#intracommunity discourse: wlw edition

[radiqueer]

stuff that would actually fix the wlw community on tumblr

dropping words like comphet that were coined by terfs to target mspec and aspec women, and cis lesbians who date trans lesbians

eradicating radfem politics from our spaces

dropping the ahistorical lie that only lesbians can use words like butch, femme, and dyke

dropping the idea that women who are attracted to men are less wlw than women who are not attracted to men

not measuring people's worth by how wlw they are: not excluding or othering aspec and mspec women because of their lack of attraction and attraction to men respectively

extending real support to nonbinary and trans wlw instead of tacking them on to the end of positivity posts as an afterthought without considering how your rhetoric actually affects and accounts for them

eliminating aphobia and beginning to consider your amatonormativity and allonormativity affect wlw

eliminating queerphobia, which includes not shitting on aspec and mspec women who use the word queer to refer to themselves, even if you're personally uncomfortable with the word.

considering wlwoc as real wlw and acknowledging that including men in their politics doesn't make them any less wlw

caring about wlw in countries that aren't just the US and some parts of Europe

caring deeply about Jewish wlw when they are excluded from wlw spaces due to antisemitism

caring about people who are not wlw: caring about queer men, about disabled people, about bisexual women who aren't wlw, about asexual women, about people of colour—including men of colour, caring about trans and nonbinary people. caring about people who aren't like you.

eliminating sex negativity; getting rid of the idea that sex is bad, that kink is bad, that people with non-normative sexual desires are bad. eliminating the idea that wlw all have pure sexualities and if they don't, they must not be really wlw. normalising sex and sexuality, especially wlw sex and sexuality.

calling out abusers in the community, including but not limited to radfems, terfs, swerfs, biphobes, aphobes, queerphobes, and transphobes. understanding that sometime can have great politics but still be an abuser. understanding that bigotry is abuse.

calling out transphobia when you see it. calling out wlw who claim attraction to trans men on the basis of their genitals. calling out wlw who refuse to include trans and nonbinary wlw.

allowing for growth, for mistakes, for forgiveness. understanding that we're not perfect. understanding that we can always be better.

[radiqueer]

the problem with every meta post about lesbians I see around is that it so rarely even mentions the ways in which bisexuals or asexuals interact with the same pressures, and yet if bisexuals and asexuals have conversations which do not account for lesbians then it’s held up as proof we’re homophobic demons

[radiqueer]

Re: that wlw post: what do you mean by radfem politics?

I highly recommend the wikipedia article on radical feminism

some radfem ideas that are depressingly common in wlw spaces:

men are inherently bad

male sexuality is bad

men being attracted to women is bad

the way men experience attraction to women is less pure/well intentioned than the way women experience attraction to women

things that men like are bad: including porn, kink, makeup on women, etc. even if women like them too

women have pure sexualities

the way women love women is better -> women are less likely to be abusive

women don’t objectify other women -> ignoring the ways in which woc are treated by white wlw, ignoring that women can objectify and dehumanize just as well as any man. ignoring that biphobia in wlw spaces arises directly from the perception of bi women as sexually available to men, and since male sexuality is bad, bi women’s sexuality is also bad. ignores that wlw can be fatphobic and ableist as all hell.

others/erases wlw who have kinks -> suspicion of sexually dominant women, suspicion of sexually submissive women, marking out kinky wlw as reiterating patriarchal oppression (because kink is a patriarchal phenomena, not a queer countercultural one)

in the same vein, despises women who have impure sex -> women who enjoy penetration, especially PiV sex, despises women who see out partners of multiple genders (others polya and mspec women) 

society: lesbians are predatorywlw spaces: lesbians are never predatory

erases the abuse perpetrated by women, including the abuse faces by trans women at the hands of cis women, and the abuse faced by bisexual, asexual, and intersex women. ignores that abuse can happen to anyone, by anyone.

lesbians are oppressed for not being attracted to men AND being attracted to women -> bisexual women are attracted to men and women and are therefore less oppressed than lesbians -> lesbians are allowed to harass and insult bisexual women because that’s punching up at your oppressors

and so and so forth.

[radiqueer]

imagine thinking that bi and ace women criticizing lesbians for their biphobia and aphobia is the same level of bigotry as a cishet man trying to turn a lesbian

[radiqueer]

been thinking a lot lately abt how some lesbians claim to be the Most oppressed or erased group, when in fact, they along with gay men have clearly proven themselves to be the ones with the power to include or exclude other groups from the community in a large scale significant way, and also seem to believe they Should have that power? never mind the fact that 'lesbian' and 'gay man' are the only two identities where their existence is never called into question, again within the community

I wouldn’t say “never” considering that for a while lesbians functionally were excluded by gay men but again, like you said, gay men were the only people w the systemic power to leverage against cis lesbians. ur basically...not wrong. I hesitate to play with the idea that certain queer subgroups are more privileged than others but the ability of cis lesbians to harm and exclude other groups has a lot more to do with, say, their ability to organize themselves than it does with their identity...if that makes sense?

