As much as I do appreciate that more people, especially here on tumblr, are becoming more accepting of lesboys, I still feel a lot of them miss the point.
Some claim that the lesboy label is "only for gender non-conforming women" or "only for transmasc people" or "only for trans men", but that's not the main point here. That's still focusing on what a person is allowed to identify as.
The main problem with anti-lesboy (and anti-turigirl, anti-mspec lesbian/gay) rhetoric is that it is thinly veiled lesbian separatist radfem rhetoric.
It inherently works off of the idea that if we "let anyone identify as lesbian, queerphobic men are going to use it as an excuse and break into lesbian spaces!!!"
This is bullshit, because queerphobic men already break into queer spaces to harass queer people regardless of what we identify as. They don't pay attention to our labels' definitions, they don't care to; and even if they do, they'll just continue to harass us as they always have, the only difference is they'd mock specific labels. Which they've already been doing this whole time.
And this idea of "b but what if they identify as lesboys!!! This means that we need to exclude lesboys for our safety!!!" is such bullshit knowing that 1) they cannot ever identify as these labels in good-faith outside of the harassment and 2) exlcuding people based on how they look or what they identify as is not protecting us, this will just directly hurt queer and other marginalised folk.
You should be focusing on how that person treats others, that's what the problem here is, not what label they identify as. Regardless of their identification their harassment wouldn't be okay.
I feel that people that try to define the lesboy more strictly still hold onto this idea, that if we define the label to be very specific, that will make it "safe". But that's missing the point of why all of this is stupid in the first place.
I'd also like to mention that this argument directly mirrors the TERF "but if we let anyone/men identify as women, then men would easily break into women's spaces to assault us!!!" argument, which is bullshit for the same reason.
If a cis man genuinely identifies as a lesboy or lesbian and does not harass queer people, that is none of anyone's business. Queer identities are complex and there will always be people that fall outside of the labels or definitions we create. Labels are supposed to serve us, not vice versa, and if a person feels these work the best for them personally, then that's what they can use.
Some people may argue "but lesbians don't wanna have sex/date cis men! Should they be forced to because a cis man identifies that way??" which is a no. No lesbian owes attraction or anything else to any other lesbian. We have lesbians that are only attracted to woman lesbians, we have lesbians only attracted to nonbinary lesbians, we have aro/ace-spec lesbians. Hell, even lesbians attracted to women don't owe any other woman lesbian that.
If one claims they must, that is a bigoted, anti-consensual idea, that the queer community does not support.
The only technical exception would be a cis woman lesbian rejecting a trans woman lesbian due to their transness, not out of genital preference or anything else, I mean only having a problem after they learn that the woman is trans, due to an "you used to be a man ewew ew" idea. And even in that case I wouldn't say they "owe" any of those things, I'd say they need to unlearn their transphobic bias.
But the top example is due to the concept of a person's transness, not their actual gender identity.
The main point here is that we need to unlearn this idea of policing queer labels to "protect" anyone. People are going to be very different from one another, and someone else using a label in a very different way from you is not a threat. A threat is harassment and disrespecting boundaries, that is the main problem with cishet bigots "identifying" with queer labels. Not to mention that people that identify with queer labels "correctly" can also be just as shitty.
When we argue in favor of lesboys, we need to focus off of the fact that they are usually trans men, transmascs and butches, and focus on tackling the root issue, the radfem rhetoric behind the hatred. Because if we don't, the queer community is going to keep finding new labels to shit on under this same belief.
