If you’re a political lesbian and you’re not listening to your lesbian sisters about their concerns, you’re being shitty.

The thing is, I very much doubt all the ‘het’ women on this planet are actually heterosexual. I doubt even half. I would presume a HUGE number would happily abstain from all sex if given that option–but celibacy is NOT political lesbianism.

When I say I think any woman can be a lesbian, I mean girls and women have been indoctrinated into the idea of heterosexuality. We’re taught that we’re going to take cock and make babies and work full-time and raise those babies (and that cock-wielder). Many young women recognize early that they are lesbian. This is not a privilege because that implies lesbians have social collateral that straight women don’t. Lesbians and het women face different misogyny from the same source, and it all comes down to: women are here to be fucked by men.

If I’d known I was a lesbian I wouldn’t have 'chosen’ to have sex with men. But even though I knew there WERE lesbians, I didn’t know any. What I saw on tv didn’t make sense to me. What I saw in porn didn’t make sense to me. When I’ve had friends, they’ve always been women. I didn’t want to do with women what men did to me because I KNEW it was fucked up and unequal. At the same time I couldn’t imagine being with a woman because I’d become so accustomed to the unspoken but constantly reinforced male > female relationship hierarchy. Not only had my male partners learned I was supposed to be 'fucked’ (dominated), but *I* also thought that’s what I was supposed to want. (cue marriage, sex work, bdsm, and a tonne of other stuff that almost killed me and does kill countless sisters).

It wasn’t until I found radical feminism that I finally understood why being with men sent me into terrible depressions, often for years. It exacerbated my eating disorders and self-harming tendencies. I had anxiety attacks. I pushed away my family to the point where they’d given up on me. I missed SO MUCH of life because I was so confused about who I was and what it meant. I thought that was just me (I do still deal with all these issues, they simply manifest differently and I’m able to cope better).

So I don’t consider lesbians who came out or understood themselves very young to be 'the lucky ones’. I dealt with different shit (I was a slut in high school, of course) but I never dealt with lesbophobia until recently. And it IS different. I learned my first night 'out’ that men don’t see lesbians as off limits. They see us as a threat which they interpret as a challenge, and they are often aggressive or violent about it.

No one gets to decide what your lesbianism means to you. You don’t have to HAVE SEX to be a lesbian–that’s no one’s business but yours. But political lesbians want to BE WITH women. If you are OPEN WITH women about your history with men and upfront what what political lesbianism means to you, and you LISTEN TO lesbians when they tell you they don’t like the way you’re acting or they take issue with your political lesbianism, then that’s good. Learn. Grow. Maybe come to the realization many later-in-life lesbians do.

I guess what I’m saying is, political lesbianism for me was a bridge. It was a way of sorting out my internalized lesbophobia and compulsory heterosexuality and my fear. I’d made my intentions known that I wanted to be with women, and more I acted on those intentions, the clearer things became. Now I understand I am a lesbian. Was I ever het or even bi? Or did I just let men fuck me because that’s what I was supposed to do–the only thing I knew how to do? Socialization under patriarchy will FUCK YOU UP. I don’t actually know the answer, but I don’t want to deny women the opportunity to unload some of the bullshit they’ve been draped in since birth, because I know how long it took me. More women are lesbians than we or they will ever know. <3