#btw i don’t use labels other than queer or sapphic for the time being

[persimnon]

hi! re: the pansexuality post. from my understanding there IS a non-biphobic difference. bisexuality means distinct attraction to multiple genders (ie liking a man feels different than liking a woman or nb person- they "see" gender) whereas to pansexual people, all attraction feels the same. feel free to correct me if im wrong (i very well could be, since i dont id as bi or pan) but this is how my bi and pan peers have explained the difference to me. its a small difference, but means a lot to some people and saying "fuck pansexuality" could be hurtful to some people :( no hate to you btw, just trying to continue the conversation <3 love you and your blog :)

but that distinction implies that bi people have to experience attraction differently depending on gender. all of the semantic differences used to justify a difference assume limits upon bisexuality that have never historically existed. additionally, saying bi people “see gender” while pan people don’t plays into the “bi people only care about sex/pan people are more pure because they care about personality first” stereotype. as someone who IDed as bi for 4+ years, it’s a biphobic definition and i don’t particularly care that speaking against biphobia hurts feelings

[laundryandtaxes]

Yea sorry, same ‘Im missing something" anon, this is easier than ask because its complex and I care more about you doing some thinking than coming back with a quick answer about what you already think you know

I’m still missing what this has to do with being a sapphic woman only attracted to women vs those attracted to more genders? Lesbian makes sense as unique label & its important to protect the current meaning of it but, what makes you think other sapphic women have less need for terms that describe ways of being sapphic, interacting with other sapphic women, navigating our queerness? This isn’t cishets stealing “queer” - this is sapphic women who experience homophobia expecting to be treated as part of the sapphic community, and the only difference I see is you pushing us out because we may be attracted to men. If you don’t call us straight but you treat us straight it’s the same thing.

I see your concern about lesbophobia & I respect that. But, to say there is ‘lesbian culture’ that excludes other sapphic women and that there are ideas that came “from lesbians for lesbians”? it just makes no sense unless you don’t think other sapphic women are really sapphic and haven’t always been a part of sapphic culture. Lesbians shouldn’t be forced to ID as anything else, but, how does that mean your needs are unique to other sapphic women? because the idea we can oppress you by being bi is just as wrong as the homophobic “monosexual privilege” idea that some bi people puked up. When you separate lesbian women from bi women you are lumping us in with straight people & that’s just as homophobic as when bi women lump lesbians in with straight women.

To say these butch/femme ideas are “from lesbians for lesbians” means your erasing bi women in the sapphic communities that developed them and, erasing that bi women were deliberately pushed out of and erased from those communities. Even the quickest search suggests exactly what I suspected that butch/femme came from sapphic women as a whole back when 'lesbian’ meant all of us, and, definitely included women who would probably now call themselves bisexual and not lesbian, before we got kicked out and erased by homophobic lesbians who see us as traitors or straight infiltrators

I don’t need a response and to be honest I would be happier if you just took some time to think about this instead of immediately coming back with something defensive.

I just want you to think on this some about, why you are insisting that butch/femme are lesbian only ideas? Why you are erasing sapphic women attracted to other genders from our shared history? And, what do you think you lose if butch/femme labels are open to all sapphic women? (like they were created and always intended to be)

Answer:

I don’t know why you need me to agree with you on this- you presumably have your own blog, and your own mind! You are literally free to disagree, free to make up your own mind, free to follow any number of blogs where “femme” doesn’t really refer to anything at all, free to follow a bunch of “sapphic wlw lesbian is a bad word” style blogs. Have at it! I’m not even mostly being tongue in cheek- these are real options for you. Why not just take them?

Anyway, you’re wrong on several counts.

1. There is no such thing as overarching “sapphic” community in the same sense there isn’t REALLY an overarching LGBT community, even though we reference it when we talk about a group of people. Bi women and lesbians are not the same, or members of the same group. I have no interest in laying claim to “sapphic” as a term, so I am not pushing you out of literally anything.

2. You can use whatever terms you want to talk about specific ways of “being sapphic” or “navigating queerness.” I literally do not care. But neither butch nor femme has anything to do with “navigating queerness,” they are specific ways of experiencing and embodying lesbianism, point blank.

