I just wanted to check, because sometimes in sapphic spaces, I feel like I’m intruding. Sometimes it’s made explicitly clear that I’m not welcome, which can be quite hurtful if the event or community describes itself with terms I use for myself, such as “sapphic” or “wlw”. In this case though, this community is named “lesbians”, so I wouldn’t take it personally if y’all would prefer that bi women don’t post or comment here, I just want to be clear about expectations; I once had someone accuse me of cultural appropriation for having carabiners on my tool harness, so I’ve ended up becoming a tad hypervigilant about overstepping.
Regardless of what the answer to this post is, it might be worthwhile to put something in the community info
Bi-erasure is very real in lesbian spaces (my partner is bi and I believe her), but I believe we’re more enlightened than that here.
As the resident bi mod, I can confirm we’re more enlightened here
Yeah, it can be real shitty. When I experience bigotry from The Straights™, it doesn’t bother me so much because I’ve sort of hardened myself in anticipation against that. When it comes from what you thought was your own community, it hurts.
The sad thing is that experiencing this has caused me to sort of self-police how I express myself in queer spaces, in a way that echoes how it felt to be closeted. Working to combat that instinct within myself is part of why I asked this question in the first place; I’m not surprised that the response here has been positive, and it was my hope that it might help to combat the negative self talk if I can point to an explicit confirmation that this is indeed a space I have as much claim to as anyone else here.
What I find weird is that bi women tend to overwhelmingly be regarded as straight women pretending to be gay and bi men tend to be labelled as gay men pretending to be straight (my brother’s bi). Very inconsistent bigotry.