Ok, so here is what I think because I'm masc, queer and South Asian and have been on bookblr for 8 years now:
There is a troubling and very normalized cowardice in the portrayal of certain types of identities in the sapphic bookish community and nobody chooses to look at it. You all continue to portray masc lesbian characters, especially POC, as hyper feminine lightskin girls with pixie cuts or even long hair, knowing full well they canonically had brown skin, and were visibly butch (egregious examples being tamar from shadow and bone, and jane from one last stop). You continue to edit, vid and draw specifically and canonically dark skinned sapphic characters as biracial light skin fems with extremely white passing beauty. You continue to hype up the same 5 books by white sapphic authors as the pinnacle of wlw diverse literature- evelyn hugo, priory of the orange tree, one last stop, criers war (this one is present on EVERY diverse bipoc lesbian booklist despite the author EXPLICITLY stating she is white), a lesson in vengeance etc.
You continue to force a certain standard of pale skinned hairless soft cottagecore femininity onto masc bodies, butch bodies, bipoc bodies that resent that type of beauty (last night at the telegraph club, the locked tomb, the unbroken, girls of paper and fire.....hell, even adiba jaigirdar's books). Even a remotely masc or baby butch side character gets feminized or "converted" to fit the aesthetic, and this is deeply disturbing.
You force us into compartments for the sake of your Aryan beauty Pinterest boards and ugly Instagram edits, knowing fully well that not every lesbian or bisexual on this planet adheres to that type of "sapphic" culture. You select the most white passing feminine Asian models so that your edits look palatable and so that our ugly ethnic features don't look bad beside your preferred fancasts for the white love interest. Then you get defensive when we call you out and say "light skinned biracials/ fem4fems are valid!!!" ok and they are LITERALLY the only type of rep that saturates every sapphic media that blows up. get real and stop using their oppression to hide your colorism and butchphobia.
And so I wonder, do you like us when we go against the Euramerican mainstream pop culture image of "sapphic love" or do you resent us and wish we were just a homogenous group of good and pure and sweet Taylor Swift/ girl in red/ strawberry sapphics like you?
