there's a tiktok audio going around that's "am i nonbinaryyyyy orrrr am i lesbian with a complicated relationship with gender" and it makes me tremendously sad and i've made an image to try to concisely communicate why

now, i'm definitely being a bit provocative here to make my point, and obviously not every nonbinary person's experiences are accurately described by the term or community "lesbian", BUT

it's important people understand these aren't mutually exclusive, or a choice btwn them!

that in fact, lesbian has always BEEN nonbinary! the gender binary is a very narrow thing & it is a heterosexual construct. "properly" performed womanhood has always required atttraction to men. there's a reason monique wittig, a lesbian feminist, wrote "lesbians are not women"!

just because we have new ways of understanding our experiences does not mean that they are mutually exclusive with other, older ways of making sense of similar experiences!

and understanding this requires drawing attention back to the fact that: gender and sexuality are defined by each other, and both totally fake! they are obviously social facts that we experience, but there is no such thing as the person who exactly fits "woman" (or "lesbian"!)

i've spoken about the history of this in this thread, but i just want to really pull out the fact that when sexologists first attempted to define lesbian, they literally defined it as "women who wanted to be men"! https://twitter.com/jessfromonline/status/1278723992241737728