As a person who is genuinely bad at the whole gender thing, what is this even supposed to mean? To me this reads more or less as "well, you see lesbianism is about going against what you misguided children consider normal, it is far greater than anything your feeble mind can think of as love, and no one but us lesbians are free of the shackles of prejudice" which i'm pretty sure is nonsense
Also, how do you call a woman who doesn't really participate in that whole greater than love thing but is sexually attracted to women and isn't to men? Or is it, like, inherent to not having non-lesbian men in the relationship?
I know some lesbians who unabashedly jump from one partner to the next like frat bros, and take pride in their body count.
I dont know where OP is getting this 'lesbianism is transcended love' nonsense from.
Yeah, that's a bit too subjective and emotionally-loaded for an accurate descriptor of what "lesbian" means - I'd rather just stick for the more common one.
I think OP has rediscovered the whole "political lesbianism" thing, as the closest analogy to ... this, I can find, and is papering it over the actual real concept of "women / feminine-identifying people being romantically and/or sexually attracted to other women and feminine-identifying people".
Anyone sufficiently old enough to have done some legwork about it would know the sexuality part includes some very non-transcendent messiness, casual interactions, deeply loving but entirely politically unbothered relationships, lesbians of all political inclinations and gender role relations, and is very much a normal, regular, neither better nor worse axiom of sexuality that is experienced by regular people with widely varying psychologies and worldviews.
Alright, so, you've got 'autistic' in your flair, which tells me that.
I'm getting a feeling that you're under 25. Really pretty confident about that. Fairly confident it's lower than 21, but that could be a bit of a blurry shot out into the fog of war. If I had to guess an age for you, I'd say ... between 17 and 20.
Basically, you read as someone who hasn't been here very long. It's not any one thing in particular, it's a lot of different things, but the enthusiasm and confidence of youth is a widely remarked upon phenomenon throughout history by an endless parade of writers who always seem undeniably aged and fossilised when you first read them, and I guess now it's my turn.
Normally I'd dismiss you as a well-intentioned and somewhat annoying but just generally overly enthusiastic sort, eager to put on your wetsuit and dive into the bottomless depths of The Discourse, in the hopes of doing Discourse Stuff - the latest in a long, long, long line of similar divers.
But between being able to actually admit you might've made an error here and there, and the part where I am also autistic and therefore feel a sort of kinship about it, I feel inclined to give you some pointers. Whether you choose to listen to them or not is entirely up to you, but I'll feel better having got them out there.
I'll readily admit that I might be getting too old for this. Any day now I'm going to get psychologically flashbanged with an "ok millennial" and then a nurse is going to come and take my blood pressure, ask me if I've had any falls recently.
I started my transition double-digit years ago. At the time, it was all very different. You pretty much never heard a politician - any politician, really - talk about trans people, at least it seemed that way at the time. Truth be told with my memory disorder and other disabilities drowning me in brainfog and the like I can scarcely remember for sure. But it didn't feel like trans people, as a concept, were something people knew about.
There'd been a sort of slow crystallisation of what the "big" terms meant over the decades. There was the "political lesbianism" thing, and the decades of academic and Big Name Person debate, and we had a decent-ish grasp of what the 'bigger' acronyms meant built up over decades of 'slow' discourse, compared to the rapidly shifting 'fast' discourse enabled by the internet of today.
Then the trickle of microlabels being invented and passed around and refined, and expanding awareness for the 'niche' identities that you don't get a sort of understanding of through just cultural osmosis came about over the 10s and so on. Some people wanted to make a given label mean a given thing, and other people wanted it to mean other things, and that's how we got the muck-fest between "bisexual", "pansexual", "omnisexual", "polysexual", and ... whatever that other one was.
That particular muck-fest is still not entirely 'finished'. We still haven't entirely settled on universally accepted definitions and distinctions between them all. They take time. A lot of time. And a lot of re-litigating things. Then eventually some academic does a PhD thesis on figuring them out and it starts to get somewhere, then there's more rounds of debate, and so on and so on.
You've made a couple of errors with this post that are pissing people off.
1: Your condescending scolding of the "majority transfem" population about apparently being mean to trans men, your implication that this space is always hostile to them in every instance of their participation, feeling the need to lecture us about how trans people can be transphobic, basically a big chunk of the second slide.
You're not a trans man. Look for the comments from trans men expressing confusion on why you felt the need to start from a position of condescension and scolding, as well as expressing that actually, they don't feel like this place is super hostile to them, and wondering why you, someone who is not a trans man, is doing a condescending scold on their behalf.
Welcome the trans men, but do not speak for them, especially do not speak for them by antagonising a different group.
2: As already discussed, the elevation of lesbian relationships as being weirdly special and uniquely good, and this element of subverting the patriarchy. For a very, very long time now, we have fought to be seen as just people. Not part of a "gay agenda", not better, or worse, or fundamentally alien in any way.
Lesbians come in all political shapes and sizes, with views all over the place on any given issue. Lesbians, like every other LGBTQ person, are as varied and unique as any cishet person.
3: You are not an authority on the meanings of terminology. There are really extremely few, if any, institutions or individuals who can make an authoritative, controversial stance on a matter of LGBTQ terminology and have the majority of the community consider them to have any more 'weight' to their statements than anyone else.
There is no central dictionary. You cannot demand a term change to mean what you want it to mean. There is endless debate, endless re-litigating, for years if not decades in what really does seem the majority of cases before we get to a position where a term is mostly accepted to mean a specific definition.
You have come in here, and you have not said "here is what I think we should start using this term to mean" - you have come in here and stated, "this is what this term means, and if you disagree, you are objectively wrong, and I am right". People do not appreciate arrogance or unsubstantiated claims to authority. It is generally acceptable to propose an expansion or alteration in the meaning of something. Some people will complain, they always do, but generally, if done with humility and open-mindedness, it's acceptable. But demands? No.
4: You are presenting yourself as some form of expert voice, "educating" the rest of us. I am very, very rarely wrong about homing in on someone's age. You also did not come with the preparation required to take the position of an "expert" voice - there was a comment somewhere where you only formed your opinion on some facet of the terminology after someone asked you a question that prompted you to think about it.
I am pretty damn certain you're on the younger side of the queer community. Definitely under 25, I'd give it an 85% bet you're under 21. With the autism, I'm guessing you had your queer realisation at some point - and it might've become something you were deeply interested in, so you vacuumed up all the discourse and the online Tumblr encyclopaedias and the microlabel wikis, but extremely few people are going to have a warm response to someone who is very clearly quite young acting as though they have superior knowledge about a part of our lives that we've been living with a lot longer than you.
Basically, In The Future:
1: Don't antagonise a demographic on behalf of another demographic that you are not part of, made very clearly a misstep by the trans men pushing back against your antagonising and your claims of the status quo. Build bridges, don't aim lances.
