Who's the 'valid' lesbian?

Spoiler⚠ Content Warning: {describe here}

Okay, fellas, I think it's time to crack open one of the problems inside the lesbian community.

I preliminarily warn y'all that you will probably want to downvote this post, curse the OP of this post, unlabel the OP and girls with similar to mine point of view. TW: homophobia and adult topics mentioned.

If you checked my account, you might see that I posted here things about questioning my own attraction. So I started questioning the whole label too. I'm not going to delve into my personal experience because this post is mostly about the community, not me but I'll take references from it.

I did some research, read some articles about lesbians and their attraction, and I encountered a big disagreement with some of beliefs I saw there. The main thing that I couldn't get on with it's the fact that lesbians who are even slightly romantically or/and sexually attracted to people who identify as men aren't real lesbians and they are under bi umbrella.

Sounds logical, doesn't it? If you are lesbian, you aren't supposed to be attracted to men in any way. The maximum is the aesthetical attraction but no more. Moreover, not many but not small amount of cishet men have a harmful and homophobic belief about 'fixing' lesbian women as if they are 'lost girls that didn't meet a good guy in their lives'. It's totally terrific because this belief perpetuates some dehumanising practices that I won't mention directly but I have a hope you'll get what I'm talking about.

We know that queer people and allies fight against fetishizing lesbian women. It caused creating some groups that strongly and radically stand for definition of the term as a woman who's only attracted to men. And again what's wrong?

While fighting for the right to be seen as women who don't like men romantically or/and sexually at all, we forget about those women who identify themselves as lesbians but they also can feel slight, very faint attraction to men. It may be just a person who identifies as a male. Also, it can be a person who identifies as a male and who has specific traits that are rare among men or not common. Yeah, it sounds like bi umbrella or pan umbrella. But in this case, these women still don't have a 20-70% attraction toward men like many bisexual/pansexual women do. These women still mostly and very likely are ready to date women, marry women, be happy with women instead of dating men yet they can a little be attracted to men.

What do we do in this case? We fight against the fetishizing, the cishet men 'savior complex', and many other problems. So we put these 'lesbians' out of lesbian community? Or should we consider existence of spectrum here as well as it was considered toward aromantism, and asexuality?

Posted Feb 21, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

011
Loading comments…