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 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.
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 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.
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