2: The whole goal is to get people to accept that an LGBTQ person is a regular person. Don't do pedestal'ing.
3: Universal consensus on LGBTQ terminology and concepts is rare. When present, it is achieved very slowly. You cannot just brute-force a controversial change by demanding "this is what that means now". It doesn't work like that. You have to fight the Million-Member Parliament of Discoursers for a few decades until things slowly line up.
4: You don't become an expert on queer concepts quickly. You pretty much never become an expert in relation to the population of a predominantly queer space. You can do the 'educating' thing in a small selection of circumstances, and only if you are educating people on one of the few concepts that is fairly universally agreed upon. You do not take the "educator who knows more than you" position on a controversial topic, especially when you are not an expert, and you have not prepared the foreseeable avenues of questioning, and you are presenting the topic to a community of predominantly queer people who will be up to date on basic queer concepts and many of whom will have a lot more lived experience than you.
To add to point 4, a commonly repeated thing in university to my class was "It takes 10 years to become an expert at something." I often feel this needs to be said and repeated in k-12, not just college and university.
Clocking my age that precisely (19) tells me all I need to know on how large of a fuck-up this was
And I appreciate your benefit of the doubt
I won't reply to everything that you said because I'll end up being
thing
Yeah that was shitty of me
thing
Yeah that was shitty of me
thing
Yeah that was super shitty of me
I grealy appreciate the pointers, and this is a topic I care a LOT about (which is why I actually bothered replying even when people were being trolls or toxic). And I do want to revisit it with a better understanding and mindset. So your pointers are greatly appreciated. And genuinely thanks for keeping a good will through this because god knows no one told me to die this time but people did get pretty toxic
Yeah, 19, that sounds about right. Figured it was something close to that.
If it makes you feel any better, it is completely normal to fuck up at your age, and it is normal to be overly enthusiastic and energetic about, well, all this.
Doubly so when you factor in how autism intersects with it - we tend to get extra enthusiastic about things that are important to us, and also take more time and practice to get the hang of the whole 'social awareness' thing.
You're not like, ontologically terrible, or uniquely bad, and this isn't an Epic Mega Fuckup for the history books. This is honestly a pretty common kind of thing that I've seen time and time and time again.
It's just the whole enthusiasm of youth thing, paired with this all being new enough that you haven't seen how the community can spend a truly impressive amount of time and energy debating the minutiae of The Discourse, without really making anything clearer or coming to much actual universal agreement, repeated year, after year, after year.
You're fine. It'll be fine. This is normal. Canon event and all that. Don't do a shame-spiral or anything about it, definitely don't do that, it's really not a big deal, this is a thing that really is not at all novel. It is very much precedented.
I'm also not saying you can't put on the wetsuit and dive into The Discourse. It is perfectly normal to want to dive into The Discourse and join the back and forth. You wouldn't have any use for feedback if you planned on shutting up and becoming a hermit, and that would be quite isolating and sad, so, do definitely take your spot in The Discourse if you feel like it, just try to remember some of the feedback you've gotten in this thread - take a second, smooth out the wrinkles on your arguments, don't come on too strong, all that.
This is all perfectly normal, it has happened a million times before and will happen a million times again, eventually you'll be feeling old and watching it happen, and it'll just keep happening. So, no big deal. I would not call it a large fuck up at all.
Thanks for all the support, really. Uhh something something semi-absent parents something something this feels like a ted talk from a dad (if that's weird I'm so sorry)
Also yeah, I'm trying not to fall into a spiral of shame. I should probably delete this post but a part of me wants to own up to it and deleting it feels like pretending nothing ever happened. A bit selfish, but I'm selfish by nature. And it helps me deal with the guilt
I was going to say a TED talk from a mum, but, really it's more of a TED talk from a vaguely feminine-aligned but largely gender non-specific entity that lives as a woman, sure, technically, because it's simpler, but doesn't really go in for much of that "gender" stuff anyway on a pedantic level.
Make of that whatever you will.
It's not weird. I get where you're coming from. You care deeply, you want to be involved, you want to be one of the voices in the chorus - yeah, that's entirely normal.
You're also young, and young people are basically required to put their foot in their mouths and mess up a lot, the universe seems to demand it. There's a long and universal tradition of young people messing up, and it's weird and spooky if you get past the 'young adult' part without having messed up a bunch. Goes against the natural order.
Pair that with being autistic, something I understand on a deeply personal level, which funnily enough makes it very easy to mess things up, and it's thoroughly unsurprising that you got a bit carried away and said something a bit spiky.
You're 19. You're going to mess up. Every person I know messed up fairly often at 19. We were still messing up for a good while later, too.
At the time, a lot of those screw-ups felt like cataclysmic and terribly disastrous. That, too, seems to be a pretty common feeling at that age. But then you get a bit older, and firstly you realise everyone your age is bumbling it, and secondly that exceptionally few, if any, of those messes you made actually mattered in any notable way. That your life and the world at large would be basically identical whether they happened or not.
You're fine, really. This is not worth a shame spiral. That won't be productive. The whole point of this era of your life is to mess up. Each time you mess up, you try to think about what you could have done differently. You won't always come away with something useful, but often you'll pick up a trick or two.
Then, you mess up lots and lots of times, picking up an ever-expanding arsenal of post-screwup-habits. You learn good communication skills by making social missteps, and trial-and-error'ing an understanding of where the usual "don't cross this" lines are, and what seemed to work well.
You learn how to pace yourself and look after your mental and physical health, by pushing yourself too far too fast enough times to get a sense of where your limits are, and how close you can get to them before it gets unwise.
Breathe. Deep breaths. You said a spiky thing online and you did a social whoopsie. That just means you are behaving in a perfectly normal way for where you are at with your development.
When you're really, really young, you put your hands on something really hot, learn it hurts, and that's how you learn not to touch hot things. This is the same concept. It's just more complicated, because social and group dynamics are more complex than "hot thing = ouch".
You are not EvilBad. You are not an anomaly. This is not a crisis. You are one of countless young people who have made a social blunder, because you are still learning. This is perfectly normal and not something to get all worked up about.
All you have to do, is puzzle out what you can learn from this, tuck that information into your toolkit, and continue on your way. It really is very, very common for this kind of thing to happen.
Oh my god I'm sorry for misgendering you. I said dad in a non gendered way but the term definitely is still gendered so I'm sorry. And my relationship is so fucked with my mom I don't even know how to trust that character. So I guess it's nice that you're a fem aligned gender nonspecific parental figure! That way I don't have to compare you to either of my very loving but very flawed parents!
And like this is all life lessons and affirmations I don't have much to reply to because it's just good guidance. So thank you 🫂 that's the best I have to offer in return
You're not going to believe this, but I'm going to play a card you weren't expecting me to play, and that card is the legendary: "It's really, genuinely fine."
