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[–]yousaythosethingsFind and Replace "gatekeeping" with "having boundaries" 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Ugh this reminds me that my friend just tried to correct me when I said I was in a heterosexual marriage. She said “but you’re gay so it wasn’t heterosexual.” I said “no, it was heterosexual because we are of the opposite sex regardless of our sexual orientations.”

Why would my homosexuality override his heterosexuality? That is treating heterosexuality as the default and as a state of purity and a drop of homosexuality as tainting the purity of that relationship. Makes no sense and calling that relationship anything other than heterosexual just makes it harder for me to tell my story and explain key aspects of my life to people.

[–]PatsyStoneMaverique 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I've been told not to call a marriage between a lesbian and a bisexual woman a homosexual/gay marriage, but rather a "same-sex marriage." I've also been told not to call bisexual-lesbian couples "lesbian."

Some people take those rules to their logical conclusion and extend it to heterosexual relationships.

[–]yousaythosethingsFind and Replace "gatekeeping" with "having boundaries" 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I've been told not to call a marriage between a lesbian and a bisexual woman a homosexual/gay marriage, but rather a "same-sex marriage." I've also been told not to call bisexual-lesbian couples "lesbian."

I am not too miffed by a relationship between two women whether the individuals in it are bisexual or lesbian calling themselves a “lesbian relationship” because there is still no good, non-awkward word for causal use. Hence the popularity of “queer.” That is one reason I would like “sapphic” or an equivalent to become popularized because a word is absolutely needed to fill that void and I want it to be a word that lacks ideological and political connotations. “Lesbian couple” is a little more iffy than “lesbian relationship” for some reason because it does for whatever reason give me more of a connotation that they’re both lesbians, but again it’s not a hill I would die on because I understand the criticism on both ends.

Some people take those rules to their logical conclusion and extend it to heterosexual relationships.

In my experience this is coming from two different groups of people with different motivations. The first is coming from people who are concerned with homosexual erasure which is now newly as much an internal problem as it is an external problem and is resulting in sexual orientation (and sexual preferences on top of that) of both homosexual and bisexual people becoming dangerously reframed in the language of discrimination and inclusivity.

In my experience, for the second group who don’t want me to call my prior marriage “heterosexual,” they tend to be of the woke/queer mindset where they want to “queer” everything no matter how shallow and meaningless even when the inevitable result is that they end up conflating with and supplanting real issues of erasure.