growing up as a Xennial girl and coming of age within a culture of homophobia, society taught me that my self-worth relied on whether men found me sexually attractive. i struggled with self esteem and body dysmorphia on top of gender dysphoria. how i wanted to look, the clothes and hairstyles that made me feel good, was not how i "should" look according to men. i remember my abusive highschool boyfriend telling me i was "disgusting" when i cut my hair into a mohawk, and he refused to hold hands with me in public.

i've been nonmonogamous/polyamorous for decades, essentially since i was a teenager and first discovered the concept on the internet (thanks to furry art). very often, there is a strong pervasive pressure not to say "no" to potential partners. it comes from a few places and can be complicated to suss out.

part of it is patriarchy's general expectation that women should not say no to men, whether they are monogamous or polyamorous, partnered or single. this pressure and expectation is particularly harmful to bi women (and those perceived as women), who are fetishized and subjected to harassment from unicorn hunters.

another part of it is from pressure to be a people-pleaser, to not say "no" in general. you don't want to hurt someone's feelings, do you? never mind honoring your own feelings; it's only the other person's feelings that truly matter. (gag me with a spoon.)

and there's a lot of folks who don't understand that nonmonogamous people can say "no" for ANY reason. just because we're nonmonogamous doesn't mean we can't set boundaries, it doesn't mean that we're automatically attracted to literally anyone who comes our way, and it sure as hell doesn't mean we're obligated to return the affections of anybody who wants us. again, this is particularly harmful to bi women (and those perceived as women), who are already subjected to the biphobic stereotype that all bi people are promiscuous and just want to fuck everyone around them 24/7. i can only imagine how much worse it is for women of color, who have long been stereotyped as promiscuous and libidinous.

can't ever escape the madonna/whore duality, huh?

okay, so you might have noticed i've focused on how many harmful ideas that bi women (& people perceived as women) are subjected to, but haven't (yet) brought the lesbian experience into it. so take all those beliefs and attitudes and enforced norms, and layer them on top of compulsory heterosexuality-- where all women (& those perceived as women), but particularly lesbians, are pressured to live up to the patriarchy's expectations, where even if a lesbian can't be fully converted to heterosexuality, bisexuality will do in a pinch, because it means they are at least theoretically accessible to men.

there is a pervasive stereotype that all lesbians are TERFs and all TERFs are lesbians, which could not be more false! this assumption insultingly erases the multitudes of lesbian trans women and transfems, firstly. and secondly, the fact is that a great deal of TERFs/"gender critical" feminists are straight or bi women.

this is not to discount that there have been many cis lesbians who have used their orientation as a reason to justify their exclusion of and discrimination against trans people (especially transfems), of course. but they are very much not the only demographic spreading TERF ideology. after all, JK Rowling isn't a lesbian, and she's the most influential TERF on the planet right now.

gender has always been at least a little Complicated[tm] for everyone under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. lesbians have ALWAYS included ample amounts of genderweird folks. it is ludicrously ahistorical to believe that lesbians cannot be transmasc or use any pronouns other than she/her.

only fairly recently (within the last 10-15 years or so) did the definition of lesbian somehow become "a binary woman who solely uses she/her pronouns who is attracted only to other binary women who solely use she/her pronouns" in the eyes of a lotttt of young folks. and as a people-pleaser (look, i'm working on that in therapy, ok?? ;__; ) that really fucked me up for years!

and that's the thing... insisting on that strict definition of lesbian is literally a TERF talking point! and some people who claim to hate TERFs are just eating it up and parroting it without thinking!

lesbians have always counted nonbinary, genderqueer, and transmasc folks amongst their numbers. to be lesbian is to be inherently gender nonconforming in the first place.

so where does this super-strict definition even come from? one, from TERFs and garden-variety transphobes, of course. but also, notably, from dysphoric trans men/transmascs who claim that transmasc or nonbinary lesbians who go by they/them or he/him are somehow delegitimizing their identities as men, as well as "tainting" or watering down the definition of lesbian identity itself.

but i realized that line of thought tended to come from insufferable terminally-online tankies who desperately need to touch grass, i was able to let go of that shame and self-doubt. i'm not "betraying" lesbians or non-lesbian transmascs just be being a he/they butch on T.