Putting the Femme in Feminist: Trans Feminism and the ‘Male Lesbian’ in the American Second Wave

Pihlak, Aino and Cousens, Emily (2025) Putting the Femme in Feminist: Trans Feminism and the ‘Male Lesbian’ in the American Second Wave. Gender & History.

Abstract

A slur, a joke or a post-structuralist case of mistaken identity. To the extent that the male lesbian has been discussed, she has figured dismissively. Yet throughout the period historicised as American feminism's second wave, potentially thousands of trans femmes organised under this identity. Despite being entirely overlooked in scholarship, the lesbian feminism articulated by a community of femme-for-femme trans femmes in the 1970s constitutes one of the most enduring and intellectually significant subsets of lesbian feminism to come out of the second wave. That they have yet to be historicised and theorised represents an injustice at the level of epistemology itself, wherein trans women are able to speak as trans, but not as lesbians. Reconstructing the archive of trans lesbian feminism that was developed by Sally Douglas in 1970 and then popularised through her organisation the Salmacis Society the year after, this article proposes that the existence of Salmacis disrupts dominant ideas of necessary antagonisms between ‘trans’ and ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s, and we highlight how the distinctly trans, sex-positive, lesbian femme-inism of the organisation can reanimate lesbian feminism today.

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