“Are you [my festival name]?”
“Yes, I am.”
“And did you host a workshop yesterday?”
“Yes, I did! The Lesbian-Feminist Organizers workshop.” (A networking opportunity for women who are actively engaged with Lesbian organizing, Feminist organizing, or both – the workshop is not exclusively for Lesbians. I facilitate, but mostly it’s the participants who speak. I ask, “What’s your project, what can you offer other organizers, and what do you need?” Each woman has a turn to answer, then we brainstorm solutions.)
“Well, a woman is very upset about something you said. About straight women.”

I racked my brain. The only time I could remember mentioning straight women during my workshop was when I briefly introduced the Dyke Directory resource we’d created after last year’s LesFem Organizers workshop. I’d explained that despite the name, bi and straight women are welcome to fill out the form too – they just have to indicate their orientations in their responses, as it may be relevant to the organizers using the Directory.

Not being able to determine what might have been offensive about that, I asked, “What did I say?”

She replied (still grave), “You said that all straight women should die.”

Between my slack-jawed shock, the incredulous laughter of my friends who were audience to this exchange, and my stammered defense that “I run a 400-person support group for all women, including any straight women who want to join!” I think she was assured that her friend either misheard me or mistook me for someone else entirely. I did ask her to have her friend find me so I could address her concerns directly, but that never happened. Someone told me later that a (bisexual?) woman (with a husband at home?) had been very upset and very vocal about things she’d heard Lesbians say that week, so I could probably assume the complaint had come from her. I don’t think that woman was actually at my workshop. I’m still a bit hurt and confused by the whole thing. Some of my Lesbian friends think I come to bisexual women’s defense too often, and apparently some bisexual women I’ve never met think I want them dead. You just can’t win.

I’ve been thinking about this interaction in the context of the tension between bisexual women and Lesbians for a little while now, and I have more to say. I do still think a lot of the online discourse (which then leaks into our real-world spaces) about biphobia from Lesbians is essentially a psy-op, though – the result of social engineering intended to destroy female solidarity, especially within the LGBT community. (See my last post on algorithm-driven “community”.) Yes, bi women and Lesbians have our issues with each other, but the traction these issues get are disproportionate to their impact, and we have bigger fish to fry – together.

Back to The Tension™. I’ll summarize where I stand in three points:

1. Sexual orientation is morally neutral. Being a Lesbian (a homosexual) does not inherently make you a better person or a better feminist than a bisexual woman. Lesbianism can be a powerful force for good under heteropatriarchy in that in order to survive, we must imagine and create less oppressive and dominating ways to relate to one another, but Lesbianism itself does not confer goodness upon individual Lesbians.

2. While biphobia is real, only heterosexuals are capable of it. Lesbians cannot meaningfully (read: structurally) oppress bisexual women. As a class, Lesbians do not possess the power to enact policy to deny bisexual women housing, employment, or healthcare; the only things we can deny bisexual women access to are our bodies and our Lesbian-only spaces (though most Lesbians I know are not especially interested in creating the latter, and bisexual women can always choose to misrepresent themselves to gain access anyway). Just like “reverse racism” isn’t a thing, when Lesbians say mean things about bisexual women, that’s all it is – being mean. Hurt feelings are not proof of structural oppression.

3. Some bisexual women’s lives can look very much like Lesbian lives, and it often doesn’t make sense to exclude those women from spaces focused on uplifting Lesbians. I also think that the harder you stress that a space is “Lesbian-only” and that bisexuals are not welcome, the more stressful you make that space for the Lesbians who need it most – the ones trying to come to terms with being Lesbians, the ones struggling with self-esteem, the ones who don’t already have a supportive community. And if your Lesbian-only space is an intergenerational one, it’s very unlikely that all of its members are actually homosexual to begin with.

I’ll explain.

I’m a Lesbian. I figured it out and came out in 2020 or 2021. I spent that year or so of the pandemic as a very active member of a Lesbian-only Discord server, and at least back then, that server’s collective attitude about bisexuals was pretty hostile. Fairly regularly someone would accuse another member of secretly being bisexual over some offense or other, and that was taken quite seriously by other members. Once, a woman (who I can only describe as recreationally contemptuous of bisexual women) abruptly disappeared from the server and resurfaced on social media not long after with a post hard-launching her new boyfriend. I came to the conclusion that while sexual orientation is not fluid, our perceptions of our own orientations can be – in other words, I didn’t think women like her had been lying all along. And as someone prone to OCD-like tendencies (as Lesbians disproportionately are), a space like that one was bad for my mental health. I often found myself obsessing over whether or not I was “really” a Lesbian. The social stakes were high if I was wrong, so I worried about it all the time. And then I worried about how much I worried about it. I ultimately left that server after a woman said something like, “I’m not saying I condone domestic violence, but I’d understand if a lesbian reacted violently after finding out her bi girlfriend had cheated on her with a man.” I was a feminist before I knew I was a Lesbian, and the misogyny of that statement disturbed me. (After I left, I heard that some members were speculating that I left because I was bisexual. Why else would I have gotten so upset?)