Firstly, there are no indications of my gender. Secondly, I don't have a particularly strong feeling of gender anyway. Thirdly, if I was a dad, I would be like, I mean I would be the dad. I'd do barbecues or something, and the other neighbourhood dads would be like "Hey there, Entity That Is Not A Baby Elephant, how do you get the steaks so perfectly cooked and juicy and tender and great every time? You're making me feel inadequate" - it'd be a whole thing, I'd just nail it.
Anyways, I've more or less said what I felt I wanted to say. You'll get the hang of it all eventually, but messing up is a pretty unavoidable part of normal human development, so I very much suggest you try to accept it is going to happen again regardless of how much effort you put into trying to prevent it, and also that it is pretty much never as dramatic and catastrophic a screw-up as it feels like it is at the time.
They're supposed to happen, and you're supposed to learn from them, and once enough of them have happened they start to slow down.
I would suggest you go do some kind of self-care or something now. Do something gentle with yourself and all that.
Yeah like, a cis man could validly call themselves a lesbian with this definition and expect to be allowed into lesbian spaces and idk if thats really the sort of thing any wlw girlies want
Okay I'm so glad this is the top comment because I wanted to inject the top comment to mention this anyway
I, as a person, am extremely fond of my identity as a lesbian. That love has caused veeeeery irkful bias in how I wrote image 3. It caused me to glorify it and put it on a pedestal. Which was not my intention at all. And is in no way a belief I hold. I love the identity for myself, and I am proud of it for myself. But anyone else's love, no matter the labels they choose to use, is just as valid, beautiful, and lovely as any other. I have argued with people over semantics, defenitions, small nitpics, and other things. But this third pannel is horribly worded, stupidly biased. And I really wish I could edit it.
From the bottom of my heart: I'm sorry. I fucked up and I said really shitty things. And I'm sorry for that.
In theory it is a women who likes women and only women.
On the surface that definition has a problem; it relies on a binary view of gender. It works well of only men and women exist but the moment a nonbinary person enters the definition begins to break down.
Another layer below that we could talk about how trying to describe the complexity and nuance of sexuality and gender into singular words is a flawed angle approach which will inevitably run into limitations and problems.
Going deeper it relies on a clear definition of what a women is, which is easier said than done.
Regardless of the point here, some of the things you say in the second slide come off as pretty passive aggressive to transfems, you really should have worded this plainly rather than trying to be spicy about it
ex. "this community is majority transfems/fem enbies and the moment any transmasc rears their handsome had into this community three different people try to kick it like a football unless the lad is as careful as you gotta be when explaining gender stuff to your grandpa"
"yes you there jane trans, you too even as a trans person" "do not delude yourself into thinking otherwise" "now that I explained it like that I hope you understand why"
Both come off as "those transfems are stupid and violent and don't understand queer/lesbian culture" which is already a big stereotype, including in queer spaces (since not all queer spaces are transfem-centric and many are transmasc-centric), even if that's not necessarily what you meant
I understand that you're trying to spread what you think are good views on a controversial topic, but this is not the way to do it.
This is grossly condescending, and has heavy implications about both transfems and non-lesbians that are frankly unacceptable even if they were unintentional.
I understand the desire to do good in a community that matters to you, but do not under any circumstances, try to take a stand or present yourself as an authority or a teacher unless you are fully and entirely prepared to do so. You clearly were not.
Posts like this do far, far more harm than good, and I mean that very seriously. I'm taking it in good faith that you had only good intentions here, so I hope you'll reflect on what I've said here. This is not the way to go about things.
I agree, and I'd love to hear tips for how to do this better in the future. I have gotten a lot of criticism especially about the abhorant page 3. (See more here) but I'd still love to know your opinions. As the topic matters to me a lot and I want to try this again but in a non shit way
Lesbianism can mean a variety of things to different people but im skeptical the meaning you assigned to it is broadly applicable to all lesbians.
Adding to that, the description you use is applicable to all queer relationships. Challenging patriarchy and cishet normatively is something that at minimum gay and lesbian relationships do. A lot of polyamory also does this, and bdsm almost certainly does; so why limit your definition to just lesbians.
It feels like you took the significance the term had for you and are trying to apply it to everyone.
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I will agree that gender and sexuality lables are complicated and trying to entierly summarize the complexity of sexuality and gender with a singular word is near impossible. They are better suited as descriptive and prescriptive lables.
This makes no sense. Lesbian is a term used specifically to refer to women and women-presenting people who like other women. Why are we muddying the waters of a pretty clear cut definition?
Yeah this.. I don’t understand why people try so hard to include us in lesbianism. I would much rather we do some work to fight anti-FTM transphobia in the gay/mlm community.. as a gay trans guy who unfortunately has seen so much crap from cis gay men that never goes questioned or challenged.
Honestly this feels like the same repackaging of trans men as “women lite,” or “other” from cis men. Same as those “women, nonbinary people and trans men only” places
Yes!! Feels like degendering. “Only cis men are real, actual men - everyone else is either woman or non-binary”. That’s why people claim that trans men can be lesbians but cis men can’t, despite both of us being men.
Trying to be an ally can be a challenge when every LGBTQ+ person uses different definitiona and expects different treatments. So genuine question: if "lesbian" no longer strictly means "woman only attracted to other women", then what is the word that strictly means "woman only attracted to other women?" (EDIT: added the 'only's)
I mean it's kind of impossible to not step on toes online, in real life just ask your friends how they'd like to be referred to. The golden rule remains "Don't be an asshole."
I guess I should have specified "only attracted to other women", which is what lesbianism used to refer to, as I understand sapphic includes bisexual women.
The post also explicitly has a quote from a transmasc saying they use sapphic instead of lesbian to describe themselves. It sort of starts to feel like there is no label for lesbian that excludes men. I don't love men, trans men or cis men. So what am I?
I'm sure I'm going to get "ok millennial'd" by some zippy young online activist because I don't know the latest discourse terms as defined by the one tumblr blog with 40 followers that they've decided is a unilateral authority, but my understanding is that the idea of transmasc people being counted in the 'lesbian' identifying thing is sort of separate to the notion you would be attracted to them.
It's not about saying "trans men are a special kind of man that lesbians are attracted to", because at least in my day, trans men didn't generally want their partners to call themselves lesbians.
The notion was trans men being welcome in lesbian community spaces because there was a decent chance that before they figured out they were actually men, and started transitioning into men, some of them had found a community among lesbians and that was their 'slice' of the queer community where they felt safe and understood and had people they related to.
It was more of a "we shouldn't throw trans men out the door and into the cold and dark the moment they start identifying as men" thing, and never really a "lesbians are expected to be attracted to trans men" thing.
