/cracks knuckles//rolls up sleeves/WELLL SINCE YOU ASK… :-DIntellectually, it’s not, and it is historically inaccurate to say that it is, although I can certainly see how that misconception arises. It definitely comes from the radfem community specifically, not just the lesbian community in general, and I think that this is one of the small risks in separatism, or in any situation where your information comes primarily from one group: you can end up coming to conclusions that make perfect sense but that are incorrect because they’re based on an incomplete picture. Like, personally, I have a similar cultural context – I went to a women’s college, I mostly consume media by women, most of the people I know are women – and it didn’t occur to me for AGES to be like “wait a minute, of course gay and bi men have been using that term for just as far back as any recorded lesbian use.” Or “wait a minute, why would we ever assume that term was originated by and for women in the first place, when it describes something that stands out so much more clearly if you are presenting and/or identifying as a guy?” I didn’t think to even research that stuff. I tripped over it when I started googling the origins of the term “femme” and was suddenly hit by tons of stuff about Polari, and gay and bi male history, and was like “oh crap of course.” But you asked how I feel. And how I feel about it is annoyed and despairing, by turns. (And a little bit of schadenfreude, to know that the term “butch” was actually appropriated from the Black community in the first place. There’s a horrifying but almost satisfying amount of irony in seeing people tell everybody else they can’t use a term that it turns out they stole from another part of their community in the first place. It’s the lingustic equivalent of white people opposing immigration.) What bothers me about it is not that I specifically care so much about the term “femme”. It’s two things, I guess. First, it’s how EMPHATICALLY people insist that the term is “created by lesbians, for lesbians only,” and how vigorously people use that to shut down bi women. And it’s weird that I’ve never thought about this before, but iirc, I’ve ONLY seen people tell bi and maybe asexual women that they can’t use the term “femme.” Not straight women. Not men of any stripe. (I’ve heard that people even tell lesbian trans women they can’t use it – TWERFs, obviously.) (I don’t think that anyone who says it’s “for lesbians only” would think that straight women, or any men, were allowed to use it. But I also don’t see anybody railing against them using it.) Just the dynamics of it bother me. There are no citations for it, no sources for the claim that it came from 1950s lesbian bar culture or that it was intended to describe Lesbians Only. People just say it REALLY emphatically, really firmly, and everybody goes “omg this is really important to them” and passes it around. I’ve seen bi and trans people apologetically tell each other that we can’t use the term. I’ve seen radfems shout down and mock people who try to oppose the argument. It bothers me because it comes from this emotionally abusive dynamic that the radfem community on Tumblr has. That dynamic is really what bothers me. The tactics the community uses are to be really sarcastic and dismissive of anyone they oppose or disagree with; to tone-police and gatekeep; and to shout over or openly make fun of people. And you can see it triggering people. People read this stuff and, because it’s delivered in this emotionally abusive manner, immediately just sort of submit to it. Immediately assume that it’s true, that they themselves have been super oppressive of others by using terms like “femme” or “queer” or “monosexual”. We don’t even check how the terms are used now, how they were used historically, what the logic is, none of it. And you can often see people reacting like, “this person is very upset about this term and a little bit scary to me, I’ll make myself safe by accepting what they say and spreading their message so they won’t attack me.” It’s not a conscious thought process, it’s just sort of an automatic acceptance-and-passing-on-and-vehemently-defending. Which is understandable, not only because so many of us have abuse histories, but also because the common response from the radfem community when people do argue any of these points is to attack people in very dismissive, mocking, emotionally abusive ways. And second, it bothers me because it’s bi erasure. There’s no way to argue that this term was invented by, and only used for, lesbians, if bi people exist in your mental picture of history. It bothers me because I know, too well, that the way bi erasure works (and the way biphobia in general works) is that we just sort of get left out of… well kind of everything, but in this case, history, and more importantly, the shared community memory of how things used to be. And then people repeat the story we’re missing from, over and over. And it becomes proof and fact, this story we’re not in. And people use it to say (falsely, but they don’t know these things are false) that the word femme is for lesbians only and always has been; that asexuals aren’t queer and/or can’t use the word queer (because they never learned that until the mid-90s, the ace community was part of the bi community); that bisexuals don’t belong at the Pride parades we started; that bi people don’t really participate in the “LGBT political movement”; that Freddie Mercury and Vincente Minnelli (Liza Minnelli’s dad) and Frida Kahlo and Sappho were gay, not bi; and that it’s homophobic/lesbophobic to say that anyone popularly assumed to be gay was actually bi…. without ever knowing that they’re just repeating examples of bi erasure. (and then if you bring up bi erasure, they erase your experience further by saying, “lmao like HYPERVISIBILITY IS A PRIVILEGE??!?!” like no, hypervisibility is also a kind of erasure. it’s just an erasure that’s a few steps up, where you get to exist but only as a villain or sex robot. and anyone with any knowledge of biphobia and bi culture knows that we experience the erasure of hypervisibility too. the very few characters that are actually labeled as bisexual are still almost exclusively portrayed as hypersexual villains.) And this is just one tiny piece of all of that. But it’s one that shows up over and over again on Tumblr. It’s a microaggression. Each one is a small papercut, a sharp reminder that the communities we love and rely on and support and relate to, that claim to support us because we are same-gender-attracted… don’t know or support our culture, don’t know or support our history, and really only support us when or if we are same-gender-attracted. That we are supported to the extent that we are the same, only. …My one regret in writing this is that if i get generic anon hate about it, I will never know, because I’m already getting generic anon hate for reblogging that post about how Fallout4 is transphobic. Tsk and alas.
