The term "male gaze yuri" is one of those phrases where you can instantly tell the person using it has no idea what they're talking about. "Male gaze" is not "might appeal to a man's sexual preferences somewhere", it is the flattening of womens' interiority to reduce them to mere visual appeal.
Yuri, as a genre, is centered on womens' internal worlds. If you definitionally ascribe depictions of sexuality/sensuality from this POV to Male Gaze, you are effectively arguing the gender essentialist viewpoint that sexuality begins with and belongs to men. Not good!
Yes, lesbian sexuality in mainstream culture is often fetishized through its reduction to a performance for the benefit of men. But that fetishization almost universally severs the connection between sexuality and internality. The focus shifts away from the woman's own pleasure, reaction, and relationship to her sexual partner to her sexual availability. It's why lesbian porn produced by and marketed towards men often tends towards a dude behind the camera making "requests", and why porn produced by and marketed towards lesbians tends towards some level of emotional engagement between participants. But nearly 100% of professionally-published work marketed as yuri (even yuri written by men!) keeps that connection between sexuality and internality intact when sexuality is a focus of the story. You have to preserve that internality, because that is the genre focus.
While I get that "male gaze yuri" might be intended as a ward against lesbian fetishization, it is so badly misapplied that it wraps around to being lesbophobic. It denies the idea that lesbians can experience physical attraction to one another, can relate to that experience, or desire it for themselves. In doing so, it often places a lesbian who is making art that reflects her experiences, interests, or desires under an intense and contradictory scrutiny that is not applied to men or straight women. Her sexuality is no longer her own to express, but something that must be questioned and policed to safeguard against the flattening of the lesbian experience by the cishets.
In addition to robbing women of ownership over their own sexuality, it also reinforces gender boundaries in a way that is kinda toxic and harmful. It betrays a belief that there is a binary, deeply gendered internality that cannot be empathized with or understood in the abstract. Any attempt to empathize with or understand experiences outside of patriarchal masculinity is treated as inherently voyeuristic and sexually predatory. If the grand feminist project is to facilitate the breakdown of patriarchal gender roles, relieve the burden of sexual expectations placed on women, and ensure women are culturally treated as fully actualized people in their own right, then I can't think of a worse place to start than gatekeeping depictions of womens' experiences and desires. Historically, every attempt to change regressive norms is delegitimized by treating those arguing for change as unknowable, and thus unappeasable.
At any rate, while I do think "male gaze yuri" can exist out there, the lack of applying any sort of thought to it beyond "could this sexually appeal to men (y/n)" really just reinforces a lesbophobic double standards while also dismissing a lot of brilliant, insightful work on non-normative identity/sexuality because a man(🥚?) happened to write it.
¤ Side note 1: I don't think there's really that much daylight between the demand for yuri "confirmation" (particularly kissing) and the Male Gaze accusation in that they flatten a relationship into the shape of audience expects. The former might be a more understandable imposition, but it treats Western expectations around PDA as universal, and lesbian aro/ace/queerplatonic relationships as expressions of lesbophobia.
¤ Side note 2: This doesn't even get into the really racist Western perception of the anime/manga aesthetic as both being inherently sexualized and youth-focused, and the refusal of a large segment of the Western fanbase to treat their sex-negative framework as anything but universal. Is Japan truly a nation of pedophiles, or might there be a reason the experiences of puberty and sexual awakening might hold special interest to gender minorities? Do Western fans have the literacy and critical thinking skills to distinguish problematic from a Problem; depiction from endorsement; fiction from reality?
