Lesbophobia

Where lesbophobia came from

Lesbophobia is a portmanteau of lesbo-, for lesbian, and the Greek suffix for fear. The earliest use listed in the Oxford English Dictionary appears in The Erotic Life of the American Wife, published in 1972 by the Harper's Bazaar editor Natalie Gittelson. The shorter form lesphobia is also used, and the parallel term for discrimination against gay men is gayphobia.

The reason for a separate word is that homophobia correlates strongly with sexism, and misogyny in particular, so acts against lesbians are commonly a mixture of both. The forms named are specific:

• assault, harassment and bullying
• murder
• fetishisation
• corrective rape
• lesbian erasure

The ordinary discrimination is less dramatic and more common: housing and employment, the absence of legal protection for partners to care for one another, the removal of children from lesbian mothers, negative stereotyping and media representation, censorship, and rejection by family or community.

Where the law is still explicit

Because lesbians are female homosexuals, legislation against them is generally bundled with other anti-homosexual law. Human Rights Watch counts at least 67 jurisdictions imposing laws and penalties against same-sex sexual activity as of 2026, and at least 38 of those have laws explicitly criminalising sex between women. Penalties vary by country and include imprisonment, caning and flagellation.

The explicit criminalisation matters for the same reason the word does. Legislation aimed at male homosexuality has historically been more common, and a count that separates out the statutes naming women makes the pattern visible instead of assuming it.

What corrective rape names

Corrective rape is a hate crime in which lesbian women are raped by heterosexual men in the belief that penetrative sex will change or remove their sexual orientation. Perpetrators have been documented telling victims that they are curing them, doing them a favour, teaching them a lesson or showing them how to be a real woman.

The term was coined in South Africa after the rape and murder of Eudy Simelane in 2008. Simelane, a footballer, was gang-raped, beaten and stabbed to death in the Gauteng township of KwaThema. The activist Sizakele Sigasa, who lived in Soweto, and her partner Salome Masooa were raped, tortured and murdered in an attack that South African lesbian and gay rights organisations attributed to lesbophobia, and the activist Noxolo Nogwaza was raped and stoned before being stabbed to death.

Zanele Muholi, community relations director of a lesbian rights group, reported having recorded 50 rape cases over a decade involving black lesbians in townships, and put the cause as patriarchy: the men who commit these crimes see rape as curative.

The practice has been documented outside South Africa as well. In Jamaica parents have reportedly hired men to rape their lesbian daughters, and cases have been recorded in Zimbabwe, Uganda and India, typically committed by family members or acquaintances.

Why the stereotypes contradict each other

Kim Emery, writing about lesbians in the United States in the late nineteenth century, set out how incompatible the accusations are. Lesbians are assumed to be both men in women's bodies and women marked as masculine by physical anomaly. They are accused of hating men and of wanting to be men, of being both sexually predatory and essentially asexual, and of committing unspeakable sexual acts while lacking the anatomy to perform any at all.

A further stereotype, identified as lesbophobic in itself, holds that female athletes are always or predominantly lesbians. In pornography the recurring tropes are straight men fixing lesbians and lesbians approaching straight women, which carry the same two claims: that lesbianism is a condition to be corrected and that female sexuality is not to be taken seriously.

Lesbian erasure is the process of ignoring or writing out the history and struggles of lesbians, of which the removal of Storme DeLarverie from accounts of the start of the Stonewall riots is the standard example.

Lesbophobic attitudes come from gay men as well as from straight men and women, where they are held to appear as a subordination of lesbian issues within the campaign for gay rights. The neighbouring words, Biphobia and Transphobia, record the same pattern inside the same movement.