mod kitttin - she/her | trans woman | intersex | mixed ethnicity | neurodivergent | ptsd
mod mia - she/her | cis | chicana | schizo | ptsd
mod lacy - she/her | cis | white | AN | delusional ocd/psychosis | sex worker
(header by Christer Strömholm)
It’s Lesbian Visibility day today so I spent yesterday making a comic about feelings. If you’d told me when I was a scared 16 year old that I’d have a wife and a rainbow flag outside of my house- I’m not sure what I would’ve said but I definitely wouldn’t have believed you.
Happy Lesbian Visibility Day. This is beautiful.
New research by Just Like Us has found that [UK] lesbians are the most likely of the whole LGBTQ+ community to be supportive of trans people. Lesbians are the most likely to say they know a trans person (92%), and also the most likely to say they are “supportive” or “very supportive” of trans people (96%). That’s compared to 89% of LGBTQ+ people overall, and just 69% of non-LGBTQ+ people.
… as a lesbian, I see so much overlap with the experiences we and trans communities encounter in the heterosexist world we live in. Particularly, as a butch lesbian, I know that we are both used to living in the margins, to not having our identities respected or understood. Lesbians and trans people stand side by side – we always have done and always will. And this isn’t just my opinion, the research shows this is the case too.
So when you hear or read a nasty, false stereotype about lesbians being anti-trans, I hope you’ll be able to see it for what it is: a lesbopobic trope.
… Transphobia is rising at an alarming rate in our society. I find it surreal when people fail to see the parallels between the tactics of promoting homophobia and the fear of the unknown used against us in the past, and the ways that trans people are being talked about today.
This article doesn’t name who is spreading this lesbophobic trope: TERFs. Claiming to speak for lesbians is just one more way is which TERFs pretend to be a bigger group than they actually are, and one more way in which they try to falsely claim marginalization, obscuring that they are largely just the usual white middle&upper class straight conservatives, misappropriating the word ‘feminist’ to peddle their usual bigotry.
The next time you see a British TERF claiming to speak for lesbians, please remind them that 96% of lesbians disagree.
T*rfs bringing back the anti-strap discourse from the 70s
Can't wait for them to starve to death in the street because eating involves oral penetration, kinda ssus right?
Wait. Wait if fingering doesn’t count as lesbian sex. And neither does using strap. What’s what even IS lesbian sex? Just making out and vaguely humping? Is it just oral or is that wrong too bc guys can also give oral? Like genuinely what r they doing?
Stare at each other and think only pure thoughts until the divine feminine manifests and generates an unproblematic orgasm.
A rambling comic I made in class instead of paying attention
i hope there are more of these women so that queer women can sexualize my titties instead
from the persistent desire: a femme-butch reader
Hot take but rigid divisions between queer identities and heavily-policed labels that are treated like diagnoses are really, really bad.
Trans men have shared histories with lesbians who have shared histories with bisexual women who have shared histories with ace people who have shared histories with aro people have shared histories with gay men who have shared histories with trans women who have shared histories with nonbinary people who have shared histories with etc etc etc etc etc.
Labels are important for people who want them, but we need to stop treating sexuality and gender as rigid boxes and checklists.
Anonymous asked:
Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)
mishafletcher answered:
So I got this ask a while ago, and I’ve been lowkey thinking about it ever since.
First: No. I am a queer, cranky dyke who is too old for this sort of bullshit gatekeeping.
Second: What an unbelievable question to ask someone you don’t even know! What an incomprehensibly rude thing to ask, as if you’re somehow owed information about my sexual history. You’re not! No one—and I can’t reiterate this enough, but no one—owes you the details of their sex lives, of their trauma, or of anything about themselves that they don’t feel like sharing with you.
The clickbait mills of the internet and the purity police of social media would like nothing more than to convince everyone that you owe these things to everyone. They would like you to believe that you have to prove that you’re traumatized enough to identify with this character, that you can’t sell this article about campus rape without relating it to your own sexual assault, that you can’t talk about queer issues without offering up a comprehensive history of your own experiences, and none of those things are true. You owe people, and especially random strangers on the internet, nothing, least of all citations to somehow prove to them that you have the right to talk about your own life.