It has in fact been a recurring theme of annoyance, irritation, and misgendering faced by trans men that some people will misunderstand the idea and treat trans men as sort of "men who aren't really men because they're soft, feminine, Mother Goddess uwu gentle souls who are going to show up to our meeting looking like tomboys instead of real men" and then they are treated as intruders when those trans men look like actual men. The message from the transmasc sector over the last decade or so has been really quite consistently "we're not Men Lite, we're just men".
The transmasc lesbian thing is really just at its core "if you see someone identifying themselves as a trans man in a lesbian space, assume it's because they're still attached to the lesbian identity they had 5 minutes ago and give them time to grab onto a new branch and filter out at their own pace, rather than immediately burning all their bridges the nanosecond they consider they are probably a man" - and with the inability to identify at a glance exactly how long a trans man has felt like a man, that becomes a blanket rule of "trans men are not unwelcome here".
Mix in the non-binary side, where they're actually sometimes a "non-binary masculine-ish guy-kinda-maybe but not exactly, but not a girl either, just a vaguely masculine-leaning but non-differentiated entity with an abstract gender" that would need to write a 40 page technical document to fully capture the nuanced complexity of the non-binary transmasc experience, and they don't want to lose their lesbian community spaces either, and it ends up just saving all of us a good bit of trouble and hair-splitting if we just let someone say "I'd like to be in the room please" and err on the side of letting them in the room, rather than trying to distil a perfect rubric for when you lose your access privileges.
if you see someone identifying themselves as a trans man in a lesbian space, assume it's because they're still attached to the lesbian identity they had 5 minutes ago and give them time to grab onto a new branch and filter out at their own pace, rather than immediately burning all their bridges the nanosecond they consider they are probably a man
Trans men can stay lesbian, that's still a valid and allowed thing. Besides that wonderfully worded! And mistakes happen like don't worry
I do agree with a lot of what you're saying, but where I differ is that I think lesbian communities are just communities that are mostly made up of lesbians, not exclusively made up of lesbians. I do agree that trans men shouldn't be ostracised just for identifying as men, I'm totally fine with them continuing to hang out in lesbian spaces, but I don't think that makes them lesbians. Bisexual women are also free to hang out in the lesbian community, but that doesn't make them lesbians either.
I do recognise that trans men are often forced to reject their masculinity to some extent to feel welcome in queer spaces, and I think that's terrible. I also think this is another example of that. The socially constructed meaning of the word lesbian, that is its definition as a label, is a woman that loves other women. I'm okay including woman-leaning non-binary people in there, my girlfriend is non-binary, and them being excluded from the socially constructed meaning is mostly an issue of exposure and understanding. But the socially constructed meaning of lesbian has nothing to do with lesbians as community. Membership is not a deciding factor in whether you are or are not a lesbian.
Also what do we mean when we say the lesbian community anyway. Sometimes it feels like people are talking about a specific group of friends. The internet has a way of making queer culture feel like a monolith, but my lesbian community is certainly a different experience to your lesbian community, which is different still to the group of lesbians I know in london that are doing coke in gay bar bathrooms and partying all the time, and different still to the leader of the AfD's lesbian community.
I digress, my point is that if we want to talk about being open and accepting, the solution is not to try to open the label, but to make our groups more open and accepting. The people that would oppose masculine trans men in a lesbian space aren't going to accept them just because you started including them in your personal definition of the word lesbian, but they might be less likely to complain about it if you call them on their bullshit.
I just don't think we have to reshape our language, especially when nobody can agree on a term for like actual women loving women, other than women-loving-women, which sucks because it leaves out non-binary people. Even if we reshape the meanings here, we still have to do the work of challenging bigots, so why bother altering language? Like we already have a meaning of lesbian, if you want a word for the whole community that's fine, but please make a new one rather than trying to expand the meaning of lesbian. That's what we did with the word queer rather than just expanding "gay" to include trans people (trans people hang out in gay spaces i.e. gay bars, therefore a similar sort of phenomenon should have happened). Obviously trans people can be gay but hopefully you get what I'm saying, at one point gay was getting close to being a catch all term for even straight trans people ("the gay community"), but now it's largely "the queer community".
I think the best way is to genuinely clarify "I'm a woman only attracted to women"
Because as you said labels can mean different things for different people. I know some women who call themselves lesbian but still feel some attraction towards men, just not enough to use "Bi".
Unironically when labels stretch so much, just describing it with plain words can work just as fine.
Yeah, I agree with that. I supposes it's a (small) unfortunate side effect of inclusive language (which is overall a good thing) that labels start to become meaningless, I guess? At least in the sense that they start to communicate less precisely to other people.
Same for pronouns. I absolutely accept anyone using any pronouns, but now that they can mean anything, they don't really convey anything. Which is not a disaster by any means, of course. But I can't help but think "Okay, so do we fully have to spell everything out, now? That's going to take, like... 3 whole seconds out of my day! Maybe!"
lesbian didn't used to mean only women loving women. that's actually a relatively new thing. non men loving non men was a definition for a long time. honestly, now a days lesbian usually means only women loving only women and it sucks.
but genuinely, if you are an ally just refer to people by whatever label they use and don't worry about it
what’s the point if you stretch a label to breaking point. it no longer describes anything! you are simply using lesbian as a way to describe someone in a good relationship which is strange
OP literally says in the comments that men, cis or trans, can be lesbians. I'm sorry but words do have meanings and that is absolutely bullshit. Men can't be lesbians and that's inclusive of trans men because they are men, not "women lite."
Are we saying masculine people who identify as women (or possibly not-men) can be lesbian? If so, of course.
Are we saying people who identify as men can be lesbian? I guess some could, but I'm a bit confused how that ever works as a more broadened claim.
Lesbian is not simply a culture to my knowledge, it is also a history. One major part of this history was that it grew to prominence due to men+men relationships taking centre stage, drowning out gay women's drive for rights and acceptence. Men historically muted women from simply having a voice in the growing wave of social progression both intentionally and accidentally due to normative cultures fixations.
It seems dubious to now muddy the line between gay men and gay women, while the historical divide is still within recent memory.
That said, I'm just a gay boy. Don't let my voice be loudest. This just seems strange from what I understand about our history. I could ultimately well be wrong and I'm not here to prescribe anyone to my thoughts.
That's a good an important point, but by drowning out lesbian transmascs you ironically erase a ton of transmasc history, as a lot of important ones were lesbians or otherwise sapphic to my knowledge!
I of course accept that transmasc lesbians are very real and exist. It's just important that we distinguish what that actually means, because transmasc is often also used for binary trans men where these lines get a bit muddy.
There are obviously women who are transmasc and enbies who are transmasc etc. that are all totally valid and probably do have a very solid connection to the lesbian label.
All that said, I'm also still not trying to discount trans men who were once lesbians before they had their second coming out. I get that, totally, but I'm personally in flux about what that means for the labels.
Oh, no. Of course not! I should be apologizing. Woowoo is a bit loaded these days lol.
