Looks like the TERFs are getting bored and trying to start shit again.

If you don’t want to look like a complete waste of oxygen and carbon, don’t buy into this gold star bullshit. I don’t know a single actual real life lesbian who believes in this crap. As far as I can tell, it’s spread by conservative radfems as a way to make baby lesbians feel special so they can recruit them and it usually starts when the biphobia is just around the corner. It’s a marketing tool for TERFs and trust me, you want no part of it.

I hope you don't mind me adding this -

I grew up as a queer kid on the internet. I knew other queer people in real life, but most were my age, and the handful of adults I knew were younger than 40, so I never had exposure to real life queer groups, and I never got to speak to any trans elders. The online discourse has been increasingly rigid and limiting when it comes to what group can use what words. I've seen the discourse go from "trans men cannot reclaim dyke, only queer women can" to "only lesbians can reclaim dyke." And similarly, I remember a time when any queer person could and did use faggot, and now I'm seeing it limited to gay men. There's this ongoing campaign to draw these neat little defining lines when it comes to identity, despite there being much overlapping, historically.

A few years ago I was looking something up and I happened to stumble upon an article written by a gay man in the early 2000s. I can't even recall what the article was about, just one line in particular standing out to me - the author referred to gay men as butch and femme. I was stunned. I'd never seen these terms applied to anyone besides lesbians. In fact, I'd seen discourse that outright stated lesbians were the only ones that could use it!

And the more you read queer history, or even read old pamphlets or articles or look at photographs, you'll notice that these people did not follow these rules we have today. Gay men referred to lesbians as dykes, with affection, in solidarity, and there was no malice to it. Bisexual lesbians were just a thing, and it was understood that these identities had overlaps, asexuals were as queer as anyone else, the list goes on. A lot of the queer discourse is modern. Much of the language we have used to be shared, and it's genuinely heartbreaking to see any one group try to claim language that once described the community as a whole for themselves alone. And I think it's important that younger queer people familiarize ourselves with queer history, because relying on online discourse exclusively is destroying the unity we once had.

The increasing specificity of microlabels correlates with this trend. I remember when “Gay Pride” became “Queer Pride” because it was acknowledged by the gay guys who were running it (in my nearest city) that it needed to be more inclusive and “Queer Rights” had been at the top of the protest docket for well over a decade at that point. No one flinched when someone used “Queer” for themselves or the community as a whole. When I was a teenager trying to figure myself out, I only knew of three possible identities. Either you were straight/heterosexual, gay/lesbian/homosexual, or bisexual (but no one really accepted bi as anything other than either “gay lite” if you were amab or “straight special snowflake” if you were afab) and those were all the options. I didn’t even know being trans was a thing! When I asked about those GORGEOUS women in the AMAZING wigs and dresses and MAKE UP who happened to be six and a half feet tall with large adam’s apples, I was just told they were “men who get off on wearing dresses stop staring you’ll encourage them”.

To be clear, I’m not saying “People who use microlabels are the problem” or “you shouldn’t use microlabels ever” or anything of the sort. Microlabels are the natural and expected progression of people being more comfortable talking about their experiences. They’re a way for queer people to find people who share the most similar experiences. I’m aroace and trying to figure out my gender right now, and I NEVER felt like part of the Queer Community until I found those labels despite the fact that I was at my first pride parade at 14 (and loved EVERYTHING about it) and 90% of my friends were always queer and I had as many girlfriends as I had boyfriends and the only people I ever wanted to look like were those “men” in dresses and I identified as bisexual for 20 years. When I found the labels that made me go HOLY FUCK THAT’S NOT JUST ME???? I finally started to feel like I had found a community where I belonged for my own sake. Microlabels are awesome actually and a sign that we’ve progressed. If you didn’t start to develop memories in at least the early 90s I think you would struggle to understand just how big the difference is. I mean you can read about it and accept it but I don’t think it CAN hit the same way.

The problem just showed up alongside the microlabels, so they get blamed. The ACTUAL problem within the community is gatekeeping. It’s the people who can’t understand why the flag for the entire community is a rainbow. It’s this ridiculous attitude that there’s some big hierarchy with some King Dyke and Queen Fag who are categorical arbiters of what qualifies as Queer Enough and that you can somehow get in good with them by stepping on baby queers until they notice how good you are at keeping The Acronym™ Pure and Clean.

Those people and that hierarchy simply don’t exist. Queer means “not the way society expected us to be” and it is a HUGE umbrella that covers so many different people, far too many to be covered by the limited language we had back when we were just fighting to exist at all. The fight for acceptance just as we are has been going on for generations and this battle to police what language we use is a tool of the enemy. Making new words to describe our experiences is one of the victories we have been fighting for and the only people who have a problem with it are the people who think we shouldn’t be allowed to be ourselves. People who tell you you’re not queer enough because you don’t experience queerness exactly the same way they do have missed the entire point, as have people who think you can only be queer if you fit into one of the categories society made for us 40, 60, 100 years of fighting ago.

They’re not new either - Aunty Sugar tells us stories all the time about how the Political Lesbians (who she hated because “most of them weren’t lesbians at all, they were just man-haters who thought all dykes were idiots who would listen to them because they had tits”) would regularly cause problems in her community in the 70s and 80s whenever gay men were included in anything, even if they were organizing it themselves. We looked up one of the women she was particularly rabid about and, surprising absolutely no one, that woman is now a very vocal and politically active TERF and married a pastor who (until recently) ran conversion camps.

The intention of these self appointed Language Police is to STOP us from building a community. They want us to focus on our differences instead of the thing we have in common - that we do not love the way society tells us we’re supposed to, if we even love at all - so that we CAN’T connect. They WANT us to stay miserable and alone and they think our suicides would be a better option than society shifting to include us just as we are.

They are wrong. Stop listening to them.