@kibi sapphic and wlw you to include bi/pan/not lesbian but otherwise women loving women. it's to form solidarity and identify common experiences.

i just realized that wlw can mean "women [who are] loving women" OR "women-loving women" and wow this just got a billion times more confusing i'm out

this is why i just use the word gay

@maunzikation this seems counterintuitive to me since “women loving women” sounds *less* inclusive of nonbinary or bi folks than just saying “gay” or “lesbian”

you can't *be* nonbinary and wlw but you can be a femme enby and a lesbian and people are all the time

(i'm not disagreeing with your explanation i'm just explaining how it sounds to my ears)

@kibi I agree with that! I suspect that being nonbinary inclusive is not the goal of many people who use wlw politically, even though this is sad. More the somewhat ahistorical "lesbians have always been women only, so we continue talking only about women even if we include more women" train of thought. (But ofc there are better use cases, for example when tagging book reviews as "there's a woman who's into women in it, no idea what her orientation is")

@maunzikation yeah the idea of talking about relationships over orientations sounds like it can be useful in certain contexts!! but i also seen it thrown around as more of a… generic identity category?? and that's a little more fishy (especially if you talk about a bi person as being wlw but don't also mention that they are wlm because that also feels like bi erasure)

@maunzikation the fact that it feels so muddled and like people are using it to mean a lot of different things in a lot of contexts is what makes me wonder if it isn't more about like, subcultural signalling and “lesbian isn't cool anymore let's come up with new words” and less about the actual meanings at stake (because really they are sorta redefining “lesbian” when they position themselves in opposition to it, right?? to my ears anyway)

@maunzikation (i'm trans and like, that's a word that has gone through like 50 different variations over the past few decades so i'm definitely not dissing on people for coming up with new words for things, but i also acknowledge that most of that evolution was about maintaining control over the narrative and defining a culture and not like, “word X is actually universally better than word Y” or so forth)

@kibi totally! These terms are all useful, but sometimes one is more appropriate in a certain context than another.

@kibi @maunzikation it's definitely more inclusive to bi women/nb people as it's not "women who exclusively love women" it's "women who love women" so it's useful in discussions of specific issues that wlw face

@danielscardoso yeah i've wondered about this—although most of the people i've seen using the phrase have been cis, i think among some communities in the younger generation “lesbian” has a lot of negative associations, either with TERFs or loud radical activists that aren't seen as “cool” anymore

but i don't have any actual data or stories to back that up, it's just a feeling i've gotten

@kibi agreed, and have had the same. I'm trying to resist the urge to lose myself on academic references over this right now #activeprocrastinator

@kibi OTOH this whole shitting on the past is annoying, or I'm definitely getting 'old', because I feel conversations had in the 80's are returning ipsis verbis and that is a waste of time

@danielscardoso @kibi as a bi woman I read wlw/sapphic as inclusive whereas "lesbian" is for women whose sole/predominant focus is women. I don't think that's a new connotation for it, the B has been there for a long time for reasons.

@mcmoots that's a great contribution, thank you! do you think it applies to "sapphic" in the same way as it does to "wlw"? @kibi

@danielscardoso @kibi As far as I can tell, yeah, it's just a matter of aesthetics - would you rather sound a bit flowery or more like a Craiglist ad? I'm also not super up on my Tumblrisms so may be missing subtle distinctions that have been hammered out there.

I'm not sure why people pick those terms over "queer", either. I haven't noticed it correlates w/ arguments over who counts as "women". Maybe more of a political vs. apolitical lust emphasis?

@mcmoots makes sense, indeed. Thank you! @kibi

@kibi oh also some of it is because of treating "lesbian" as, like, an identity term instead of a descriptive one, in that, like, if yr talking about some woman who's into other women but you don't know whether they'd call themselves as a lesbian, "wlw" can feel safer, less charged, less likely to be upsetting, in that cultural context

@kibi tho i can’t really offer any insight on like how the terms originated or came into popularity, just on reasons why people choose to use them in present-day tumblr (okay actually i’m like 1.5 years out of date on the dynamics of tumblr tbh but, 1.5-years-ago tumblr at least)

@kibi i should also make it explicit that this is all from the perspective of a white pan trans woman. like ofc you know all of those things are true of me, but it's still useful to make explicit that that's shaping how i relate to the words

in particular, iiuc sapphic and wlw are also p common in some black and poc communities on tumblr and i definitely cannot speak about the reasons why the terms are popular with them

@kibi wait fuck is this another case of white people appropriating words introduced by black people without understanding their nuances and purposes

@srn i am extremely the wrong person to ask for this lol

@kibi yeah not so much asking you as just like thinking the question at myself aloud to you

@kibi @srn I'm probably not the right person to be commenting all too much, but I'll agree with this: it seems "wlw" is a little softer in its intent even with the same effective meaning (reference, for example, "amab [woman]" versus "trans woman"). Regarding sapphic, I don't really know, other than it just being a little less common in public discussion and therefore maybe a bit more open for claiming. (Similarly, "dyke" in some circles.)

