However, if we are truly going to strive for inclusive intersectional feminism, the answer shouldn’t be a bashful ‘oh no I’m not one of those hairy lesbians’ the next time someone asks if you are a ‘manhating dyke’, but rather a defiant ‘so what if I was? At the peak of Second Wave Feminism, campaigners were demonised as man-hating, bra-burning, communist lesbians, gleefully plotting society’s destabilisation.

It took a lot of different things to pluck up the courage to start labelling myself as a lesbian to everyone. The word ‘lesbian’ encapsulates so much – the friends that first made me feel so comfortable in myself, the loving memories I hold so close, and the peace I’ve found within myself.

She added: “I never said that lesbian was a dirty word, and I never ever would say that it’s a dirty word because it is not. It’s sad that an ideology that concerns itself with the freedom of women from patriarchy is willing to engage in lesbophobia unashamedly. Turning off the personalised advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. If you are reading this as a non-lesbian perhaps question your own preconceived notions surrounding this. Misty lives in Second Life and bases many of her outrageous short stories on her encounters and observations in that amazing world.

Please familiarise yourself with our community guidelines to ensure that our community remains a safe and inclusive space for all. I love being a lesbian in Second Life, I love letting my inhibitions go free and doing things in Second Life I could never dream of doing in the real world. Gay’ may be welcomed as an umbrella term for the wider LGBT community, but it also remains primarily used for gay men. Poems, letters, diaries, protests, activism – all these pieces of history, and for every new thing I learned, I would uncover more. Growing up, I would hear members of my own family talk about same-sex relationships in such a negative way that it made me want to do nothing but retreat inwards, hiding myself and my identity in the closet.Why is it that, amidst all the exciting new victories for the LGBT community, all the flamboyant explosion of pride month celebration, ‘lesbian’ remains a stigmatised word? JoJo Siwa however took to TikTok to explain that “lesbian” is not a “slur”, but “gay” just “flows off the tongue for me”.

The recent American gay marriage court decisions highlighted how out of touch Straight and even Queer identifying feminists are with Lesbians.He may even go as far as to insult your mental health because homosexuality implies imbalance, which is doubly triggering if you do suffer from mental illness.