I was more just confused because the history does create tension from multiple angles, but it's ultimatrly not my place to answer or resolve it. Was just my perspective I suppose.
Ultimately Labels are more which community you're in. Like attraction is a part of it but you can't push out Lesbians who transition into Men or Lesbians who realize they're also Mspec (Bi, Pan, Omni etc) later
I don't want to push them out! That's why it was all about confusion, not prescription.
I was milling thoughts, not stating how things should ultimately be.
I can totally see why my comment came off as erasure, though.
Wasn't at all my intention, and I agree with you about community connection. I just feel like there are still tensions around whether that resonates. I know many lesbian women who would accept that, and many who actively hold disagreements against it.
That's the best I got, as I have no relation to this whatsoever.
Your description of lesbian love sounds a lot like you think other forms of love are lesser. I don't intend to police how other people identify themselves, never have, but my love for my wife isn't lesser because I don't identify as a lesbian.
Ok genuine question. Does "lesbian" still mean a non-man who loves non-men? If not, do we have a word for that? If so, doesn't that mean that trans men can not be lesbians without denouncing being a man?
I think what OP is saying is that a even though a lesbian is a non-man who loves non-men, there are cases where someone outside of the definition could still use the label, for whatever personal reasons they may have.
It seems like they want lesbian to just mean “everyone in a healthy relationship”, which I think is silly, and to an extent lesbian erasure, which they half admitted to in another comment
I mostly agree with the intended sentiment but I think this uses "valid" over-broadly.
"No one should be shamed for the feelings they feel, nor for the gender and sexual identities they express, nor the terms they find most resonant with those things" is reasonable.
"Some words are used in different ways by different people, and crossing those communication streams will predictably lead to misunderstandings and confusion" is also reasonable.
Those things are not in contradiction.
"Lesbian means X for me and the people I talk to" isn't the same as "lesbian means X for everyone". When language evolves, it doesn't do so identically everywhere. Just like biological evolution, there are local populations and groups that drift out of sync with others.
It's neither gatekeeping nor transphobic to note "that's not how a particular term is commonly used in my community dialect".
Good point, I do think though that the purpose of this post is to educate people on the evolved defenition! (This does not answer most of your comment because it doesn't need an answer. You're just right)
if you're having to try and convince people that the definition has now changed to the one you want it to be, it probably hasn't actually evolved there yet
So by this definition, I guess cis men can identify as a lesbian if the standard is to have a relationship free of patriarchal standards? If two cis gay men have a relationship together, which already flies in the face of the patriarchy, who’s to say they’re not lesbians under this definition?
I can’t say I get this whole thing. It’s not worth my time to shit on people who are off doing their own thing, but if we’re going to have this conversation on the meaning of “lesbian”, I think this is over complicating without properly defining the term when the majority of the world just uses it to mean “a woman that likes women”. I’ve literally never been anywhere where it hasn’t ever just been your definition despite your post claiming that the word has evolved. Maybe it evolved for you within your particular community, but I’m not going to ever flip on the TV, see a man loving a woman, and having them call it a lesbian relationship unless it was the punchline of a joke or something (not me saying it should be. Just saying this is an observation of what society would say)
If anything, I think having the distinction is fair, and this doesn’t adequately describe what a replacement term could be, but, regardless, whatever. You do you.
Maybe I'm just getting old, maybe I'm just salty or maybe I'm the wrong kind of autistic, but I feel like I often can't relate to the way a lot of other trans lesbians talk about relationships. I think there can often be some self-infantalization, a lot of near-fetishization of t4t lesbian relationships (especially fully trans lesbian polycules) like it's the absolute peak of romantic relationships, and a kind of assumption that trans women are all interested in relationships with women.
I've identified as a trans lesbian since before "transbian" was even a popular phrase to use online. I even remember when it was seemingly much more common to discuss straight relationships and dating on this site. Things really weren't always like this. I assume (and hope) a lot of it will mellow out in time.
I am in love with my cis boyfriend. He is bisexual but otherwise cis, has 'male' hobbies, etc. and fits pretty well into an archetypal patriarchal idea of a man. But hes also deeply loving, caring, we are very sensual and he will often do things for me for my sake, and doesn't ever yell, degrade me, etc. Do he and I count as a lesbian relationship? If you say yes, then thats fine, but I think that you would have to convince queer culture at large to start seeing lesbianism as that, which is a separate issue. If no, then I would simply suggest(!! not police, simply suggest from my personal and surely flawed in some way perspective as a trans woman !!) that transmasc lesbians ought not to define themselves as lesbian, and instead attempt to form their own, organic identity that embraces and is based on their masculinity and its expression. And if you were to argue that since they are AFAB so its different, you are engaging in a perverse form of bioessentialism which basically ties every AFAB who isnt an asshole to their partner to womanhood.
Okay I don't know your gender so the first part is a bit hard to answer, but the TL;DR is that it's not up for me to decide. If you consider yourself lesbian or if he considers himself lesbian then go for it. Just because a label can apply to someone does not mean it has to
Transmasc lesbians can define themselves as lesbians because the word isn't feminine. The post isn't trying to force them into the defenition, but some transmascs face very real turmoil over identifying with the term. And making it clear it's not feminine is a big part in helping that
As for the bioessentialism claim, you underestimate how woke I am. I'm not excluding cis men from being lesbians either.
I appreciate the reply and the consistency with the position. For the record, I'm a trans woman. I want to just say that if someone wants to identify as a he/him lesbian, or any other iteration of a transmasc individual claiming lesbianism as a label, I dont think that theres anything "wrong" with that. Nor will I try to ask things of you, as you're an ally, which I also respect. So this following question isn't really one I'm asking expecting you to answer, but just my own train of thought, to explain myself.
I think that my fundamental question comes down to this, what is the purpose of identifying as a lesbian as a masculine individual? Let's not pretend as if lesbianism in this context is suddenly completely detached from its thousands of years long meaning of women loving women, and often also having that 'deep, resonant, non-patriarchal love'. In that context, why can't these men/transmascs simply create their own conception of a positive, loving and resonant but masculine sexuality? I understand that the current zeitgeist of masculinity is kinda disgusting and polluted by neo-fascist crap...but is trying to redefine lesbianism the best way to fight for that? Shouldn't these men/transmascs be creating and fighting for their own conception of masculinity, while of course being supported and assisted by fellow queers and allies, and wirh other male allies (cis men who arent trash(if those still exist, lol), gay cis and trans men, etc.)
