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#if you're obsessed with giving every label one rigid definition then fuck you
elysianmadness · 8 months
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"Lesbian means exclusive attraction to women!"
"No, it means non-men exclusively attracted to non-men!"
"It actually means queer attraction to women!"
"Lesbian means women and nonbinary people being exclusively attracted to other women and nonbinary people!"
Lesbian is a multifaceted label that can describe many different experiences. There is no one perfect definition of lesbian that will encompass the entire diverse experiences that lesbians can have.
I'm personally a genderqueer woman who's exclusively attracted to other women, but the lesbian next to me might be a transmasc lesbian who loves all genders except for men. And the lesbian next to them might be a bigender lesbian who's both a girl and a boy, who's exclusively attracted to women. Our experiences can all be described by the term lesbian if that's how we wish to describe it, but we might define it differently based on our own experiences. And guess what?
None of our definitions are wrong, but none of our definitions will encompass every other lesbian's experiences. A word can have multiple definitions without any of the definitions being wrong. And those definitions can be very vague or very specific. Labels are made to fit us- we aren't made to fit labels.
People who may have a different experience with the lesbian label are not your enemies. People in lesbian spaces who aren't exactly like you are not your enemies. The problem comes when you try to force one singular definition on every single lesbian. THAT is harmful. Sending death threats to other lesbians because they don't have the same experience as you is harmful. Not another lesbian having a different experience from you.
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