we got out

A female-only space for lesbians who have left Christianity to share our experiences.

[hard--headed--woman]

Lesbians, everything you do to share your experience matters. Even if it's just a little bit. Your song about lesbian experience matters, your poetry about lesbian experience matters, your book about lesbian experience matters, your text about lesbian experience matters, your video about lesbian experience matters, your posts on social medias about lesbian experience matters. Even your little fanfiction with a lesbian main character matters.

In this world, lesbians are silenced. We never hear about our experience, see it talked about or represented. Everything you have to say about what it's like to be a lesbian matters. And it's incredibly meaningful for the young lesbians reading it or listening to it.

So go on, make this post about the crush you have on this girl or this long text about what it felt growing up as a female homosexual. Make this joke about lesbian sex, write this song, make this video. Even if you find it silly or useless. It matters.

[sweatermuppet]

from Philadelphia Gay News, 1976

[howlonghaveyoubeenseventeen]

being on the other side of christianity I’m just like. why would you take something as beautiful as human life and ruin it by creating a higher power who hates your natural state of being and demands perfection with a set of standards that don’t mean anything. when you could just like. be kind and respectful to others. and enjoy being in your body. we never needed guilt and fearmongering.

[lesbianlenses]

Womonspace 1995

[lesbianartandartists]

Women marching in front of the White House during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, Washington D.C., 1987

[forsapphics]

I HOPE EVERY LESBIAN HAS A GREAT DAY

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, from “Culpable”, Instructions for Traveling West

[voluptatiscausa]

Been thinking a lot about how the central myth of my life since I was an infant was the idea that I was born fundamentally broken, dirty, and undeserving of love but an omnipotent entity in the sky was so benevolent and condescending that it loved me anyway (even though I did not deserve it) HOWEVER the only way I could be made unbroken and clean enough to someday approach this entity was by the torture and death of that entity’s inherently pure offspring

Anyway now I struggle to accept that I’m loved because I fear I am fundamentally broken and dirty inside. Probably not related tho

[spurgie-cousin]

I remember when it hit me like a mack truck that the people who told me God was "talking" to them were actually just....... having thoughts and feelings

[dragondroid]

One very important thing to keep in mind is that Christians have a fundamentally different definition of "love" than healthy people do.

In Christianity, you hear a lot about god's love for people, and how everything that happens to you is out of his love- including disasters, death, pain, and even eternal torture. Similarly, a lot of Christian abusers justify their abuse as being out of love for the victim.

This is because they view love as one-sided. They see it as something you do to someone, not a healthy bond of mutual consent and respect that you form with someone. When Christians call themselves a "religion of love" while abusing gay people or forcing non-Christians to conform to them, they're not being hypocritical in their eyes- to them, controlling or even harming someone because you think it's best for them is what love is.

[girlfishes]

What girls and women are taught about God directly sets them up for abuse from men. We were told that God is our father and is all loving, but that he punishes disobedience by sending us to be tortured forever. Furthermore, this punishment is not a contradiction, but a sign of his love for us.

When women are taught that the model for a father, god himself, is violent and vindictive, she is taught to expect that from male authorities in her life. When a husband or father hurts her, that is a sign of his love. He is only mirroring God.

When women are taught they if they don’t serve God, she will be sent to hell, that models her service to the men in her life. She must serve her husband like she serves God, and if she doesn’t she deserves what she gets, because the punishment is from her husband, her model of God.

When women are taught that even thinking ill of God is a sin, we are therefore taught that thinking of husbands, fathers, and pastors, in any negative way is a sin.

This is a psychological trap that functions to keep women in service to men. The contradiction of an all loving and violent god isn’t a mistake. It’s to teach women that violence is love.

[theshoesofatiredman]

No amount of praying to be repulsed by my sin ever helped me. It only made me hate parts of me that were normal and healthy and deserved to be loved. It erected barriers that prevented me from understanding myself and the world around me. You can go ahead and train your gag reflex to respond to your normal sexual impulses, but all that did to me was cause me to puke up the soul I was so desperately trying to prostrate. In my experience, you cannot use disgust as a roadmap to unrelenting love.

