I recently went to a birthday party in south London with the theme “childhood aspiration”. I wore a pink lycra leotard, thick black tights, a wrap skirt, and rubber-soled Repettos and sat on the carpeted floor to tell stories of my very lesbian childhood. I was glad to be dressed as a ballerina while I told them. It felt like an assurance that I wasn’t that kind of lesbian – except, of course, I am. This landed sharply, followed by the quiet shame of having thought it at all. The emotions of my childhood felt singular, but their shapes were known to my listeners. Almost all the women—lesbians, bisexual, or “pretty much straight”—had a story of their own and a maxim to accompany it—“Did I want her or want to be her?” “No heartbreak like the end of a homoerotic friendship”, “We stopped speaking when she got a boyfriend”.

Simone de Beauvoir’s declaration that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” serves as a touchstone of gender theory. In a less celebrated coil, another French feminist argues that lesbians never become women at all. To Monique Wittig, the lesbian transcends the category of woman altogether. Womanhood is contingent upon relations with men, defined by men, in pursuit of heterosexual norms of existence, Wittig argues, and the lesbian evades these standards altogether. To become a woman, one must transcend the girlish bonds of childhood and seek attachment with men. The girl outgrows the intimacy present in the platonic dynamic between girls and graduates to heterosexuality.

At the party, I spoke of the ways I felt when popular girls didn’t find the things I said interesting and how I would pick crushes based on whichever boy was remaining in the complementary friend group. When my best friend changed her BlackBerry messenger status from “sophiii <3” to “joseee <3”, I ignored her for a week and cried every day after school. I snuck into my mom’s bathroom cabinet and stole a tube of Maybelline Mega Plush and brought a copy of Jane Eyre to school. I started wearing mascara and reading the book during lunch to show her I had my own life too.

This narrative arc is tenacious on the lesbian internet and the media around it—two close girl friends, one matures and seeks relationships with boys, ex-friend is jilted and heartbroken. In My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, platonics of women’s friendship border intimacy. Alicent Hightower and Rhaenyra Targaryen of HBO’s House of the Dragon are childhood companions who “could have kissed in the closet” but later become bloody adversaries at two poles of a war (talk about the breakdown of a homoerotic friendship!). Penance by Eliza Clark voices the devotion, brutality, and queerness present within a friend group of English schoolgirls. Olivia Rodrigo’s lacy is a hymn in which teenage envy renders desire. Even the Wicked (2024) film has been given a queer reading—Glinda has comphet, Elphaba is bisexual, and the two best friends love so much it turns to hate. It all feels a bit like a cultural moment.

If Wittig argues lesbians are not women, might they be stunted girls? Psychoanalytically, yes. Freudian explanations ground attraction to women by women in the closeness of maternal relations. Lesbianism is a kind of homesickness, an urge to replicate early experiences of emotional intimacy with the mother. Understood bio-essentially (and Freud is always understanding bio-essentially), lesbian attachment is non-penetrative. The vaginal opening is the body’s only hole with which young girls hold a non-instinctual relationship—without the phallus, this entrance is uncharted as there is no reason for its discovery. The natural urge is for clitoral stimulation—lesbian postures are then both developmentally damaged and originating in regression, while simultaneously natural.

Lacanian perspectives similarly fail to account for mature lesbianism. They are grounded in the concept of the phallus as a symbol of completeness—representing wholeness and the resolution of desire. Heterosexuality, in this framework, emerges from the interplay between woman’s perceived perpetual lack of a phallus and man’s inherent inability to achieve completeness. It is an ongoing negotiation between lack and desire, an eternally ill-fated attempt to find fulfillment through heterosexual relations. Lesbianism operates outside this dynamic—there is not only lack, but no pursuit of completeness through the phallic framework. This disruption challenges the structure of developed sexuality as defined by Lacanian theory. The passage from girl to woman is marked by the formation of a heterosexual bond, and lesbianism is thus read as an unripened or incomplete form of women’s sexuality—a sexuality for young girls.

