#congrats another queer has found another place that feels hostile

[glitterfop]

absolutely no way am i the first person to say this, and dear gods i hope i don't start or even continue discourse with this, but tonight, ~as a bisexual~, i am appreciating the word "dyke" for not distinguishing between lesbians and bisexuals. like. i just live with the knowledge that like 50, 60, 70 years ago, the community i would have found a home in would have been the lesbian community. and primarily because separatists decided Men Are Icky, people like me got chased out of those spaces and left to build our own, and now i've got teenagers telling me to "stop invading lesbian spaces" and whatever, like. we are family. we are the same. i'm real sorry i've got boy cooties, i'm sorry i don't pass your arbitrary (and i'm sure very feminist) purity test or whatever the fuck, but within living memory we found home in the same place and we were the same, and it is not my fault that broke. and there is something beautiful and healing and hopeful in "dyke," because people like me have been dykes since dykes were invented, and so have people like you, and we are still just the same even if there are still random assholes on the internet yelling at me to stop appropriating your slurs. we're still all just dykes in the end.

and i know we've tried to find more sanitized terms that do the same thing. we have sapphic now, and isn't that more civilized, isn't that safer? maybe it is. i like that we're still trying to build something that mends this. i like that we're still trying to recognize our solidarity with new words. that's important. and hey, love shouting out sappho every chance i get. nothing wrong with sapphic. but it does feel a little insular. like you're not going to get what sapphic even is unless you're a certain level of online, a certain level of educated maybe. it's not new, i know, but it wasn't in fashion for a pretty long while afaik. it seems like some folks might have missed that memo.

idk, but i like that i can say DYKE with my whole chest and absolutely everyone knows the important parts of what i mean and doesn't get to know the unimportant parts. do i mean dyke in a bi way? in a lesbian way? in an aro way? in an ace way? in a woman way? in a genderfuck way? a trans way? a trans fem way? a trans masc way? a cis way? a butch way? a femme way? who gives a fuck, we're all dykes here. maybe that's almost like coming home after all.