Trish Bendix at Slate also writes about Facebook’s tendency to recoil at the word “dyke,” though as an aside in a longer piece on dyke marches under threat.
… Read the rest[M]uch like the larger community has done with “queer,” lesbians have been working to reclaim the word for their own use and identification for decades.
“Lesbians have long been the object of vicious ‘name-calling’ designed to intimidate us into silence and invisibility,” wrote J.R. Roberts in the 1979 essay “In America They Call Us Dykes.” “In the Lesbian/feminist 1970s, we broke the silence on this tabooed word, reclaiming it for ourselves, assigning it to positive, political values.”
Since then, dyke has been a political identity for many young lesbians, its meaning