Sylvia (or May, during may. Relevant, now.)

If people had chosen shemale, trap or ladyboy instead of femboy as their new label I'd be arguing against those instead. Hell, tme people do call themselves traps, which is extra disgusting considering what that word implies.

Put on a fucking dress. Grow your hair out. Wear eyeliner, it looks great on everyone. I encourage it. Gender is a scam invented by bathroom sign companies.

Redo of a 2006 joke, and followup! That original joke is so dated nowadays! But glad Link 63 is still fun to draw and play with even now.

Original after the jump!

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".

all the words we have to describe 'sexual orientation' are descended from the diagnostic categories that a heterosexual and cisgender society used to define us as ill. those terms were then changed over time and redefined to become the vague boundaries of rights based social movements as we ourselves, the queer people who were categorized under them, engaged in social struggle. part of this redefinition was the idea that identity labels *do* have strict definitions and categorize people distinctly, but for the purpose of communicating our true and beautiful inner selves (which are of course completely categorizable) and sorting us into groups only with those who completely share the key traits that define our identities: some people were just born this way as women who only love women (itself a socially defined category...) and they must be categorized strictly in order to ensure that nothing and no-one gets mixed in somewhere where its not supposed to be (impositions which words and categories can surely protect us from). this was strategically crucial to the hugely important victories won by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movements under the traditional social organization we live under, but it is not a truthful or liberating model; it is a model built for compromise with a tyrannical, puritan society which in this case especially operates through the institutions of psychology and state power.

i don't think that model is what anyone needs. the words we use don't just exist as language for communication, they make possible understandings of what is and what can be. a diagnostic category makes a group of people real, and by grouping ourselves in these categories we restrict our agency in order to prioritize the agency of a system of categorization: a system of categorization which, as you've noted, is always malleable to the will of the powerful. in our gendered social hierarchy that means that men have an outsized influence on the definitions of identity categories: again, categories which not only are defined, but also define us in response. categories that we must actually live within.

"I'm a lesbian who is only attracted to women and not men." is a sentence that you shouldn't believe anyone should have to say unless you believ in abolishing the "lesbian" label, in which case people will just make another word and the Thing will happen again, that's just how language works.