A few years ago while on assignment writing about a tiny gay redneck village in the Ozarks, I was struck to discover a healthy and thriving population of bulldykes. Walking around Eureka Springs, Arkansas on a Saturday afternoon I spotted pockets of them grazing outside bars in their gray mullets and Oakleys, perched on their Harley Davidsons cat-calling the skirts that passed by, and shooting snot-rockets onto the pavement.
How wonderful, I thought. With the exception of a couple groups, like Dykes on Bikes, who migrate into big cities for gay pride parades, you almost never see real bulldykes anymore, particularly on the coasts. I was working at a gay magazine and pitched my editor to write an ode to the vanishing bulldyke complete with a glossy, high-fashion photo spread of leathery, shorn, haggard and grisly old lesbians in their Wranglers and tool belts. I thought it would be gorgeous, but the pitch was swiftly rejected. That’s transphobic, I was told.
If that’s the case, I think we could all use a little more transphobia. The term ‘dyke’, once a pejorative against lesbians but reclaimed for empowerment purposes around the 1970s was taken from the original ‘bulldiker’, a crude, 1920s Harlem renaissance slang for lesbians believed to be derived from the 19th century ‘dike’ for ‘ditch’ (or vulva) and male cattle. Although average homosexuals embrace, or don’t mind, the word, bored, language-policing busybodies at Hollywood-adjacent, glitzy NGOs like GLAAD call it hate speech. GLAAD’s list of speech demands say the word ‘dyke’ must never be used in polite society ‘except in a direct quote that reveals the bias of the person quoted’, which is why I’ll use it liberally here.
‘Bulldyke’ has come to refer specifically to those extremely obvious, highly aggressive, usually working class lezzers. You’ll usually find the best ones possess a healthy level of natural misogyny coupled with alcoholism, can change a tire, and hang out in rough bars where they pick fights with men twice their size and collapse into tears after about a dozen Bud Lights thinking about the day Luanne walked out for good. Come to think of it, they’re exactly like all the men I enjoy spending time with. As far as gays go, they don’t have that hyper-sensitive political gloom hovering around them which has come to define LGBTs in the 21st century. Bulldykes are also the only lesbians you can be sure actually mean it and won’t flip back to men unexpectedly, as so many do.
But the T is slowly devouring not just the Gs but the Ls, beginning in childhood, and bulldykes, like tomboys, appear to be going completely extinct. It feels like every masculine lesbian under 50 now tapes down, or slices off, her tits, tries to grow a wispy little mustache and adopts some cartoonishly manly name like Skyler. Masculine lesbians, like feminine gays, are disappearing, now being convinced by the trans lobby that they are actually men despite having no clear signs of gender dysphoria whatsoever.
Lesbian blogs are even so desperate for bulldyke icons they include characters like Rachel Maddow, Ellen DeGeneres, and Jane Lynch in their lists of top bulldykes. Those aren’t bulldykes so much as your standard issue, middle-aged bean-flickers with short hair, bad glasses, and too many degrees. Lea DeLaria of Orange is the New Black may be only celebrity who comes close but being a bit too hipster and woke doesn’t quite fit the bill, either.
Old school lesbian and author Cynthia Yockey told me she’s noticed this as well. ‘Dykes of all ages are disappearing into testosterone disguises now that male privilege comes in a bottle. And just when it is safer to be a butch lesbian than at any time in history, teen lesbians are being seduced by social media and coerced by trans activists into believing puberty blockers, mastectomies, and testosterone are their get-out-of-gay-free card’, she said.
‘But the flaming queen boys and butch little girls nearly all grow up to be gay if they have not been socially and medically transitioned. This is the most comprehensive and vicious gay conversion program conducted in history’.
Silicon Valley is eager to help. The crowdfunding site GoFundMe brags that this year alone dozens of users as young as 18 have raised over $100,000 to pay for gender reassignment surgery. Most users aren’t opting for the Cadillac of man-made vaginas, it would appear, and have set up campaigns begging for around $3,000-$10,000, a goal easily reached. An entire section of the site is devoted to educating users about paying for surgery and includes ‘GoFundMe’s Gender Confirmation Surgery Cost and Funding Guide’ where it promotes active campaigns where people can give.
The TERF movement, which has become more mainstream in UK feminist circles than in the US, and stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, have taken arms against biological males infiltrating female spaces like prisons, locker rooms, bathrooms, athletics and swimming pools. Although they’re among the biggest man-haters on the planet, it’s difficult to not like them. At least their message is straight-forward and digestible, as opposed to the baffling contradictions, inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the trans narrative and intersectional feminism. TERFs appear to want to be left alone while Big Trans seeks to police your thoughts and sterilize your children. Yet the TERFs, too, are usually silent about this growing plunge of butch lesbians giving trans a try.
The LGBT industrial complex isn’t too concerned by this particular cultural archetype going the way of the dodo. The true bulldyke is a creature of the working class. The gay machine, like the Democratic party it works for, is hideously bourgeois. Its delicate pink soldiers have a crippling fear of the crude, impolite, and uneducated, especially in their own ranks. These are the same journalists and activists who would gladly make drag queens illegal over cries of misogyny and transphobia. They begrudgingly tolerate drag culture, for now, despite some attempts to cancel RuPaul’s Drag Race in the last 10 years, which spectacularly backfired.
And this is, perhaps, the nut of it. As gay became corporate, dull, mainstream and swallowed by the Democratic party it is not only on course to do irreparable damage to society at large, but those cranky bottoms and miserable transgenders now running things have forsaken the true outliers and oddballs in their pathetic quest for broad, generic acceptance and power. The upside is that trans insanity may, finally, be splitting up the alphabet soup — a coalition that the Gs never belonged in, were guilted into joining, have been abused by, and are increasing turning away from. The other dozen or so letters will then be free to openly condense into Generalized Neo-Marxism, which is all that it is.
Over Christmas I was back home in Tennessee, out one night for karaoke with my cousins. We were joined by one of their friends, a 30-something lumbering lesbian named Chloe who waddled in late and flipped her chair around backwards to sit down. She had filthy fingernails, wore work boots, and her chin-length auburn looked like it had been cut with a butter knife. ‘I’d shake your hand but I just came out of the bathroom with explosive diarrhea’, she said. As usual, still some hope in the red states.
