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 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 😅
+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.