There's a sapphic group in a town not far from me that has been criticised for being insufficiently welcoming to trans women. At the moment it's like 70 : 30 cis women : transmasc non-binary people. The group described itself simply as "for sapphics", and obviously trans lesbians should be included in that. But we don't know that they understand that word to include us, and so we are understandably anxious about going, and even more so when we get there to find no other transfems at all.
So, after this criticism, the group has rebranded to "FLINTA", a category that explicitly includes trans lesbians, but also: all straight women, all intersex people irrespective of gender or sexuality, all non-binary people irrespective of sexuality, all trans men, and all agender people irrespective of sexuality. The majority of people on Earth are FLINTA, and the majority of them are exclusively attracted to men (because they are straight women)! That's not a sapphic group any more!
I found this really frustrating because the problem was never the admissions criteria for the group, but rather the fact that we couldn't know in advance how transphobic the organisers were. If a sapphic group is run entirely by cis women, that is frankly already an amber flag, and to counteract it it needs to say something like this: "We encourage all trans women and all non-binary people (no matter their assigned gender) who consider themselves sapphic to attend. We know transfeminine people have historically been excluded from spaces like this and we want to make it as clear as possible that we encourage you to join." Otherwise most of us will always be too nervous about abuse to attend at all.
Instead of doing that, they responded by also opening the doors to trans men and straight women, which is an extra insult because it suggests that they think trans lesbians don't count as "lesbians" in the first place. To respond to a request to be more accommodating of trans women by saying, "sure, what the heck, in fact everyone might as well join!" is just another way of saying you didn't really want us.
And even with these changes, I still don't feel welcome, because FLINTA (essentially "anyone but cis men") is a category that has historically excluded many transfems in practice even if not in theory. A cis woman can show up to a FLINTA event wearing whatever she wants and always be welcome. A trans woman will often feel compelled to present as femininely as possible, especially because FLINTA includes a lot of cishet women who will just call you a man if they clock you because they have no tact or experience with queer identities at all. If you show up in trousers and no make-up as a transfem there's a chance you might not even be allowed in the room, so it can often serve as a gender presentation barrier that is exclusively applied to us.
I actually prefer "queer" to "FLINTA" because, worst case scenario, I get mistaken for a feminine gay cis man, and no one is telling someone like that to leave a queer event. I need to go to these things in the expectation of being misgendered, and make sure that the consequences if that happens are minimal, that's the only realistic way to engage with the wider queer community.
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