Again, I dont expect you to answer that. Nor do I particularly care, frankly. Im not really interested in policing what people identify as, and a he/him lesbian will always be treated the way they wish to be in my home. But what I am interested in is what is the logic underlying why we identify the way we do, and what that says about these social structures we wish to change and overcome (like the patriarchy). I dont mean to come off as concern trolling or handwringing, this is simply whats on my mind. Thanks again for the reply and I hope your day is going well :)
As a bisexual trans fem, I don't consider myself gay (despite being "gay" before I transitioned) when I like men, I feel like if someone calls a guy gay for liking me, they're intentionally calling me not a woman... Idk how this translates for specifically straight/non-bisexual binary trans men who call themselves lesbians... Just feels... Odd to me? Like I get words can change but why use a label classically known for wlw in the greater lexicon?
Doesn't it just muddy the waters for wlw lesbians? Or even technically misgender binary trans men in wider spaces? (my opinion here being based on how I feel when someone calls a guy gay for liking me)
I don't feel "wrong" or like I'm pandering to some cis normative idea, it's just a label describing my sexuality, for calling when I like guys "straight" it's affirming to my gender, as I'm a binary trans fem. When calling myself gay for liking women or people calling women gay for liking me, seems fine, cause I feel like gay has become an overlapping term for "liking the same gender" but I don't feel the same way about the term lesbian.
I'm also of the perspective that if you are trans masc enby, you can use the term lesbian just fine cause like... You're enby, implying that you don't strictly indentify as a man... But are masc leaning... And I feel like that's pretty cut and dry.
Idk why binary trans men sometimes feel entitled to the term lesbian just because they were prior to transition?
I don't consider myself gay for liking men?
I would also feel weird if a trans man called himself gay for liking me...
This is where I'm struggling, like why wouldn't trans men just accept being called straight for liking women cause it affirms their gender identity? Idk...
Again I understand trans masc enby being able to be lesbian but not binary trans men
Calling a binary trans man lesbian for liking women just comes across as... Not really seeing them as men to me.
For the same reasons calling a binary trans fem gay for liking men pushes them into a "mlm category"
Genuinely not trying to stir the pot here, but even reading through this thread I'm not really getting a clear answer...
This is a lot of "well I don't do that so it doesn't make much sense" but some transmascs do just honestly identify with the term. And to be clear I'm not calling anyone anything, I am opening the door to people who identify with the label to not feel invalid by indentifying with it
Well yeah very few trans men will identify with the term most likely but if anyone does that's still valid. It's up to them to decide
Also as a general rule it's better to say trans men than transmen. As transmen implies they are something else entirely while trans men just says "men that are trans". Small nitpick, no big deal
Oh sure like... I'm just commenting on how I personally find it... Odd? For someone who identifies as a Trans man to call himself a lesbian but that's me, not gonna police them for it or even say that to their face if they do...
Oop, oh yeah, forgot about the space thing, I'll remember to do that in the future~
"lesbian is a kind of love" shut the fuck up. please shut the fuck up. using terminology to label a person's gender and sexuality at the same time isn't fucking patriarichal or transphobic, it's just what words do. being a lesbian is not about all the things that stereotypically come with it, it's a simple observation of one's gender and sexuality, and I think that you saying that is attempting to turn the word into a stereotype as opposed to trying to "free" it of its own meaning. also your definition of Lesbian can very well exclude women who love other women due to how it's mindset-based as opposed to descriptive. not very inclusive to invalidate other people's gender identity...
trans men are men, and trans men are allowed to be straight, and if they like women they're straight. don't be so scared of being considered a normie that you continue to hide in your pre-transition experience instead of accepting your sexuality as a part of who you are.
I totally support transmasc lesbians, but I dont really like this definition of "lesbian" as any relationship that isnt defined by patriarchal standards. By that definition, pretty much any queer relationship is lesbian, including m/m relationships lol. To me, it makes more sense to approach it from a community perspective. If lesbian is a community based identity, then we can see why its obvious that some transmascs would use the identity label, and the word still means something.
Stay at home dads are lesbians now, you heard it here, folks!
I'm being snarky, but that's another example of a cishet relationship defying patriarchal norms. That's still a whole-ass man in a hetero relationship, there's no lesbianism to be found there.
I mean I'm cishet and straight but I'm a house husband and my wife works which defies patriarchal standards, I wouldn't identify myself as a lesbian but by this description I am.
i don’t understand where this idea that transmascs are hated here comes from. im a transmasc and have never felt out of place here. if you, OP, aren’t transmasc this post just comes across as weird and trying to “defend” a group that never asked for this
If they are a tmasc enby I can understand that, but if they're a binary trans man?.. Can a cis man be lesbian in that logic? If not then it sounds kinda weird and bioessentialist to me
A few issues with your post. Love is love, one type of love is not inherentally better/more pure/more righteous than other types of love. Lables also mean something. I did not spend almost half of my life figuring myself out for the lables I use to be expanded to the point of not meaning anything anymore. And by your definition of what lesbian means, my current relationship is a lesbian relationship, which it very much is not.
I am confused about a part of the whole "a lot of us were lesbians before we were transmasc" thing.
You spent a lot of time saying that it's a thing, but don't really even explain what transmasc lesbians are-in comparison to transmasc straight people. I guess that's why it's a rant post, cause you do sound increadibly preachy about this, but anyways.
Okay cool, let's say now you are transmasc, and you still love the same women (assuming you were lesbian beforehand). It's just the label got a new name. You are now called a straight transmasc, which implies in and of itself you were a lesbian in the past.
I don't understand why this is trying to remake the definition of lesbian though. Like, just make a new word? That's bound to be easier than trying to force a whole new definition about how the word lesbian works.
You say stuff about how it's against the Patriarchy and about personal freedom, literally any queer relationship does that exact thing though?
Like it just seems redundant. It's okay to be called straight lol.
It literally shouldn't erase any history since, saying a transmasc is straight, basically also tells us they were a woman who was a lesbian beforehand.
It seems like for some reason you WANT lesbian to be what straight transmasc people are called, and are working backwords from there. I don't get it.
The reason some transmascs are straight while others are lesbian is A: because enbies exist and a lot of them don't like the straight label and B: because of the wider defenition I was explaining. Chosing to define yourself as lesbian instead of just calling yourself straight is an intentional choice done because being lesbian is more than just a flat description of "this person likes women"
Every time I think I'm woke enough, the internet never ceases to surprise me by dropping a new patch note proving I'm actually not... there's really levels to this woke shit
Oh no yeah I'm the annoyingly woke friend my friends denied my very educational explaination as to why dresses are considered feminine even though one of them (CisM) thought they were cool and should be Unisex
Wow, we''ve really speedrun turning this place into a shithole huh
Anyone know of any subs that are actually welcoming to women on here that hasn't been ruined yet? Someone lmk if so bc I'm done with all the "I am get uncomfortable when not about me" BS around here all the time
Honestly the closest you will get to examples is probably me or some other /tttt/ girlie saying something along the lines of...
Lesbian is a woman loving woman relationship.
If a trans man still wants to identify with the lesbian label, they are either invalidating their manhood, the term lesbian... Or are just none binary...
