Okay, so, let's talk about bisexuality for a minute or five, because boy I am REAL FUCKING TIRED of hearing "bisexuals like men" or "bisexuals must like men" or literally anything that equates bisexuality with a mandate to be into both binary genders.

A thread. 1/

Okay, first, some facts, and some ground rules:
1) I am a 43yo bisexual lesbian.
2) I came out for the first time in 1990.
3) I have a 20 year old daughter.
4) I am not going to be lectured to by people younger than my child about a community I've been in for 30y.
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5) No one gets to tell anyone else what their identity is, or is not.
6) If someone says their identity is bisexual lesbian or bisexual moon juice, guess what? That identity exists now.
7) All identities are made up.
8) What I will be discussing is historical precedent.
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9) There is no such thing as telling someone their identity 'doesn't exist.' If you say that, you are automatically very boring, and I am going to block you.
10) All words & phrases are made up. There is not a magical 'identity garden' where people harvest fresh-grown words.
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Okay, with that out of the way, let's talk about bisexuality and what bisexuality has historically meant, and how that definition has changed in the past few decades, and why!

Let's start with a segment of the Bisexual Manifesto of 1990:
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"Bisexuality is a whole, fluid identity. Do not assume that bisexuality is binary or duogamous in nature: that we have “two” sides or that we must be involved simultaneously with both genders to be fulfilled human beings. In fact, don’t assume that there are only two genders."
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You see that? Even back in the dark depths of the 1990s, bisexuality did not necessarily have an affiliation with a binary definition. Right from the start, the assumption is baked into one of the most famous pieces of bisexual writing that there aren't only two genders...
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... and that bisexuality is not binary or duogamous in nature. Thirty fucking years ago we were saying "you don't have to be involved with or even interested in both binary genders to be bisexual."
At the time, this was a radical opening of doors for many people, me included.
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The idea that the bisexual community would have your back if you felt like you weren't one of the binary genders was a profound statement of solidarity from the bi community (such as it existed at the time) to the trans community, or at least, that's how it read to me...
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... as a teenager who was being told that my identity was a way to be special and not be straight until I grew up and married a man, that I was predating upon lesbians, the whole nine yards.

During this time, bi AFABs like me were constantly told
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that bi people and trans people were out to destroy the gay community, that it was, in fact, the GAY community, and we were only there on the sufferance of lesbians and gays, if we were permitted at all.

The sin of not being sufficiently pure was a great one.
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But that's a topic for another time. The concept that bi women taint lesbians by bringing men into their proximity is a particular pernicious one, and one that goes all the way back to the political lesbians of the 70s.

It's an old biphobic canard...
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... and it's why bisexuality as a community even exists in the first place! Not because, as the ahistorical community-splitting dialogue goes, because we 'fought for our own community,' but because we were kicked out, and banded together. Irony, right?
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Until the rise of the political lesbian, and the rise of purity politics in the lesbian community post-Stonewall, 'lesbian' was a woman who slept with women. It didn't matter who else she slept with: sleeping with women was enough.
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As the community organized and there was internal power to be gained by organizing, there was actual incentive to gatekeep. People who were insufficiently 'pure,' who didn't choose to entirely eject men from their lives... 15/

... who didn't believe gender was binary, butches who performed lesbian 'wrong' for political lesbians, people who included trans women in community (remember, political lesbians were proto-TERFs) were all ejected, in some cases violently, from the lesbian community.
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It should not be surprising, either, that the vast majority of the people determining who was the 'right' kind of lesbian were middle- or upper-class and white as well as being cis and able to perform lesbianism to the correct timbre required.
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All evidence and lived experience reflects the fact that bi dykes, queer dykes, trans dykes and ace dykes were always part of the greater community, and the radical, queer, working-class community embraced the full diversity of the lesbian, sapphic, loving-women experience. 18/

The lesbian community at its healthiest and most diverse does not center men, even in the negative. It centers the sapphic experience and sapphic love. It centers relationships that don't center men. It isn't about hating men, because that kind of hate centers a thing.
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And the fact that bisexuality has always rejected the binary, even going back thirty years, means that bisexual identities have always encompassed the possibility of being bisexual without including men at all -- or women!

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Strangely, we're only having this conversation about the lesbian community, even though homoromantic bisexual men exist, and 'bi gay' and 'bi het' were terms that explained people's preferences wayyyyyyyy back in the dark days of the 90s.
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("Bihet" became a slur, mind you, but that's another conversation.)

So, since bisexuality does, and always has, encompassed identities which exclude men (and are thus lesbian or sapphic), and since saying bisexuality must include men and thus cannot overlap with lesbian...
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... is expressly biphobic, why does the identity 'bi lesbian' matter, especially now?

Well, for one, it matters because it matters to the people who claim it, and that should be the only thing that matters. People find labels that resonate for them and matter to them...
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... and build community around them.

In the last 2 decades, I've seen the rise of the terms genderfluid, transgender (which used to mean what non-binary does now), pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual, the creation of multiple lesbian flags, the creation of the Trevor Project...24/

... and so many other terms, communities, and symbols which now matter intensely as objects of belonging to many many LGBTQ+ and queer people.

They're not 'invalid' because they're new. They're just new, and for a queer who grew up in an isolated rural background... 25/

... the blossoming of a vast and wild online queer community is AMAZING to me. I have said many times and will continue to say that I would have given my eye teeth, as a teenager, for the kind of ability to connect with other lesbians that young lesbians now enjoy.
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I was ALONE in a deeply profound way for so much of my teenage life, miserable and unable to access accurate information about who I am or what I am, and I thought things like, you know, that I'd just automatically catch AIDS at some point.
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Because that's the kind of shit-ass information that you could get before the internet was a thing. It just wasn't there.

Anyway. These labels are important because they allow the creation of community around them, and because they allow people to understand themselves...
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... and the kind of community that they want to create.

Bi lesbians can seek out other bi lesbians, who have a very specific life experience that other lesbians don't share, including our experience of being treated generally like crap by monosexual lesbians.
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(If you don't want me to say it, stop fucking doing it. This is my history, and you can't bludgeon me into silence with kpop gifs, kids.)

Bi lesbians can speak about our specific experiences within the queer community when we have better terms for who we are...
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... and how we experience our queerness. Denying us our labels or saying they're 'invalid' doesn't change those experiences, only prevents us from speaking to them more accurately, and bringing about change within our community.

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Which, of course, is the point of trying to deny us our labels: if we can't speak to our experiences, we can't make needful change within our communities and stop the sort of bullshit treatment of non-monosexuals which has been a plague upon our community for decades.
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Funny how that works, isn't it?

So who benefits from gatekeeping, I ask, as I have always asked? Who benefits from keeping us split up?

It surely isn't us. It has never been us.

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