It came from a cis lesbian very close to me, we’ll call her Jess. Jess was my partner’s childhood best friend, and she’s been my biggest fan for months. She loved my articles on lesbian dating because they gave her the confidence to ask out her longtime crush. I’d been opening up to her about being trans, and the conversations had gone really well. She was respectful, affirming, and open with me in turn. I didn’t realize our connection relied on how much my empathy validated her as an ally, until I had the audacity to demand empathy myself.

Jess brought a cishet tagalong to Pride and left us alone to go dance. This girl cornered me for a very condescending and disrespectful one-way conversation about my transition that almost ruined my night. I vented to Jess in private about how angry this made me. Her people pleasing instincts kicked in, and she blew it up to her whole cis friend group. I became a liability, so me and my partner were iced out for the rest of Pride weekend. When we confronted her she escalated to attacks on both of us that had nothing to do with what I’d experienced. I haven't heard from her in two weeks.

The two of them have avoided important conflicts for years, and my partner admits as much. There has been tension as they grow apart, especially lately, that they needed to address. But Pride weekend felt like the safest time to put that aside and come together. Besides, Jess and I had grown close; she was starting to feel like a sister I could trust with a part of myself I usually keep guarded. Instead, my unique vulnerability as a token tranny made me an easy target for all her hard feelings. When she widened the scope, any pain I’d felt, or anything I needed to heal, was minimized—including any self-criticism she might need to experience.

This wasn’t shocking. People pleasing always comes with a dark side. The Jess I knew at heart was sharp, funny, charming and generous; the problem was how she had to be like that with everybody. Even people she didn’t like, or who didn’t like her. When the people she was pleasing didn’t like each other, she chose the path of least resistance. And Protecting the Dolls is anything but. It can cost you friends, family, jobs and safety. These are all things the dolls have already given up, but making the conscious choice to do so on our behalf requires bravery.

Jess’ need for acceptance, combined with her fear of conflict, made her a coward in that moment. This is a common story for many trans women: the second we stop being a slogan or an infographic, and become complex humans with needs and boundaries, we find out what our allies are really made of. Sadly, that’s when most of you fold. So we make ourselves small and quiet to avoid finding out that the love and community in our life has been fake all along.

That’s why this has been so devastating for me. Jess’ actions make it very easy to move on from that friendship if necessary, and even my partner knows it may have been long overdue. But this has shaken me politically, even spiritually, in a way I’ve never known.

I feel broken, disgusted, and used. I feel hollow but I haven’t been able to cry. I’ve missed work, I can't smile. I feel distant from my partner, who is also cis, even though she’s been on my side through all of this. She is worried about me and wants to help me process it but I don’t know what to say. I'm used to being sexually objectified, or reduced to a political talking point. But this is new. Jess brutally severed the tenuous connection to cis women and other sapphics that I forged against all odds with one selfish, insecure outburst. It shouldn't be this easy to hurt me so deeply. Did I bring this on myself? How long until it happens again?

I am also shaken as a writer. The lesbian dating articles Jess inspired me to write have paid dividends, not just with her but with thousands of readers. Now I feel like I contorted myself to appeal to an audience who would care more about me if I died, so they could post about me for clout and move on.

I’m working hard not to question my relationship with my cis partner, who I fully intend to be with literally forever. I also trusted her not to throw me away—and she didn’t. She stood by me and chose to risk a breakup with her oldest friend because she loves me. But I feel guilty about that more than anything; after a lifetime of isolation and objectification, I can't feel worthy of actual protection.

My first instinct is to cut you all off and never trust again. But I know that isn't the lesson to take from this. What's clear is that I need to protect myself more while still making room for love and community. It means I have to start scary conversations with the TME people in my life, and test them early and often. Every new friend or fuck will have to prove themselves, and I can’t be afraid to lose people. This might mean accepting that some of them have a long way to go before they’re worthy of me. And I can only help them so much in getting there.

But most importantly, I need to throw down the gauntlet with my writing. That’s why I’m launching a tier of paid subscriptions with this article. No bonus content, no future paywall. Just a chance to put your money where your mouth is. If you have felt empowered or seen by my articles about sapphic dating, then you’d better be fighting for me everywhere you go. And that includes running your pockets—double it if I got you some pussy.

Because I’m done with allies pretending to Protect the Dolls. You can’t half-ass your love for us. If you try, you’ll do more damage than if you’d simply left us alone. And at that point I’d rather you just call me a slur so we can fight.

If overcoming fear was that easy, we’d all be doing it. If your end goal is to Be Direct; you’ll need to address what’s stopping you from doing that first.

In truth, your fear of women is actually the key to a lifetime of Lesbian happiness. Even when it’s irrational, fear is an important feeling. And when you ignore it, all you’re doing is silencing a part of yourself that’s begging to be heard. Self-invalidation disguised as self-improvement is what men use to avoid having feelings, and it’s also a big reason why straight men approach sex and dating so callously: the successful ones capitalize on a lack of empathy, while the unsuccessful embrace self-loathing inceldom. This is what makes men so scary, and so lonely.

