Yah you’re right “labels” was a bad word to use. I get what you’re saying but ultimately the reason it is important to me to not put barriers on which wlw can call themselves what is that it further divides our community and turns us against each other, and ignores the fact that not everyone knows what their exact sexuality is, and you can centralize your life around your love for women without being positive you’re a lesbian. At this point in my life I’ve just given up on trying to explain my complicated relationship with my sexuality with people and call myself a lesbian, but I think a lot of that stems from trauma and some days I wake up and I really feel like I made a mistake and should actually call myself bi. But if I were to change that (ultimately arbitrary) label it wouldn’t change my lifetime of experiences with lesbophobia in any way, it just might change my future romantic prospects (and in my case it wouldn’t even change that, because there are, as a matter of fact, bi women who center their lives around their love of women due to preference, trauma, etc. but still feel comfortable identifying as bi.)

Focusing your identity around potential future relationships is a black hole that leads absolutely nowhere. If a bi woman ends up in a relationship with a man she can just… stop using those labels. It’s not an all-or-nothing deal. But as long as a bi woman is in a committed relationship with another woman and faces all the stigma that accompanies that, why shouldn’t she be allowed to express herself with the same labels as her lesbian peers?

I agree that butch and femme are terms founded in gender nonconformity that inherently exclude men! But I think its important to understand that a relationship between two women in which one or both is bi is just as exclusionary of men as a relationship between two lesbians. The potential for attraction to men does not actively bring men into a f/f relationship, and assuming that it does is biphobic. And historically speaking, bi women in same gender relationships have been regarded the same way as lesbians.

I don’t think that it’s always appropriate for bi women to use the butch and femme labels, but I think that they should be allowed to use them when discussing their presentation around other women and their relationships with them. I feel the same way about the d slur, which is similarly reclaimed partially for the purpose of excluding men. That being said, of course bi women in same gender relationships still experience homophobia and biphobia, but their experiences with gender conformity are often different.

I think that tumblr’s new culture of encouraging women conflicted about their attraction to men to just push it aside and call themselves lesbians makes us forget that there are plenty of women out there who don’t really want to pursue romantic relationships with men and instead prioritize women, but still identify themselves as bi. And I think that putting barriers on which wlw can say which terms just heightens the pressure placed on us to choose a strict label instead of just saying, I like women, and that’s a big part of my life, so this is how I identify myself with respect to the world. Which feels more important to me I guess, as someone who doesn’t really know her sexuality and probably never will.

Aw, thank you! I’m honestly a bit disappointed in myself that you even had to ask such a question, because I am absolutely against transmisogyny in all of its forms, and I’ve always considered TERF ideology to be not only violent and dangerous, but also inherently hypocritical. I’m not transfeminine and I would never claim to fully understand the extent of their suffering under transmisogyny, but as a dfab lesbian who has dated trans women I have definitely seen first-hand the horrifying lengths to which TERFs are willing to go to frame trans women as predatory, manipulative, and deserving of violent assault. Trans women are one of the most marginalized groups in society right now, and any feminism that does not include them is not actually advocating for women at all.

The reason that I identify myself as a gender nihilist and not a gender abolitionist is because mainstream gender abolitionist theory tends to be, yes, written by TERFs. Gender nihilism is a term coined by Alyson Escalante, a trans women of color, as an expansion of gender abolitionism that points out the hypocrisy in attempting to dismantle gender only to preserve sex. Here are some excerpts from her original essay:

This is not to say that those who identify as trans, queer, or non-binary are at fault for gender. This is the mistake of the traditional radical feminist approach. We repudiate such claims, as they merely attack those most hurt by gender. Even if deviation from the norm is always accounted for and neutralized, it sure as hell is still punished. The queer, the trans, the non-binary body is still the site of massive violence. Our siblings and comrades still are murdered all around us, still live in poverty, still live in the shadows. We do not denounce them, for that would be to denounce ourselves. Instead we call for an honest discussion about the limits of our politics and a demand for a new way forward.

[…]

The violence of gender cannot be overestimated. Each trans woman murdered, each intersex infant coercively operated on, each queer kid thrown onto the streets is a victim of gender. The deviance from the norm is always punished. Even though gender has accounted for deviation, it still punishes it. Expansions of norms is an expansion of deviance; it is an expansion of ways we can fall outside a discursive ideal. Infinite gender identities create infinite new spaces of deviation which will be violently punished. Gender must punish deviance, thus gender must go.

And thus we arrive at the need for the abolition of gender. If all of our attempts at positive projects of expansion have fallen short and only snared us in a new set of traps, then there must be another approach. That the expansion of gender has failed, does not imply that contraction would serve our purposes. Such an impulse is purely reactionary and must be done away with.

The reactionary radical feminist sees gender abolition as such a contraction. For them, we must abolish gender so that sex (the physical characteristics of the body) can be a stable material basis upon which we can be grouped. We reject this whole heartedly. Sex itself is grounded in discursive groupings, given an authority through medicine, and violently imposed onto the bodies of intersex individuals. We decry this violence.

I highly recommend reading the entirety of this essay, as well as it’s sequel, which addresses the more concrete actions that we can take to dismantle the European colonialist gender structure.

This got long, so TL;DR I hate trans exclusionary radical feminism and I would walk across hot coals for trans women.