to be same-sex attracted. I was one such girl, and I am far from alone.

But is a traditional culture going to allow such a girl into a social category that diverts her from the expected female lifepath of becoming a mother? Highly unlikely. And it’s even more unlikely she would be allowed to pluck another woman out of her role to live with as a couple! Sperm is cheap, but even very butch, same-sex attracted women would have immense pressure to put their wombs to use, even in cultures where a small minority of men would be allowed to opt out of the reproductive pool.

(Pardon my slightly random aside, but I think this blindspot among people who insist on the social differences between men and women but then insist that these differences are reflective of ability or moral value extends so much further than just this one issue. Take, for example, the fact that Jesus’ twelve apostles were all men. You could use this fact on its face to argue that it means only men should have spiritual authority. Or, you could look practically at the logistical and social issues of a woman dropping everything to follow a traveling religious teacher at that time. Most had children or other dependents. Not to mention the question of physical safety.)

To be clear, I am sure Peterson’s comment did not come only from the consideration of traditional social categories. I am sure he is far more familiar than me with research into male and female sexual responses and I have no interest in challenging that. From what I gather and have experienced in my life, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that male sexuality is more fixed and female sexuality is more fluid.

Based on nothing but my own hunch, I think the percentage of exclusively same-sex attracted women is very small, smaller than the percentage of exclusively same-sex attracted men. I also think we are far outnumbered by autogynephiles, hence how lesbian dating apps and spaces have become completely overrun with them.

I think women are far more likely to be bisexual or at least open to sexual experiences with other women, and I don’t think the social stigma against bisexuality in men fully accounts for this discrepancy. Just the other day, a woman who I don’t know but am somehow connected with on Facebook had to “come out” as dating a man! I gathered from the caption and the comments that she had exclusively dated women before, and she was slightly embarrassed about this new development (but very much in love and not wanting to hide it anymore). I was pleasantly surprised at the supportive comments, some from very staunch lesbian radical feminists!

This is not a terribly uncommon experience among women who date women. At the same time, I don’t think as many gay men are coming out later in life as falling in love with a member of the opposite sex! There are, as I said at the beginning, significant differences in male and female sexuality, which extend to male and female homosexuality.

I am okay with that (why quarrel with reality?). But I also think lesbians exist. I mean, I consider myself living proof. Still, I am also okay if Peterson doesn’t think so, whatever his reasons might be. If I am free to live my life, be with my female partner, and start a family together, then that’s all I need.

I actually think people with Peterson’s overall mindset are the reason I can live so freely. Queer theorists want to destroy all norms and are currently my biggest threat because of the backlash they are stoking. However, people like Peterson understand the importance of norms and ideals and the importance of the margin, where I find myself. He is simply against making the margin the new norm, which is what the queer theorists have done, to disastrous effects for the gay community itself.

As Peterson also said in the interview:

If the conservatives had conspired to produce a catastrophe that was aimed more horribly at the gay community, they couldn’t have done worse than this.

He is referring, I assume, both to the backlash and to the fact that many of the kids being transitioned would have grown up to be gay. In fact, earlier in the interview Peterson mentioned that all the clinical literature up until just six years ago was clear that most of the small number of gender dysphoric kids would grow up to be gay, so they should be left the hell alone.

This makes the lesbian comment even more perplexing. Yes, all of the literature that I am familiar with focused on young boys, since boys used to vastly outnumber girls in cases of childhood gender dysphoria (that ratio has now been flipped on its head). But it would be quite silly, in my opinion, to think that no girls seeking to transition were exclusively same-sex attracted—lesbian, in other words.

Today, I think the vast majority of girls identifying as trans, girls in the rapid-onset gender dysphoria cohort, are straight. But it would be a big oversight to not realize that homosexuality and gender non-conformity have been a great driving force in butch lesbian women particularly seeking to transition over the decades. Many no doubt thought, probably correctly, that it would be easier to move through the world being perceived as a man because their existence as masculine lesbian women was so troubling to so many people. To look at the reality of these women and say that genuine lesbians don’t exist would be a slap in their faces.

This is not to say that only butch lesbians are “real” lesbians, just like I don’t think only effeminate men are “really” gay. But if we are to look across cultures and admit that male homosexuality seems to be naturally occurring and that cultures sometimes carved out a place for a certain kind of male homosexual, then you’d have to be wilfully blind to not admit that there is a female counterpart to this phenomenon.

We just haven’t always been able to live our lives openly. No doubt if I was born exactly as myself into an earlier culture or even if I grew up somewhere different in the world today, I’d probably be long married to a man with several children already. And I’d be secretly falling in love with other women. In this sense, I wouldn’t be alone. Men and women regardless of orientation have always and continue to have social expectations and roles in family life to fulfill, who they actually love and are attracted to be damned.

As I said, I don’t think this has historically been primarily about oppression—it was first and foremost about necessity and practicality. But that’s why I am highly aware and grateful for the freedom I have in the here and now, and why a flippant comment by the fantastic Jordan Peterson just can’t bother me.