3. At no point have I said bi women oppress lesbians. I think that’s as stupid an idea an monosexual privilege, yes. You’re making an assumption that doesn’t make any sense. Being in a relationship with someone of the ~opposite~ gender obviously affords a number of material benefits, but not all bi people are, have ever been, or will ever be in these kinds of relationships, so I wouldn’t universalize that to bisexuality itself.

4. Bi women and lesbians do not need to be separated with rhetoric because, again, we are literally already separate groups, that share a lot of community, history, and issues (including homophobia) in common. But we are literally not the same. We are not the same because “lesbian” references an experience bi women don’t have, and “bisexual” references an experience lesbians do not have. This is fine. It is okay for us to be different. It is okay to celebrate difference, to see it as diversity. But to say lesbians and bi women are roughly the same is no more reasonable than saying lesbians and gay men are roughly the same, even though we are both gay- different lived experiences, period. So when you ask why I am separating them you’re presuming, wrongly, that we aren’t literally already separate but close to each other. Bi women also have a number of NEEDS (depending how you define needs) which lesbians don’t, and lesbians have a number of needs which bi women don’t.

5. Anne Lister as the source of the contemporary use of “butch” and “femme” has been debunked a million times- why you think working class American bars would have been so intimately connected with Anne Lister’s ideas as to credit her with “femme” in the bar scene sense of the term is beyond me, but “femme” literally means “woman” in French and this is almost certainly the way in which Lister used it, and I believe in certain contexts it also means “sister” and “wife;” additionally, Lister’s “plus femmes que moi” (not even actually worded by Lister, btw) translates roughly to “more womanly than me.” Not that it matters, because “femme” starts popping up in its current use in the US in working class gay bar scenes almost 100 years after Lister’s death in the UK. That’s a major geographical and historical gap.

6. WHATEVER the answer is to “Well lesbian used to refer to women who were probably attracted to men as well/many women who called themselves lesbians would not identify as bisexual,” which is a claim that is likely true but absolutely disprovable in the vast majority of cases, the absolute worst possible solution is to rhetorically dig up dead women and coercively relabel them as bi just because you think they wouldn’t see themselves as lesbians today. First of all, the meaning of the word has literally changed over time- the idea of being gay as a lifestyle choice in accordance with underlying attractions used to be very popular among actual LGBT people, and is not anymore, for instance, and people absolutely used “lesbian” to refer to women who had histories of dating men, may have still been attracted to them, but lived lives in communities of women who exclusively dated other women. I don’t care what politics you have, I think it is disrespectful and historically and intellectually disingenuous to dig them up and reclassify them according to your personal politics and taste. Doing so is gross. Stop it.

7. As for the idea that I haven’t already considered the overwhelmingly popular opinion that any and every woman has the right to use “butch” and “femme” as an identifier for themself, honestly that’s both stupid and deeply annoying, on top of being obnoxiously patronizing. Yeah, I considered it and I disagree, point blank. Don’t wanna see it, just don’t look at my blog. It’s not that deep.

8. I want you to think about why you are so defensive when confronted with the reality that actually, yeah, lesbians and bi women are different and not the same, and there are a number of experiences lesbians have that bi women don’t, and vice versa- for instance, if there was a term which specifically referred to the ways bisexual women navigate bisexuality while being gender nonconforming, I wouldn’t go “Oh I’m gnc too so that’s my word.“ What about lesbians wanting to lay claim to something we made upsets you so much? As for your last bit, you’re a total stranger- why should I care about what would “make [you] happier” when it comes to your unwanted opinion on misappropriated lesbian terms? You’re quite oddly entitled, honestly. Which does not surprise me, considering this whole conversation is about your entitlement to terms that don’t reference you. Frankly, this whole thing is why I hate the popular use of the term “sapphic” and the culture of brushing over difference which has popped up around it on tumblr. There is a reason I never use the term, and instead opt for lbpq in most cases or SOMETIMES wlw, where it makes sense.