🏳️‍🌈 Izzy Rizinti Profile picture
Aug 18, 2019 20 tweets 4 min read Read on X
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. 🤷🏽‍♀️

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More from @BellaRizinti

Aug 15, 2023
Just had a terf insisting that suffragette movement wasn't at all racist because women of colour "didn't exist" back then in the UK. She asked me to name "ethnic women" who were there. The suffragette movement was loaded with white, upper class "imperialists" who dropped...
out of the fight for women's rights the very second they got vote. They were not interested in advancing rights for working class women (many of whom were women of colour). The suffragette movement was driven by those with white supremacist ideals. "Imperialism" and "empire".
There were actually women of colour involved in the fight for women's rights back then. Since you asked for names.... here you go.

Read 9 tweets
Feb 11, 2023
I've been thinking about this tweet. Last night I was watching one of my favourite cis lesbian channels. A cis lesbian with a 413k following of predominantly other cis lesbians. She often discusses non binary and trans inclusion as matter of fact, because to most of us...
... non binary folks and trans folks are just a regular part of our everyday lives and we go about our business of being very inclusively gay without spending too much time on this because there's no need too. She has this series she does where she reads out "queer secrets"....
...which is a fun series, where queer folks email in their most embarrassing queer secrets. Some of the submissions are hilarious. Occasionally there'll be a trans or non binary person write in or a cis lesbian who mentions dating someone trans and she'll casually point out...
Read 14 tweets
Sep 9, 2020
Watching the hate group LGBAlliance and the few queer folks who are propping it up take aim at LGBTQ+ kids is sickening. This whole "It's a phase" and "You'll grow up straight" rhetoric they're pushing is pure homophobia. There's not a queer person who's made it to adulthood...
who hasn't lived through some form of homophobia/biphobia as a kid. Whether it was just background noise that took form of "straight" being the only acceptable option or the more direct and violent bullying for being *different*. Pretty sure we all have those experiences.
There's nothing wrong with creating an environment where kids are shown that "straight" isn't the only option. That it's ok to experiment and discover yourself. That being gay or bi isn't "wrong". That if you don't fit into that straight category...
Read 12 tweets
Aug 15, 2020
Lesbian discourse is still popping off in my mentions about lesbians using he/him pronouns.

I suggest those of u still having issues with this rewatch The L Word. The episode with Ivan & Kit. On & off stage, Ivan uses HE/HIM pronouns. Stop harassing he/him lesbians you fuckwits.
The L Word was a fictional serious but it's rooted in LESBIAN CULTURE and the fucking proof is there. Some lesnians use HE/HIM pronouns.

DEAL WITH IT.
Yes, I typo'd.

Fictional SERIES not serious.

The lesbian typo... meh. lol
Read 15 tweets
Aug 1, 2020
I think people are unaware of how organised the transphobes are in the UK. They've established online hate groups, groups that are attacking LGBTQ+ education in schools, groups attacking Stonewall, groups that infiltrate political parties, groups to "recruit" young lesbians...
They have thousands of fake social media accounts that spend 24 hours a day targeting trans & nonbinary folks and anyone who supports them. They have groups that monitor twitter, search for words and then call in other accts to pile on the abuse. They monitor all...
the groups and orgs that are set up to advocate for women and whenever they post something inclusive, they descend upon them in their 100's with hateful attacks that are relentless and can last for weeks (no exaggeration). They attack anyone who is inclusive with hateful...
Read 16 tweets
Jul 29, 2020
I want to talk about "The LGBTQ+ Community" for a sec and how I feel our internal prejudices have become more of a problem since we've become an actual community.

Ok so we've always been here. That's not a matter of dispute but we haven't always had the community we have today.
There was a time when being who we are was illegal. I'm specifically talking about western countries for the sake of this thread. When being who we are was illegal in these countries, we still here but very much underground. There's a long history of places we'd gather...
clandestinely. It was all very cloak and dagger. Before that, we were very much isolated and kept apart from each other. Many of us living our whole lives without ever coming into contact with another queer person. Living "straight lives". Being of the "forbidden class" if u...
Read 20 tweets

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