“People are called the d-slur because they reject men! That’s why bi women can’t use it! Lesbian-only word!”
Nice separatist rhetoric, but that’s not how any of this works.
First, while there are lesbians who are called the d-slur after they say they’re not into men, nobody is going to ask a woman whether or not she likes men, or “make sure” she doesn’t, before they hurl that slur at her.
Not only is it impossible to know who someone isn’t attracted to unless they tell you, but bigots most often do not give a damn. Gay/bi people experience homophobia and fight for rights on the basis of our attraction to the same gender. No gay man is fighting for the right to not marry women. The idea a lack of attraction is all that homophobes attack people for also implies that they’d be similarly mad at aroace women, which is false.
(Here’s a post on the whole “lack of attraction” concept, pointing out historical conceptions of women’s [proposed lack of] sexuality.)
Second, there are bi women who only date women and straight women who don’t date anyone—lesbians aren’t the only ones who “reject” men or are punished for not being “available” to them. Insisting that other women are inherently “catering” or even “available” to them just because of their attraction to them is straight-up misogynistic.
Third, it takes about two seconds to learn about the etymology and see that it was originally about women being masculine (which most people associate with same-gender attraction, which bisexual women experience; this connection may also explain the common stereotypes of lesbians being hairy or ugly). At first, it virtually only applied to butches. The solitary d-slur as a pejorative arguably came from the term “bull-[d slur],” which was used to describe masculine women or those who “engaged in lesbian activities” (“lesbian” used to be a synonym for “tribade,” something one did rather than who one was.) A lot of homophobic violence comes from perceived gender-nonconformity.
Fourth, lesbians and bi women have shared community spaces and terminology including butch/femme and the word “lesbian,” for decades. forever. “Bisexual” wasn’t a (recorded) reclaimed identity term until about the 50s (possibly 40s), and in the 60s, some bisexuals chose to “call [themselves] homosexual, not bisexual” because they saw the “bisexual” label as a cop-out, and they’ll “be gay until everyone has forgotten that [same-sex attraction] is an issue.” Score one for internalized biphobia!
Until the 70/80s or so—when political lesbianism came about and gained popularity, especially among modern-definition lesbians—the word “lesbian” typically (though not exclusively) referred to all woman-loving women (but sometimes, only butches were considered “true” lesbians). The political usage of “lesbian” increased as the gay movement grew in response to its misogyny and power imbalance. We find one clear example of it including bi women from a 1973 issue of the lesbian newspaper, Lavender Woman:
To me, a lesbian is a woman-oriented woman; bisexuals can be lesbians. A lesbian does not have to be exclusively woman oriented, she does not have to prove herself in bed, she does not have to hate men, she does not have to be sexually active at all times, she does not have to be a radical feminist. She does not have to like bars, like gay culture, or like being gay. When lesbians degrade other lesbians for not going to bars, not coming out, being bisexual or not sexually active, and so on, we oppress each other.
Up until even the 90s (and allegedly early 2000s), “lesbian” was sometimes defined as “any woman who has at some time in her life loved another woman.” The woman who said this was Joan Nestle, out lesbian and founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The term “leather[d-slur]” was (as far as I can tell) coined in the 1996 book The Second Coming: A Leather[d-slur] Reader, co-authored by Robin Sweeney, a butch-identified bisexual woman. A 1996 study, “Ambiguous Identity in an Unambiguous Sex/Gender Structure: The Case of Bisexual Women,” states:
Many women in this study define a [d-slur] as ‘anyone who is not heterosexual,’ and lesbian-aligned bisexual women often use the term to describe themselves. This move allows bisexual women to participate in lesbian contexts without either the onus of deception, since ‘[d-slur]s’ includes bisexuals, or the burden of the bisexual stigma.
There weren’t many organized and independent bi communities until the 80s/90s, which was also when the lesbian community, for the most part, significantly split off from bisexual women (though separatism had been proposed and practiced before then). During this political shift, lesbians deemed bisexual women the “only true heterosexuals” and “parasites attaching themselves to the Lesbian community” even though, for decades, the lesbian community was their community.
Even without this history, many bi women will talk about how they’ve been called the d-slur by strangers, family, friends, and partners in regards to their bisexuality, and people still go “well, sorry, but you’re attracted to men so you can’t say our word,” as if bi women’s attraction to men negates the homophobia they face, as if they can’t be gender-nonconforming in the same way butch lesbians are.
Even by saying that “bi women are only called d-slurs because people assume they’re lesbians,” one acknowledges that bi women can have so much in common with lesbians that they get “mistaken” for each other and attacked for the same reasons: their love for women, and sometimes the gender-nonconformity that comes with that. Speaking of the second thing, do you think homophobic strangers would call a femme lesbian a d-slur more than they would a GNC/butch bi woman?
When bi women argue that they should be able to reclaim the d-slur, it’s not due to them being itching for shiny new ways to be edgy or even wanting to say it—it’s simply because this word targets them for the same reason it targets lesbians. It has always been their word.
Inb4: “Well, cishet guys are called the f-slur sometimes, can they suddenly reclaim it now?” This poor excuse for a counterargument only has a chance of working if you think bi women oppress lesbians. News flash: They don’t. Please cease your obsession with comparing bi people to straight people.
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