Bisexuals are annoying
Can we as a community be honest with ourselves and say Bisexual trans women can be so annoying
because I am a les4les transsexual engaged to another les4les transsexual we found each other on purpose and chose each other on purpose and the romantic shape of my life is women who want women who want women without a boyfriend hovering near the snacks with the spiritual hygiene of a damp basement couch, and that should be the single most boring fact available about me, since I have publicly said worse things about more powerful people yet nothing on this earth opens my mentions faster than me typing the sentence "I only date lesbians" and pressing post like a normal woman with a normal life.
It is the word "only" that summons them, one normal English word, and the second it goes up half the group chat starts foaming like I personally revoked their grindr access and they dont have access to st4t trade who hasn't showered in a week, and within the hour somebody's girlfriend's boyfriend's other girlfriend has materialized in my replies to explain to me that desire is fluid and that her boyfriend who looks like he owns one towel with an element of her radical queer praxis and that her attraction to men is somehow the bravest thing happening in a room full of women, and ma'am, I am a woman with groceries and a podcast and a wedding to plan because I don't want your boyfriend anywhere near my bed, he can stay exactly where he apparently lives now, which is in every sapphic space on the planet, eating chips with his mouth open and lowering the property value of rooms he was never invited to.
Lesbianism is the only sexuality that gets background checked, because a straight woman can say she doesn't date women and the whole world nods and moves on since that is simply understood to be the weather she was born under, and a bisexual trans woman can say she dates everyone and the room applauds her for the sheer range of her heart and somebody offers her a panel where she can explain how dating a man named Zach is more subversive than cutting my dick off and wanting to be with a woman who has done the same, and then a lesbian says she dates women only and suddenly a hearing convenes, suddenly my monogamous engagement to one specific woman requires a public comment period where "only" is exclusion and exclusion is violence and I have therefore harmed strangers I will never meet by declining to be theoretically available to them, and I went and personally checked on every woman I am not dating and I can report that they are all thriving, most of them curled up with a Josh who owns a full podcast setup and no bed frame and a single fork and a theory he will explain to you unprompted about why lesbians are kind of essentialist if you think about it, which he has, once, briefly, in the shower he takes weekly.
And apparently i’ve been told everyone is a little bi, which, doll, no, you are a little bi, possibly a lot bi, and that is yours and it is also not the law of the land that descends on every woman in the room just because it descended on you after three drinks and a man who called himself a leftist because he owns one bell hooks book with the spine still factory tight, because when you tell me everyone is a little bi what you are actually telling me is that somewhere underneath the transsexual lesbian engaged to a transsexual lesbian there is a girl who just hasn't met the right whatever yet, and diva, straight people ran that exact line on lesbians for an entire century before you were born, you did not invent it, you gave it a septum piercing and a Notes app apology about how lesbian boundaries reproduce carceral logics, and women went to psych wards over the insistence that some of us are all the way one thing, so my refusal to be a little anything is the house I actually live in while you stand in the yard describing your own floor plan and calling it architecture.
"I don't like lesbians having a boundary that includes me," it shows up dressed as theory, the boundary is assimilationist and it’s secretly cis, and a lesbian says "only women" and the room fills up with Reddit particles, a spiritual residue that settles over any conversation
And ofc the T4T boyfriend jump scare, where you will be somewhere that swore up and down it was for women who love women, a group chat, a party, a server, an app that put "sapphic" in the bio.
a Josh haunting the third paragraph of her profile like a water stain and the serenity of a man who has never once been asked to leave anywhere because every room he enters silently reorganizes itself around his comfort like he is a gas leak with pronouns, and when you finally say in your smallest voice that you thought this room was for lesbians, you become the issue, because the man at the lesbian party is totes okay and you noticing him is the problem, his presence gets filed under community while your discomfort gets filed under discourse, his vape cloud is nuance and your lesbianism is fascism, and I have personally watched grown lesbians apologize for wanting one room on the entire planet where the question "so what does your boyfriend think"
What tips me from annoyed into genuinely feral is that her attraction to men is treated as self-evident and requires no defense, no origin story, no receipts, no follow-up questions of any kind, while my lack of attraction to men is treated as suspicious, as political, as probably trauma, as something worth interrogating and she never has to account for Josh, Josh is simply there, like mold, like some ancient curse on the T4T group house that everyone has quietly agreed to live around, his presence is weather and my absence of interest in him is a political emergency, and I am being asked to account for an empty chair, an empty chair where a disappointing man could have been sitting, because apparently the empty chair is the hate crime now and the man in it would have been the community.
The bar for her sexuality is that she feels it, and the bar for mine is a dissertation defense in front of hostile reviewers, and as a trans lesbian the audit doubles, because now my "only" gets read as insecurity, as overcorrection, as a symptom of something a healthier girl would have integrated by now, when my fiancée and I looked at every configuration of desire available to two transsexuals in this economy and picked each other with our eyes open
I have watched a white dyke say something meaner than anything I would sign my name to and collect little hearts for her courage while I got a gentle DM about my tone for the polite version, and it is the same sentence in both mouths
Every word we coin gets new tenants too, because sapphic used to mean something and WLW used to mean something and dyke night used to mean something and T4T used to mean something sharper than "a man with pronouns can stand in the kitchen while lesbians explain to each other why they feel weird," and now the umbrella covers Josh, so we mint new words and the new words get moved into within eighteen months and then we get accused of inventing vocabulary to exclude people, and yes, obviously, that is what a word is, a word that includes everything means nothing.
so I am truly sorry the dictionary did not ship polycule-inclusive and pre-loaded with an explanation of why a lesbian event needs to hold space for a man whose entire contribution to queer life is making three women simultaneously worse at texting back.