#but i need more gays i need lesbians i need sapphic material i need tumblr influence please god please

[sapphroditewrites]

well i have 4 bluesky codes does anybody want to join bluesky LMAO it's dry ill admit but we can start our own lil marvel circle if u want??

[comingoutofthecauldron]

let’s talk about lesbophobia in fandom

i don’t like to use the word “lesbophobia” unironically because of all the gross radfem terfy connotations, so i will clarify right off the bat that i am neither a terf nor an aphobe and that if you are i want you off my blog like, right now. unfortunately, the meaning of lesbophobia has been so warped by alt right lesbians that seeing it in an unironic context makes me, a lesbian, uncomfortable, which speaks volumes in itself. so to clarify, lesbophobia is essentially homophobia with a pinch of sexism thrown into the mix, and it’s running rampant in supposed safe spaces and, more relevantly, fandom. 

/i’d also like to clarify that i’m not only speaking on lesbophobia, but also the general disgust and disdain for all wlw in fandom, and am using it as a sort of umbrella term/

lesbophobia and disdain for wlw has been around forever, but whilst gay positivity, mlm and mlm ships have been steadily increasing in popularity within fandom over time, wlw and wlw ships have remained perpetual underdogs. why? because lesbophobia has become a fandom within itself. both in and outside of fandom, we see instances of casual lesbophobia every single day—from aggression towards wlw to something as simple and prevalent as the complete and utter lack of sapphic ships and characters in media. hatred of lesbians and wlw is practically a trend, and it’s seeping in through the cracks of fandoms who are already facing issues with minorities and marginalized groups (i.e. racism, ableism). if you honestly think that lesbophobia isn’t prevalent as hell in fandom right now, you’re either not a wlw, you’re not all that involved in fandom, or you’re dumb as shit. 

just look at ships. in almost every single fandom, the ratio of mlm ships to sapphic ships is ridiculously unbalanced. people are quick to ship male characters who so much as smile at each other (and i don’t condemn that) but would never do the same for two women—even on the rare occasion that the ship is actually canon. i once wrote a wlw fanfic for a [predominantly straight] fandom, and received messages like this gem:

on the flip side of that, if there is a sapphic ship in canon or fanon, it is often fetishized and sexualised to a disturbing degree. there will be double the amount of nsfw art and fics, and ninety percent of it will be derogatory and fetishized as hell. having been actively involved in several fandoms over the past few years (and currently a content creator in one), i’ve seen instances of all this hundreds of times. people go crazy for mlm ships, but the second you say you ship/prefer a wlw ship, there’s always someone at the ready with, “i think all ships are great!” or “it’s not a contest” or “i prefer [insert m/m or m/f ship] actually” or “they’re my brotp!/why can’t you just let them be friends?”. not only do lesbians and wlw not get to have any rep in media, any rep that they try to create for themselves in fandom just gets attacked or ruined. this is so detrimental not only to all wlw, but especially to younger wlw who will end up being indoctrinated into this belief that their sexuality is something dirty, something that can never be tender and sweet but rather something that deserves to be preyed upon. 

building on that, let’s talk about engagement. i run an instagram account (where i have a significantly bigger following) as well as this blog for my fandom, where i post the content i create (mainly text posts). when i first started creating content, i made a lot for a relatively unpopular wlw ship, in which both girls are canonically romantically involved with a dude—though one of them is canonically pan. their canonical m/f ships are both very popular, and i noticed that my engagement was dropping every time i posted them, so i eventually just stopped. it wasn’t even a conscious decision; i merely resigned myself to the fact that the fandom didn’t want to see sapphic ships, and some people would even go as far as to condemn them. for reference, my instagram posts get an average of about 500 likes per post (popular ones usually exceeding 1k), but when i post this ship, my engagement drops to about 250 likes. similarly, my tumblr text posts have an average of about 140 notes per post (popular ones usually reaching up to 750), but my wlw content rarely surpasses 100. this just feeds the cycle of wlw never getting rep: if, like me, content creators become disincentivised by the lack of engagement with their sapphic content, they’re more likely to stop making/posting it, leading to further lack of rep—and when new content creators try to rectify that, they face the same problems. 

and then, of course, there’s the treatment of actual wlw in fandom. my best example of this is when my friend and i made an anti account on instagram (the first instagram anti account in that fandom), our bio saying something like “salty and bitter lesbians being salty and bitter”, and received an onslaught of lesbophobic insults and threats from angry stans within hours. (tw: r*pe) one commenter even went as far as to tell us that they wanted us to get r*ped. as well as this, i’ve seen so many instances of people using slurs against lesbians in arguments/in anons, often for no apparent reason other than they feel that they have the right. when i first mentioned i was a lesbian on instagram, my account only had about 200 followers, and within a day i lost 20. i also lose followers whenever i post f/f ships, not quite to that extent but enough for it to be noticeable, on top of the aforementioned engagement dips. in the face of all this adversity, i think a lot of wlw turn to mlm ships because they’re the closest thing we have to actual rep, but when we do we get accused of fetishizing them by the same people who fetishize us. there’s an endless list of double standards that non-wlw have been upholding for years, and i can firmly say that i’m really fucking sick of it. because of our sexuality, we will never be allowed to enjoy something without someone labelling it or us as dirty or otherwise problematic, when to them, the only problematic thing about us is that we aren’t pleasing men. 