[radiqueer]

you're not a lesbian, you don't get to dictate what our movement should and shouldn't look like. why should we build solidarity with straight women who don't wanna fuck. also quit equating terfs with lesbians thank you

sent in reference to this post. two things;

1. you’re accusing me of dictating what your movement should look like while also repeating blatantly wrong definitions, actively harmful definitions of another group. ace women are not “straight women who don’t wanna fuck” they’re women who aren’t attracted to men. you know, like lesbians? except ace women also aren’t attracted to women. 

2. it’s rather suspicious that you react to “it sucks that terfs are harming the lesbian community” with “stop equating terfs with lesbians.” it’s almost like you yourself read ‘terf’ to mean ‘lesbian’ which, in case you didn’t know this, is pretty much exactly what terfs want. 

[radiqueer]

tiny brain: bi women have more in common with straight women because of "het" attraction

large brain: bi women have more in common with lesbians because they're both wlw

galaxy brain: not all bi women are wlw and bi/ace solidarity is the real deal. bi and ace women's experiences are mirrors of each other and by holding both in the same framework alongside lesbian and straight experiences, we can come to a unified view of systemized womanhood and all the ways in which it inflicts trauma

[radiqueer]

Wlw tend to be like 'oh of course we accept all wlw, but only if you date women and never speak of men sweaty' :)

true lmfao

[radiqueer]

total sidenote but this line about "inability to let lesbians have things." is such disingenuous nonsense. No one is trying to take away lesbians' access to this terminology! lesbians can talk about experiencing coercive heteronormativity, or about corrective rape, or whatever! What's actually at stake TERFs' inability to let *anyone else* have things. They don't want lesbians to be allowed to use those terms, they want to be allowed to *take them away from other people*. so who's the asshole?

i have nothing to add to this! u are completely right!

[radiqueer]

My main problem with the whole "um no that's for lesbeans" thing is that it creates a purity dichotomy. People will often point to certain kinds of attraction to women (especially sexual physical attraction) and say "Ew, only straight men see women that way! Lesbians are so much purer!" And as a bisexual woman I hate this because sometimes I am attracted to the same things straight guys are. I like boobs. And I'm tired of feeling like I'm somehow gross or a "straight man" because of that.

yeah there’s this weird tumblr thing that’s like “the way straight men see women is impure” and “lesbian attraction to women is different from cishet men’s attraction to women”...like okay sure? to a degree I guess that’s true but like you said, it creates a dichotomy and it puts lesbians in this position of being...better at loving girls, which is plain bullshit. you can’t state that lesbians are better at loving girls than straight men without devaluing the relationship of every girl dating a straight guy......which is just plain old misogyny lmao. also that’s a huge red flag because it makes it harder to identify and deal with woman-on-woman abuse

[radiqueer]

dont reblog

“homosexuality is the ultimate gender non-conforming trait in female people” i fucking love when radfems have such woke views on gender and sexuality they loop right back around to “lesbians aren’t real women”

[radiqueer]

articulated in relation to this post by @themadcapmathematician

I genuinely think that rejection of nb/gq people (i’m just going to use nb from now on) is inherent to wlw and mlm spaces. it’s predicated in the relationship of wlw and mlm towards GNC men and women, which is mostly that being GNC is fine so long as you’re still a binary gender at the end of the day.

I’ve seen wlw spaces work to accommodate trans women but refuse to extend that safety towards nonbinary transfems.

it’s hard for me to articulate the anxiety that i feel about these spaces as an nb bisexual, when it seems like so many lesbians i see these days on this website are also nb. it feels like you’re allowed to be an nb lesbian in a wlw space, but you can’t be an nb bisexual in a wlw space - you’re considered other when you’re both nb and bisexual/asexual. the only difference between me and an nb lesbian is that i am multi-gender attracted (many lesbians do not consider themselves to by mspec even if they’re nb and/or dating nb lesbians) and they’re not. i can only surmise that the category of lesbian is more internally cohesive and tightly-knit than the categories of woman and nonbinary, which leaves people like me, who are neither woman nor lesbian, out in the cold.

it’s also difficult to talk about this because many lesbians on this website are closed off to dialogue, or to people asking about their identities. i don’t think lesbian identities should be called into question, but i would like to know more about them and how they’re structured. i think many lesbians interpret people asking about their identity as people calling their identity into question, and of course that is in part due to the incredibly toxic nature of dialogue on this site. when i try to learn about it without asking, i have to wade through an ocean of biphobia, aphobia, queerphobia, and sex negativity. since i can’t do that as much as i need to in order to actually learn something, i’m forced to theorise in the dark.

saying that wlw spaces are full of lesbians is a neutral statement of fact, and also, like i said above, the category of ‘lesbian’ supersedes the category of ‘woman’ and ‘nonbinary’ in order to include people from both groups. but because they’re defining themselves as lesbians first and women/nb second, there’s no space left for nonbinaries and women who aren’t lesbian. this renders wlw spaces increasingly toxic to us until we cave and leave, reinforcing the idea that these were lesbian spaces all along and we were either fakers or interlopers.

