“You’re too pretty to be gay!” “You don’t look gay!” “So you’re the girl in the relationship, right?”
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These are things any ‘lipstick lesbian’ has heard before. And let me be the one to say, WE ARE TIRED OF IT! Can you imagine constantly having to validate yourself and your sexuality because you don’t fit society’s standard of gay? What does gay even look like anyways? Do I have to sag my pants for you to get the picture?
Truth is, anyone can be gay and they don’t have to look a certain way to be! We need to kill these God-awful labels and stereotypes that surround the LGBTQ community and force us into boxes that don’t fully describe who we are.
Most lesbians are identified as studs, butches, or dykes for the more masculine girls or as fems, lipsticks, and girly for the feminine ones. Sort of like being on the right or left side of the spectrum. The girls in between are classified as stems and they go back and forth with appearance depending day, event, etc.
I am considered a fem because I normally wear dresses, leggings and make up and don’t look like a dude but some days I put on sweatpants and sneakers and know that if I saw myself from afar I’d think I was a guy. So why don’t I just identify as stem if I want? Well, because I don’t want to be identified as anything other than a person!
These labels were created by society to profile us so that people better understood the lesbian community. But while trying to ease the minds of the rest of the world, society placed lesbians in yet another box forcing them to conform to it.
People outside of, and even some inside, the community don’t understand the issue with these labels. Some people do find comfort in having something to identify themselves as and that’s great for them! But, I am not one of those people.
So let’s clear some things up here:
Lesbians can be girly!
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We can wear pretty dresses and celebrate our women hood while being proud of our sexuality.
Gay doesn’t look like anything other than a 6-colored rainbow flag!
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I promise you see at least 20 gay men and lesbians every single day and have no idea. You probably talk to them, buy things from them, maybe even have lunch with them and you won’t know unless they tell you.
We’re both girls, that’s the point of being a lesbian!
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I don’t care how manly a girl looks or how deep her voice is, she has a vagina therefore she is a girl. We don’t submit to gender roles based on outside appearance, we are both women and we both take out the trash and do dishes. And PLEASE don’t ask questions about our sex, it’s not your business!
I never believed in labeling things as beautiful as love and I have a tattoo to prove it. So, society can take its labels and stereotypes and shove them down someone else’s throat. I refuse to be forced in a box of being anything other than myself!