Lowkey, I Didn't Choose To Be a Lesbian

Photo by Gloria Giganti

At eight years old, I had my first crush on another girl. The thought of it was so terrifying that I woke up every night for a year with medically inexplicable nausea.

At ten, I was gifted an Encyclopaedia for Girls. Between the alphabetically ordered entries on ‘bags’ and ‘tampons,’ sat ‘homosexuality’. I read it first, hoping for comfort and reassurance. Instead, the entry assured young readers that “some women may only be gay or have gay experiences for a few years of their lives,” but that this was a normal part of growing up. The author emphasised that questioning and worrying about one’s sexuality was okay, and that most lesbians knew that they were gay from a very young age, as boys “disgusted them”. If anything, this confused me more. Boys my age didn’t disgust me – but they also didn’t make butterflies flutter in my stomach like girls did.

By thirteen, I had started coming to terms with liking women, and turned to online forums to practice spelling out “I l i k e w o m e n,” still too scared to admit it to anyone in real life.

By fourteen, I had an entire network of online queer friends, with whom I felt comfortable talking about my own queerness. Yet, the moment I turned my phone off, that nausea returned, and I felt the familiar grips of panic. I ignored it, pushed it back down, and decided that I would marry a man and build the family my parents had hoped for.

Fast forward to seventeen, and I finally had something resembling a girlfriend. Yet that nausea lingered, resurfacing when it was most inconvenient.

Earlier this year, at twenty-two, I finally revealed to my grandmother - the sweetest, kindest, most loving woman on the planet - that I have a girlfriend. For twenty-two years of my life, I hid a fundamental part of myself from the woman who loves me most.

So no, I did not move to New York and “choose” to be a lesbian. I didn’t adopt lesbianism as a political “choice”. I didn’t “de-centre men” and decide to no longer date them. I have never felt attracted to a man. I have never given a fuck about men.

In the summer of 2025, Malavika Kannan wrote an article for Autostraddle titled “Lowkey, I chose to be a Lesbian”, which recently resurfaced online after being mentioned by American rapper Doechii. In the piece, Kannan presents lesbianism as a conscious decision that followed unfortunate experiences with men, culminating in a pregnancy scare that led to her decision to reject men and “become a lesbian.” I thought we were past the age of believing that lesbianism stems from negative experiences with men, but, evidently, that is not the case.

Kannan writes that she “knew what [she] was rejecting - men.” But lesbianism does not place men on its central axis. We do not reject men; we have simply never felt any kind of attraction toward them. When she frames lesbianism as a political act of rejection, men paradoxically remain centred, even if unintentionally.

You can de-centre men politically, socially and romantically by deciding not to date them, but that decision does not make you a lesbian. Being a lesbian means you do not experience physical, romantic or sexual attraction to men. It is not a political stance nor is it a political statement.

Kannan describes being “determined to be gay as a lifestyle.” The phrasing echoes rhetoric long used by right-wing homophobes who framed queerness as something that you can “snap out of,” rather than an intrinsic part of identity. For decades, queer activists have argued that sexuality is not a choice, precisely to counter the justifications for discrimination, conversion therapy and social exclusion. Reintroducing the language of choice – even when framed positively, unintentionally reverses that logic: if queerness is elective, it is also reversible.

Somehow, Kannan’s article manages to come across as both biphobic and lesbophobic. The biphobia lies in the implication that choosing to be a lesbian is some kind of ‘upgrade’ from bisexuality, as if moving to lesbianism is somehow above bisexuality on a pyramid. Kannan mentions her previous belief that lesbian identity was “lonely,” which again taps into stereotypes of the isolated, loveless, lesbian spinster. The central claim of the article itself – that lesbianism is a choice, and a political one at that – is extremely harmful to the lesbian community, a community that has spent generations fighting against that exact characterisation.

Kannan does not mention political lesbianism once in the article. I am unsure whether she is unaware of the concept, its history, and its entanglement with trans-exclusionary politics. Nevertheless, what she describes seems to be, functionally, political lesbianism: the idea that women should leave heterosexual relationships and choose homosexual ones instead as a political stance against male oppression. Hello, and good morning to you, too, Germaine Greer!

A sexual orientation is not, and will never be, a political statement. The ways we live, express ourselves and move through the world can be political. However, attraction itself is not.

Kannan could have written an article about decentering men and the politics behind her choice, and it would have been a well-written, engaging essay. Instead, she claimed an identity that does not belong to her, and in doing so, gave fuel to the fire of every person who has ever told a lesbian that she just “hasn’t found the right man yet.”

It pains me that lesbians can never have anything that is entirely our own. It pains me to think that younger generations of lesbians will still need to assert and defend their sexuality and will still be questioned about the authenticity of their desire, thanks to articles such as Kannan’s.

Today, I kiss my girlfriend on the tube without looking around to see if anyone is staring. I hold her hand in hospital waiting rooms and proudly say, “I’m her girlfriend,” without my voice shaking. My grandmother refers to her as my girlfriend and asks me how she is anytime I call. My father kisses the top of her head when he hasn’t seen her in a while.

I love being a lesbian, but I did not choose it, and it did not make my life easier. I wish eight-year-old me could see the life I’ve built for myself and sleep easily knowing her future will be bright and peaceful.

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Edited by Zarah Hashim, Sex and Relationships Editor