You deserve to treat yourself better than men. And you deserve better results. So let’s handle this fear with the same sensitivity we currently use to handle any perceived rejection from other women:

“Irrational” does not mean your fear makes you crazy or stupid. It just means that your conscious feeling defies logic. Unconsciously, I bet your fear makes perfect sense. Because there is actually a lot to be scared of when you like a girl.

You’re delusional and she was just being friendly.
She probably likes men better anyway.
You aren’t gay enough, and everybody can tell.
She hasn’t been with a lot of girls before, she’ll probably be bad.
You haven’t been with a lot of girls before, you’ll probably be bad.
If she rejects you it will hurt so much more than a man.

You’d be crazy not to acknowledge these possibilities. None of them go away if you ignore them, but they also won’t kill you if you encounter them. So you might as well give them a name and a home so you can keep an eye on them. If you listen to them, you’ll see that they really aren’t as strong as they seem. Love yourself for being scared, and thank your fear for showing you how badly you want women.

After you defeat all your fears of failure and rejection, you will face the final boss: success. Because when a woman says yes, you have to be gay. You encounter authentic parts of yourself and each other that you’ve been taught to treat with shame. You have to put in all the effort and vulnerability it takes to have sex with her, or date her, or even love her. And if you do love her, and you build a life together, you are setting yourself up for the most devastating breakup of your life.

Loving a woman is so much more work than loving a man.
Lesbians either die bitter and alone or stay together long enough to see Bed Death.
And if she breaks you heart you might not make it.

This is probably what you mean when you say “women are scary”. And keep in mind you could also just hate yourself for normal woman reasons: your family, upbringing, race, class, ability, assigned gender—all of these already inform how worthy you feel of love, safety, and joy. Every time you approach these things in your life, your body will try to use fear to keep you stuck where you are.

The more patience you give yourself for having these fears, the quieter they will become. But most importantly, know that they will never disappear. You are not a baby queer for having these feelings. I’ve never gotten used to being in love, and I’m still learning to let myself be loved back. I get scared every time I realize how badly I want to marry my partner, and I hope that never goes away. Because fear exists to tell you what you care about.

Any previous advice about being direct and confident still applies. But the most important part of kissing a woman is to love yourself as much as you can. Someday, you might overcome your innermost fears and demons in a transformative process of self-actualization—right now, it’s enough to just get laid.

So take a deep breath, remember that it’s going to be OK no matter what. And then lean in.

When lesbians hear this story, they ask some variation of “why can’t I have that?” And I haven’t had the heart to tell them to their face, but maybe they don’t deserve it yet.

My love story wasn’t magic. It was work. Both of us played the long game before meeting; bouncing from hypersexuality, to celibacy, to codependence. While there is no truly consensual sex either of us would undo, there is lots of time and energy we wish we could take back. And even then our own love at first sight is only in hindsight. At the time it was actually pretty brutal. We both had to destroy and rebuild what we thought love even was, and it could have fizzled or blown up several times. Over that month, and for some time after, I felt despair, boredom, impatience, frustration, and other reactions that I didn’t even know existed in me. Today I’m thinking about marriage and kids for the first time in my life.

Only now can I look back and appreciate how everything led to us falling in love. And it couldn’t have happened if either of us had been looking for it. It only happened because we each went to a lesbian event alone equally ready for bathroom sex, a future wife, or a total flop.

But too many of the thirsty sapphics I know are looking for an instant romantic “spark” to justify quenching their desire. They somehow position casual sex and romance as opposites, while also requiring one to create the other. This impossible task turns into a fixation on love that resembles the way straight men obsess over sex: stripping it of its complexities and putting it on a pedestal as an end instead of a means. Just like men do with sex, this objectifies both love itself and the person it’s with. Our distortion leaves us longing for something that does not and cannot exist, idealized to the point that we feel unworthy of it. We create a hole in our hearts that can’t be filled, yet can’t be ignored. This is what we’ve come to call sapphic yearning.

Love is not an object. It is not a feeling that exists inside you waiting to awaken, and it is not a magical force that floats around waiting for you to find it. Love is a choice, and that choice is to act. When you find her, you will know, but only after you test your ability to move through the world you’re creating together. The reality you share with her will be equal parts shocking and ecstatic, because love is devastating by its very definition. Your love will live and die at the hands of your patience, vulnerability and self-knowledge. And yearning, at its core, is the fantasy that we can anticipate this process ahead of time.

Meeting your perfect person does come down to random luck, but trying that luck means taking a huge risk. Every desire, need, and wound you understand about yourself makes you more open, more discerning, and more genuine with whoever comes next. If you are yearning for an objectified version of love that comes without discomfort, growth, or the possibility of failure, you are denying yourself opportunities to learn through practice. This keeps your odds as low as possible. In your quest for a game with zero chance to lose, you are making sure that you will never win.

