Hi everyone,
I hope this is okay to post here. I thought this board might be the right place because the topic is sex-based boundaries, lesbian spaces, and the way girls are taught to understand consent.
I’m a French lesbian, and this subject is personal for me.
When I was younger, I was exposed to the idea that refusing male-bodied people who identified as women was narrow-minded, cruel, or bigoted. At the time, I did not have the confidence, language, or emotional strength to clearly say: “No, I am a lesbian. I am not attracted to male bodies. My boundaries are not hatred.”
That kind of message can be very damaging for young lesbians and girls in general. Especially girls who are kind, anxious, isolated, conflict-avoidant, or desperate to be accepted by a community.
If a girl is taught that her discomfort is prejudice, that her boundaries are exclusionary, and that saying no makes her a bad person, she becomes easier to pressure. That is what worries me.
A lot of the public discussion focuses on medicine, children, sports, prisons, and free speech. Those topics really, truly matter. But I think the lesbian angle is often treated as a side issue, when it actually reveals one of the clearest conflicts in the whole debate.
Female homosexuality is based on women being exclusively attracted to women. That should be simple. But increasingly, lesbian boundaries are reframed as suspicious: “genital preference,” “cotton ceiling,” exclusion, bigotry, lack of education, lack of openness.
The issue is that women, and especially young lesbians, are being asked to surrender sex-based language, spaces, and sexual boundaries in order to prove they are kind.
That creates a very specific form of misogyny: women’s refusal is treated as a problem to solve.
I made a video rant (through a personal storytime[ about this from a French lesbian perspective. It is in French with handmade English subtitles. The tone is caustic and vulgar at times, but the argument is serious.
Link:
Id be interested to know whether other women here have noticed this pattern, especially mothers of teenage girls, lesbians, or women who have seen similar dynamics in schools, online spaces, dating apps, or LGBT communities?
Cheers!!