This makes some people uncomfortable, and to be clear, I think that that’s good: people who feel entitled to demand this information should be uncomfortable. Refusing to justify yourself takes power away from people who would very much like to have it, people who would like to gatekeep and dictate who is permitted to speak about what topics or like what things. You don’t have to justify yourself. You don’t have to explain that you like this ship because this one character reminds you a bit of yourself because you were traumatized in a vaguely similar way and now— You don’t have to justify your queerness by telling people about the best friend you had when you were twelve, and how you kissed, and she laughed and said it was good practice for when she would kiss boys and your stomach twisted and your mouth tasted like bile and she was the first and last girl you kissed, but—
You don’t owe anyone these pieces of yourself. They’re yours, and you can share them or not, but if someone demands that you share, they’re probably not someone you should trust.
Third: The idea of gold star lesbians is a profoundly bi- and trans- phobic idea, often reducing gender to genitals and the long, shared history of queer women of all identities to a stark, artificial divide where some identities are seen as purer or more valuable than others. This is bullshit on all counts.
There’s a weird and largely artificial division between bisexuals and lesbians that seems to be intensifying on tumblr, and I have to say: I hate it. Bisexual women aren’t failed lesbians. They’re not somehow less good or less valid because they’re attracted to [checks notes] people. Do you think that having sex with a man somehow changes them? What are you so worried about it for? I’ve checked, and having sex with a man does not, in fact, make your vagina grow teeth or tentacles. Does that make you feel better? Why is what other people are doing so threatening to you?
Discussions of gold star lesbians are often filled with tittering about hehe penises, which is unfortunate, since I know a fair few lesbians who have penises, and even more lesbians who’ve had sex with people, men and women alike, who have penises. I’m sorry to report that “I’m disgusted by a standard-issue human body part” is neither a personality nor anything to be proud of. I’m a dyke and I don’t especially like men, but dicks are just dicks. You don’t have to be interested in them, but a lot of people have them, and it doesn’t make you less of a lesbian to have sex with someone who has a dick.
There’s so much garbage happening in the world—maybe you haven’t noticed, but things are kind of Not Great in a lot of places, and there’s a whole pandemic thing that’s been sort of a major buzzkill? How is this something that you’re worried about? Make a tea, remind yourself that other people’s genitalia and sexual history are none of your business, maybe go watch a video about a cute animal or something.
Fourth: The idea of gold star lesbians is a shitty premise that argues that sexuality is better if it’s always been clear-cut and straightforward—but it rarely is. We live in a very, very heterosexist culture. I didn’t have a word for lesbian until many years after I knew that I was one. How can you say that you are something when your mouth can’t even make the shape of it? The person you are at 24 is different to the person you are at 14, and 34, and 74. You change. You get braver. The world gets wider. You learn to see possibilities in the shadows you used to overlook. Of course people learn more about themselves as they age.
Also, many of us, especially those of us who grew up in smaller towns, or who are over the age of, say, 25, grew up in times and places where our sexuality was literally criminal.
Shortly after I graduated high school, a gay man in my state was sentenced to six months in jail. Why? Well, he’d hit on someone, and it was a misdemeanor to “solicit homosexual or lesbian activity”, which included expressing romantic or sexual interest in someone who didn’t reciprocate. You might think, then, that I am in fact quite old, but you would be mistaken. The conviction was in 1999; it was overturned in 2002.
I grew up knowing this: the wrong thing said to the wrong person would be sufficient reason to charge me with a crime.
In the United States, the Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996, clarifying that according to the federal government, marriage could only ever be between one man and one woman. It also promised that even if a state were to legalize same-sex unions, other states wouldn’t have to recognize them if they didn’t want to. And wow, they super did not want to, because between 1998 and 2012, a whopping thirty states had approved some sort of amendment banning same-sex marriage.
