nerdflighter | intracommunity discourse: wlw edition

articulated in relation to this post by

themadcapmathematician

[please bear in mind that this post was written with tumblr lgbtq intracommunity discourse in mind.]

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