i want to talk about women and people who are perceived as women and our attraction to men. a thread

note: i am transmisogyny exempt and not binary trans so i will never fully understand the nuances of passing. i am really just speaking from my experience first as a cis woman and then as a nonbinary fem-presenting person

okay. so i came out as bi in late summer 2016. i didn't date a woman until the following spring (i dated another nonbinary person around that same time as well). i continued dating men throughout

but my experience dating men shifted, especially as i began to question my gender starting in january 2017. even before that, though, my feelings for men were not heterosexual. they were queer because i was (and am) queer

an experience that i think a lot of bi women share is self-invalidation and self-exclusion from queer or lgbtq+ communities, largely driven by those communities being very bi exclusionary, but also driven by the guilt that queer women are made to feel for their attraction to men

this isn't specific to bi women. lesbians who dated men before coming out are invalidated. there's discourse around whether they can actually identify as lesbian. hell, this bleeds over into nonbinary people, particularly afab nonbinary people who are lumped in with women

. . . which is yet another layer of Bullshit, because nonbinary people are not a third gender and we shouldn't be lumped in with people who share our AGAB

also, & this has been said many times before, equating "women's spaces" with "spaces for people who i gender as women" is extremely exclusionary and forcibly misgenders trans people of all kinds

the point i wanted to make w this thread is that women's attraction to men is not always heterosexual. and anytime i see anyone saying that attraction to men is Bad, i assume they're transmisogynistic. i do have some thoughts that, at least on the surface, seem to conflict w this

namely that men do benefit from the patriarchy and male privilege and women do experience compulsive heterosexuality and pressure to date men

still. that doesn't mean we get to invalidate women for performing attraction to men. that doesn't mean we get to tell them how to feel

there is nothing inherently better about being a lesbian than there is about being bisexual. there is nothing inherently better about not being attracted to men. attraction to men is not inherently sad or unfortunate. the patriarchy and white supremacy make it so.

anyway i love and support all bisexuals. bisexuals who are attracted to men: yes. bisexuals who are not attracted to men: yes. bi lesbians: yes.