it makes me so sad how many lbpq+ women, me included, wrote off their attraction to women as “admiration” or “purely aesthetical” before they came to terms with the fact that they weren’t straight, because they didn’t experience attraction to women the exact same way they experience/d attraction to men.
because obviously society is incredibly invested in telling women that there’s only one way to feel attraction and it’s the way they feel attraction to men (even if they might not feel any attraction to men at all outside of compulsory heterosexuality) and if their attraction to women feels even a little bit different then obviously it’s not ~real~ and they’re really just straight. but that’s horseshit.
there’s a billion reasons why experiencing attraction to women and experiencing attraction to men would differ for women like, oh, i don’t know, the fact that our virulently homophobic and misogynist society grooms young women into heterosexuality before they’ve even learned to walk or talk while they’re explicitly dissuaded from any same gender feelings.
there’s an entire script for how women are supposed to feel about men laid out for them before they can even start forming an identity: this is what you’re supposed to want (a nice nuclear family), this is what you’re supposed to fantasize about (countless heterosexual narratives in media and the dominant rhetoric around sex), this is what you’re supposed to desire; it’s enforced by peers, media, the state, the education system, everyone around them. there’s no script for how women are “supposed” to be attracted to women apart from, yknow, not at all.
if you’re one of those women who feels like they’re not “allowed” to identify as gay/bi because your attraction to women doesn’t match what you had shoved down your throat all your life by compulsory heterosexuality: your feelings are valid, your attraction to women is valid, you are welcome among wlw and you don’t need to doubt yourself.