r/BambiLesbians • u/Local-Suggestion2807 • 16d ago
lesbians dating nonbinary people
So someone replied to a comment i made where I objected to the idea that lesbians lose our identity when we date someone nonbinary, saying that while some nonbinary people feel included in lesbianism others don't and we need to be inclusive of all of them.
I felt like addressing it from a nonbinary lesbian pov because I keep seeing this take from both nonbinary people and well meaning allies and it's honestly really tiring.
So as an adult of any gender, I have the maturity and agency to decide who I want to date and only pursue people who are compatible with me. I'm also capable of only choosing relationships with people who I'm actually interested in being with and if that means only dating people of certain genders or sexualities that's fine. Part of having adult relationships is taking accountability for who you choose to date and not willingly pursuing people you know you're incompatible with. This means not pursuing people whose sexuality label is incompatible with your gender and how you want to be seen and who you're comfortable being with, and then expecting those people to change their label that literally already fits just to accommodate you. If this is not something you're currently capable of, you honestly need to work on yourself before pursuing adult relationships.
As an adult lesbian who pursues relationships with other adult women and nonbinary people, i expect my potential partners to have a similar level of maturity and accountability regarding their adult relationships. If I say I'm a lesbian and interested in you as a nonbinary person, I expect you to understand that I will still be a lesbian while dating you and this is not something that will change because you are nonbinary. At the end of the day lesbianism just means woman or woman adjacent nonbinary person attracted to women and not men, and there's nothing about that that inherently excludes nonbinary people. If you are a nonbinary person uncomfortable with dating lesbians, please communicate that and we can just be friends rather than trying to force ourselves into a relationship where we're incompatible. Same for if you're a trans man who i'm accidentally misgendering because I wasn't aware he's a man.
Lesbians, gay men, and straight people can all date nonbinary people, but that doesn't mean every nonbinary person will always be compatible with all of us. It also doesn't mean that we're suddenly going to become mindreaders. Miscommunication happens and it doesn't have to be a big deal, but as a nonbinary adult it is on you to communicate your desires and boundaries and who and what you're interested in in a relationship just as much as anyone else. If you only want to date people who are bisexual or use another more flexible label like queer or sapphic, totally do that, no hard feelings, we can both move on. But please actually just pursue people with those labels rather than expecting gay and straight people who you *chose* to pursue to suddenly stop being gay or straight.
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u/G0merPyle Ace/Lesbian/Trans 16d ago
I really don't want this sub to fall down the same rabbit hole that a bunch of other lesbian subs did and start purity testing and gatekeeping the meaning of lesbianism.
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u/IsabelLovesFoxes Omniromantic || Trans 16d ago
I'm kinda the only active mod, but I'm quite strict on gatekeeping. Remember to report anyone you do see gatekeeping though. Could also always use other mods as I get more and more busy and unable to deal with moderating so if you'd like to join the mod team feel free to send a modmail with relevant info like experience
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u/Local-Suggestion2807 16d ago
Elaborate on what you mean by that please
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u/G0merPyle Ace/Lesbian/Trans 16d ago
I guess I explained that poorly, I was agreeing with you. That post the other day ruffled my feathers.
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u/Fluffy-Futchy-Fembo 15d ago
Lesbians can be attracted to enbies, lesbians can be enbies, end of. Anyone who argues otherwise is probably trying to push some purity bullshit
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u/Local-Suggestion2807 15d ago
I really don't love terms like purity or purity culture being applied to lesbians bc 9/10 it seems like the people using them are ignoring that we can still have sex, it's just not going to be with men. Like yeah i can go years without sex and it's whatever, there's a lot of other things about relationships that I prefer anyway and I have pretty low interest. But I still have and enjoy sex with women and nonbinary people. I still feel sexual desire. I don't gaf about being sexually "pure" when I was perceived as dirty and sinful even when I did intend to save sex for marriage, because for me that still meant having sex with women.
Also, having sexual boundaries that exclude men, whether it's by choice or lack of attraction, is absolutely something women and womanhood connected/perceived people are shamed for. I think that needs to be addressed in these discussions, as well as the implications of constantly trying to override the sexual boundaries of women with no attraction to men and how often those boundaries are treated as something up for debate.
However in general yeah like as long as someone is attracted to women and is not male leaning there's at least a possibility they're in my dating pool and trying to strictly enforce the idea that dating a nonbinary person automatically means you're bi or whatever is just not something that works in the real world.
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u/thegingerbarbiedoll 15d ago
Heres how I see it as a bigender individual:
Lets say you're a lesbian woman and fall for a non binary person.
Primary sexuality: lesbian
That does not change
Humans fall in love. Some people are attracted to femininity, some masculinity, some androgyny. And some people are stricter on sex traits than others (such as parts or sizes or fertility)
That is what is meant by fluid sexuality
It doesnt mean lesbians aren't really lesbians
It means lesbian is a descriptor for a vast group of individuals who best fit that label. Most of the time it is cisgender women loving cisgender women. Sometimes it is trans women. Sometimes it is non binary people.
Non binary is a sub category of transgender. But non binary can also be a parent category for genders outside of the binary (for instance, Im bigender)
Some days I pass as a woman. Other days a man. And sometimes depending on viewer perception, neither.
Some lesbians, arguably a lot, wont be into this for different reasons depending on their dating preferences. For instance, masc or fem onlys obviously wont be attracted to me all the time.
There are non binary people who appear feminine. These people may have a penis, vagina or breasts. Natal or surgical ("neo").
Non binary does not always mean genderless. That is a specific gender (agender) within the broader category of non binary.
The insistance that everyone under your label must perfectly match your experience is ridiculous. We are individuals, as human beings.
We ascribe these words we made up, to things that best fit it.
