Thread by @BellaRizinti

I want to take a few minutes and talk about "lesbian gate keepers".

Seen a lot of things on twitter lately. A group of lesbians busy policing femme & butch, Bisexuals, Pansexuals.

To be clear here, the lesbian community has never been all hearts & rainbows. There's always...

...been a level of elitism within our ranks and it sucks. You can find evidence of this 4 as long as we've been using the word "lesbian" to describe who we are. Some have taken identities such as "Femme & Butch" & claimed them as uniquely ours. No1 else gets to use OUR words...

The people I see claiming "Femme & Butch" are usually jumping on Bi folks about this. Their tweets usually consist of insults that lack any substance for the most part. There's a lack of knowledge surrounding our history. It's sadly very apparent in most of their tweets...

..Femme & Butch go back a long way. Gay men have been using these terms for each other for as long there have been gay men. Hell you can even apply it to cis-hets. Some are "femme" and some are "butch". Lately though, bisexuals have been taking a lot of abuse over this....

.. The thing is, bisexual femmes and bisexual butches EXIST. Like it or not elitist lesbians out there, they exist and they have every right to define themselves. Just as we categorise ourselves with femme and butch, stud, diesel, high femme etc...

... We've never owned "femme and butch".

I'm a proud lesbian, don't get me wrong here. There's a lot about the lesbian community that makes me proud. We have our own culture, publications, shows, music, writers, celebs, artists etc.. and all of that is amazing. We've come...

a long way from hiding out in underground dive bars and being forced to feel shame for being who we are. Times have most definitely changed and for the better.

What bothers me the most these days is that some lesbians aren't learning any queer history/queer theory and it shows.

Biphobia has always been an issue in our community. FYI: I have no time for biphobes. The arguments spewed out concerning bi folks are fucking ridiculous & belong in the bin. When I see lesbians trying 2 claim "femme & butch" because their "ours", it's nothing but more biphobia..

I've seen "A lesbian came up with this word" and *insert dictionary definition cuz it mentions lesbian* which is a really fucking terfy tactic btw and it makes me cringe. Not calling all those who do it terfs here (although some of them are). Words, definitions have meaning....

...Yes words have meaning. They have meaning because we assigned the meaning to those words. I keep going back to the "define chair" argument that ensued on trans twitter when a certain transphobe tried using it to "own the trans". Hilarity ensued...

There was a whole lot of "Wot's got 4 legs & u sit on it?" Horses came up a lot, followed by memes of horses labeled CHAIR. You get my point here? Arguing over who came up with a word first so it's "OURS" is equally fucking ridiculous. Good luck policing an entire population...

who uses butch or femme and ISN'T a lesbian or even LGBTQ. Oh & go have at those French folks for u know, speaking French & using their own word that you're trying to claim cuz it's OURS.

Reading the abuse Bi folks take for this pisses me off to no end. It's elitist as fuck.

Lesbian & Gay (L&G) are not the all powerful two groups that get to dictate to the B, T, Q+ folks how they can and can't identify and those of you out there trying to pull this shit need to stop. We aren't a dictatorship, as much as some of you act like we are. LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY..

We're a community because we've fought together, we've bled together, we've sacrificed together, we've DIED TOGETHER to get to where we are today. You damn well need to learn some history & respect for the B,T & Q+ because without them, we'd be fucked...

You need to get your priorities sorted. All the energy you waste acting like you own "Femme & Butch" when they were never uniquely ours. All that energy writing biphobic tweets & giving the cis-hets massive fucking orgasms because "The queers are eating themselves" needs to stop.

Oh & just in case the "elitists" have a fit about the cis-het part. We've all done exactly that. "Oh check out that butch woman over there." and "She's so femme" etc.. don't act like you don't categorise people who aren't lesbians like that becuz you know that's bullshit.

Seriously, aren't you all fucking tired of this shit yet? The endless bitching & sniping. Decades of this same elitist bullshit. Decades in which no lesbian's life has been altered because a bi woman defines herself as femme or butch. The futility of this crap blows my mind.

I'm reminded of a convo I overheard once btwn 2 lesbians.

"She's hot".
*Who?
"The femme at the bar."
*Ah, yeah. She's Bi tho*
"ugh, not going there then*

Obvious biphobia aside there, lesbians assign "femme" & "butch" to bisexuals ALL THE DAMN TIME. To then turn around & deny..

..their right to identify that way for themselves is hypocrisy of the highest level.

Anticipating the "they're our words to use, we can call bi women femme if we want, they just can't use it for themselves." Nope. That's not how it works. U literally just assigned that woman...

... "femme" which means you clearly acknowledge and are in no doubt at all that femme bisexuals exist. You don't get to deny them that in your quest to be the best lesbian gate keeper you can be. 🤷🏽‍♀️