Love in the Time of Banned Books #7 | "Who's Afraid of the Le$bians?" by Jessica Walton

Art by Rajveer Parekh

"Who's Afraid of the Le$bians?" by Jessica Walton

Edited by Chloe Qin

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"Aghast Beauty." Artwork by Rajveer Parekh

Found objects, wood, clay

11 x 8 In.

This object attempts to veil the horrific nature  of the enforcement of societal norms by portraying itself as a gift of nature.

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"Who's Afraid of the Le$bians?"

by Jessica Walton

As one of the largest social media platforms in the world, TikTok has an active lesbian community – despite the app’s best efforts to the contrary. Or more accurately, le$bian community. Read by TikTok’s voice-to-text feature as “le-dollar-bean”, le$bian has become an increasingly popular term across the app. Moreover, it’s bled out of TikTok, into other media, realms of the internet, and real-life speech, which don’t require Aesopian avoidance of censorship. When reality TV show contestant Jordan Whitley called herself a “le-dollar-bean” in 2021, she faced backlash for not using the term lesbian. Is “le-dollar-bean” intrinsically harmful? No, nor is there value in criticising how one person chooses to label themselves. So why does its use feel so much like a slap in the face to some?

Le$bian developed in order to avoid TikTok’s censorship – a phenomenon also present in terms associated with the wider queer community and plenty of other marginalised groups. “Seggs” instead of sex, the “alphabet mafia” instead of the queer/LGBTQ community, and possibly most famously, “unalive” instead of die. Specifics about TikTok’s censorship guidelines are little-known – censorship of queerness and other social issues is described as both prevalent and inconsistent in a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. However, users generally agree that terms like “gay,” “queer,” “trans,” “lesbian,” and many others will get you shadowbanned, with your account limited and content suppressed. TikTok’s censorship is not apolitical; it reflects their values and shows us what they view as taboo or inappropriate. They can control what is deemed acceptable (which can be dangerous on such a large platform with so much influence), at least to a certain degree; the userbase’s ever-spinning wheel of neologisms adeptly avoids this. “Algospeak,” meaning the alternative versions of words used to avoid censorship, is an incredibly common practice on TikTok,  and is considered normal. But it is undeniably somewhat dystopian that, in a self-described progressive society in 2023, on arguably the largest current social media platform, lesbians, among many other groups, are unable to describe our own existence.

“Le$bian” can be understood as an evasion of censorship and resistance to our erasure by continuing to acknowledge our own identity. Historically, making space for ourselves where there shouldn’t be, in an environment that actively refutes us, is a very lesbian move. So much of our history is hidden away, either from our own self-preservation or by our oppressors. 

Regardless of the murkiness of its history – the overlap of queerness and womanhood being historically largely hidden and ignored – one thing is true: “lesbian” meant and means a lot to many people. Lesbian erasure has happened before – a lot, in fact. It has taken so much for this term to become widely known and used – there’s still plenty of resistance, still plenty of connotations. I myself can’t always shake the sense that it’s a dirty word. It has been used over two centuries both to help and hunt people: rallying outcast women together; creating labels and communities for people who otherwise had no way to describe their experiences; to mopping up those women who fermented at the edges of society, and forging communities where there are none; yet it’s also been used to exclude and oppress trans and genderqueer people; it’s been leveraged for and against feminism; used to contradictorily sexualise and disgust at the same time. “Lesbian” presently fills an important niche in many queer and societal spaces; its large associated community allows it to function as a widely known yet not-too-general term for a certain subset of queer people. There’s no definition for lesbian that every lesbian will agree on. It’s rich. It sits heavy on the tongue.

While a word itself isn’t the end-all be-all of meaning, and everyone who uses le-dollar-bean understands what it’s shorthand for, words do have power, and do have an impact. We’ve fought so hard to get as far as we have, for the word lesbian to be openly recognised and used. Regardless of intent, defensiveness is a natural response to watching a paltry homonym bleed out into the world. But whether or not the censorship is effective doesn’t change the fact that we shouldn’t be erased in the first place. And it still inhibits our ability to discuss our history, identity, community, with the significance it deserves, using the words meaningful to us. 

In the same way that “unalive myself” has a minimised and less serious connotation than “suicide,” as though the brain doesn’t process it with the same severity, le-dollar-bean doesn’t have the significance attached to it that lesbian does, regardless of its definition. Le-dollar-bean feels cute and wholesome. It’s an aesthetic, a microtrend, rounded down at the edges. Lesbian feels rougher, heavier, far more encompassing. Like it could fit a whole person behind it. Le-dollar-bean is as thin as a phone screen.

“Le-dollar-bean” as a term is not inherently negative – it’s a response to censorship. However, watching it spill out from TikTok into other media, even where unnecessary, and then used preferentially over “lesbian,” can feel regressive, regardless of intent. It’s a version of lesbian which is more comfortable, and more palatable, and we have spent so long being palatable and trying to stop being palatable. Yes, language evolves, and the le$bian trend isn’t hurting anyone – except it sort of is. Popularising this word is endorsing the site of its creation, which it’s inherently tied to. The cute “le-dollar-bean” Etsy merch exists because a corporation wants to censor our existence. When we merchandise this word – search “le-dollar-bean” on Etsy or RedBubble and find mugs, shirts, and more – or popularise its use and turn it into a trend, we are also advertising the corporation that wants to erase us. Searching le-dollar-bean has Redbubble and Etsy selling printed mugs and t-shirts. Le-dollar-bean is cute! It’s trendy and fun! It’s born from this corporation actively censoring our existence! 

TikTok’s banning, or shadowbanning of the word lesbian, alongside other queer words, implies an inherent vulgarity, a maleficence associated with these words on the level of hate speech and discussion of crimes and terrorism and dark subjects.

It’s not inherently bad or problematic to use the term “le-dollar-bean,” nor is it going to completely overtake the word lesbian, nor does it or the rest of TikTok algospeak signal the end of English as we know it. But this isn’t a natural evolution of language, either – it’s shaped and perpetuated by a corporation, and thus language is shaped by and often conforms to their beliefs. But when we use it, especially outside of the context of TikTok, we should remember the reason it exists, and we should remember that we aren’t allowed to use the word lesbian there. And that should make us angry.

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About "Love in the Time of Banned Books"

In this series, we seek to celebrate LGBTQ+ identities and experiences, while critically examining book bans and how they impact the LGBTQ+ community.

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