Lesbian, Left, and Labeled a Threat

Lesbian, left, and labeled a threat. That’s not a tagline; it’s the box this era keeps trying to shove people like me into.

growing up “out of place”

Existing as a lesbian in the United States has never been neutral, but for a long time the hostility felt ambient—family tension, church whispers, legal gaps—rather than explicitly codified into “security” language. Being left‑leaning layered more friction on top: the sense that my politics and my love life both marked me as suspect to some invisible “normal” America.

That tension sharpened after 2016, and it’s become something else entirely since Trump returned to office. The shift isn’t just cultural; it’s legal and structural. It’s in memoranda, executive orders, death‑penalty directives, and data platforms that don’t know I exist but quietly sort people like me into risk categories.

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when “values” become threat matrices

On paper, most of what I am is still lawful. I can marry a woman. I can criticize the president. I can attend a protest. The Constitution still says nice things about speech and equal protection.

But under the new domestic‑terrorism framework, my values and communities are being recast as indicators of danger. The policy language doesn’t say “lesbians,” but it does say:

• “Anti‑capitalist,” “anti‑police,” “pro‑migrant,” “radical gender ideology”

• Movements that challenge “traditional family and morality”

• Networks that oppose “law and immigration enforcement”

In other words: left, queer, solidaristic spaces. The places that feel like home to me.

The president’s domestic‑terror strategy and the Justice Department’s follow‑up memo take these currents and wire them into a security architecture built for war. They tell FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to treat a wide spread of conduct—rioting, doxing, “violent civil disorder,” but also loosely defined conspiracies—as potential “domestic terrorism” when associated with certain ideologies. Personal traits aren’t illegal; the mix of beliefs plus any misstep becomes a pretext for extraordinary scrutiny and punishment.

So I find myself reading policies that might never name me directly and feeling their outline around my life. Not because I’m planning violence—but because the government is building systems that assume people with my politics and identities sit closer to it.

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the quiet heat of a “domestic terrorist” label

The danger here isn’t only in dramatic raids and headline cases. It’s in the slow accumulation of flags and lists.

Under the new approach, nonprofits, donors, student groups, and online networks can be mapped, scored, and investigated as part of “criminal and terroristic conspiracies,” even when most of what they do is speech and organizing. That means:

• Joining a queer mutual‑aid network that also supports undocumented neighbors might place my name in proximity to “extremist” files.

• Donating to an organization that challenges ICE or Border Patrol could be logged in a system that treats such support as a data point in a threat assessment.

• Showing up at a protest where a few people commit acts the state defines as “violent civil disorder” could make my presence part of an investigative graph, even if I never touch a stone.

None of this automatically equals arrest. But it quietly changes the default: from “citizen with rights” to “person of interest.” For a lesbian leftist, the line between identity and suspected disloyalty gets thinner.

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death, deterrence, and who is disposable

The revived federal death penalty, especially in Washington, D.C., belongs in this story too. Officially, it targets “the most heinous crimes.” Practically, capital punishment has always fallen heaviest on those already deemed less valuable—Black communities, poor people, the mentally ill, those tied to stigmatized movements.

When the same government expanding domestic‑terror tools also accelerates capital punishment and celebrates it in punitive, symbolic ways, it sends a message: some enemies of the state are not just wrong; they are killable. Linked with rhetoric that paints migrants, protesters, and “gender radicals” as existential threats, the death penalty becomes part of a broader theater of deterrence.

For someone like me, that doesn’t mean I expect a death sentence. It means I live in a country where the state is more willing to use ultimate violence and where the categories of “dangerous” and “deplorable” are expanding toward communities I belong to.

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technocracy’s blind spot for bodies like mine

Layered on top of the legal changes is the rise of data‑driven governance: Palantir platforms, AI risk scores, massive integrated databases. These systems don’t hate lesbians. They don’t “believe” in anything. They optimize for whatever objectives they’re given.

But when the objectives are defined by an administration that sees anti‑fascists, pro‑migrant organizers, and queer justice movements as threats, the math becomes political. The algorithms learn from biased historical data—who gets stopped, who gets charged—and from present‑day priorities—who gets labeled “domestic terrorist.” The patterns they surface are treated as neutral truth.

A life like mine—searches, follows, group chats, donations, locations—feeds into those systems. I don’t have to be an organizer to become a node. I just have to be connected to people and causes that the state is teaching its machines to fear.

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Living as a “risk factor”

What does it feel like to be lesbian, left, and labeled a threat?

It feels like:

• Watching legal documents and vendor blogs and seeing your communities only as problems to be neutralized.

• Knowing that the same government that couldn’t be bothered to protect you from discrimination now invests enormous energy in modeling you as a potential extremist.

• Hearing friends and family say, “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about,” while understanding that “wrong” is quietly being rewritten.

It’s not constant panic. More often, it’s a hum in the background: a sense that visibility is a calculation, not a given. That writing this very post is an act of faith that truth‑telling still matters more than the file it might end up in.

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why warn anyone at all?

If I truly believed nothing could change, I’d stop writing. The point of laying this out is not to wallow in inevitability; it’s to show how a regime doesn’t need to outlaw lesbians or the left to make us governable.

It just needs to:

• Redefine dissent as security risk.

• Tie our communities to “terrorism” frameworks.

• Harden punishment for those who cross certain lines.

• Embed all of that into code and courts that most people never see.

The move from “citizen” to “suspect” is quiet. It happens in memos, dashboards, and precedents.

So this is why I keep warning: because the more people recognize this pattern early, the less easily they will swallow the next justification, the next raid, the next quietly ruined life.

Because a society that lets lesbian leftists be treated as test cases for repression will not stop there.

Because the file they’re building for me is, in the end, a file they’re building for all of us.

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Stay curious.

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