[that’s not even getting into the toxic biphobia in claiming that mspec and aspec women can’t have as complex a relationship to their gender as lesbians can - as though being a lesbian makes you more of a person, or being bi/ace makes you less of one. it’s saying that bi & ace women face less bullshit from society than lesbians do, which is.........blatantly untrue.]

I’m talking about wlw spaces because those are the ones I have experience with - I cannot speak with any authority about mlm spaces. I cannot speak to how they account for trans, nb and bisexual men.

but I can only imagine it’s more of the same. which is why i strongly believe that we need a unified and cohesive bisexual, asexual, and nonbinary community that caters to our needs without us having to center monosexual / cis people in the process. i don’t think the wlw and mlm communities are above salvation, but i do think that the job of ‘saving’ them is going to go to trans, nb, aspec, and mspec people, and we need to have community support of our own before we can tackle that problem

[radiqueer]

wlw communities will literally never be free of biphobia and aphobia because of the way they're structured and complaining about how biphobic and aphobic they are gets us nothing but pain

[radiqueer]

Your take on the wlw community? Fucking true. As a bi ace trans person, I have to do tons of searches on each blog that's wlw. BUT the worst part is the vast majority of the time, they have some bigoted shit on their blog. I feel like that's why I have always been more in tune with my attraction to men because I don't have to deal with the gatekeeping shit of the wlw community. You aren't allowed to call it out and it feels like it's getting worse. Radfem trash is festering there, I hate it.

i am kinky, aspec, bisexual, and queer, and i have found maybe...........1 blog that doesn’t make me feel alienated for any of those things. maybe 1. that’s horrible! and shameful! it should not be like this! wlw should not feel this alienated and excluded withing our own fucking spaces? how is this fair and safe for wlw? why is the acceptable range for behaviour and identity so fucking narrow for us? it’s not even cishets who are doing it to us, it’s other wlw - primarily lesbians hopped up on terf juice - and it sucks. and it isn’t fucking lesbophobic to call that out

[radiqueer]

at this point if someone on tumblr points out another user as a lesbophobe 99% of the time they’re a bisexual who thinks all wlw can reclaim dyke, or a trans woman talking about how lesbian tumblr is chock full of crypto terfs, or an ace blogger talking about how they can’t so much as breathe without getting called lesbophobic. we literally cannot call you out without getting an entire smear campaign directed at us. it must be nice to never have to face any consequences for your bigotry, protected by your circlejerk of mutuals calling anyone who disagrees with you a ~cringy kweer~ but the rest of us aren’t feeling so great about it! have some compassion maybe

no offense to lesbians but ur community is overwhelmingly biphobic, aphobic, queerphobic, transphobic, exorsexist, and sex negative and at some point u have to admit u have a problem rather than yelling lesbophobia every time somebody points it out. it gets old, and i don’t really care anymore unless ur actually gonna do something abt the fact that ur community is outstandingly toxic for anybody who isn’t a gold star lesbian. 

[radiqueer]

why... do sapphics accuse other sapphics of “fetishizing WLW” when they talk about their sexual interest in girls? I’m not gonna go into details in case that’s inappropriate but just like. Why do sapphic relationships have to be romantic? I mean, aro sapphics exist, do they not count? I’ve seen a weird number of think pieces about bi women ‘objectifying women’ and ‘reducing sapphic relationships to just sex’ and. Am I? Missing something??? Bc that just sounds so regressive and radfem.

right, so this is a synthesis of a few toxic tropes about bi women

bi women are slutty and down for threesomes [origin: queerphobic heterosexual men]

bi women can choose to prioritize women but don’t [origin: radfems]

a bi woman who can choose to not be with men who has sex with other women for her boyfriend’s benefit (her consent is not relevant to this equation) must be doing it because she hates women and she’s a lesbophobic bihet who wants to aid in the corrective rape of lesbians. 

of course, radfem definitions of words are looser than their fictitious version of a bisexual woman. this means that any bisexual woman who dates a man and then dates a woman (or vice versa) wants to correctively rape lesbians. 

because bi women aren’t people unless they’re being fucked. [origin: society]

I cannot stress just how deep radfem dehumanization of bi women runs. to the point where i strongly believe that biphobia is as inherent to radical feminism as queerphobia and transphobia is