"At first glance in these places, you’re surrounded by lesbians. It takes a while to notice that something feels off or at least it did for me. Soon I realized the problem: most of the people calling themselves are not lesbians. They write us in their image and it hurts."

I've had this twice - First from the TQs then in radical feminism (which I got interested in for a while). I was super-excited that there were so many lesbians and thought this is the answer, these are my people. Immediately, it seemed weird, the way they talked about lesbians - like setting lesbians up as these patriarchy-smashing goddesses and idealising lesbian relationships and lives to a ridiculous degree. I noticed that nearly all of them seemed to have been in long-term relationships with men and, while yes some lesbians don't come out til later in life, this was vastly disproportionate to what I'd ever seen in the LGB community. Then I noticed how clueless and dismissive they were about lesbian experiences and how much hatred they had for regular lesbians who didn't comply and didn't see and experience the world through a heterosexual or bisexual woman's perspective. And any time I or any other lesbian questioned whether a woman who was attracted to men could be a lesbian, they would all swarm in with their "sexuality is fluid" spiel, trying to twist it into being about "gold star" lesbians and sexual experience rather than their attraction for men being what makes them not a lesbian (even saying "so you're saying that if a lesbian was raped by a man she isn't a real lesbian?" when no one had said anything of the sort), saying that if we don't allow them to call themselves lesbians (like we have any power over them) we are forcing them to be in abusive relationships with men (nope, date or don't date whoever you like, just don't call yourself a lesbian if you aren't one). And some of them are blatantly lesbophobic but get away with it by identifying as lesbians.

The frustrating thing (besides encountering this shit twice when I was trying to escape from the first lot) is that they see this all when talking about transwomen. They understand the importance of boundaries, of having words to describe a particular group of people (particularly a group which is oppressed), they will say "dress however you like and do whatever you like but don't call yourself what you are not", they will say "but even if they convincingly transition they don't have the same experiences in life as someone who grew up as a girl and who is actually a woman". As soon as it is about straight and bi women identifying as lesbians, all this just goes out of the window.