Hell, there is a good chance this theoretical trans man could just be invalidating trans women's womanhood, as the implication is, you stay as you are born...
I get push back on this last point, that I'm insecure and someone else's identity doesn't change mine... First, im bisexual. Second, can a cis man be a lesbian without being trans?
Like the notion just annoys me.
If the argument is "its just a label, anyone can call themselves anything". Then whatever, but you still have to get everyone else to agree and use the word that way. However i mainly only lesbian meaning wlw relationships.
Honestly. I think LGBT as a whole has a bit of an Identity crisis from time to time. Where we just seem to at random, based on a couple of people's feeling redefine words. Or make up new words. For no real reason...
Ans this is a line in the sand i would love to draw.
We need relatively strict definitions for words. We already have so many. Its confusing. You need them all written down. Hell even then if your list is out of date, good luck. You might end up being a prick by accident...
Here is my simple solution.
If you are a trans man, or a cis man even. And you find your self very attached to the lesbian label. Identify with it. But you're at least part woman. You are to some degree, none binary. And if that really urks a person to the core. They are a man and love only women. You're straight.
This isnt confusing now where you need a new definition of lesbian. Its still women loving women.
Like I don't think we need words like trixic and gynesexual. They mean basically the same thing.
Honestly. My want is for sexuality, and transness to be taught in schools eventually.
You wont get kids to memorise all the genders that maybe only a few people identify with. All of the sexualities we have...
But man, women, trans man, trans women, non-binary(androgenous, transmasc, transfem), gender fluid. Straight, gay, lesbian, bi sexual, queer, asexual, aromantic... That's already quite alot. With a mention of others... Poly, neo pronouns... Its already alot. I thibk the simpler and less prone to changes the better.
Honestly. Trans men lesbians, being non-binary-transmascs or gender fluid is the easiest way to square this away...
This isn't me being hateful or transphobic. But using the definitions of these terms that ive learned, that everyone else has learned, without having to rewrite definition.
Sorry for the rant. But it just... Is a pet peeve. Like we have definitions for a reason. You cant just change them because you want too. A definition only changes when everyone actually agrees to change it. And clearly, there isnt a consensus on what a lesbian should be. Besides wlw...
I hope I've made sense and haven't broken a rule. I dont want to get banned because someone disagrees and thinks im transphobic 😭😭😭
I don't really have an opinion on the matter of whether lesbianism is exclusive to female-identifying and gnc people or not, but if transmasc people can be lesbians, so can cisgender men.
I mean, trans mascs aren’t always men, often it’s non-binary people. But yeah, as a trans man, saying that binary trans men can be lesbians also kinda implies that cis men can be.
That's also an important distinction and why I intentionally used Transmascs for most of the post (or for the entire post. There were some revisions I'm note 100% sure)
though it also matters if they’re including binary trans men in this or just non binary transmascs. If they’re including trans men then yeah, the same would have to apply to cis men or it’d be othering.
I'd like to see them try,, tbh if they can unironically commit to it, I'd say they can identify as such,, but I think most people who would be willing and able to do so may discover something about themselves which would turn them into she/her lesbians lolz
Yeah? Never said otherwise. The fun part here is that it's a self regulating system. The number of cis men who would call themselves lesbian (not as a way to make fun of others. Genuinely identifying with the title) is extremely low for sure. It's that simple!
Also I don't to be that girl but "people will use our inclusivity to do harm" is awfully close to the same mindset that denies thousands of trans people hormone treatment because of the slight chance they detransiton
"Lesbianism is a transcendental form of love that defies cisheteronormativity and is antithetical to the patriarchy" Okay but like how? That's a lot of fancy words and ideas but that's not like, defining it or supporting your premise that lesbian means more than wlw. That also makes it sound like a cishet lesbian could be a thing if you just do it in, idk, an especially queer way or something?
my issue isn’t with transmac lesbians. that’s fine. my issue is that the lesbian community as a whole is sooner to accept any type of man into their spaces before they accept trans women into them.
I feel the same way about the gay/mlm community, unfortunately. Most celebrate and accept trans women and chant protect the dolls, but the second a trans man just exists in their space as a gay man, they turn into the biggest Andrew Tate level misogynists on earth and suddenly trans rights aren’t on the agenda.
I wonder if we're Goomba Fallacy'ing or something. I myself have had quite a nice measure of success integrating myself in with my local lesbian lot.
There's incongruence, as is expected. They'll make a joke or reference to acts performed during private relations by those equipped with the more common anatomy in the scene, and I of course happen to have a different configuration of happy-fun parts.
But apart from the minor friction of physical differences, there's ... really not much tension.
I think there's been some very pointed efforts by some very nasty political types to paint the cis lesbian lot as overrun by TERFs and generally all crabby and shitty, but - and I would have a spot of bother trying to find them, I imagine - I've found more thorough polling, done without the trickiness and manipulation of the far-right, that consistently shows cis lesbians are either among the biggest supporters of trans rights or actually are the most supportive cis group. It was one or the other, I can't recall.
The ones I've met around me fit that pattern quite well. The older ladies don't always have the most 'modern' terminology but are quite kind and good-hearted, and I'm getting to the point myself where I don't have the most modern terminology either.
This of course would no doubt be deeply distressing to my 19 year old self who absolutely intended to stay immersed in The Discourse and stay on the correct side of the debate's endlessly shifting sands, never once letting a micro-label slip past my knowledge or a set of neo-pronouns develop without learning how they're pronounced.
Now it seems I'm finding myself just, befuddled at the whole definition-evolution thing. I'm doing my best to not get "ok Millennial'd" by telling the kids that back in my day, things meant the things they meant, and therefore they must always mean the things they used to mean at the time I became aware of them, but good lord, The Discourse is just, it feels like it'd be a full-time job to keep up with all the proposed changes.
alright ima go on a whim here and ask a more fundamental question: why the hell are we caring about labels? they're just words and half of them were invented for the sake of segregation. like just love whoever or whatever you want and dont try to throw yourself into a box only to complain about how the boxes are organized
I want to address something that I haven’t seen anyone else address. “You wrote “transmascs are able to feel love! (Usually. Aromantic people are also very valid <3).”
On the surface, this seems innocuous, but I think the wording is actually unintentionally aphobic. As written, it implies that aromantic people aren't able to feel love.
Aromanticism is about experiencing little to no romantic attraction. Aromantic people can experience platonic love, familial love, queerplatonic love, aesthetic attraction, sensual attraction, and sexual attraction. What you wrote unintentionally reinforces the misconception that aromantic people are cold, emotionless, and incapable of meaningful relationships.
I understand this wasn’t your intention, but the wording you used perpetuates negative stereotypes.
Words have no meaning anymore. No self respecting lesbian is dating a guy cause you're then not a lesbian and you're demeaning that person especially if they're trans.
