I myself experience sexual attraction to both masculine and feminine people, leaning strongly toward feminine, but I have a hard time imagining myself being with a binary man. It feels a bit awkward to identify as a bi woman sometimes because my sexual attraction for men just kind of exists, yet I don’t feel entirely comfortable identifying as a lesbian for the same reason. I just learned about the bi-lesbian flag/identity and it feels more right to me because I don’t want to erase by bisexuality, even if I never choose to act on my sexual attraction to men. Curious what others think.
I’m in a similar camp. My attraction is almost exclusively fem leaning in practice. Even tho it’s actually about understanding and safety for me, so some men do occasionally fall under that umbrella. Tho it’s true that these men are also usually queer in some way and super kind and soft :P
I’m quite comfortable using sapphic for my self, especially since when it comes to romance, the area of attraction tightens further once emotional resonance becomes more than just a vague preference.
I see no issues with using multiple labels in any combination. If it describes you well have at it! People are complex. No system of categories can survive contact with the real world. There will always be exceptions and edge cases.
I am an asexual lesbian. You can be a bi lesbian. That’s fine too!
Back in the day I’ve always just identified more as homoflexible in that regard. Like yea physically I more tend towards feminine people but I am flexible enough to have a boyfriend now.
I think to actually find what label you’re comfortable with, or just to accept to ignore labels, you kinda have to try around. For me, i’m at a point where I’d consider myself just Bisexual since in my experience there are reasons both for and against someone based on their gender (or lack there of).
I just call myself queer.
Physically, I’m attracted to men more than I’m attracted to women. But romantically, I can be attracted to anyone that labels themselves queer.
Which means I mostly end up dating queer women. I don’t feel that bi or gay sum up my experience. So I just call myself queer
I am a lesbian and I really have no desire to gatekeep what labels someone uses to describe their sexuality. It’s up to other people to convey their preferred labels to me for the purposes of clear communication. But ultimately it doesn’t really affect me at all.
I think prioritizing the rigidity of definitions is the business of fascists. Words are not sacred. We should be the end all be all for the labels we use for our gender and sexuality, no one else should get to decide them for us.
If the term bi-lesbian has meaning to you, that’s alright. I’m glad you’ve found a label that feels right to you.
I feel like labels make sense to point someone in a general direction. If I’m interested enough in them that specificity is worthwhile, I’ll explain myself, or like if their specific sexuality is relevant to a conversation, I’m down to learn more, but otherwise I just do not have it in me to memorize 60 different flags for niche levels of attraction. Get me in the ballpark and it’s probably close enough.
It’s why I like ‘hetero/homoflexible’ despite some people being against it. “Oh, you’re mostly straight or mostly gay? Cool, I gotchu.”
Edit: Oh my god, I’m an idiot. I meant to post in response to OP, but I got so distracted, because I literally tried to grab the username LadyAutumn when I signed up. 🤭 You have amazing taste.
lol, I would have no clue what hetero- or homo-flexible would mean, but TIL - thanks 😅
I feel like labels make sense to point someone in a general direction. If I’m interested enough in them that specificity is worthwhile, I’ll explain myself, or like if their specific sexuality is relevant to a conversation, I’m down to learn more, but otherwise I just do not have it in me to memorize 60 different flags for niche levels of attraction. Get me in the ballpark and it’s probably close enough.
+1 for this - I’m usually using the label to give someone a quick gist of my sexuality
my sexuality doesn’t need to be hyper-specific, but I completely support exploring sexuality and making our language more rich
I’ve used labels in the past like pansexual and it mostly added confusion rather than clarified anything, esp. once its meaning started to overlap with different and contradicting things, and also once I really introspected enough I realized I’m not really pansexual. Maybe it’s good to have a label like pansexual, maybe it’s good that it generates interesting conversations. But mostly I just didn’t find it useful, so now I have reverted to saying I’m bi, a lesbian, or usually just not disclosing my sexuality.
Isn’t bi-lesbian just bi?
Not to OP, as I think they described.
Sure, but bi carries an implication that you’re open to dating across the gender spectrum. If you’re not open to dating men, even if you’re attracted to them, then some people feel that the bi label doesn’t fit, even if it’s technically correct.
