I do also wanna say, the original intent of my post was both a question and a framing device. It's not necessarily cis men or the patriarchy as a construct that's been working to change what the word lesbian means. It's been a concerted push by both TWERFs and left-leaning queers over the last decade or so to change the meaning of the word lesbian.
TWERFs and other transphobes work overtime to include trans men in lesbianism (and exclude trans women in the same breath) by focusing on some definitions that amount to AFABs who love AFABs. Trans men have been cozying up to TWERFs for decades, and this is just one manifestation of that.
Other left-leaning or liberal queer people have been working to reshape the definition of lesbian to be something akin to "non-men who love non-men", or "women and nonbinary people who love women and nonbinary people". I fundamentally disagree with this both of these styles of definition. I can think of three problems with definitions like this:
1. It still centers men's positionality by way of exclusion.
2. It lumps all nonbinary people into a category something like "woman-plus" or "woman-lite". This also acts as a neat bait-and-switch for transmisogynists, who deny trans women and transfems any sort of nuance with their own genders. It denies nonbinary people language that accurately centers their own experiences.
3. It denies women who love women the language to accurately describe ourselves without doing it in relation to men.
A big part of the reason I'm constantly banging this drum is that I'm tired of things that ostensibly are meant to center women being broadened to the point of uselessness.
This isn't about kicking people out of a community. You can be friends with and associate with whoever you like. This isn't even necessarily about policing people in certain community spaces, although as a trans woman,I do immediately feel less comfortable and less welcome in any lesbian space that is welcoming of trans men.
To mist-etc's point on how having accurate language will not materially protect us from harassment, I disagree. Allowing wiggle room in the definition of lesbianism such that it includes trans men gives those same trans men progressive sounding language they can use to spin being denied access to women's bodies as transphobia. Allowing trans men into the definition of lesbianism gives them space to shout down trans women who are actively fighting to be perceived, loved, desired, and respected as women.
One of the other big differences to me is this: lesbian has two constituent parts to its definition: [Women] who love [women]. Bisexuality doesn't care about the gender of the bisexual person using it to identify themself. Homosexuality doesn't care about the gender of the homosexual person using it to identify themself. Nonbinary doesn't care about the assigned sex of the person using the word (society does, the word itself does not). We have umbrella terms like queer, genderqueer, transgender, that already encompass messier definitions that don't have clean delineations.
Lesbian has two equal parts: being a woman, and loving women. This is important to me as a trans woman, and as a feminist, because it centers women.
Language should grow and add new words and ideas that more accurately describe the things they are trying to define, not expand the words that already have meaning until that meaning is lost.
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