imagine time traveling and speaking to a young lesbian in the 1990s. maybe she escaped her conservative hometown and moved to a big city with a thriving but underground lesbian community. she feels like things aren't perfect, but more and more people are becoming accepting. when she's in the city, she can generally be herself. her and her lesbian friends can always hang out at the lesbian bar if they want a respite from the outside world, and to be around people like themselves, who understand them.
imagine telling her that in 2026, we have the right to get married, and we're protected in law from discrimination. but all the lesbian bars have closed and shuttered their windows, or tacked on footnotes that say "all are welcome", and the bar goers are mainly non-lesbians. and it's considered offensive to outwardly define lesbianism as female homosexuality, or to talk about your same-sex attraction without including a disclaimer that of course you think males can be lesbians, it's just your own personal genital preference keeping you back from dating them. and history has been rewritten, to make it so that lesbian has always meant a mixed-sex group, attracted to a mixed-sex group, on the basis of internal identity, and lesbianism has always included both sexes. and males fought for your lesbian rights, so you kind of owe it to them to pretend that they're lesbians. and history has been rewritten to exclude and erase all of the gays and lesbians that played key roles in gay and lesbian history, to make it so everything was done for us, by transgender people. and don't mention anything about not being attracted to male genitalia, that's offensive to males. and don't say anything about lesbians being women, that's offensive to the women that don't want to be women, but want to be lesbians. and you see women married to men suddenly calling themselves lesbians and claiming to be in lesbian relationships because their husband put on a dress. oh and if you can't accept that males can be lesbians, you'll be outcast from your former community, and labeled a bigot. and if you mention your homosexuality, people will insist that you actually already have been attracted to a male who looked convincingly female, and question that if you're attracted to females, you could be attracted to a female who looks like a male? and really, you're so bigoted that you wouldn't even date a male who had gotten genital surgery and been on female hormones? and don't even mention that sexuality is based on sex. don't be shallow, come on don't you know it's what's on the inside that counts. you'd seriously discount someone just because of what's in their pants? and all of this comes from your alleged community. not conservatives or bigots, other people calling themselves lesbians say these things to you. actual other lesbians also say these things to you.
I don't have a point here, but I just imagine she'd be wondering how and why this backslide happened, and I wonder if she'd prefer to stay where she was or come to 2026 with us now.
