S2 E14: Hips Don’t Lie and Neither Do Rocks (with Jamie Reed of the LGB Courage Coalition)

Power femme Jamie Reed of the LGB Courage Coalition joins the podcast (@lgbcouragecoalition and @jamiewhistle on Substack).

Rachel and Katherine fangirl over Jamie’s bravery as a whistleblower, the process behind the New York Times article that changed everything, and her incredible work since to protect lesbians like her and us. We squeeze in some delightful butch-femme confessionals, too: it’s not the femme’s hips that Jamie’s talking about…

Deep thoughts:

• Jamie’s personal and professional history with “gender” and her journey to telling the world what was happening at the Washington University Transgender Center

• What it felt like for Jamie to hide her femme lesbian identity in a relationship with someone who identified as a trans man, and how their identities affected both the writing and reception of the New York Times article

• Accusations that Jamie emasculated her partner by doing wildly male things like using a hammer

• How she navigated being a femme lesbian in that relationship, and what femme lesbian identity means to her after leaving it

• The effects of testosterone on a person over time; how the drugs and ideology of medicalization kill lesbian sexiness from a femme’s perspective

• Katherine and Jamie describe their butch and femme experiences with being and disappearing in couples that passed as straight

• Jamie interviews Katherine about why Gen Z is so bleak for butch lesbians; we discuss how butch-femme proves the lie that there’s something wrong with the butch (and why Gen Z fights butch-femme)

• The historical moment when “queer” ate everything and sucked Jamie into believing she wasn’t a woman too, and the millions of reasons it’s easy for young lesbians to think their problems are gender

• “How do we medicalize girls when they haven’t experienced anything yet?!”

Fun thoughts:

• What attracts Jamie to butches?

• The experience of butch-femme sex signaling, from both sides

• How femme sex signaling works uniquely, and when it may or may not involve rocks

• Visibility: knowing the femme “from the butch on her arm” and vice versa

• Rachel becomes fixated on what Jamie says about hips

• The first rule of lesbianism: Women can do whatever they want with rocks and balls

• The femme “thing” with butch pheromones

Two must-read essays by Jamie:

• “Homophobia on My Mind”

• “Shields”

Oh, and here: queer queer queer queer queer. There, we’ve fed the hungry algorithm.