What’s more, fixating on your preconceived version of love will inevitably have you imagining it where it doesn’t exist—and missing the real thing when it’s right in front of you. In the process, you will be moving the goalposts on your own happiness. Think about it. What kind of world do you live in where kissing beautiful women is some kind of disappointment? What distorted goal are you chasing that having titties in your mouth isn’t something to celebrate on its own? I promise you that love is out there, and you will find it. You are beautiful and you are still young. You owe it to yourself to enjoy being a lesbian for everything it’s worth.

I can also promise you this: the best way to find your future wife, is to stop trying to find your future wife. So scrap your preconceived ideas of love and sex. The next time you meet someone hot, give her five chances like I did. Listen to your gut if you get the ick or a red flag, but otherwise show up as honestly as you can, without judgement or expectations, and see what happens. Even if you don’t find a wife you’ll leave with a new friend, or a new lesson, or (if you’re lucky) a new kink.

This study is very much still in progress, and any beautiful femmes are welcome to slide in my DMs if they want to contribute. But after sifting through the preliminary data I’m finally ready to share my findings for peer-review.

Validating each others’ yearning addictions is making us miserable. There is nothing endearing about neglecting our needs. We need to stop unconditionally affirming the blatant self-sabotage that keeps us lonely, disconnected, and unfulfilled. We owe it to ourselves to be unapologetically forward, if not straight up perverted, after so much wasted opportunity. And that means admitting exactly what it is that’s been stopping us the whole time: men.

It is easy to fall back on the idea that women have inherently different sex drives. That we require some level of romance, or some external force, to initiate anything that could lead to an orgasm. But the fact that we’re all so desperately horny for each other proves that to be a lie. Specifically, a lie created by men. And from what I’ve seen, the true cause of our yearning epidemic was created by men as well.

We all remember the times we’ve been separated from our friends, or cornered, or surprised, or pressured, coerced, threatened, even forced to dance and kiss and fuck when we didn’t want to. When we think of making a move, we are reminded of the men who have ignored our signals to get access to us, and how we may have gone along with it out of a genuine fear for our safety. We love and respect women so much that we can’t imagine making them feel how we’ve been made to feel since we first grew boobs or put on makeup. And so we stay nervous about anything more than fleeting eye contact, shamefully peeking at cleavage, firing drive-by compliments with platonic plausible deniability.

The intention behind this is so pure that we can’t judge ourselves. And the trauma that informs this anxiety is extremely real. So instead of affirming our learned helplessness, let’s take a moment to sit with what I just said. You’re not gross, you’re not lazy, and you’re certainly not doomed. You’re probably more scared than anything else. It’s scary to be a woman, it’s scary to be gay, and it’s downright terrifying to be both. What we need to remember is that when we collectively embody this fear, we are letting men oppress us when they aren’t even in the room. The lies and violence of patriarchy are still controlling your body, even after all the work you’ve done to disentangle it from men’s expectations. You deserve pleasure just as much as anyone else, and it’s within your reach.

In case nobody’s ever told you: there is no way in which you could look at a woman that would be the same as how cis men look at her. Your desire is not charged with the implied threats that come with male impunity. That’s part of what makes sapphic love and sex so beautiful. When we exist outside of the inherently subjugating dynamic of heteronormativity, our bodies can finally be vessels of pure, un-policed, un-marketed pleasure.

The whole point of being sapphic is that we don’t have to be scared of the male gaze anymore. But we’re so accustomed to that fear that many have come to expect it. Some women see no other choice but to embrace it by making passive, submissive, self-victimizing reactions to male attention a key part of their sexuality or personal identity. When you are used to dealing with that dynamic, its absence is jarring, and receiving attention from women can feel just as scary as giving it.

As you read this, there are probably a dozen other excuses popping into your head to explain your lack of motion. And you’re not wrong. This is not the only thing standing in our way. Being rejected by a woman, or disappointing her in bed, is often far more devastating. Maybe you’re not experienced with girls, and you’re worried the sex will be bad—or maybe she’s not experienced with girls, and you’re worried the sex will be bad. The list goes on.

At the end of the day, you should be so lucky to be having these problems, because it means you’re getting laid. And there’s only one way to make that happen: start cruising.

I’ve heard lesbians complain that there’s no sapphic version of Grindr, but there actually is. It’s called Grindr. I’m not joking. There is nothing stopping us from using the popular location-based cruising app that already exists. Lots of Trans women (myself included) have used it to find het couples, chasers or T4T hookups, and I’ve seen cis queer women and nonbinary sapphics using it to look for girl dick.

All that’s missing for lesbians on Grindr is other lesbians. And the same goes for everywhere else. Most sapphics are scared to put their pussies out there because they don’t want to look like some kind of pervert; but those same ladies secretly wish that everyone else would do it so they could respond. So be the change and break the cycle. Make a Grindr profile. Send that risky text, sneak that cheeky kiss, wear that slutty outfit you’ve been nervous about. We all need to step up and get our titties out for each others’ sake. But you know who needs to the most?

The girl reading this :)