#someone just saw me talk about lesbophobia and lesbianism and decided to call lesbians as a whole terfs | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bullywug-n-mugwort · 4 months

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idk why people just decide they get to invalidate someone else's identity when they are not the one with that identity and therefore don't know what they're talking about. just saw someone i otherwise respect reblog a post about how bisexual lesbian is an invalid term because each term has changed over time and claiming it's lesbophobic and biphobic to use the term [something something mutually exclusive experiences]. i usually call my orientation "queer" but i often use "bi lesbian" to make sense of my own experience. the tags of this post were full of people dunking on all imagined reasons someone may call themselves a bi lesbian, none of which reflect my own experiences and reasoning.

not that i should have to defend myself, but a lot of these comments were very fixated on the experiences of "liking only women" vs "liking both women and men." these categories obviously have social significance, but to me personally, romantically and sexually, these categories aren't super helpful. i cannot isolate traits of manhood or womanhood i find attractive. i'm into femme traits until i see a hot butch. i like certain chests, certain facial features, and any genitals. these traits don't map onto coherent binary genders very well. not to mention my attractions shift with my fluid gender. if i'm looking for a consistent pattern, i'm into gendernonconformity if anything. i guess i'm far more into women than i am men unless the man is a flamboyant twink but at the end of the day i'm not into either as much as i am a very specific weird collection of queer gender markers. (and pansexual had never seemed to fit the bill, because there are also many gender expressions and markers i am certainly unattracted to.)

does that really make me a biphobic bisexual? i wrestled with more shame at the idea that i was a lesbian, a stereotype threat for the bisexual community i love. the twink i married turned out not to be a man at all. i was struggling with worries about comphet for years because i loved them but our marriage didn't feel "right," and now that we're both practicing genderqueers it does. to me, that experience made bisexuality feel less like home than it had before. at the same time, finding like two men attractive excludes me from the lesbian community. is it such a sin to have found home in a term that made coherent my knot of comphet and dysphoria?

i realized, as many lesbians with comphet do, that i would probably never be happy in a relationship with a man, as in someone who self- identified as a man and embraced manhood. i also find astarion bg3 hot as fuck. i fail to see how these are mutually exclusive experiences.

can i guarantee that no biphobia or lesbophobia has wormed its way into my brain? of course not, but it is so strange that embracing both those terms brands you as someone who hates both. it's also strange to exclude people from terms on the basis of internalized shame. why care if some people call themselves bi lesbians? does it feel invalidating to you? that's your own work-- same as women who think afab nonbinary people are really just women who are ashamed of being a woman and therefore should continue living as "women". (ie it's not my job to choose an identity that you approve of or think is free of shame. you figure it out.) are you worried it invalidates us in the eyes of the heteros? i simply don't believe in policing our own terms to make cishets see us as more valid or understandable. it's disguised respectability politics, plain and simple.

all these terms for our identities are best fits and best guesses, grasping for connections under this big lovely queer umbrella. the person who reblogged that post is a nonbinary lesbian. why do the same people who accept the concept of a nonbinary lesbian-- a thing that should be impossible if the term "lesbian" has actually calcified as the post claims-- insist that "bisexual" and "lesbian" are concrete, immovable, and mutually exclusive identities? to be extremely clear, i support nonbinary lesbianism. it's valid. and it's a weird fucking line to draw, saying that the gender spectrum can support loosely-gendered lesbianism on the side of the beholder but not the recipients.

there was also a historical argument claiming that people are misinterpreting contexts in which bisexual lesbian was used circa early 20th century. and like... okay??? i found the term in a pdf zine from the 90's which interviewed self-identified bisexual lesbians, gleaning a bunch of different reasons for the label. some fell into the assumptions of the aforementioned post, eg bisexuals who were basically political lesbians. (i don't claim to support this stance, though i do still insist people can call themselves whatever they want.) many more summarized complicated stories like mine, people who did not fall neatly into either "mutually exclusive" category because, it turns out, gender is a fluid weird spectrum. bi lesbians whose attractions are bi and gender is lesbian. bi lesbians who were literally only into women except for one "man". bi lesbians who were trying to untangle comphet and so weren't sure which label, if either, fit. bi lesbians who liked to fuck any gender but only fell in love with "women". so anyway, fuck outta here with "history doesn't work like that" narrow target practice.