That’s why you differentiate between bisexual and biromantic
I wasn’t talking about attraction as such. Like, I won’t date people who don’t identify with queerness in some way. I’m not “queersexual” but rather, it’s a personal preference and understanding of my own needs that influences who I date above and beyond who I’m attracted to. My last boyfriend for example, I was attracted to him romantically and sexually, but he wasn’t queer, and I felt like my queerness was invisible when I was with him. And so after we broke up, I decided that I won’t enter another relationship like that.
And similarly, there are people who are technically bisexual, but who won’t date men, despite having attraction, even romantic attraction to them.
I had an acquaintance years ago who was almost exclusively attracted to men, but he had been in a relationship with a woman for over a decade and feared that his gay credentials were in question. He would never leave her though.
The tomes clash aggressively on my device.
I think usually the trouble you get into is with the term “lesbian” which is seen as a term reserved only for women attracted exclusively to women (not capable of attraction to men).
The typical way I’ve seen getting around this is a broader term being used instead like “sapphic”, so calling it a “bi-sapphic” flag might make some people hung up on “lesbian” happier.
But even “sapphic” gets complained about because then people who identify as lesbians and not as sapphic can feel like they’re seen as not using inclusive language, the way sometimes people have been criticized for calling themselves “bisexual” because it can be seen as transphobic (the implication is that you should identify as pansexual and not bisexual, because you should be trans-accepting in your attraction; but other people just reject that “bisexual” was ever really transphobic, etc.).
Controversies aside, I’m definitely more than incidentally attracted to men (probably like 60% attracted to women, 40% attracted to men at this point), but I really relate to your experience - in practice I’m just a lesbian, I’m only going to date women, I’m not going to date men, and my attraction / sexual orientation feels irrelevant and separate from how I actually live and present, which is as a woman who is in a relationship with a woman.
Other people see me as a lesbian because they know I’m married to a woman (and ngl, a big part of this is that I pass and don’t disclose my trans status), and I’m pretty much happy with that designation. I’ve felt like a lesbian most of my life, as weird as that is to say, and even if I’m “technically” sapphic, I live my life as someone who has only ever dated or been with women and who prefers to keep it that way.
So yeah, I get it - makes sense to me!
I probably won’t use the label or flag (esp. since it will be confusing and require explanation).
I’ll probably just call myself a lesbian because it’s what most people will understand.
Yeah militant lesbians being really defensive about the term only applying to wlw exclusively is what gives me pause identifying as a lesbian. You still hear about drama in the lesbian community when someone dates/fucks a man (or so I’ve heard).
I’ve heard people make the claim that bisexual is transphobic but that never really sat right with me because it’s a literalist interpretation of the word and in the end just feels like an unnecessarily anal semantic argument at best, and another example of bi erasure at worst. Words mean things beyond their etymological roots, so bisexual doesn’t literally mean only attracted to two genders, it means attracted to multiple genders, at least that’s how I use it and how bisexual people have historically used it.
Honestly at this point I don’t think I’ll be dating anyone who isn’t queer anyway, so any confusion would be pretty easy to resolve. The only option for me dating someone who isn’t queer would be cishet men and they are the group I’m least interested in lol.
Yeah militant lesbians being really defensive about the term only applying to wlw exclusively is what gives me pause identifying as a lesbian. You still hear about drama in the lesbian community when someone dates/fucks a man (or so I’ve heard).
Same, I don’t really want to alienate lesbians for whom that is an important distinction. But … on the other hand, I’ve never slept with a man and don’t plan to, so … I dunno, sometimes I feel like it’s not that crazy to identify as a lesbian when that’s at least how I exist in a social sense. (Though, a lot of times my partner and I are viewed as two straight women - people will assume we’re relatives or roommates rather than lovers. So even getting to the point of being viewed as lesbians is a struggle sometimes.)
Also, there is so much drama and toxicity about men in some of these “militant lesbian” spaces, like the idea of “gold star” lesbians, the idea that a lesbian is somehow “less” of a lesbian if they have ever slept with a man. I tend to just experience a lot of this as unnecessarily alienating to both actual lesbians and bisexual women. Like, get over yourself - women are subject to heteronormativity like everyone else, not everyone is equally privileged with access to tools of interpretation to understand their sexuality, and many of us have been coerced into heterosexual relationships by church, family, and society. Let’s not shit on other queer women, please. (Not to in any way diminish the legitimate hurt some lesbians feel when they’re cheated on by their partner with a man, for example - but then the focus probably belongs on the sexual immorality rather than the gender.)