as i mentioned before, the lack of rep for wlw in media is appallingly consistent, and part of that stems from tokenism. in a lot of modern mainstream media, you’ll have one, maybe two lgbt characters, and nine times out of ten those characters are white cis male gays. of course, there are exceptions to this, but generally, that’s it. script writers and authors (especially cishets) seem to have this mentality of, “oh, well, we gave them one, that’s sure to be enough!”, which means that on the off chance you do get your gay rep, the likelihood of also receiving wlw or any other kind of rep becomes practically non-existant. this belief that all marginalized groups are the same and that one represents all is what leads to misrepresentation on top of lack of rep, which is what makes tokenism so dangerous. if you treat your only gay character badly, you are essentially treating every single gay person badly in that universe. so not only is lesbophobia and disdain for wlw harmful to sapphic women via their exclusion in media, it’s also harming those minorities who do get rep. when people try to defend lesbophobic source material, that’s when fandom starts to get toxic. the need for critical thinking has never been more apparent and it has also never been less appeased—and wlw are getting hit hard by it, as always.

finally, a pretty big driving factor of lesbophobia is, ironically, lesbians. my lesbian friends and i often joke that though everyone seems to hate us, no one hates lesbians more than lesbians do. though i’d say it’s most prevalent on tumblr, i see traces of it all over the internet. the growth of alt right lesbian movements is not only reinforcing hatred for lesbians, but also reinforcing hatred for bi and pan women. here you have these terrible lesbians using their platforms to express their disgust for bi/pan women, for aces and aros, for trans women/nb lesbians, and people see them and say, “gosh, lesbians are just awful.” and just like that, all of us are evil. occasionally, lesbian blogs that i follow get put on terf blocklists for no other reason than the fact that they have “lesbian” in their bio. and the lesbians that actually deserve to be on those blocklists? they’re too busy spewing misinformation about trans women and bi women to care, boosted up by their alt right friends in an ever-expanding movement. i’ve found that this heavily influences fandom on tumblr, lesbians often getting branded as “biphobic” when they hc a female character as a lesbian rather than bi or pan. this criticism of both lesbians and wlw by lesbians and non-wlw alike only ever allows lesbophobia to grow, both in and out of fandom. that said, lesbians aren’t to blame for their own discrimination; rather, many of us have been conditioned into subconsciously endorsing it after spending our entire lives hearing heterosexual platitudes about lesbians and sapphic relationships. homophobic cishets are and always have been the nexus of this oppression—the only difference is that now they can hide behind alt right lesbians.

one thing has been made apparent to me throughout my time in fandom, and that thing is that no one likes to see men “underrepresented”. people hate sapphic ships and lesbians so much because there is no room for men, and men Do Not Like That. so, like the worms that they are, they slither their way in, be it through fetishization or condemnation of wlw characters and ships, and they ruin whatever good things we have going for us. the thing about worms, though, is that they’re easy enough to crush if you’re wearing the right shoes.

so to all my bi/pan gals and lesbian pals: put on your doc martens, because we’ve got ourselves some lesbophobes to stomp on. 

[tamsythepansy]

VOY: “Workforce”, the transest Star Trek episode ever

So. There’s a two-part episode of Star Trek: Voyager (“Workforce”) in which the crew all find themselves living out new lives as vaguely Fordist industrial workers on a planet called Quarra, all memory of their real lives having been artificially suppressed.

Imagine my surprise when, rewatching it years later, the bogus diagnosis they’re given as their memories start to resurface is...

...which also happens to be exactly what my partners have been reminding me for the last two months (bless them). I giggled.

Lo and behold, it happens to Tuvok as well:

Now, I get that it was the turn of the millennium and this hadn’t really entered the lexicon yet, but... this is just the tip of the iceberg. Watch along with me and see how it all plays out:

Tuvok, of course, is the first to experience memories of his real life breaking through the facade, has a panic attack, and is hospitalized:

Well, if this isn’t relatable to multitudes of trans and non-binary Star Trek fans, I don’t know what is. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Of course, the ‘treatment’ for Dysphoria Syndrome involves suppressing the offending memory engrams, so the patient can peacefully return to being a cog in the cisheteronormative machine Quarran power distribution facility (read what you will into that). As the expert on Dysphoria Syndrome himself later puts it:

Sounds like an allegory for LGBTQ conversion therapy to me, I mean, what?