and even if that's true... again, words are evolving all the time. we've made words like sapphic and achillean to make some sense of gender. "lesbian" has on-off been used as a gender term for decades. we've invited nonbinary people into lesbianism and many understandings of gender into bisexuality. bi lesbian is another evolution of our language, and people have been shitty about it since at least the early days of DTWOF-- bechdel's characters struggled with all of the above since the 80's.

and what's the point of terms? to find community, self- identity, and sometimes practical utility, eg in the dating world. were i to date again (yikes), "bisexual" would not be a helpful self-descriptor for finding a romantic partner. lesbian would. if i wanted to hook up, bisexual would be more helpful than lesbian, and i'd have to root through lots of gender expressions anyway. so in terms of my self identity and finding communities of similar folk, "bi lesbian" is a super helpful term. if you are a bisexual or a lesbian and feel frustrated or confused by my term, that's because it doesn't apply to you. maybe just realize this isn't your thing and leave our community to explore our experiences. love you, see you later in the sapphic tags where we have things in common.

so anyway, i think it's pretty silly to see a term, imagine reasons you dislike for why someone may use it, and pitch a fit. my identity's legitimacy has no bearing on yours. leave us alone.

#anyway #fuck that got long #that logic just really gets to me #obviously #i don't want to respond to the main post because i don't want to risk a stupid dogpile and days of arguing #but i'll post this in our tag so others can know i see you and you're doing great #bi lesbian #bi lesbianism #bisexual lesbian

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hmsindecision · 7 years

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omg, what has happened to the radeon community? both eco-rad and misaandry are defending the "lesbians trigger me bullshit". tbh, I'd not seen misaandry before, but eco-rad... she's the one that wouldn't stop defending that ramona blue book, and now she's back defending lesbians as triggers. what's it gonna take before everyone sees through their bullshit excuses for lesbophobia?

Anon, I don’t usually respond to asks specifically about other women, but I will address what you’re talking about here.

I found a lot of the talk with the books (there were multiple) where “lesbians” fall in love with men to be deeply, deeply hurtful. In fact, I contacted one author via facebook, with quotes from her book, only for her to tell me that I had no business criticizing her and that obviously I was just a big baby about sex scenes and then deleting the entire conversation. That hurt. It hurt me. A person.

And the posts saying that lesbians are a perfectly natural trigger? That was deeply hurtful too. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what a trigger is, and when I dig deeper I saw that one of the original posters said that she couldn’t see any lesbians because her friend committed suicide and she had been a lesbian. And that made my heart stop. So I wrote about clinical diagnoses and how that didn’t fit a clinical diagnosis.

So I am not going to specifically attack anyone’s words, that really isn’t my style, and I don’t really care to page through someone’s blog to read an ugly conversation, but I will address how this hurts me. A person. A lesbian person.

I have learned a lot lately about ways to humanize language. “People experiencing homelessness” instead of “the homeless” emphasizes the person and does not declare “homeless” an identity. Transitional housing often uses this to help people feel less defeated.

When people call me a lesbian, sometimes they mean it positively, and sometimes they’re forgetting the implication that I am a person.

Not too long ago, a friend died in a terrible accident. The next day, my heart beat so fast in my car that I had to pull over. She was very kind. She had a great laugh. She had a deaf rescue dog. She liked wine.

Those things make me think of her. They make me so sad that she is gone. She left a hole in the world.

If there were a word that summed up her personhood, I’d never want it erased. I don’t want the things about her to be gone, even though they hurt to see. Because she was a force of good in my life as a friend.

Imagine if I blacklisted her name. Imagine if I wanted to pretend she never lived. I never see a dog again. I cover my ears when I hear a loud and resounding laugh. Those things remind me of her and being up pain, but they aren’t triggers. You know in the DSM-V, for major depressive disorder, what an alternative diagnosis is? “Sadness.”

“Sadness” is a normal grief. When someone you care about dies, or there is an unshakeable loss, heaven and earth refuse to move and life can feel small and hollow. It’s a hard and terrible part of life. But it isn’t a PTSD trigger.

If I were to die, if one of the times I’d been low I had taken my own life, and someone who called me a friend decided they could never look at or hear about lesbians again, what was I to them? A person? Or a token? What, to them, was the sum of my existence?

That lesbian girl could have been me. And nothing breaks my heart more than to imagine a friend who decided to erase me from existence by erasing lesbians. That friend didn’t care about me enough to experience grief on my behalf. That makes me feel… like nothing.

#lesbophobia #trigger warnings #personal #sorry about discoursing

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