Discourse and Iām not sorry
This isnāt gatekeeping. This may look like a long rant but I have some things to add in this discourse.
Lesbians wanting to have their slurs, their terms and their spaces is not gatekeeping. Slurs arenāt there for anyone to reclaim. Dyke is a slur to degrade lesbians, therefore only lesbians can reclaim it. Butch and femme are lesbians exclusive words. Butch and femme come from the 1950s, if Iām not mistaken, and theyāre words to describe how those lesbians felt attraction towards women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women; butch cannot exist without femme, and femme cannot exist without butch; butch/femme donāt equal masculine/feminine, so itās not just because you dress a certain way that you can call yourself butch or femme. You call yourself butch or femme if youāre lesbian, and even then, theyāre not words to describe masculine and feminine. Lesbians spaces only arenāt meant to exclude other sapphics, but lesbiansā experiences are different from bi/pan women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women because we do not fell attraction towards men/non-binary-people-aligned-strictly-to-men, and sometimes we need to discuss these different experiences that other sapphics donāt understand completely.
Lesbian is Ā women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women attracted exclusively to Ā women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women. Thereās no attraction towards men/non-binary-people-aligned-strictly-to-men. Lesbian is not an umbrella term for every sapphic to use. And this shouldnāt be controversial. If every wlw is supposed to use lesbian because it also implies attraction to every gender, then we wouldnāt need to use ābiā or āpanā, we would call every sapphic a lesbian ā but when we do call every sapphic a lesbian, people say weāre erasing bisexuality and pansexuality. So non-lesbians can use lesbian for themselves but if we call every wlw lesbian weāre being bigots. Whatās even the point? Every word has its meaning and words change throughout time, if lesbian was used to describe every wlw, now it describes women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women attracted exclusive to women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women. Itās not that hard.
āBi/pan lesbianā is just blatant lesbophobia and bi/pan erasure. Bi/pan are not adjectives for people to use to āclassifyā their ālesbianism/lesbianityā, and ālesbianā isnāt a expression to say youāre homoromantic. Lesbianity/lesbianism, bisexuality and pansexuality are different sexualities with different meanings, and bi/pan are an antithesis to lesbianism: bi/pan ānullifyā lesbianism. Bi/pan people are attracted to more than one gender, and lesbians arenāt.
If youāre bi/pan with a preference towards women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women, then youāre bi/pan with a preference towards women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women or a bi/pan homoromantic! And not bi/pan lesbian. One thing excludes the other, and it implies that lesbians can give a chance to men ā and they canāt.
Saying that lesbians should be open to men is just lesbophobia. And all these ālesbian doesnāt exclude attraction to menā is just another way to invalidate us, to make men feel entitled to our bodies and our sexuality so they can feel comfortable enough to try and hook up with us.
I donāt know why itās so āwokeā to say lesbophobic things if it means that youāre fighting against oppression. I donāt understand why is it that lesbians receive all this hate all the time (I read things where people said lesbians should be beaten, I saw GBT people fetishizing lesbians, people saying our sexuality is regressive, and a lot of other things like rape apology ā because we should ālearnā to like dicks). How this can be progressive and woke?
Bi/pan lesbians is just another way of lesbophobia and bi/pan erasure.
Saying weāre gatekeeping because we want to have our things is also lesbophobic. No one says trans people are gatekeeping when they say cis people cannot reclaim their slurs, Ā nor do people criticize aces who say lesbophobic things ā itās almost as if people donāt like real lesbians but this idealized version of us, where weāre attracted to women but also available for men (which weāre not; and if you like women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women + men/non-binary-people-aligned-strictly-to-men youāre not a lesbian, youāre bi or pan).
This shouldnāt be controversial. This shouldnāt be discourse.
And saying lesbians arenāt attracted to men isnāt āgold starā bullshit because gold star is a (lesbophobic) expression to describe a lesbian who has never had any kind of relationship with a man, and not an expression to describe any lesbian. Gold star lesbian isnāt the same as lesbian. Some lesbians experience comphet and some lesbians only come out to themselves late in their life, but theyāre not any less of a lesbian because they now know that theyāre attracted exclusively to women/non-binary-people-aligned-to-women. Many lesbians feel bad with āgold starā, and the only ones I met that are proud about it are radfems (and lesbians arenāt inherently radfems and terfs).
