Welcome to The Sapphic Archive, where we uncover the people, places, symbols, words, and moments that helped shape sapphic history. Today, we’re opening the archive on The Labrys, the double-headed axe that became a symbol of lesbian strength, independence, and resistance—and whose meaning is still being fought over today.

The labrys has a history far older—and considerably more interesting—than the argument the internet is currently having about it.

Long, long ago. And I do mean ancient.

Double axes appeared across the ancient Aegean and Anatolia—roughly parts of modern-day Greece and Turkey—but they became especially prominent in Bronze Age Crete. Archaeologists have found double axes as functional objects, ceremonial objects, votive offerings, and recurring images and signs. In Minoan contexts, the double axe repeatedly appears in ritual settings and in imagery associated with female divinity.

So this is where things get even more interesting.

Older interpretations connected the labrys to goddess worship and to the possibility of Minoan society being matriarchal or matrifocal. Modern archaeology is considerably more cautious. The surviving evidence does not allow us to confidently declare, “Congratulations, we have discovered a matriarchy.”

Supposedly, we do not have enough evidence to say for certain that Minoan society was matriarchal.

How convenient.

There is a peculiar habit in historical interpretation where evidence suggesting female power must clear a multitude of evidentiary hurdles, provide two forms of identification, and submit a notarized letter from a Goddess herself before anyone is allowed to entertain the possibility that women might have been important.

Meanwhile, an interpretation involving some unidentified “powerful social group” somehow sounds wonderfully sober and neutral.

What the evidence does show is that the double axe occupied an important place in Minoan society and ritual life, including contexts involving female religious figures. Exactly what that tells us about the structure of Minoan society remains open to interpretation.

Thousands of years later, women picked the axe up again.

By the early 1970s, the labrys had entered modern lesbian-feminist culture. A March 1970 feminist journal included Helen Victry’s “The Labrys”; Amazon Quarterly, a lesbian-feminist publication, returned to the symbol in 1972; and surviving graphics from the decade place the labrys directly inside lesbian-feminist visual culture.

Lesbians connected the labrys with Amazons, female independence, strength, resistance, and self-sufficiency. It became part of a visual language created by women deliberately centering women in a culture that generally preferred they didn’t.

And, yes, it developed a particular resonance in butch culture.

The labrys was never exclusively a butch symbol, however its associations with strength, masculinity, defiance, physicality, protection, and female autonomy made it an especially natural symbol for butches.

Then lesbian feminism fractured.

Some strands of lesbian feminism and separatism developed explicitly trans-exclusionary politics.

The labrys, however, was already there.

There was no grand ceremony in which somebody handed the Official Lesbian Axe™ to the TERFs and wished them luck with it.

Trans-exclusionary lesbians unfortunately continued using symbols that already belonged to the lesbian-feminist movements they came out of. Trans-inclusive lesbians continued existing in those same broader lesbian communities. As those political divisions hardened, the symbols carried by people on either side accumulated new associations with them.

The labrys became one of those symbols.

There is no credible single moment when the labrys suddenly “became a TERF symbol.” No one person invented that association. No organization officially seized the axe. What happened was much messier and, frankly, much more ordinary: a symbol already deeply embedded in lesbian-feminist culture continued to be used by people whose politics increasingly diverged.

By the late 2010s and early 2020s, some queer people had begun reading the labrys itself as potentially TERF-coded. That association is real. It should not be hand-waved away simply because we dislike it.

But an association is not an origin story.

TERFs did not create the labrys.

They did not introduce it into lesbian culture.

And they do not possess some mystical historical deed granting them permanent ownership of a symbol lesbians had already been using for decades. (maybe even longer….)

Which brings us to reclamation.

There is something particularly appropriate about butches, lesbians, sapphics, queer women, and trans women refusing to surrender the labrys to exclusionary politics.

Reclamation does not require pretending the ugly part of the symbol’s history never happened. Quite the opposite. You acknowledge what happened, understand how it happened, and then decide that the people who tried to narrow the meaning of the symbol do not get the final word on it.

Because that narrower meaning was never the whole story.

Those ideas are not made more coherent by excluding trans women from them.

If anything, an axe is an unusually appropriate symbol for what comes next.

You don’t have to preserve every rotten branch just because somebody insists it has always been part of the tree.

Today, the labrys signifies lesbian history, sapphic strength, butch defiance, female autonomy, resistance, and a deliberate reclamation of a symbol that no exclusionary faction gets to own.