Janice Turner again in The Times about lesbians

[busyboysmum]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/meet-alex-bertie-the-transgender-poster-boy-z88hgh8b8

This woman is a powerhouse.

Datun I'm saying as a teenager I identified as a lesbian but I believe sexuality is much more fluid than that and identify as gay/queer

BatShite

Yes, sorry I was going to change it, but I had already pressed post. Even I am getting caught up in this whole mangling of language and find myself reverting to neutrality. It’s ridiculous.

Same sex attraction is homosexuality. Women are lesbians, men are gay.

If you’re happy either way, you’re bisexual.

If you are a man who sleeps with a transwoman, both you and he are gay. You can call it pansexual if you like, to indicate you’re happy to sleep with someone who has a different gender identity, but that’s all it is. You’re still gay.

And the whole damn world knows it. Transpeople know it. Otherwise why would transwomen persecute lesbians, instead of sleeping with each other. They don’t, because they are straight men. Not lesbians.

Grrr

Grpsxox

There is no such thing as a lesbian identity. It’s a sexual orientation.

"none of those situations have made me any more or less gay."

of course being a woman who willingly sleeps with men makes you less gay

You believe YOUR sexuality is more fluid than that, or lesbians in general should accept penis?

Grpsxox

Are you seriously telling me that you think Alex and their partner are in a male homosexual relationship? That they are gay men?

Also I don't think I agree with trans people erasing homosexual history or anything like that, the stonewall riots were started by a trans lady of colour!!

Who please? Because you seem to invalidate the first half of your sentence by the second. Storm Delarvarie was a butch lesbian and drag king, she never in her lifetime identified as trans.

I'm seeing more and more lesbian women being claimed as trans when they never themselves identified as such, and those rewriting their identification for them are serving their own purposes. They have no idea how those women would feel or whether they would agree. In the process, women who do identify as lesbian are being stripped of their role models and heroes, which increases the message that being a biological woman is very much a non identity left over at the bottom of the hierarchy.

I'm uncomfortable with the implication that my self identification is old fashioned and perhaps a bit rigid? I certainly am not sexually attracted to male bodied people, I am sexually attracted to biological women. That's homosexuality. If homosexuality is being framed something that more modern, enlightened young people have overcome then that's erasing centuries and millenia of homosexual people. Not to mention that it's a bit homophobic to imply that women who are homosexual and not sexually attracted to male bodied people are at best behind the times and at worse, transphobic.

if you use the wrong wording understandably a trans person, who is more used to abuse than well meaning questions, my go on the defensive (or offensive) and then call you a terf.

Its worth taking into consideration here that the vocabulary is extremely complex, specialised, not part of every day speech and therefore very unfamiliar to people who do not frequent the right online places, so it's very difficult indeed to not accidentally use the wrong wording.

However I don't agree that 'burn a terf', 'die in a fire' and 'punch a terf' is understandably defensive. It's threats of violence, hate speech and completely inappropriate.

but I believe sexuality is much more fluid

Yours maybe, plenty of people are only attracted to the opposite sex, or to the same sex. And remember that sexuality is about sex, not gender.

Bucketsandspoons I was talking about Marsha P. Johnston who did identify as transgender! And I think we've just demonstrated how easy it is to get wires crossed!

I would never dream of invalidating your identity and I would hate for you to think that's what I'm doing. Personally, I think sexuality is a spectrum and yes some people fall firmly on either end but the majority of people fall somewhere in the middle.

I wouldn't say young people find your sexual orientation old fashion or transphobic at all! I just think young people are choosing to discover who they are without trying to fit tightly into labels, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

i don't want to end up in an argument as ultimately we are on the same side here even if our views don't exactly line up.

Ah, but you see there is no such thing as a lesbian, they are just bigoted vagina fetishists. Normal people are attracted to gender rather than sex, being attracted to someone's physical attributes is just so shallow. A real lesbian would be happy to be penetrated by a female penis...

Personally, I think sexuality is a spectrum and yes some people fall firmly on either end but the majority of people fall somewhere in the middle

Happy to be corrected but I don't think most people are bisexual?

Bucketsandspoons I 100% agree with you that the language is not easy to get your head around at all and I don't agree with what people have said in reply at all.

But, say, if you were a trans person, you receive 50 abusive messages and 1 message with great intentions but accidentally transphobic wording, would you not see it and assume it belonged with the rest? Maybe not fair to the person who sent it but a very easy mistake for someone to make.

All you can really do, is try your best to use the correct language as much as possible and find nice trans people who are happy to correct any mistakes you do make. Everyone slips up sometimes, I do it all the time, but as long as you acknowledge your mistakes they shouldn't be held against you and I think if someone did attack you for an honest mistake they couldn't be seen as an accurate representation of the trans community as a whole.

Itsallgoingtobefine It's a hard thing to get your head around but bisexuality isn't necessarily 50/50. No one would pretend that the majority of teenage girls don't have "girl crushes" and wouldn't on some level even an innocent girl crush show at least some level of romantic attraction to the same sex?

it gives an impression that there are situations in which it is acceptable to misgender someone and there aren't

I'm happy to use the pronouns someone asks me to use in general but this smacks so much of someone stamping their foot and saying 'those people over there have xyz privileges. I want them too.'

Gender isn't an objective thing. You can't literally misgender someone. I hate the way it's framed as a bullying act.

EVen if 'sexuality is a spectrum'. Lesbian women are attaracted to solely female people. Not male people in dresses. If you are attracted to male people plus female people, then you are bi. And have no right to inflict your female penis onto lesbians and call them transphobic for rejecting it. Its just nonsense.

Itsallgoingtobefine It's a hard thing to get your head around but bisexuality isn't necessarily 50/50

So you are arguing that most people aren't either 100% homosexual, or 100% heterosexual. That makes a bit more sense, I thought you were arguing that there were more than two sexes

I was talking about Marsha P. Johnston who did identify as transgender!

Marsha P Johnson identified as a gay transvestite.

Marsha P Johnson identified as a gay transvestite

Ah, but transvestite is now under the trans umbrella (like literally everyone on earth)

No! Marsha P Johnson* did not identify as transgender. She was a drag queen and called herself that. Stop reinventing history to fit your narrative.*

And Joan of Arc wasn’t trans either

And Joan of Arc wasn’t trans either

Or Snape

Marsha Johnston regularly gets mentioned on these threads. I saw a discussion about it on Twitter recently, which backs up the wiki entry below. Marsha was a gay activist and drag queen/transvestite. On the Twitter thread I saw, someone pointed to an interview conducted late in life/near to Marsha’s death where Marsha said he thought of himself as a gay man, so even if Marsha would fall under the very broad trans umbrella today it is not how they identified in their lifetime. I don’t think we should be retrospectively transing anyone. I get particularly cross about women who concealed their femaleness to get into proscribed professions like medicine being transed - they were feminist pioneers, not bloody transmen!

From Wiki:

Marsha P. Johnson (August 24, 1945[1][2] – July 6, 1992) was an African American gay liberation[3][4] activist and drag queen.[5] Known as an outspoken advocate for gay rights, Johnson was one of the prominent figures in the vanguard of the Stonewall uprising in 1969.[3][6] A founding member of the Gay Liberation Front, Johnson co-founded the gay and transvestite advocacy organization S.T.A.R. (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), alongside close friend Sylvia Rivera.