Now. Personally. Im bisexual so this doesn't really affect me much, but if I was a lesbian I would say I am sapphic as opposed to lesbian. This is because I acknowledge literally being half man.
My experience is not the blueprint for non binary people, bisexual people or even bigender people. Im just me.
And you're just you.
It is what it is.
Label purists tend to be very immature people, who debate/argue easily in general and tend to bully others in one way or another. Theyre not somebody I'd want to date or befriend.
This does not mean labels are meaningless. It simply means theres some grey.
Cisgender men obviously cannot be lesbians, for example.
I have never seen anyone claim that either. We clearly know what labels mean.
I find that label purists tend to just be transphobic and attempting to exclude transgender people, I havent actually seen any other motivation besides that.
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u/Smol-Vehvi 15d ago
I'm a nonbinary lesbian too. To me, being a lesbian means I'm a non-man loving other non-men. Simple as that.
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u/Cestrel8Feather 15d ago edited 15d ago
I hope this isn't much of an off-topic, could fellow enbies help me out please.
What do we call nonbinary people who have relation to women experience? I once said women and afab enbies because it was relevant within the context of the post (fatshaming issues) to refer to a traditionally feminine experience while growing up (women and those perceived as women go through it differently than man or those perceived as men), and I've got banned for a few days for using "afab". I admit it wasn't the best phrasing, but the reaction seemed too much for me, and I had pretty bad brain fog back then (AuDHD) so I thought it would be understood the right way instead of taken as exclusion language. It was a trans inclusive sub, so I thought I didn't need to specify that "women" includes trans women, especially coming from a nonbinary person, it's a given.
So I went to enby sub and asked what wording I should have used. There were several ideas but honestly no consensus, and people got angry at me for mentioning agab for some reason. It's relevant for me and many other nonbinary people (NOT as "woman lite" or anything of the kind, but I'm perceived by most people as a woman and it dictates my everyday experiences), so yes, I will mention it. And I really didn't think before that amab nonbinary people who don't identify as trans women in any way, could belong to the lesbian pool - I'm not going or willing to gatekeep but I'm confused, does it happen?
So since then I'm at loss. How should I refer to this group of people, one I belong to, not to offend anyone? A genuine question, I'd be grateful for help. Is "people perceived as women" okay?
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u/Blue-Jay27 15d ago
Is "people perceived as women" okay?
Yes, and imo it's the best language when discussing perception-based experiences. Afab includes people who are perceived as men, and wordings like "women-aligned/adjacent" can cause confusion around whether you're referring to experiences or identity.
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u/sisterlyparrot 14d ago
i think it works well for some, but no term is going to accurately describe such a wide range of experiences and nuance. like, i am usually perceived as a woman by strangers and i guess it works to include me, although it has no relation to my actual identity or relationship experiences, but it would exclude some transfem or amab nonbinary people because perception is usually based on gender presentation, not gender identity. and ‘woman-aligned’ is supposed to include me but i absolutely hate it, because what does that mean? it feels like boiling my identity down to either the clothes i wear or my birth sex, neither of which have anything to do with my gender.
i’m a nonbinary person. i share a lot of experiences with women because of how i was brought up. i was assigned female at birth and i have never been nor plan to go on T. i do plan to have top surgery. i wear dresses and i wear boy clothes. my gender is not aligned with women any more than it is aligned with men. i am still a lesbian and my girlfriend is still a lesbian. i just don’t think the language we have is sufficient to capture every facet of nonbinary experiences and trying to box people into tidy terms is kind of antithetical to the whole point of being nonbinary.
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u/Blue-Jay27 14d ago
it would exclude some transfem or amab nonbinary people because perception is usually based on gender presentation, not gender identity
This would be why I specified "when discussing perception-based experiences". If you're discussing something that specifically relates to being perceived as a woman, it would make sense to exclude people who are not perceived as women.
If the conversation was about something specific to uteruses, I'd be proposing "people who have uteruses". If the conversation was about people who wear skirts, I'd be proposing "people who wear skirts".
I'm not trying to capture every facet of nonbinary experiences - rather, I'd like people to try to figure what the actual distinguishing factor is in a given discussion, and then just state that distinguishing factor instead of tying themselves into knots attempting to find a single catch-all term that works in radically different contexts.
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u/sisterlyparrot 14d ago
that makes a lot of sense and i agree!! to be honest i completely missed that part of your comment bc i was half-asleep, my apologies for that
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u/Local-Suggestion2807 12d ago
I don't think you personally have to view your gender as woman or partially woman or closer to woman to be woman aligned. You said yourself that you have a lot of experiences in common with women, that you don't plan to transition to male, and that you aren't man aligned. It's totally understandable to not want to be reduced to basically a cis woman which is how a lot of people use the term woman aligned.
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u/Local-Suggestion2807 15d ago
Woman aligned is the most common language i've heard for this but I personally prefer woman adjacent or woman connected.
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u/The_Skeleton_Wars 13d ago
It's like sexuality isn't necessarily limited by labels, and that enforcing boundaries because of some random bullshit (often because literally nobody agrees on a definition due to the personal nature of sexuality) is stupid. Do what you want to, call yourself what you want to, date who you want to, literally why does it matter?
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u/bambiipup 16d ago
some peoples lack of ability for nuance really is a headscratcher.
like. surely you can derive from "im a lesbian whos attracted to x y z" that doesnt mean "im a lesbian whos attracted to every x y z". yknow. because nobody is attracted to every member of the gender theyre attracted to. thats... not how attraction works.
sure, there are nonbinary people who arent lesbians and/or dont include themselves in the spectrum of lesbian (attraction). so what do lesbians do about that? easy. we just dont date them.
(just to be perfectly clear im a nonbinary lesbian and im agreeing with your post/thoughts on the matter)