The Bi-Lesbian: An Exploration of Identity in the Queer Community

“Both parts of the community [bisexuals and lesbians] are trying to find homes in their identity.” Let’s explore how the bi-lesbian came into being and what it means for the sapphic community.

BY: VICTORIA MBABAZI

Art by Ryanne Kap // THE UNDERGROUND

I spend an inordinate amount of time on my phone—whether to share memes with the same five people I talk to every day or to convince my girlfriend that the movie with the 30% Tomatometer score is definitely worth our nightly Netflix party. My favourite app on my phone is the epicentre of all chaos and discourse: Twitter. As a Black lesbian, most of the people I follow on Twitter are either in the Black or queer community. A couple weeks ago, the sapphic community got into a war over a term I only started hearing about this year. Since it’s not the first time this discourse has come up on the timeline, I think it’s worth writing about. 

Bi-lesbian flag courtesy of @bi-lesbian

There’s always discourse on any social media site. The one the queer community has been revisiting a lot lately is the validity of the term “bi-lesbian”. From what I’ve seen on Twitter threads, a bi-lesbian is a bisexual person who has a preference for women, and therefore has an attachment to the lesbian label. 

I’m going to be honest—when I first heard the word bi-lesbian, I didn’t really have a problem with it. As a lesbian, I feel like bisexual sapphics and lesbians go through a lot of the same experiences. I couldn’t possibly understand who this was hurting in any real sense. However, a recurring argument against the term was always the question: “Are people gonna call themselves bi-straights now?” Bi-straights would refer to bisexual womxn who prefer men. I was left on the fence with this argument, so I decided to talk to more members of the sapphic community and see if I could give myself, and maybe anyone reading this, a more informed opinion on the matter. 

Before we start, we should get into some terminology. A Google search brings up the definitions (from Oxford) for the following words: 

Lesbian: A homosexual woman (e.g., Wanda Sykes, Lena Waithe, Kate McKinnon, etc.)

Bisexual: Someone who is sexually attracted and not exclusively attracted to people of one particular gender (e.g., Janelle Monae, Megan Fox, Billie Joe Armstrong, etc.)

Genderqueer (non-binary): Denoting or relating to a person who does not subscribe to conventional gender distinctions but identifies with neither, both or a combination of male and female genders (Cara Delevigne, Tommy Dorfman, Quintessa Swindell, etc.)

Already, the definition of “lesbian” from the Oxford English Dictionary is lacking since it fails to include genderqueer people. Non-binary lesbians are valid and are readily accepted by non-transphobic people into the lesbian community. This definition of lesbian wasn’t one I could accept, so I looked into it more and found this definition on Merriam-Webster: “a woman who is sexually or romantically attracted to other women.”

Again, this definition ignores the existence of non-binary lesbians, although it does give validity to bisexuals who identify as lesbians. If we were validating definitions purely based on dictionary analysis, this would be the end of the debate for most people. According to this definition, it would be enough to say you’re a lesbian. Why even add “bi” to the lesbian label? To answer this, I went to the epicentre of queer discourse: Tumblr. 

I asked the owner of a bi-lesbian positivity blog to define what bi-lesbian means to her. She expressed that she identifies as bi-lesbian because although she holds a small and rare amount of attraction to men in real life, it’s “extremely insignificant” and “pretty much close to nonexistent” compared to her attraction for womxn.

“Even though my attraction to men is so small,” she said, “it’s still there, so I’m still attached to the bi label!” She also explained that “bi encompasses such a wide range of attraction that it doesn’t feel specific enough to define my identity [...] while lesbian alone also doesn’t completely define my whole identity, because I don’t want to exclude my attraction to men entirely [...] I also use the term to mean that I like any kind of women, but for any guys or enbies that I like, they’re always feminine or androgynous in some way.”

For her, the bi-lesbian label allows her to recognize that her love for women is great while also acknowledging her attraction to men. It seemed simple enough, so why were these kinds of debates happening in the first place? I reached out to Dr. SJ Sindu, an English professor who specializes in queer theory and taught me Writing Queer and Trans Voices this past semester. 

Dr. SJ Sindu explained that “most queer, trans and enby youth don’t get to learn the histories of their people the way cishet people do.” She believes that the lack of accessibility and education of queer theory was the cause for this debate in the first place. 

“The problem seems to be that people are arguing for ‘lesbian’ as a term that’s fixed and unchangeable, and also thinking about it in the context of our modern-day lexicon [...] Even Sappho, the poet whose very name has become synonymous with women loving women, wrote about both same-gender and different-gender love. The term lesbian itself derives from the island of Lesbos, where Sappho is said to have lived. Some of the earliest pioneers of so-called lesbian literature might not be called (or call themselves) lesbians today. Radclyffe Hall, for example, who wrote The Well of Loneliness (1928), might be called transmasculine today. Leslie Feinberg, who wrote Stone Butch Blues (1993), one of the canons of lesbian literature, used non-gendered zie/hir pronouns. The argument that lesbian means only one thing is absurd.

“The kind of policing that I see of identities like bi/pan lesbian (some of it quite vitriolic) is sadly not new but also cruel. At the end of the day, what’s to be gained from this kind of policing of terms? [...] can the term lesbian be policed if it's always been a flexible identity? What makes the bi/pan lesbian argument different from the argument that trans women can’t identify as lesbians? Or that cis women with trans women partners can’t identify as lesbians?”

