question for the "trans men can be lesbians" crowd:
what word is there to communicate to others "I'm a woman who loves women"?
hi sorry for using this short post as a jumping off point for a long one, but this sparked a lot of thoughts for me!
this is something that I wish people would take more seriously. I am a woman who loves women and no one else. that's my sexual orientation. I didn't pick it, it's just who I am.
there's currently no single word I can use to communicate that. when I say I'm lesbian, queer people consistently assume that I mean it in the most expansive way possible.
and no one wants to say it, but the reality of what's happening when people make those assumptions is that they hear the word "lesbian" and replace it with the word "bisexual." they think I'm attracted to all genders, even men, as long as they're the good kind (AFAB).
the problem with this, which should be obvious, is the misogyny. people don't want to accept that a woman could ever be satisfied by only loving other women. they have to squeeze other genders in there to make it make sense to them. and they have to push the limits of lesbianism to include people who are more and more in proximity to manhood until it's assumed as a matter of cour that lesbians are all attracted to men.
we're already very far down that road. I can't call myself a lesbian without having people make all kinds of wild and wrong assumptions about who I am and who I'm open to dating (which leads to sexual harassment and feeds into all other kinds of misogyny that women face from the rest of the queer community).
I don't know whether the right way to reduce the harm here is to push back on the idea that men can be lesbians, or to come up with a new word that specifically means women who love women, or both. If there's a new word then it'll be corrupted sooner or later. That's already happened with sapphic, and, incredibly, "WLW".
either way the situation leaves me with no sympathy for trans men who call themselves lesbians.
oh and you (the reader) might think, why are trans women the ones who seem to have the strongest opinions about this? it's because everyone else sabotaged their misogyny radar (misogydar, if you will) when they decided to twist their feminism into knots in order to exclude us from it.
