Would it kill you people to actually listen to trans men who identify as lesbians instead of just assuming their beliefs to get mad about them
"But saying trans men belong in lesbian spaces implies that trans women dont" no it doesn't. Hope this helps <3
Some of you really read this and immediately went "but how about I make some bad faith assumptions anyway"
Vroom vroom motherfuckers here comes the male lesbian 101
Because if I'm gonna have the respectability fandom doing the macarena in my notes i might as well
Male lesbians: what are they?
Male lesbians are men who also identify as lesbians. There are two main subcategories, which are:
nonbinary people who have "man" as one of their genders
binary trans men who spent a long time identifying as lesbians before realising they're men
The distinction is relevant here because the justification differs for each type.
Nonbinary lesbians
Starting off with the definition of lesbian. That's simple right? Women who are into other women and no one who isn't a woman. Boom, over, done. But that common sense definition breaks down when you add trans people into the mix.
"No it doesnt. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. Ergo lesbians can be trans women and into trans women, but cannot be trans men or into trans men. Call me Alexander the Great for i have untangled your gordian knot and it was easy as shit".
Okay, sure. That seems to make sense. Except- what about nonbinary people? Some of them have "woman" in their identity. Does that still count if it's not your whole identity? How much woman do you have to be before you're allowed to be a lesbian? How much do you have to be for attraction to you to still count as lesbian attraction?
"Well fine. Women and nonbinary people then. Just as long as they're not men, it can still be lesbian."
Except nonbinary identity isn't so clear cut. Some nonbinary people are both men and women. Some have a flunctuating identity that leads them to feel like a woman one day and like a man the next. Where are we meant to sort them? And for that matter, what about nonbinary people who are neither? Are we to shove them into the Acceptable Lesbian Attraction Target bucket, even if they feel it invalidates them, just because they're not men?
"Look, this is simple. There's no real Nonbinary Look so "attraction to nonbinary people" can't be a thing. If they look like a woman then attraction to them is attraction to a woman. If they look like a man then it's attraction to a man."
Congratulations, you're transphobic! Shut the fuck up and get the fuck away from me!
Lesbian trans men
Okay, so nonbinary lesbians are a bit more complicated a subject than it initially seems. But what about trans men? Surely that's as clear-cut as it gets, right? If you're Just A Man and Not At At All A Woman, you can't be a lesbian.
Well, uh. Not quite.
The truth is that lesbians and trans men are pretty closely connected. Not in the way terfs like to claim, where trans men are really just misguided lesbians, just to be clear. But because when you're an afab person who wants to explore gender noncomformity, there's a good chance you're gonna do that through lesbianism. Because lesbian spaces allow you to explore and celebrate ways of existing outside of traditional femininity.
There is a trend of people who for a long time identified as lesbians realising they are trans men. There is also historical precedent. The Butch and Stone Butch identities frequently used in lesbian spaces would include people who wore all men's clothes, bound their chest, used masculine names and pronouns and even got top surgery or hrt in some cases. It is possible to do all of that and identify as a woman, but some of those people were transmasc. Some were trans men.
This relationship between butchness and transmasculinity is explored in the book Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, available for free download on hir website, https://www.lesliefeinberg.net . Be warned that it contains potentially triggering material, including police brutality and sexual assault.
Now you can still argue that this doesn't count. Sure trans men used to be accepted in lesbian spaces, but now they have their own community and they should leave lesbians alone.
And that's a shitty take. People aren't meant to be organised with rigid categories. Once someone has spent years in a community, built relationships within it, shared the troubles and joys of its members - once they have received and given support and learned to love themselves and to be more like themselves - are they really meant to cut all ties just because they no longer fit a dictionary definition? Are they just meant to give up all the words they found to describe themselves? And for what? To avoid confusing the cishets? To keep us all in our easy to understand little boxes? Is that really worth it?
Clarifications
This "can trans men be lesbians" debate gets a lot of people very heated and we all know reading comprehension has a very low evaporation threshold so I'm gonna need to make some things clear.
trans men can identify lesbians, if they want to. This does not mean they're women, and it does not imply anything about trans men as a whole. Calling a random trans man who you do not know identifies this way, a lesbian, is still a shitty transphobic thing to do.
i am not arguing based on agab here. Nothing I've said is meant to imply trans women cannot be lesbians, or are in some way inauthentically female. Trans women are women, and trans women can be lesbians.
What i am arguing from is a position of solidarity. Or experiences shared between all the letters of the acronym, and people that cannot be fully defined by an easy to understand set of labels. I am arguing from a position of inclusivity and of putting diversity above respectability.
So who gets to be a lesbian, or gay, or any other idenity out there? Whoever feels that identity fits them. Whoever has their understanding of themselves improved by it. Whoever the fuck wants to.