I’ve heard people make the claim that bisexual is transphobic but that never really sat right with me because it’s a literalist interpretation of the word and in the end just feels like an unnecessarily anal semantic argument at best, and another example of bi erasure at worst.
I don’t think it came from an overly literal interpretation, instead I think it was around when pansexual as a term came out to indicate openness to dating trans people that some bisexuals were starting to intentionally use the term to specify they weren’t open to dating trans people, so … bisexual became more associated with transphobia during that time, but I think there was a big backlash and now we just ignore that transphobic use of the term. I tend to think of bisexual as not literally meaning “attracted to two genders / sexes” but more just being a general-use umbrella term for sexual orientations that don’t fall on either extreme of homo- or hetero-sexual.
Honestly at this point I don’t think I’ll be dating anyone who isn’t queer anyway, so any confusion would be pretty easy to resolve. The only option for me dating someone who isn’t queer would be cishet men and they are the group I’m least interested in lol.
theoretically I would be open to dating non-queer people, but … yeah, the only non-queer option for me is also cishet men. I think there probably are men out there who I would want to date, maybe even cishet men, but … I dunno, I don’t see it as likely.
i use “bi” specifically because i feel like it excludes androgyny since im attracted to gender binary presentation, trans inclusive, as long as you’re convincingly masculine or feminine in your presentation. not a hard line exclusion ofc but it is my preference and so it’s what i use
None of the labels really fit me well especially since I’m technically agender, even if I have a vagina and present femme more often. So there is no homo or hetero since I don’t fit either side and I don’t like bi because it excludes non-binary people who are no bi-gendered, like me. So, I have my internal labels which are pretty loose, and my external labels which are context specific. Pan is the best I’ve come up with as a general term, but I heavily prefer femmes and since I present femme a lot, lesbian works ok. Queer is a good one, too, since it’s nonspecific.
Bisexuality is inclusive of non binary folk. The name predates widespread awareness of gender experiences outside the binary, but the even back nearly 40 years ago, the bisexual manifesto was quite clear that bisexuality includes folk whose gender falls outside the binary.
That doesn’t mean you need to use the label for yourself, but it’s important to recognise that the label itself isn’t inherently exclusive
But bi means two meaning it literally refers to being attracted to two genders by definition. Sure it’s often used to refer to people who are somewhere between binary genders as well by more inclusive people, but it also often is used to exclude trans and non-binary people by more conservative people. What it definitely doesn’t include by definition of the word is people who are totally outside of the binary spectrum.
It’s like people who call transwomen “dude” or “bro”. Sure they might mean that as a gender neutral term in their heads, but it is not a gender neutral term to the majority or by common usage. Or people who use the b word. Sure in some groups of people it’s a term of endearment, but in many its meant to degrade women since the literal word means “female dog”. So, if some people use the term as an insult then it doesn’t matter that you might not be meaning it as an insult, it’s still going to feel like one. On the internet you have to be more specific with wording things and not use regional slang outside of communities specifically for those groups.
Similarly, even if you personally use bi to mean all, that’s not how some people use it, and it’s not the literal meaning of the word, so it is generally assumed by people who are outside the binary spectrum, and sometimes trans people who are often treated as non-human by conservatives, to not include them unless they know the specific person or group means it differently.
For example on dating sites that include both bi and pan, if people choose bi over pan, I generally assume they aren’t interested in trans or non-binary people. If there’s no other option, then I might assume they mean all.
What it definitely doesn’t include by definition of the word is people who are totally outside of the binary spectrum.
It does though.
This is a quote from the bisexual manifesto, back from 1990
Bisexuality is a whole, fluid identity. Do not assume that bisexuality is binary or duogamous in nature: that we have “two” sides or that we must be involved simultaneously with both genders to be fulfilled human beings. In fact, don’t assume that there are only two genders. Do not mistake our fluidity for confusion, irresponsibility, or an inability to commit. Do not equate promiscuity, infidelity, or unsafe sexual behavior with bisexuality. Those are human traits that cross all sexual orientations. Nothing should be assumed about anyone’s sexuality, including your own.
