I couldn’t imagine the experimenting/“just-a-phase" trope being foisted on men. Guys who have sex with other guys, despite youth or inexperience, are rarely if ever thought to be “just fooling around” — we see them as queer, no question, whether gay or bi or any other label besides straight. Nobody ever thought Lance Bass was going to go back to women eventually. (Though queer and questioning men, for whom sexual exploration remains more taboo, are themselves limited in the completely opposite direction.)

Queer women have to do far more than own up to sleeping with other women to be recognized as queer. This phenomenon is amplified when one or both of the women are more feminine, like I am. Men have hit on me at bars, thinking I'm just another straight lady, seemingly blind to my girlfriend next to me even with my hand on her back. I once had a male boss who kept making references to the sorts of guys he thought I’d be interested in, even after I repeatedly told him my dating life is a no-guy zone. Bisexual women have it even worse in this arena than lesbians do — dating men some part of the time translates in the popular consciousness to dating men all the time, exclusively, forever.

The onus placed on queer women to prove their own queerness is exhaustive. And since women have a hard enough time asserting their sapphism when they’re in relationships with other women, claiming queerness in the amorphous world of crushing, dating, and casual sex is quite another task entirely.

Because the media and other powers that be so often refuse to call female queerness what it is, some women who might otherwise embrace an LBQ identity eschew queer identification altogether. They can get away with not identifying in a way that queer men can’t — it’s both a blessing and a curse.

There’s a paradoxical way in which the current culture is celebrating some vague idea of female sexual fluidity, without allowing that fluidity to tip over into full-fledged queerness. In many ways, that’s long since been the case — women “experimenting” has always been a titillating show for the straight male gaze. It’s only when women are sexual with one another without regard for male pleasure that their sexuality becomes a problem. Fluidity is innocent, temporal. But queerness is a threat.

Sexual fluidity of all stripes became a hot topic when the release of Orange Is the New Black’s third season on Netflix introduced mainstream culture to someone lesbians have loved for years: the gender-fluid DJ, model, and actress Ruby Rose. Everyone lost their collective shit over this very attractive, very androgynous person. Women who otherwise identified as straight flocked to social media to declare that Rose was making them question their sexuality. If you’re a lady who’s only been into guys until now, and Ruby Rose’s unbearable hotness is inspiring you to consider switching teams (or playing for multiple), that’s a pretty great thing.

Here’s where this gets tricky, though. Plenty of women took care to clarify that they would “go gay” for Ruby Rose, and Ruby Rose alone. Rose doesn’t identify as a woman, which makes the gay comment enough of an issue in itself. But beyond the limits of language, queer women were uncomfortable with straight women coopting their identities — they argued that you can very easily recognize someone’s attractiveness without saying you’d go gay for them. I’m sure a good number of women had a full-on sexual awakening when, thanks to Orange Is the New Black, androgyny in the form of Rose’s character Stella was depicted as sexy and desirable (and of course, we’ve already seen the show’s queering powers in action: When Lauren Morelli was writing for the first season, she figured out her own gayness). But I also suspect that there were plenty of women who said they’d go gay for Rose, but haven’t been inspired to look at other women any differently — let alone sleep with them, date them, build lives with them.

Queer women who judged straight-identified women for fawning over Rose were chewed out in many corners of the internet for policing other people’s sexuality — it’s just hyperbole, stop being so sensitive. There’s been a grand virtual consensus, apparently: Protect a woman’s right to sexual fluidity. I strongly believe in protecting that right, but I’m also wary of its ability to drown out the desires of queer and questioning women who’d like to go beyond conjecture and actually, physically have queer sex. There are blurry overlaps between the fluid/questioning/queer camps, to be sure, but a lot of the time when people talk about fluidity, that’s what it remains: just talk.

Just Ruby Rose.

Just a phase.

That’s what person-specific and situation-specific fluidity feeds into: the misconception that lady-on-lady action is a flight of fancy, something small and passing and easily contained. The New York Times Vows column about Brittney Griner and Glory Johnson's wedding described their marriage as “between a gay woman and a straight woman" and quoted Johnson as saying: “I’m not a lesbian. But Brittney is different.” (The couple has since separated.) In a similar vein, one of my friends once had a girlfriend who didn’t identify as queer — “I’m just gay for you,” she’d say. And maybe that’s true. Or maybe Johnson and my friend’s ex-girlfriend are rather tragically limiting themselves, foregoing life’s great gay potentials, because it’s easier to package female queerness into a single box: one-time-only, one-person-only. It’s easier because the world would rather champion a sexually fluid woman — widely considered a straight woman who has only temporarily strayed — than a dyke.