Every queer person who’s older than about 25 watched this, knowing that this was aimed at people like them. Knowing that these votes were cast by their friends and their families and their teachers and their employers.
Some states were worse than others. Ohio passed their bill in 2004 with 62% approval. Mississippi passed theirs the same year with 86% approval. Imagine sitting in a classroom, or at work, or in a church, or at a family dinner, and knowing that statistically, at least two out of every three people in that room felt you shouldn’t be allowed to marry someone you loved.
Matthew Shepard was tortured to death in October of 1998. For being gay, for (maybe) hitting on one of the men who had planned to merely rob him. Instead, he was tortured and left to die, tied to a barbed wire fence. His murderers were both sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. This was controversial, because a nonzero number of people felt that Shepard had brought it upon himself.
Many of us sat at dinner tables and listened to this discussion, one that told us, over and over, that we were fundamentally wrong, fundamentally undeserving of love or sympathy or of life itself.
This is a tiny, tiny sliver of history—a staggeringly incomplete overview of what happened in the US over about ten years. Even if this tiny sliver is all that there were, looking at this, how could you blame someone for wanting to try being not Like This? How can you fault someone who had sex, maybe even had a bunch of sex, hoping desperately that maybe they could be normal enough to be loved if they just tried harder? How can you say that someone who found themself an uninteresting but inoffensive boyfriend and went on dates and had sex and said that it was fine is somehow less valuable or less queer or less of a lesbian for doing so? For many people, even now, passing as straight, as problematic as that term is, is a survival skill. How dare you imply that the things that someone did to protect themself make them worth less? They survived, and that’s worth literally everything.
Fifth, finally: What is a gold star, anyhow? You’ve capitalized it, like it’s Weighty and Important, but it’s not. Gold stars were what your most generous grade school teacher put on spelling tests that you did really well on. But ultimately, gold stars are just shiny scraps of paper. They don’t have any inherent value: I can buy a thousand of them for five bucks and have them at my door tomorrow. They have only the meaning that we give them, only the importance that we give them. We’re not children desperately scrabbling for a teacher’s approval anymore, though. We understand that good and bad are more of a spectrum than a binary, and that a gold star is a simplification. We understand that no number of gold stars will make us feel like we’re special enough or good enough or important enough, or fix the broken places we can still feel inside ourselves. Only we can do that.
The stars are only shiny scraps of paper. They offer us nothing; we don’t need them. I hope that someday, you see that, too.
trans lesbians enrich lesbianism. trans lesbians are an important part of lesbian culture and community.
plain text: (in the gradient color scheme of the trans and lesbian flag) trans lesbians enrich lesbianism. trans lesbians are an important part of lesbian culture and community.
Anonymous asked:
Thanks for organizing all your homophobic talking points into one blog like this. Although I've never seen a lesbophobe actually identify as one. That's fucked up. Why can't you just be a good person and support gay rights and the science behind homosexuality?
pissing the right people off since like 2016
As a lesbian i will always relate more to trans women than cishet women. Made to feel disgusting and predatory in women’s spaces? Check. Berated and mocked for our relation to sexuality and womanhood? Check. Hated for our “deviancy from the norm”? Check. Every single essay about womanhood by a trans woman–and especially, especially by trans wlw–has spoken more to me than anything written by a cis straight woman ever could. T*rfs can take that to the bank.
also, may I add because it’s not just the negative stuff. there’s so much positive connection:
gender euphoria experiences with a self determined approach to womanhood, attraction and sexuality
celebration of bodies beyond the norm
creating our own culture of appreciating complex and intertwined expressions of gender and sexuality
destigmatization and newfound respect of and for our bodies
true sisterhood based on choice not force
the inherent revolutionary nature of our existence and our love and community
creating space for exploration of pleasure and identity
These posts were fundamental in my coming out as a woman and hopefully someone else will see them and see the overflowing love and acceptance that is waiting for them too.