I completely understand that you may be uncomfortable with the term yourself, and I’m not suggesting that you need to use it. But the term was inclusive of non binary people from before many people using the internet today were even born. You can’t assume that someone using the term is exclusive of non binary folk.
I can genuinely say that I’ve never met a bisexual person who is explicitly only interested in men and women. I mean, I’ve ran across them online, but the people that I’ve actually met and spoken to in person? Not a single one has used the label in an exclusionary way.
And like any term with problematic, out of date origins, there is power in reclaiming it.
All of which is to say, you can’t tell people that an identity they’ve been using in an inclusive way for literally decades is actually exclusive just because you personally aren’t comfortable with it.
For what it’s worth, I feel similar about the term transsexual. It’s a term that in modern usage, has a good chance of meaning that the person labelling themselves that way is a transmedicalist, with exclusionary beliefs about who is and isn’t transgender. I don’t label myself transsexual because of that discomfort with the word. But I also know people who came out as trans decades before I did, who use the label because that was the language at the time they came out. They’re not automatically transmeds themselves, and I don’t get to tell them that they need to redefine their identity for my comfort.
Unfortunately, I have met many people who identify as bi, but are exclusive of trans people. As gay and lesbian people have become more accepted, but trans people have not, many bi people who identify as TERF, for example, exclude trans people from their bisexuality.
J.K. Rowling is the most famous close to an example, but definitely one of the reasons it’s acceptable. Although she says she turned out to not be, she did once identify as bi while exploring her sexuality, but of course trans people excluded.
I’ve experienced my fair share of people saying they’re bi, but not being interested in me or people like me who don’t conform, so I’m speaking from experience. The idealists who documented the bi label may not have meant it to be used that way many years ago, but again, the literal meaning is that, and since it is often used that way, that’s how I interpret it.
It doesn’t matter to me what words other people to describe themselves to themselves, only what words they use to describe themselves when communicating possible interest or not in me.
I think the problem here is you’re letting transphobes corrupt a word that never meant to exclude trans people, and actual bi and trans people use to describe their sexuality, me included. I’m trans, and I have sex with trans people. My most recent ex is nonbinary. All words are made up and they mean what we decide they mean. If you let some bi transphobes sully a word they’ve tried to corrupt with hate you let them win. You wouldn’t write off feminism as anti-trans because TERFs exist. You wouldn’t write off lesbians as racist because racist lesbians exist. You wouldn’t write of pan people as rapists because pansexual rapists exist. Why the fuck do you want to let bi transphobes claim our word?
Reclaiming a word is a great goal, but it starts in targeted local communities and then having those communities reach out to reclaim it in larger ones and so on. And it’s much more difficult when both the intricacies of the literal meaning dont support the one you want and it’s in active use to mean something different by people who don’t believe they are using it in a bigoted way. It’s much easier when it’s very explicit that people are using the word as an attack like gay, bitch, the n word, etc., all of witch are in various stages of being reclaimed.
But if it’s about communication and in a larger community like the internet or even a city of people, and there are more specific words that explicitly give those meanings rather than intricate socially defined implications, then it’s better to use those words outside of the community you’re reclaiming the word in.
In this case, if a cis-woman I’m interested in says they are bi, I will assume they are not interested in me vs if they say pan- or omni-sexual or use a word that has no explicit intricacies associated with it’s literal meaning like queer. And asking clarifying questions might out me in a potentially life-threatening way. If a trans-woman I’m interested in says bi, I’m likely to be more inquisitive to figure out what they mean just like if they said queer. But again, that’s a different community of people. Very few trans people are going to be bigoted against other trans people. But lots of cis people are bigoted in the current state of the world.
So feel free to try to reclaim it. I think that’s a noble goal. I’m just saying that you may be misinterpreted in a larger community like on the internet or even localized dating sites.
You’re just wrong though. Bi doesn’t mean trans exclusive. You are personally pushing for that definition through your actions and words. You are actively giving that word away to transphobes. Ultimately you’re free to believe whatever you want to believe, but you’re still just factually incorrect.
It doesn’t matter to me what words other people to describe themselves
That’s the important part!
but I have a hard time imagining myself being with a binary man
Always remember your ABCD’s.
Anyone But Cis Dudes.