The bi/pan lesbian debate seemed different to me because it extends the definition of “lesbian” to include attraction to men. I understand why this is unsettling for those against the bi-lesbian identity. However, when Professor Sindu brought up Sappho, it further legitimized the bi-lesbian identity for me. It’s a big part of the debate when it comes to whether bi-lesbian is a legitimate term. Those on the anti-bi-lesbian side argue that Sappho was a lesbian, and those on the pro-bi-lesbian side argue that she was bisexual. 

The truth is, we don’t know what Sappho’s sexual orientation was. I also can’t ask her since she’s been dead since 570 BC. In the New Yorker, Daniel Mendelson wrote a piece called “Girl Interrupted” in which he details all the things we thought we knew and actually don’t know about her. The part that stuck out to me in this piece was the fact that in Ancient Greece, “lesbian” used to mean a slutty person who gave a lot of fellatio. Clearly, the word has gone through a series of definition changes, and maybe going back to the origin of the word is a nonstarter. We don’t know what it meant to be a lesbian back then, but words change meaning over time. We can’t get into a dictionary war or a history war over what it means to be a lesbian. So why now are some queer people against the label? I asked a few people who were active in Guelph’s queer scene and their opinions on the matter.

Reighne, who is a lesbian, feels like the term “reflects the unwillingness to let go of lesbian privilege.” When Reighne talks about lesbian privilege, she is referring to the fact that homosexual cis women don’t get erased the way other queer identities do in the LGBTQ+ community. According to Reighne, the term “seems unnecessarily tied to the lesbian culture rather than embracing the bi label. It reinforces the fear of bisexuality in the lesbian community and feels like it is downplaying a part of a person, because of the fear of repercussions and judgment from some lesbians.” 

Reighne also added that “bi-lesbian” feels like a “direct contradiction of ‘gold star’ lesbian,” further stating that she is unsure why just saying “‘I am bisexual, but mostly date/connect with women’ is looked down upon.” Nevertheless, she recognizes that this may be because of biphobic lesbian spaces.  

Lindsey, a bisexual woman, shared in this sentiment and commented on how terms like bi-lesbian can cause erasure. “I recognize that the language we use to describe our identities can feel limiting at times and is always evolving,” she said, “but I think we have to be very conscious that we do not contribute to further minimizing or erasing bisexual identities and privileging of monosexual identities.” 

So while Reighne was worried about the bi-lesbian label taking power away from the bisexual community and Lindsey was worried about erasing bisexual communities with this type of term, Cas—a non-binary bisexual—was concerned about the importance of the lesbian identity to queer monosexuals. Cas recognized that as someone that is perceived to be in a lesbian relationship, they often “identify as a lesbian in relation to cishet people.” However, they can understand the uproar from the lesbian community because, to them, “the meaning is different for lesbians who are exclusively attracted to women and the absence of attraction to men is an important part of their identity.” 

I found all three takes very interesting. There seemed to be great care for lesbian communities and bisexual communities alike. Through listening to these points of view and trying to understand our histories better, I feel as though I have a greater understanding but not enough to pick a side on the matter. I know why there’s a push to keep the lesbian label exclusionary of attraction to men. Being gay and a woman, before I found freedom in the word lesbian, it used to scare me. For myself, and I’m sure for many other womxn, it’s heartbreaking and more than confusing to know you have no interest in the gender you are conditioned to be attracted to. 

It’s the kind of confusion that leads to compulsory heterosexuality, and why it can sometimes take us a long time to realize our attraction to men is purely based on societal pressure. It’s why we want a word that encompasses our experiences, and supposedly for a long time now, it seemed like that word was going to be “lesbian”. Adding “bi-lesbian” into the mix can be a little unsettling for those who did all that work to get to a place where they could be proud to call themselves a lesbian. When it comes to our bisexual counterparts, it seems as though they’re trying to find an identity that best matches the fluidity of their orientation. With bi-erasure, it’s been hard for bisexual people even to find a way to identify themselves in ways that feel correct, especially since their orientation is already called into question at all times. 

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Both parts of the community are trying to find homes in their identity. Being a part of the LGBTQ+ community means that our identities are constantly under attack as marginalized people. When debates like this come up, they may be fun and messy to watch, but as a community we get stuck on them because we are trying to make sense of our orientations. It took me awhile to figure out that I was a lesbian and to find solace in that term. I also found pride in the term because of how I know it's popularly defined today. As in I found solace in it being a term used to describe queer monosexual people. Right now, it seems to belong to queer monosexual people, but the fact remains that “lesbian” is an ever-changing label. 

Is there a way to make both parts of the community feel validated? Or is this less a lesson in validation and more about accepting the fluctuation of norms? The latter could be a question posed to both sides. As the queer community becomes more visible, we learn more about ourselves and create terms that make us feel more at home in our identities. Sometimes, the words we have to define us don’t always fit well with how we see ourselves. We are marginalized people and with social media it’s been easier for us to come together and share our similarities and differences. This leads to us creating more terms and trying to create and recreate our own lexicon to feel more like who we are. As someone who’s just now finding a home in my label, it’s hard to fault a subsection of the community who’s found a way to do that as well.