In general, what do you feel about The LGBT Foundation using a 'gender fluid' person to promote lesbian visibility day?

Just had a conversation with a friend who is dealing with situation at work where an employee has come to her distraught over a colleague habitually referring to another colleague as “little dyke”.

We’re so far from done with harmful lesbophobia. My blood is boiling about appropriation. Stop erasing lesbians.

I recently realised that I've started judging people by how they react to the cotton ceiling. If they don't see it as a problem or minimise it or pretend they haven't heard of it or its made up, I assume they have dodgy views on sexual violence.

I do the same. It was the whole cotton-ceiling / lady penis stuff that peak-transed me in the first place.

To hear young lesbians on social media - and no doubt in real life too - being told, being pressurised to get used to the penis, that it's not a male sexual organ, because it belongs to them, and they are definitely a woman, because they say so, and so much other stuff that I'm not even going to type here - makes me sick. It's a rape culture.

Lesbians are attracted to women. Women don't have penises.

I had to skip huge chunks of the derail, but going back to that pink news video...it was posted on social media by my young, very newly out niece, so I watched it, thinking to myself “bet there’ll be a stray Y chromosome in this somewhere. They can’t help themselves”.

And lo, it came to pass. I feel so very, very sad for my lesbian friends and family. How can my niece express her sexual orientation when the institutions that are supposed to be there to support her in it are undermining the very definition of those orientations? How is she to make sense of her sexuality in this Humpty Dumpty world? It’s breaking my heart.

Lesbian = female homosexual.

Honestly I’m just yacking. Lesbians are women, have female reproductive organs and don’t have willys. I have known this for a long long time and it’s fairly key to...being a lesbian.

What interest? And - indeed - what possibility? Have I missed something?
the circular thought processes are interesting.

So A is male, but wants to be female because he feels that is “who he truly is”.
However A does not feel attracted to men and so would like to have relationships with women. A decided that A is a transwoman lesbian.

Disappointingly female lesbians don’t want to sleep with A because THEY believe A is a heterosexual male transwoman and they rather obviously are only attracted to female partners. They veto A as a potential partner.

If A cannot have relationships with lesbian females, A can only have relationships with other transwoman. This would not be a lesbian relationship because both parties are male.

oops logical should read illogical

The individual in question looks like a man to me.

Some butch lesbians look exactly like men and can easily be mistaken for me, especially older women.

I am not a lesbian but did identify as a lesbian in my distant past. I have had intimate LTRs with men and women and am more interested in what goes on in a person's heart and mind than what body parts they possess.

My definition of a lesbian is somewhat different to others here in that if a woman predominantly has relationships with women but is occasionally attracted to / has intimate relations with people who are not women but still says that she is a lesbian I will accept her self-definition.

However, whatever differences I might have with posters here regarding having the state of being a lesbian revoked by the sisterhood should a woman have sex with a man (does it get revoked after one sexual encounter? 2? how many? who decides? etc.) it seems to me to be insulting and ridiculous to suggest that a man / trans woman or even a woman who identifies as gender-fluid should represent lesbians on lesbian visibility day.

Surely, now matter how much a person or group respects diversity, the choice of a person to represent a particular category of people, especially when oppressed and in the process of being erased via the policing of language and collective adherence to logical / nonsensical rules, should be a person who encapsulates the most visible qualities of the category concerned?

So, regardless of whatever disagreements I might have with posters here on a range of issues, on lesbian visibility day the poster woman who represents the category should at very least be a woman who identifies as a woman and whose primary intimate relationships are with other women.

Well the LGBT foundation has certainly decided to queer the pitch....

I never thought I'd have to use the phrase in this context though and quite so literally.

This is mainly a British expression, so I should explain that when you queer someone’s pitch you spoil their chances of success, usually deliberately. It came originally from the argot of nineteenth-century market and street traders.
The word pitch here is closely related to the other British sense you give of an area of ground marked out for some sporting purpose, such as a cricket pitch or football pitch. But it’s a different meaning of the word. It was the name given then as now to a position in a street market or the like where a trader set his barrow or stall. And for at least three hundred years queer had been a slang term for anything wrong, nasty, bad or worthless.

And if they are lesbians that means they are only attracted to women. But they don't believe that lesbians can only be women? So they are attracted to every gender?

So negate themselves in that sense too.

Fucking lunacy.

Perhaps we should launch a campaign as to how evil movember is as it excludes almost all females

Surely by their own reckoning if they are gender queer they can't be lesbians?

They claim not to be women but non binary.

So surely calling themselves lesbians is a complete contradiction to their own identity?

But it has effectively illustrated the entitlement of men.

But it has effective illustrated the entitlement of men.

The individual in question looks like a man to me.

But it's besides the point.

A lesbian day is for female homosexuals.

Not gender questioning, pansexual non binary queer unicorns.

Fucking hell. I wish MN had a block user function.

Completly disrailed.

No biological men should be representing lesbians but I think from looking at the FB page of the individual in question they are actually a born woman.

I only want the same rights. The same right to participate fully in society and not be driven out and excluded through sexist disrespect, fear, and bullying. We have those rights only in words today, not in practise,

"If I see cause I'll do my hardest to fight it."

@Trebe - do you notice when women are interrupted by men in meetings? Men are far more likely to interrupt or talk over women than to interrupt men. They also wildly over-estimate the amount that women contribute to the overall discussion in meetings - there is a study (which I can't find just now) that shows that, if women talk for, say 25% of the discussion, men in the meeting will say that they contributed equally.

When you walk down the street, do you notice that women automatically move out of your way? There is a new game called Patriarchy Chicken, where women walk down the street and deliberately don't dodge when a man walks towards them - and they watch the men's reactions. Men are shocked when women don't move out of their way - they walk into them and sometimes swear at them. Most men walk as if their journey is the most important, so they get to pick the most direct route. They will dodge round other men, but not women.

Basically, your gripes about what women want, are based on your perception of what women already have, in relation to men, and I am willing to be that your perception is wildly inaccurate. So when you think we are getting MORE rights than men, we are probably not even close to approaching the SAME rights as men.

The way this poster is continually posting "gotcha!" type comebacks, I have this vision of them sat at home all gleeful about how they've really socked it to these uppity women now, pats on the back for me!

And then I fell really really sorry for them to be so deluded.

What happened to the interest in the possibility of trans women being lesbian?

What interest? And - indeed - what possibility? Have I missed something?

It's impossible for men who identify as women to be lesbians. Being as how a lesbian is a female homosexual.

It would take much more than this

Its the the lack of the liberal values that upsets me. I swear to god I'll leave now. I want it to do well I just want it to do well with the old liberal values.

It doesn’t only effect lesbians any more than any other form of oppression only effects the victim.

I’ve read back a few pages. What happened to the interest in the possibility of trans women being lesbian? It’s been helping me snag my thinking and I was looking forward to reading other people’s thoughts. Instead man demands appreciation for his previous left-feminist-thoughts progressing to threats of not supporting anymore because feminists are not doing feminism right and are (horror of horrors) man-haters and incapable of “dignified” discussion.

Really?

Cheers Trebe.

Anyway, I must say I saw more men claiming to be lesbians on the lesbian day of visibility, so how about celebrating a few actual lesbians.

I did love the lesbian character in series two of Fleabag (I'm only on episode 3 or 4) especially her speech about the menopause.

Thank god for that.

Fair enough theinbriata, i've hijacked a thread they were particularly using for something that only really affects lesbians. I just joined in the conversation because something interesting was said and it spiralled from there I apologise for taking over the thread.

I'm gonna bow out as gracefully as I can and leave this thread in peace.