Anyway, Seven realizes that Tuvok might be on to something, and heads to the mental health clinic to get a gender assessment investigate:

Stepping into the realm of the purely serious for a moment, I *have* sort of read Seven’s character arc as a plausible trans allegory, and it’s pretty compelling: having her true identity suppressed at an early age, and finally being forced to confront it in adulthood; processing layers upon layers of trauma just to function as an individual; being rehabilitated by a circle of strong, compassionate women, each with their own identity issues (plus the medical wizardry, overeager cisheteronormative life coaching, and starry-eyed / vaguely inappropriate crushing of The Doctor, I guess, so yeah); struggling to reclaim her human (/feminine) sense of self even while the effects of her Borg (/patriarchal) upbringing have thoroughly warped her thoughts (even as they continue to give her superhuman resilience and insight). I’m sure there’s even a comparison to be drawn to transfeminine desirability politics — Seven is continually presented both as an extremely conventionally attractive human *and* as a mysterious cyborg whose embodiment and manner communicates an often-threatening sense of Otherness — but I’ll leave that for a future discourse. I’m honestly spitballing a bit with all of this, but to see it so explicitly referenced, intentionally or not, is quite something.

So, Seven asks the obvious question, and it turns out that, while being trans is undoubtedly a Real Thing, the specifics are... inconclusive:

Let’s take a moment to celebrate the fact that we’re finally starting to see gender doctors who actually understand us in all our nuance, because...

...we already know this is bad news. (Paging Dr. Harry Benjamin.)

Anyway, the compassionate gender doctor goes to the conversion therapy doctor to see what’s up, because clearly something over at the power plant is turning people trans:

One important takeaway from this story is “never walk away and leave your work computer unlocked”:

I get it, though! On a planet ostensibly without Tumblr or OKCupid, trans community is just really, really hard to find. 🤷🏻‍♀️

The compassionate gender doctor soon notices a pattern:

...mm hmm, it all started when a genderqueer person sneezed in the employee locker room, and somehow the conversion therapy doctor wound up with his hands full as everybody in the office came down with a bad case of The Trans.

Finally, the compassionate gender doctor is determined to be just a little bit too sympathetic to these gender deviants, and the now-canonically trans but still awesome at passing Seven of Nine comes to the rescue:

As if this weren’t trans enough...

...check out the subplot featuring Jaffen, a co-worker with whom Captain Janeway has an adorable but bittersweet whirlwind relationship. Though Jaffen presents as male and uses he/him pronouns, THIS TOTALLY HAPPENS, and its implications are never made clear:

Though this is set up as the punchline of a “your father” joke, Jaffen isn’t just fucking around here. Tuvok knows what’s up, and proceeds to Vulcan-splain the joke right back to him:

Which begs the question, how do Norvalians procreate, anyway? Are they clones, like the Vorta? Do they deposit their genetic material into pods, like the J’naii? Do they pick up ready-made offspring, like the Kobali? Whatever the intent is, it has serious implications for whatever kind of relationship he and Janeway would have (like, it’s not on the cisheteronormative trajectory of sex and babies, at the very least). So, bear with me for a moment, because this is my honest-to-goodness fan theory: 

(okay, I admit I just had that image lying around, and this seemed like as good a moment as any to use it.)

What if Norvalians reproduce parthenogenetically, leaving the entire need for a biological “father” out of the equation?

This could mean one of two things: as with terrestrial Komodo dragons (I think), parthenogenesis happens but binary sexual reproduction is still an option (which honestly doesn’t seem like the most likely explanation, given the way Jaffen and Tuvok both frame it), *or*, as with terrestrial whiptail lizards, parthenogenesis is the default, and male (i.e., sperm-producing) offspring are extremely rare and/or usually infertile.

So yeah, okay, they reproduce parthenogenetically, Jaffen is a rare male and is probably infertile, and therefore the Jaffen/Janeway relationship is more about companionship and cooperation than sex and babies. I’m fine with that, and I actually find it quite heartwarming.

But, with that in mind, do we need to assume that Jaffen is male, whatever that means for his species? After all, whiptail lizards engage in female/female courtship behaviour, which somehow makes them more fecund — and remember, it’s the Delta Quadrant; we’ve seen enough weird sex shit by Season 7 (cf. “Elogium”, “Favorite Son”, “The Disease”, “Ashes to Ashes”, off the top of my head) that we can reasonably conclude that all bets are off. 

My interpretation? Jaffen is an honest, gallant, leather-waistcoat-rocking, he/him pronoun-using, parthenogenetic Space Butch. Maybe I’ve spent too much time on Sapphic Star Trek Tumblr, or have finally disappeared up my own genderqueer ass, but I’m convinced it’s the simplest explanation that’s congruent with the facts.

[I just spent a bunch of time trying to find the “Captain Janeway is a closet lesbian, change my mind” meme, but no dice.]

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, it’s time for me to deliver on the non-binary trans lesbian Star Trek shitposting that I’m usually all about. Having been closeted for a long time, I know a thing or two about relationships that seem straight on the surface but are actually hella queer under the hood, so to speak. Just look at these two u-hauling it on the third date (it’s adorable!):

This also seems really gay for some reason:

And, at the end of the day, he’s a good ally:

Watch the whole episode for the obligatory Sad Lesbian Ending.

The icing on this three-tiered Tholian gay wedding cake

...yup.

[Thanks to Em for subtly egging me on (ha) and Bry for putting up with me procrastinating all night. Love you both.]

[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.