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Lesbians get to decide their own sexuality
A common refrain from gender critics and conservative agitators is that lesbians are both being erased from society by trans ideology, and that trans women are somehow turning lesbians straight and forcing dick on unwilling lesbians. In old parlance this is called horse manure, in modern parlance it is straight up bigotry. No woman ought to be forced to do anything with her body against her will, so if she decides that her lesbian sexuality is trans positive then who is anyone to tell her what she must identify as.
Sexuality is not three discrete boxes of straight/bi/gay, it is a vast panoply of seven billion different people understanding their own attractions, cultures, religions, and sex drives to find the right person for them. Women who love and are attracted solely to other women have has many labels over the centuries with sapphic and lesbian being the most recent western society has alighted on. “Lesbian” is a social term that has both been liberatory, as it enables women who love women to have a concept they can identify with and explain to the world in shorthand their sexuality, and exclusionary as it has allowed society to ring fence such women away from heteronormative ideals. Being a “lesbian” is freighted with the weight of both, and the accumulated social history of lesbianism has fostered a specific conception of sexuality that is at best ill-fitting and at worst ignore the actual contours of women who love women’s sexuality.
Labels such as gay, lesbian, bi, pansexual etc are short hands for much more complex and textured sexualities. I identify as queer because whom I am attracted to and sleep with is all the people irrespective of bodies, yet I find myself attracted to certain gender expressions over others. This is why broad brushstroke labels have many sub-cultures within them, such as twink, bear, butch, diesel dyke, femme, queen etc. A gay man can sleep with whomever he likes and still conceive of himself as a gay man, the same for a lesbian; no-one has the right to impose on them a conception of sexuality that does not align with a person’s understanding of self.
Which is why gender critical conceptions of sexuality as espoused by the likes of Julie Bindel and the LGB Alliance are fundamentally flawed. No trans person imposed their bodies into another person’s sexuality, and…