That Lesbian is mean for a reason

I do understand why Lesbians are mean about bisexual women – it’s basically always due to personal experiences of lesbophobia from bi women. Bi women, being capable of heterosexual attraction, benefit from proximity to men in a way Lesbians cannot. They do have the power to structurally oppress and interpersonally harm Lesbians. Many bi women are male-centered and some put Lesbians in harm’s way in their efforts to keep their men sexually interested. (For example, “unicorn hunter” couples who target Lesbians, and who don’t disclose that there’s a man at home until a date or hookup with their Lesbian target is already underway.) And some bisexual women are not dangerous, but are still not appropriate guests in Lesbian-specific spaces because they speak over Lesbians, center their own feelings, and don’t seem to be satisfied when we explain that we don’t hate them for being bisexual, we just need to be able to talk about our differences. These bisexual women are often emotionally immature and confuse being in a liminal, once-annual, underground Lesbian-majority space for being systemically oppressed by Lesbians. (Amazon Trail has had a bi-only channel since its creation, because I was sensitive and sympathetic to how bisexual women sometimes feel in Lesbian-majority spaces. As admin, I can’t remove my own access from that channel, but I don’t wish to intrude so I keep it on mute unless someone calls my attention to it. It went mostly unused for years, until a member sent a message lamenting that bi women have to “carve out” their own spaces to speak in Lesbian-majority spaces like my server... As if the channel had just appeared organically, without my consideration or effort. Alright.)

I don’t want to hang out with the born-again “Lesbian”

Some bisexual women’s lives can look very much like Lesbian lives. The flip-side of that is that not all self-identified Lesbians are very good feminists. Who you decide to include or exclude from your space should come down to what you’re trying to accomplish with that space. I created Amazon Trail to uplift women, especially Lesbians, by building female solidarity and fostering community rooted in feminist values. So the question it comes down to for me is, “Who can I work with to create a supportive, uplifting, and nuanced feminist community?”

I have met feminist Lesbians with OCD-like tendencies who (despite being open about their physical repulsion at the thought of being with a man) seem to be managing their moral scrupulosity and intrusive thoughts by identifying as bisexual. I can work with these women. I am friends with feminist bisexuals who only pursue women sexually and romantically, who never assume they are included in Lesbian-specific spaces, and who defend Lesbian boundaries when other bisexual women are out of line. I can work with these women. And I also have met more than one troubled woman who points to her newfound Lesbian identity as proof of her in-group status, of her moral uprightness – as if the identity itself can absolve her from being abusive to other women (particularly if the victims are bisexual women). These women remind me of born-again Christians. I find that I cannot work with them very well or for very long.

I admire the enthusiasm, but Alix Dobkin was perhaps a bit too optimistic

After Amazon Trail, my other Lesbian Feminist project is volunteering as an organizer for a small Lesbian-specific festival. Our festival’s primary goals are intergenerational Lesbian connection and “Cultivating Lesbian Joy”. That festival admits bisexual women on a case-by-case basis. Any bisexual woman who wishes to attend must be in a serious, monogamous relationship with a Lesbian attendee, or she must exclusively pursue other women sexually and romantically, and she must pass a brief vetting interview wherein she confirms that she understands that our festival centers Lesbian experiences. This policy allows Lesbian attendees to attend with their bisexual wives, and I believe it disincentivizes bisexual women who are desperate for easy answers and to feel part of something (the born-again “Lesbian”, the political “Lesbian”) from lying to themselves or others about who they are, then going out with a bang when they cannot keep the act up any longer and creating a rift in the community. And the fact of the matter is, many older women who have lived “as Lesbians” for decades, who are pillars of the Lesbian community, are themselves bisexual – capable of attraction to men. I don’t believe these women are lying about who they are, and I’m not interested in telling them they shouldn’t call themselves Lesbians. But, to combat a new wave of lesbophobia and conversion therapy rhetoric within the greater LGBT community, Gen Z and Millennial feminists have found it important to distinguish between choosing to be with women for feminist reasons, and being a homosexual woman – which isn’t a choice.