In line with psychoanalytics, what we may read within this commitment to lesbian infantilization by queer women is a desire to evade pornification, or, more gently, sexualisation. The word lesbian is often synonymous with the carnal and this eroticism is often directed at and created for cis men. Lesbian sex is constructed as a temporary transgression in the lives of otherwise straight women—the interaction is not built upon a basis of love or affection, but the search for a phallic replacement. In anchoring of sapphism in youth, it becomes neither erotic nor indoctrinated, but innocent and congenital, an instinctive love between girls. Psychoanalysis and popular culture then seem to be suggesting something similar, an idea I struggle to find convincing. In it, there is an implication that every girl could be a bit gay, that we would all rather be lesbians, but that a woman knows how to grin-and-bear-it, move on from the childish gumminess and live correctly.

I also do not feel like I am sidestepping lesbian sexualisation by speaking about these memories. It sometimes feels like sexualisation to read a layer of stickiness onto what were otherwise sanitised experiences and romance isn’t really what I am trying to get at when I talk about them. I don’t remember being attracted to the best friend that I wore Maybelline to impress, but I once pulled her hair when she told me she loved her boyfriend more than me and she once slapped me when I implied I preferred the friends at my new school. I was starting to understand that I was not straight, but she was not a conscious part of this understanding. I remember feeling something tender and explosive towards her, happy when she got her first boyfriend and miserable when she ignored my Skype call in favour of his completeness and lack. But we weren’t even teenagers yet and I don’t know if these emotions were part of a latent queerness or just typical of the ferocity of young girls’ friendships.

In invoking sapphism in these memories, maybe I’m not recalling romantic love, or anything sexual, but rather painting a devotional stroke over these friendships. We could situate their intimacy on Adrienne Rich’s lesbian continuum, which includes a range of what Rich terms “women-identified” experiences. These experiences are not necessarily erotic or romantic; the continuum embraces all bonds between women, particularly dynamics in which male supremacy is disrupted by the prioritisation of these bonds.

That friendship was marked by undeniable devotion. I wanted more than anything to live a full life with her. We made colorful lists of our plans over the next few years, laminated for longevity, and each experience I had, each idea about my future, was adjusted to fit her into it. I was open with her in a way I never really could be again, not for several years. Dressing this experience in the language of lesbianism, what I might be intending to communicate is unhitched from romantic love and eroticism, instead an appeal to the sacred nature of this friendship, a space of latitude and discovery.

Still, queering largely platonic friendships feels like a mode of engaging with lesbianism while keeping it at arm’s distance: a product of the past, innate but evolved from. This temporal framing strikes me as a failure to elaborate lesbianism’s wholeness. We disavow ourselves and our present desires in the name of what feels like the cleaner sapphism of youth, and the field of view is restricted to a candied queerness.

Equally, there is a perverse awareness that as much as we claim to desexualise childhood years, young queer girls are sexualised. Capitalism trespassed on sexuality at a moment when the body, as a site of desire, began to be measured, marketed, and commodified. In the 19th century, as the engines of industry hummed louder, sexuality became entangled with the imperatives of the market: it was sold, regulated, and packaged into a consumable form. Early capitalism, with its emerging consumer economies, began to shape the way we understood what it meant to want—it wasn’t just about feeling desire but about producing it, making it visible and valuable. The commodification of queerness, loudest in the 21st century, entails that the visibility of lesbian sensuality must be negotiated in consumption’s playhouse—lesbians with sagging skin and greying hair, especially those who fuck, are not actors. The commodification, marketability, and fetishisation of lesbian identity are most effective when the subjects are shiny, sexy, and “barely legal” adults—or uniform-wearing schoolgirls.

The self-disavowals present in the youth worship of sapphic childhood open the door and encourage capitalism’s trespass. Our fear of aging, our desire to be free of sexualisation through the invocation of childhood, our equal desire to be marketable—these circulating forces converge as a disavowal. Lesbian youth worship (from within and without) is the primary avenue through which to view queerness. What is lost in our constant desire to harken back to youth is a picture of lesbianism as a mature phenomenon, as something with longevity. We are Peter Pan lesbians, lesbians who cannot imagine a tomorrow.

I want to be an old lesbian. I want my hair to thin and my skin to wrinkle up like a prune, to birdwatch with my partner, to sit on the porch serving lemonade from a pitcher into highball glasses, and to lose the names of the places we loved when we were young. I don’t want to age like fine wine or look good for my years—I want the years and their weight, the fade of love to habit, the quietness of a life well-lived. I want the wholeness of the future, soft and steady.