@srn @kibi (Though I don't think "sapphic" has the same reclaimed history that "dyke" does, so it's a limited comparison.)

@srn @kibi Biphobic gatekeeping about who's really a "lesbian" isn't new, though - I saw it in the 90s, and it wasn't new then either. Like, as far as I ever knew, the idea that "lesbian" meant you are exclusively or at least primarily attracted to women was the standard definition. It's only in the last few years I've started seeing people use "lesbian" explicitly to include all queer women-and-allied-enbies.

@srn @kibi It is honestly surprising to me that anyone would expect bi/pan women to feel comfortable under the lesbian banner. Like, sure there's some "lol I'm gay" shitposting but that's not the same as being able to walk into a space thinking "yep this bar is definitely gonna be friendly and inclusive to me, no one will be weird if I bring my male partners to the softball game, my date will not demand to see my queerness resume".

@srn @kibi (oh just realized that could be read in a more combative way than i meant - not saying "expect" as in I think you're demanding that our feelings conform! just "expect" as in starting with that assumption and being surprised when it turns out not to be true.)

@mcmoots @kibi i mean i feel like i describe myself with a lot of terms that i don’t trust that people fitting under will be inclusive and friendly to me

like “woman” and “pan” and “queer” forex

@srn @kibi Fair. There are definitely other spaces where I fight for inclusive definitions rather than shrugging and picking a new label (it's probably part of why I haven't embraced an agender label for myself, I've still got political if not personal attachment to "woman"hood).

Not sure what the difference is here. Maybe just that the exclusive definition was the first one I encountered + I have another label that I'm happy with.

@srn @kibi Or the lack of symmetry, since if "lesbian" is an umbrella term that leaves no specific label for monosexual queer women. Which means they're the default class and bi/pan women are a marked case? Like if you tried to talk about "women" and "trans women" without using the word cis.

@mcmoots @srn see for me terms like "wlw" have *more* implicit gatekeeping and erasure than just "gay" or "lesbian"—if i went out and started dating a man, literally no passerby on the street would see that as "straight" but it doesn't fit under the labels of "mlm" OR "wlw"—and same for literally any relationship involving a nonbinary person. so it creates solidarity between (mostly cis) binary gender identities but while erasing everyone else?

@mcmoots @srn "gay" has always been an umbrella term for anything not-straight and "lesbian" for me is just "gay only for people who also have to deal with misogyny"—which isn't to say the political history of lesbianism isn't problematic, but no more so than feminism as a whole? but cis girls generally have no problem calling themselves a feminist despite the existence of TERFs so :P

@kibi @srn Out of curiosity, how old are you? Trying to figure out if there's a generational component to our conflicting intuitions here (I'm 37).

@kibi @srn
First person to come up with good inclusive shorthand for "people who have to deal with misogyny" is gonna get their name in a lot of gender studies textbook footnotes. I feel like *everyone* is struggling with this and it makes a lot of community jargon really unsatisfying.

@kibi @srn "Gay" has always been an umbrella term but it has *also* always been used to talk about homosexual men. If everyone felt equally included in "G" why did we need "LGBTQ"?

Firming up my take, I think it's like using "guys" or "dude" as gender neutral terms. There's a lot of generic usage & it's 99% fine, but when it's not, I don't feel more comforted by "lesbian is a generic term for me" than I would "dude is gender neutral in California".

@kibi @srn Yeah, "wlw" explicitly includes cis bi women while asking trans women & women-allied enbies to just kinda hope they're covered by any given community's definition of "women". Not endorsing it.

@kibi @srn I also don't want to frame the situation as "wlw scores 12 gatekeeps, lesbian 4, queer femmes 2" - or w/e the score is when we've worked out all the intersectionalities. That pits the interests of Bs and Ts (and other groups sidelined by various language options, like elders who don't want to reclaim queer) against each other, priming us to argue about whose marginalization should score more points.