“People are called the d-slur because they reject men! That’s why bi women can’t use it! Lesbian-only word!”
Nice separatist rhetoric, but that’s not how any of this works.
First off, literally nobody is going to ask a woman whether or not she likes men, or “make sure” she doesn’t, before they hurl slurs at her. Not only is it impossible to know who someone isn’t attracted to unless they tell you, but bigots do not give a damn. Gay/bi people experience homophobia and fight for rights on the basis of our attraction to the same gender, not the lack of it towards different ones. No gay man is fighting for the right to not marry women. The idea a lack of attraction is what homophobes attack people for also implies that they’d be similarly mad at aroace women. They… are not.
Second, there are bi women who only date women and straight women who don’t date anyone—lesbians aren’t the only ones who “reject men.” Insisting that other women inherently “cater” to men just because of their attraction is straight-up misogynistic.
Third, it takes about two seconds to research the etymology and see that it’s also—if not primarily—about women being masculine (which most people associate with same-gender attraction, which bisexual women experience). It arguably came from “bull-[d slur],” which was used to describe masculine women or those who “engaged in lesbian activities” (“lesbian” used to be a synonym for “tribade,” something one did rather than who one was.) Plus, a lot of homophobic violence comes from perceived gender-nonconformity.
Fourth, lesbians and bi women have shared community spaces and terminology (including butch/femme) since forever. “Bisexual” wasn’t a (recorded) reclaimed identity term until the 50s, and in the 60s, some bisexuals chose to “call [themselves] homosexual, not bisexual” because they saw the “bisexual” label as a cop-out, and they’ll “be gay until everyone has forgotten that [same-sex attraction] is an issue.” Score one for internalized biphobia!
Until the 70/80s or so—when political lesbianism came about and gained popularity, especially among modern-definition lesbians—the word “lesbian” typically (though not exclusively) referred to all woman-loving women (but sometimes, only butches were considered “true” lesbians). The political usage of “lesbian” increased as the gay movement grew in response to its misogyny and power imbalance.
The lesbian community didn’t significantly split off from bisexual women until around the 80s/90s, and even during the 90s, “lesbian” was sometimes defined as “any woman who has at some time in her life loved another woman.” There weren’t many organized and independent bi communities until the 80s/90s. During this political shift, lesbians deemed bisexual women the “only true heterosexuals” and “parasites attaching themselves to the Lesbian community” even though, for decades, the lesbian community was their community.
Even without this history, so many bi women I know talk about how the d-slur is virtually all they’ve ever been called by strangers and even family and friends in regards to their bisexuality, and still, people go “well, sorry, but you’re attracted to men so you can’t say our word,” as if bi women’s attraction to men negates the homophobia they face, as if they can’t be gender-nonconforming in the same way butch lesbians are.
Even by saying that “bi women are only called d-slurs because people assume they’re lesbians,” one acknowledges that bi women can have so much in common with lesbians that they get “mistaken” for each other and attacked for the same reasons: their love for women, and sometimes the gender-nonconformity that comes with that.
When bi women argue that they should be able to reclaim the d-slur, it’s not that they’re itching for shiny new ways to be edgy or even that they necessarily want to say it—it’s simply because this word targets them for the same reason it targets lesbians. It has always been their word.
