How to Use lesbianism in a Sentence

lesbianism

noun
  • The women are so empowered, and there are shades of lesbianism as well.
    — Jim Hemphill, IndieWire, 19 June 2024
  • And what better way to step into lesbianism than to have a toxic love story?
    — Destiny Jackson, Deadline, 3 Oct. 2025
  • My heart is for those trans masc lesbians, or T4T down, or just lesbianism.
    — James Factora, Them, 16 Jan. 2025
  • Her lesbianism was a source of conflict and comfort and helped shape her feminist politics.
    — Salamishah Tillet, New York Times, 12 Jan. 2018
  • How did the church, how did society—in this case, a religious society—look at lesbianism?
    — Jane Hu, The New Yorker, 30 Nov. 2021
  • Adultery was not a crime in England in 1928, and lesbianism never had been.
    — Louis Menand, New Yorker, 1 June 2026
  • With so few men around, excluding the director’s chair, lesbianism is apparently par for the course.
    — Elle Carroll, Vulture, 6 Dec. 2021
  • By the end of Season 1, for instance, Leighton has begun to embrace her lesbianism.
    — New York Times, 13 May 2022
  • Her mother decided that her daughter’s lesbianism was only an adolescent phase.
    — Nicole Flattery, Harpers Magazine, 19 Sep. 2025
  • The law is similar in some ways to a law passed in 2013 that stiffened some penalties and criminalized lesbianism.
    — Reuters, CNN, 10 Mar. 2023
  • The message is that black lesbianism is something in need of defense, something uniquely imperiled and also uniquely precious.
    — Moira Donegan, New Republic, 5 July 2017
  • Issues motivating protest range from climate change to disarmament, from labor rights to lesbianism.
    — Washington Post, 6 July 2017
  • Millett, who was then married to a man, but also slept with women, was quoted (or misquoted) in a magazine distancing herself from lesbianism.
    — Joy Press, The Cut, 8 Sep. 2017
  • In this scene, Alike has just returned from a rock show with Bina, a girl from church who her mother has been pushing her to become friends with, in the hopes of steering her away from lesbianism.
    — James Factora, Them., 26 Sep. 2025
  • There was no legal definition of lesbianism in any case because under English law no such condition existed.
    — Longreads, 8 May 2018
  • Many social media users criticized Who for spreading lesbophobic myths and furthering the harmful idea that lesbianism is a phase that could end, even if it was said in jest.
    — Mathew Rodriguez, Them., 28 Aug. 2025
  • Critics have questioned Maisel’s mothering, debated whether the show celebrates white feminism, hides lesbianism and skips over racial discord.
    — Mark Kennedy, chicagotribune.com, 6 Dec. 2019
  • These unchaperoned women, some people worried, could be pedaling away to engage in prostitution or lesbianism. Cycling trousers, along with women on bikes, were also a target of ridicule.
    — Christine Ro, The Atlantic, 15 Apr. 2018
  • Last year, the internet mistook an offhand remark Fox made on TikTok as a coming-out declaration of lesbianism.
    — Nicola Dall'asen, Allure, 19 Aug. 2025
  • In the 1960s, political lesbianism emerged from the second-wave feminist movement as a means of decentering men from the lives of women.
    — Quispe López, Them, 19 Nov. 2024
  • Still, Murray’s disinclination to identify as a lesbian rested partly on a misprision of what lesbianism means.
    — Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 7 Apr. 2017
  • Ma Rainey is our earliest example of a Black woman explicitly embracing lesbianism in her music.
    — Gerrick Kennedy, Variety, 27 Jan. 2022
  • Gumbs makes the case that Lorde’s community organizing, teaching, and radical feminist lesbianism had a cosmic reach.
    — The Week Us, TheWeek, 1 July 2026
  • The Novice somehow manages to capture the obsessiveness of athletic competition, friendship envy, and lesbianism all in one movie — a perfect trifecta.
    — Ana Osorno, Them., 26 Aug. 2025
  • At first—in what feels like a winking allusion to the legend that Queen Victoria was unable to conceive of lesbianism—Mary simply can’t fathom the possibility.
    — Literary Hub, 10 June 2025
  • At Narratively, Britni de la Cretaz looks at the history of lesbianism in early pro women’s baseball and at the beautiful, lifetime love stories the film chose to ignore.
    — Krista Stevens, Longreads, 31 May 2018
  • But while almost all effeminate guys are gay—so stigmatized is femininity in males (even in the gay community)—masculine swagger in women is less stigmatized and therefore somewhat less likely to correlate as strongly with lesbianism.
    — Dan Savage, Chicago Reader, 20 Dec. 2017
  • The film, written by Julia Cox, begins at Diana’s 60th birthday party, in a scene that acknowledges the swimmer’s lesbianism without making an issue of it.
    — Stephen Farber, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • There was not even a hint of lesbianism for Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman movie in 2017 despite some of her most prominent writers pointing out the obvious.
    — Jason Johnson, The Root, 18 May 2018
  • The argument destigmatizes lesbianism while also minimizing its erotic and social power, its centrality to both pleasure and politics.
    — Merve Emre, The New Yorker, 23 Aug. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'lesbianism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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