glumshoe:

glumshoe:

Me: “Anyway here is my complicated relationship with lesbian identity and why publicly identifying as such is something I have avoided because it invites nauseating discourse from strangers about nonbinary identities and gender litmus tests, but I use it privately in real life among people I know are capable of nuance and value compassion over participating in righteous discourse. I no longer see a purpose in keeping that private.”

Tumblr: [crickets]

Me: “Here’s a lighthearted joke about being a lesbian—“

Tumblr, en masse: “You disgusting, ugly, hairy MAN, you creepy RAPIST, you are not and NEVER WILL BE a lesbian, go fuck yourself, I can’t BELIEVE you think you’re entitled to FUCK LESBIANS. You’re so predatory. Kill yourself. You referred to the Bechdel Test? Appropriative. You are too masculine to have any right to call yourself a lesbian.”

That statement was in direct response to a flood of people claiming that interacting with lesbians made me predatory and that my difficulty discerning extreme friendliness from possible flirtation was “male entitlement” and “rape culture” because no lesbian would ever find someone like me attractive. When passing as male and living stealth, being identified as “female” without coming out to them either means you aren’t passing (dangerous, dysphoria-inducing) or they have special knowledge about you. A lesbian approaching someone romantically in this context without first clarifying how they conceptualize their gender and sexuality is showing disregard for their identity and is quite possibly a TERF – you have no idea how many cis lesbians have approached me with some variation of “oh it’s so sad that you bought into those Transtrender Lies and have mutilated your Sacred Wombyn’s Body”. 

This, too, was immediately on the heels of “DFAB nonbinary people are Actually  Just Men who don’t want to admit to having male privilege so that they can parasitize women’s spaces”. As much as this upset me and felt wrong, any attempt to distance myself from “man-ness” would (and continuously has been) be construed as “dodging accountability” and “invading safe spaces”. I did not want to push back against being considered Basically a Man both because I would be used as proof of this belief and because I fundamentally disagree with the unspoken attitude that the only two genders are “predator” and “prey”, and that too many drops of masculinity into a solution chemically transforms it into Predator Gender. 

I can’t really relate to the aspect of ‘discourse culture’ that involves getting really invested in the long-term development of strangers’ personal identities and feeling the need to challenge or police how they express them. You are free to consider me “suspicious” – it is unlikely that there will ever be a time in which you will need to trust me – but I can guarantee that disaster will not befall the Earth if you decide to mind your own business.