i can’t reblog this post bc i’m blocked by OP but the idea of bisexual lesbians is… ridiculous, cockamamie, and absolute horseshit for a lot of reasons that really should be obvious. lesbian = exclusively attracted to women / explicitly not attracted to men.

the majority reasoning i see for the idea of bi lesbians or bykes or whatever the fuck else is the idea that bi women who choose to only date women/never date men are therefore “practicing” lesbianism, and that’s stupid for a lot of reasons but mainly choosing not to date men doesn’t mean you aren’t attracted to men and that is what labels for sexualities mean. 

i’m also seeing things like this comment in the notes of the posts calling out the lesbophobia in emily gwen being harassed for not indulging the idea that bi/pan lesbians exist:

this is only technically true. and by technically true i mean it’s literally only true because yes, women who now identify as bisexual would have been called lesbian until the mid-80s to early 90s when bisexual people began organizing their communities as bi people, identifying as bisexual rather than gay or lesbian. 

that is because bisexual wasn’t an identity label yet. bisexual was originally the pathological term for people who were “not strictly hetero or homosexual”, and was medicalized. that’s where a lot of medical biphobia started but that’s beside the point. bisexual people reclaimed that term and identified with it and began using it more frequently and consistently to differentiate from men exclusively attracted to men and women exclusively attracted to women. once that term was reclaimed, that became our label. 

even before then, there was still recognition in those communities that “lesbians” who were attracted to men weren’t the same as lesbians who were not (and you kinda get into some gold star rhetoric there but again, things change over time) it was just a matter of “we’re all women who are not straight” and when you’re building communities and spaces for the purposes of protecting yourselves and your communities, that’s generally more important than other intricacies/nuances that might b present.

bi women and lesbians have always shared spaces, though, which is why it’s important for us to continue to do that by respecting each other and recognizing that our many similarities do not erase the fact that we are different in some ways. 

one of those ways being that lesbians are inherently unattracted to men and you cannot be a lesbian if you are attracted to men. whether you choose to date men is irrelevant to the fact that you are attracted to men in general. and that’s Obviously not implicating lesbians who have crushes on dudes In Concept. in the same way that bi people who have only or mostly dated people of different genders aren’t suddenly straight because of that fact, bi women who choose not to date men are not suddenly lesbian.

so like… no. you cannot be bisexual and lesbian. you cannot be a lesbian if you’re attracted to men. your dating choices are not equivalent to your sexuality. 

nothing useful comes from trying to ignore that we are different communities. we should be in solidarity and all. but we’re not the same.

as a butch, and specifically at that a trans woman, I can often find myself questioning how much I’m being viewed as a woman by people. Not in the “will I be misgendered in public?” way, but in the “if I tell people I’m a woman, tell them I am not a man, would they really accept that?” Because I have very little interest in wearing clothes or presenting myself in any way that would be considered feminine aside from like, my long hair? Perhaps on occasion a light application of makeup? If I ever voice train I’d probably see my goal as being an androgynous sounding voice rather than wanting an unmistakably “feminine” voice. 

Femme/butch offers me something that nothing else really can. When you call yourself one you should (or you’re supposed to) have some sort of grasp on what these identities mean. You’re meant to understand them beyond an aesthetic, meant to understand that one does not exist without the other. In my view, a femme should be a person who understands butches and who sees me for what I am regardless of my physical appearance. Femmes and butches find comfort in one another and the ways we’ve concluded we see ourselves in our gender and the unique relation we have to womanhood. 

To see someone calling themselves femme, I should be able to feel safe around them. Even if they know very little about me on a personal level, they would know I’m a butch and carry the knowledge of what femmes and butches have meant to each other both in the past and in the present. I should feel as though I don’t need to justify why I’m a trans woman who isn’t trying to wear a dress or paint my nails, and that I don’t need to feel that ever-constant twinge of doubt in the back of my head saying that I’m being viewed as a man or, at least, some sort of not-man-but-not-woman in a person’s eyes. 

When these stop being identities with the history and culture behind them, and become aesthetics, I lose that. Barring of course transphobic lesbians, I no longer can know if a femme is someone who would understand me in a way other people won’t. To see “femme” can’t automatically mean “this person consciously makes space for butches, understands our lived experiences and can be trusted. They make a conscious effort to love and accept butches.” Over time it will continue to lose that for me, and instead grow to mean “They could be that, or maybe they’re one of the people who use it just to mean they present femininely. They may not know anything about the context behind the word they’re using.” 

being femme is so much more than the way i keep my hair or the clothes i wear. it doesn’t matter that i love dresses or that i have long hair or that i spend an hour on makeup every day. those things don’t make me femme, and you don’t have to do any of them to be femme. it’s the way that i do those things – explicitly for women. it’s taking all the things i’ve been told my whole life that i’m doing for men and saying “no, fuck you.” it’s yelling, even with my lipstick on and my heels pinching my toes, that none of this is for them, that it never has been, that it never will be.

it’s giving myself the space to be exactly who i feel comfortable being – it’s taking care of other women, other lesbians, it’s keeping my hands soft and my heart softer so i can hold them better. the way i perform my gender is writing a love letter every day to butch/femme culture and knowing that it’s writing back. that it’s keeping a place for all of us to come home to, if that’s where we decide we want to be. 

fat butch women aren’t ‘a stereotype to avoid’, they’re a wildly under- and misrepresented demographic inordinately targeted by the ‘predatory lesbian’ trope

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HUFFPOST - When Those With Hearing Loss Are Pulled Over By Police: TW: death mention, police brutality, ableism, violence. 

I tried to type this 3 times on my phone earlier today, but the Tumblr app sucks. I’m home now, so I can vent all this frustration.

Since I accepted that I’m bi, I’ve received several unsolicited messages telling me that I can still call myself a femme. That any wlw can use femme and butch. As someone who previously identified as a femme, who understands butch-femme culture, this is extremely offensive and lesbophobic, because I know what it means to be femme. These identities have meaning, developed over decades as they evolved from the original lesbian bar scene of the early 20th century to the modern lesbian subculture. Being femme doesn’t just mean you’re a feminine woman. Being butch doesn’t just mean you’re masculine. It defines your relationship with other lesbians, and gives context and meaning to how you interact with society and how you perform femininity (or reject it). Others have explained all of this better and in more depth so I’m not getting into the intricacies of butch-femme culture. You wouldn’t tell a lesbian to call herself a twink or a bear, and you wouldn’t tell a trans man to call himself a lesbian (unless you’re a terf), so don’t tell people to take identities that by definition are only applicable to lesbians

hi here is just a funky little bit of! me and my gf