[theshoesofatiredman]

Something that's genuinely so eerie is that after spending enough time outside of Christianity, the responses that Christians give to questions or the things they say in conversation start to sound so canned it stops sounding like you're even talking with a person. It's like one moment I'm talking to my mother and the next she's telling me that God's ways are higher than our ways and in her feeble human mind she cannot begin to imagine what it's like to be God and somehow that means she doesn't have to view the amount of suffering in the world as a contradiction. And the shift is so jarring that it feels like I activated a sleeper agent, like I'm not talking to my mom anymore but the person she was programmed to be by her religion. And she sincerely believes what she's saying too. She may sound like she's parroting the party line but it's a lone she's bought into fully. And it's even crazier because I know I used to sound exactly the same. I know I used to code switch hard into the same sayings and had no awareness of how it sounded. They sound like they're in a cult

[exchristianlesbians]

I heard someone today say that humans have death anxiety because... get this... we weren't "created" to die. It was such a jarring thing to hear in the midst of an otherwise normal conversation at a funeral. Like, this person didn't want to (or rather, was programmed not to) acknowledge that we are animals like any other, with an instinct towards life and away from death, towards pleasure and away from pain. Something encoded deep in our DNA. No, we must be "special", different from every other animal, we were "supposed" to be eternal beings. It doesn't fully even make sense within Christian theology. But it was such a canned response, clearly said by this person dozens, if not hundreds, of times. It's still throwing me for a loop, it was just so weird. But the unnerving thing is, if I were still a Christian, I probably wouldn't have even blinked at such a sentence.

[keysmash-keysmash]

TO WHOEVER NEEDS TO HEAR THIS:

THE RAPTURE IS NOT REAL.

it will NOT happen.

The rapture was only introduced into US christianity in the late 18th-19th centuries.

Fundamentally, the rapture serves as a boogeyman to lord over believers, keeping them trapped in the church because....well....you dont want to be left behind when the rapture happens, do you?

YOU WILL NEVER HAVE TO TAKE THE MARK OF THE BEAST. THERE IS NO ANTICHRIST. THEY HAVE BEEN SAYING THE END TIMES ARE NEAR SINCE TIME STARTED. ALL OF THE "SIGNS" ARE JUST THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN HAPPENING IN THE WORLD FOREVER. THEY WILL HAPPEN AGAIN AND AGAIN. AND THE RAPTURE WILL NEVER HAPPEN.

you will not hear a trumpet call and then be left alone. you will not have to survive the tribulation of apocalyptic hell with satan ruling the earth until christ returns.

i promise.

you have a future!!!! you really do!!!! life will not end suddenly bc of the rapture.

plan for your future!!! envision it!!!! think about places you want to go and people you want to spend time with!!!

in order to build a beautiful future for yourself you must envision it!!!

[rarebritney]

lesbian couple on their wedding day after 72 years together, photographed by Thomas Greyer

[reasonsforhope]

When I was born, there was not a single country in the world where they could have gotten married.

In the year 2000, there was not a single country in the world where they could have gotten married.

The first country to legalize same sex marriage was the Netherlands in 2001.

Now, in 2026, there are thirty-eight countries with same-sex marriage, with another two on average being added every year (x). Including three of the most populous countries in the world (the US, Brazil, and Mexico, x).

Altogether, over a billion people now live somewhere that same-sex marriage is legal. Twenty-five years ago, that number was zero.

Things are hard right now, but in so many ways they are so much better than they have been for a very, very long time.

Never lose hope, never kill yourself, love wins.

[exchristianlesbians]

I'm ex-Mormon, but there's enough overlap that I'm following

Please, feel free to follow! You are in the same boat as the rest of us ex Christian lesbians... and a worse boat than many of us.

[vampfire1]

"jesus died for you" didnt ask for him to + my therapist told me im not responsible for others actions