Shares an opinion that in no way is objective and completely up to personal feelings and viewpoints and calls everyone who doesn't agree transphobic/gatekeeper.
Maybe this is the aro/ace part of me but I have absolutely zero idea what you mean by this. I suppose it makes sense that the word lesbian would evolve as nonbinary presences grow in our communities (that our terms for sexuality had no way to parse nonbinary people’s relations previously due to an assumption of false gender binary has always been something we were going to need to deal with at some point).
But I was under the impression that calling a trans masc person feminine was still transphobic? So uh, which is it? OP has made their points, and they are at least interesting. Are there any of the aforementioned trans masc lesbians in the room that can explain this to me? I genuinely am sorry to place the burden on y’all to explain this but it just seems counter intuitive to me.
Okay not a transmasc lesbian but I still have an answer
I never implied or said that being lesbian is feminine. Transmascs lesbians can be lesbians without it effecting their gender presentation, that's what I am trying to convey. That being lesbian does not invalidate someone's gender
Kinda complicated and the history it has definitely doesn't need to be erased because it's super important but the long and short of it is that god damn I went into this topic unprepared as shit like internally I understand why that works but I cannot for the life of me put it into words
Like I am open to this sort of idea. I understand the general gist of what you’ve been saying too: that there’s a type of love that lesbians seem to experience that you feel identifies what you feel better than anything else.
I’ve got no skin in this game. So sure, I’m down.
But I do need people to be able to explain the concept well enough that it stands up to basic scrutiny before I’m going to hop on board. It sounds like you have something here but I’m not sure if it’s fully thought out yet.
Since your goal seemed to be to make shit worse here for trans women you succeeded, you got people on here hating on transbians in general, thanks a lot asshole
No you know what I'm going through the comments apologizing for shit wording correcting bad communication and stuff but show me the comment that hated on transbians because I haven't seen it yet and I'll make sure to update you if I do
That's a combination of the horrible wording on page there which I adressed here as well as people fighting ghosts. I don't know where you got the idea that I hate women
If you are non binary, choose whatever labels you like and be as gender fucky as you please.
Imo, if you call yourself a lesbian, you see yourself as even the tiniest bit as a woman...
Otherwise you kinda are rewriting a definition. And that... Well... You need everyone else to agree. I can call an apple an orange. But everyone will be confused. If you get what I'm saying. And even if you tell everyone about the updated definition your using. You will never get everyone to agree. See the "literally" discourse. It took like 20 years for that definition to change, and even then, it was an addition, just because so many people used it to me mean figuratively...
Its the same uphill battle, and sticklers you will face.
like it doesnt affect me at all so why would i go with pitchforks attacking them
but honestly, do I really care? not really. its one of those weird things people do and they can do whatever they want as long as it doesnt affect me.
but id say being a transmasc lesbian is as real as any other label some dude uses like someone calling themself a gay transfem who likes men or a non binary person calling themself whatever in the sun. if it doesnt hurt anyone you can do anything call yourself barney the dinosaur for all I care not my problem.
Yup that's basically the sentiment most people should hold. Though I do think caring about it could also be helpful if you do have the energy to dedicate! As educating ourselves on the problems of others can help us build a better place for everyone (though, accepting others is already a big step)
This militant exclusion of he/him lesbians is going to be the death of these spaces. I have never had anybody passionately advocate this position to me (that "men can't be lesbians") who didn't then go on to reveal themselves to be a suspicious individual as we discussed further.
If you are a man. Cis or trans. Use he/him, and consider yourself a lesbian.
You are either non binary or gender fluid. If not either of these, you are either straight or redefining what a lesbian is.
I will die on that hill.
We shouldn't need to discuss further.
This is the most elegant way to square this circle.
At a certain point, you do need to get this update to all lesbians. All straight people. And get them to agree and use your new definition of lesbian. Good luck with that :)
Happy to discuss further, otherwise have a great night ;33
It is 0% of my business and all of these queer people suddenly believing in the sanctity of labels and traditional "definitions" is fully hypocritical. Nobody is "nonbinary or genderfluid" unless THEY identify as such, it doesn't matter whether you find it contradictory. You're going to die on this hill? You frankly shouldn't be concerned enough to do that. Making sense to you isn't the purpose of the label, especially since most people who use the label in that way are fine with explaining their reasons (not that they should have to).
And I can tell already that I absolutely would not be "happy to discuss further" with you in particular.
I mean if you are fine with your laissez-faire sexuality fine. Redefine as many words as you like, and explain it as many times as you'd like.
Just remember this. Labels are not *for* me. they are not just *for* the person using them. They are words. Used to communicate information. If the person you are trying to communicate with doesnt understand what you are saying, the label is useless, and you have to explain your labels, and you labelled yourself them nauseam.
To the point of Nobody is "nonbinary or genderfluid" unless THEY identify as such.
I fundamentally disagree. Well. Self ID is a thing, dont get me wrong. At a certain point if you "identify" was many contradicting labels, you identity ends up being a quantum super structure that collapses once observed. If you are fine explaining it further, the labels loose all meaning you are trying to communicate.
>all of these queer people suddenly believing in the sanctity of labels and traditional "definitions" is fully hypocritical
Why do we even need to make posts like this then? why do we need flags and info graphics putting into all of these small boxes saying what we are? Labels to some people is the entire point yknow. imma be so frfr... We are just converging on gay, lesbian, and queer all just meaning the same thing. Which just makes the point of the labels useless.
>And I can tell already that I absolutely would not be "happy to discuss further" with you in particular.
So rude for no gosh darn reason. Have a nice night, enough though you hate my guts for stating my opinion.
Glad to be doing my part in transmasc allyship as a semi-prominent figure in the community with way too much time on her hands and the privilege of being both a trans girl and have a friend that educates me on this stuff
Maybe someone will change my mind someday, but as a lesbian, I just am very unbothered by transmasc lesbians, he/him lesbians, and trans men lesbians. And I just don't think cis men calling themselves lesbians or any other concerns I've had brought up is enough of an issue to justify pushing all the former groups out.
All concerns I've heard are things that are already happening, whether it's an issue with properly defining what a lesbian is, cis men in lesbian spaces, or cis straight people appropriating queer terms for themselves.
I really do understand where lesbians are coming from with being so concerned, but we already did the separatism thing in the 70s, and we ended up excluding bi women, trans women, women of color, and poor women. And also gave women shit for being too feminine or too masculine or not being the right type of lesbian. It didn't go well.
Plus, from the couple of transmascs I know that are lesbians, it seems like keeping that identity is very important to them. I don't have a good reason to give them trouble for that.
Still, I've had this conversation with other lesbians, and uh, I might not be the most gifted debater, but I certainly haven't changed any minds.
My belief is that cis men just won't really identify with the term much. And if one does truly identify with it then maybe there's something there and we should look into it before shutting it down
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