During my second year at that Lesbian-specific festival I help organize, I had a brief conversation with a woman in her 50s. She began reminiscing fondly about a high school boyfriend, and going into detail about how attracted she had been to him. “But that was before I became a Lesbian,” she finished. As a homosexual, I could not relate, and I found the conversation upsetting. When I was in high school, everyone assumed I was dating my guy friend, and the first time I overheard someone refer to him as my “boyfriend” at a party, I locked myself in the bathroom and splashed water on my face to ride out the resulting wave of nausea. I can probably still work with a woman like this, but I’d rather be friends with a female-exclusive bisexual woman who won’t tell me about her male celebrity crush in the same breath in which she calls herself a Lesbian.

Younger feminists like myself don’t tend to believe that “any woman can be a Lesbian.” But I do believe that any woman, regardless of her sexual orientation, can be an ally in making the world a safer, kinder place for Lesbians – and I believe that a world that is kind and safe for Lesbians is a world that is kind and safe for all women, including bisexuals. (And yes, for straight women too, who I do not think should die.)

Can you answer the question, “What was I looking for when I opened the app just now?”

I was a closeted lesbian tween in a conservative household when I created my first social media accounts in the mid-2010s. I was looking for community, and I used to be able to find it. (Some of my longest-lasting connections came out of Pinterest comment sections, actually.) But gradually, the “community” I find online has become more like a flickering projection onto a cave wall: a sense of togetherness that disappears the moment there’s friction or you need it to translate to something in your real life. You can be “surrounded” by people on social media and still feel untouched, unseen, and cold, because what makes community real is not reach. Community that can hold you evolves from shared context, repeated interaction, and the slow building of trust.

Some stats: the average person spends 2.5 hours a day on social media. (It’s 3 hours for Gen Zers like me.) In 2024, the average American spent only 35 minutes a day socializing IRL. If meaning is socially constructed, and if the medium shapes the message, then the places we socialize shape what we become. A social media platform built around virality and conflict (which is basically all algorithm-driven platforms) will produce shallow meanings, shallow bonds, and a constant sense of being jerked around by forces you did not consent to. A desperate plea for support sent into the void can easily find its way into the lions’ den. (See: “my post wound up on the homophobic side of the internet, can any WLW interact with this to bring me back?”) I only have a few followers on the platforms where I’m sharing these thoughts — I have no idea who the algorithms will decide should read them and no idea what those people (or bots) will say.

This problem is getting worse as “dead internet theory” becomes less of a conspiracy theory and more a fact of life. More and more, we cannot know if we are interacting with a person, a persona, or an AI bot trained to provoke us. Even when the person behind the account is genuine, the incentives are not: outrage generates the most clicks, so bad faith is rewarded with attention, and it travels further than care.

We can’t help but let these learned ways of interacting with one online another bleed into the rare and fleeting moments of face-to-face interaction we do have. Friction can feel like danger, because online, it often is.

So what happens as trust collapses online (and offline)?

Some won’t notice what’s happening or how it’s changing them, and they will stay.

Some will go offline completely. (Some already have.)

Not everyone has the option to leave, though. For a long time, and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find any of my people IRL. (Lesbian feminists are hard to come by in rural communities.) So I started building something that could meet me (and others like me) where I was — only without the algorithm, and without the lions. I started building a small, hand-vetted group where I hoped online community could be possible again through proof of good faith, a shared context, and the chance to meet each other in-person someday. (You’re less likely to reduce people to just text on a screen if you know you’ll be camping together next summer.) I called that place Amazon Trail. Three years, 400 members, and several IRL meet-up groups in, I am proud to say that it is working.

If public social media is the cave wall, then a vetted community like Amazon Trail is the fire you can sit beside. Our social meaning and shared values are developed by the actual human beings involved, with no lurking algorithm waiting to convert our normal human slip-ups into ragebait for public consumption (and shareholder value). We’ve learned (and are learning) to sit with conflict. We allow ourselves the time to interpret each others’ occasionally imperfect words in good faith & to ask clarifying questions, because we prioritize the relationships we are building with one another over the dopamine hit of letting a snarky comment fly. (Most of the time we are good about this — but there’s room for repair when we fail.)

If you are a lesbian, or another kind of sapphic, but especially if you hold feminist, humanist, & anti-capitalist values, consider this your invitation to look into Amazon Trail. If our mission resonates with you, fill out an application. We hope you’ll join us by the fire.