It’s a common misconception that members of gay relationships have to map onto the roles of a straight couple: woman and asshole,” said Acharya. “But neither of us is the asshole; that’s the entire point.

The dictionary defines femme as “a lesbian whose appearance and behavior are seen as traditionally feminine.” However, that’s what makes it subversive. To be “femme” is to capture femininity on your own terms, reclaiming it from the heterosexual gaze and performing it instead for a queer community.

Stewart never had a public coming-out process, and somehow, that made me realize that I didn’t need one either. She just starting dating women openly and felt no need to redefine her sexuality, and I guess I figured I could do the same thing.

Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.

My most recent experiences in the classroom, coupled with my experiences while conducting research within the transgender community, however, have convinced me that our current practice of asking that everyone state their personal pronoun is not a good idea. My position is perhaps best explained by sharing two experiences.

In my gender class, as it has come to be known, I ask that students journal in response to readings, class discussions or a prompt on a controversial issue. Occasionally, those entries get personal. In a recent year, a student revealed in an entry that they thought they might be transgender. The next time I spoke with the student alone, with the best of intentions, I asked what pronoun they wanted me to use. Their eyes filled with tears as they answered, “I don’t know.” At about the same time, I asked someone at a conference what pronoun to use, and she burst into tears. She later explained that she had hoped that she “passed” and that my question made her feel like she did not.

Eunoia II is outfitted with 48 vibration pools, inspired by the 48 emotions philosopher Baruch Spinoza outlined in his book, Ethica, like frustration, excitement, engagement, and meditation.

Each speaker vibrates according to Park’s brain wave-interpreting algorithm, which transforms intense signals from Park’s Emotiv EEG headset into intense vibrations in the pools of water atop speakers.

That's so cool.

I enjoyed talking to friends about our arrangement, but quickly found that most everyone knew someone who had left their male partner for a woman after a messy bout with polyamory.

“Be careful,” they’d say. “What if you fall in love?”

In the current social climate of the #MeToo movement, men are under siege. We really have it rough; all of a sudden we have to think about, like, what we say, how we’re perceived, and if we’re safe. Who lives like that?! At this point we’re lucky if we dominate just 99% of corporate culture, politics, and the world at large. It’s like we’re barely running everything anymore.

This Sunday, there’s a tall woman a few tables over with this hot outfit (almost entirely denim) and her hair gracefully swept up and back. She’s here with her parents. Do they even know she’s gay? I’m pretty confident that she is, she gave me the nod on the way in. I’m here with a sweetheart, teaching them how to control the object ball with little adjustments. I pocket a shot and catch the woman’s eye, she gives me a look: mutual recognition but definitely flirtation too. I think maybe she would come home with us. She certainly seems to be signaling, the way her eyes ask me to play just before she looks away. A fantasy starts to grow in my mind; I want to take her home with us. What does she enjoy? Would she let me lead the way I like? Am I allowed to be fantasizing about a stranger like this?

The term was intended to explain some parents’ observations that 1) their children came out as transgender seemingly suddenly, often during puberty, and 2) their children also had trans-identified peers and interacted with trans-themed social media. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for reluctant parents to presume that their child has adopted a trans (or LGBTQ+ more generally) identity as a result of undue influence from other children and/or outside sources 

Pour comprendre les problèmes de la conception féministe radicale de l’oppression des femelles, nous devons nous demander ce que ces féministes veulent dire quand elles parlent « d’être femelle » ou quand elles disent que « la féminité est basée sur la biologie ». Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire, être femelle ? Quelles sont les caractéristiques et les éléments qui font de quelqu’un·e une femelle ou un non-femelle ? Sur quelles parties de la biologie est supposément basée la féminité ? Quelles expériences biologiques partagent toutes les femmes ?

La vérité du genre n’existe pas en dehors d’un ensemble de conventions sociales intersubjectives. Le genre n’est pas une propriété psychique ou physique du sujet ni une identité naturelle, c’est une relation de pouvoir soumise à un processus collectif constant d’assujettissement - en même temps de soutien et de contrôle, de subjectivation et de soumission.

When I stopped drinking, I finally realized the deep sadness I'd been trying to drown with alcohol was really gender dysphoria.

Pour une femme dans cette société sexiste, être indépendante signifie qu’on ne peut être une femme – on est une gouine. Ceci devrait en soi nous éclairer sur la situation des femmes. Ce que cela dit, aussi clairement que possible, c’est que les mots femme et personne sont contradictoires. Car une lesbienne n’est pas considérée comme une vraie femme. Et pourtant, dans l’imaginaire collectif, la seule différence essentielle entre une lesbienne et les autres femmes, c’est celle de l’orientation sexuelle. Ce qui revient à dire, au fond, que l’essence de la condition de femme est d’être baisée par les hommes.

She’s not allowed to quit or even change her style because Dad’s in charge and Britney’s not legally allowed to make those decisions on her own anymore.

In every ancient society where beer existed, the craft was created and carried out by women. Often, they even received their instruction from goddesses they conjugated with for life. There’s no mythology in which a male god gifts brewing instructions to humanity, and no mythology in which a man receives brewing instructions from a deity. It’s always goddesses and it’s always women brewers.

Last year I quit my well-paying city job to go back to school and work in retail and my mother still hasn’t gotten over it. To her my decisions seem like symptoms of mental illness that plagued my grandmother and great grandmother. It’s hard to explain why I needed to leave the world of business casual clothing and passive aggressive emails to feel sane again.

We’ve heard a lot about what it is to be a woman who is unsatisfied in herself and her relationships and turns to another woman for those needs; we haven’t heard the stories of the Other Women. Those stories might reframe these affairs away from the question of loneliness, unhappiness, malaise, and need, and towards a question of labor, consumption, and use. It might help us recognize how when straightness is the assumed default, gestures of queer intimacy get muddled, blurred, and erased amidst all that platonic friendships have been stretched to encompass.

Since having a reserve army of labor is necessary, capitalism requires a set of criteria for who will be granted status as a laborer and proletariat and who will be relegated to unemployment. Social marginalization on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and gender identity all serve a crucial role within capitalism to ensure that some people are forced into the reserve army of labor. Social marginalization is actually a fundamental structuring principle of capitalist economics.

I use Lesbian Feminist as a term to refer to a broad and not entirely internally consistent group of theorists and theories which are interested in theorizing from the perspective and experience of lesbianism, understand lesbianism as a form of resistance towards heteropatriarchy, and understand heterosexuality as a cornerstone of patriarchal domination.

There’s little conversation about the bodies of trans women who have not undergone gender confirmation surgery—online, in media, anywhere, really. Where are all the sex guides for trans women who don’t want to have surgery, who aren’t ready, or who haven’t yet had the opportunity?

To create my own, I decided to chronicle my own process, and reach out to trans women friends to ask what’s helped them most. Here's what I learned.

We cannot separate our sense of our gender from the social forces which construct both sex and gender and which influence the ways we think of ourselves. If both gender and sex are constructed, then we can imagine a world where we didn’t have a gendered or sexed idea of ourselves. This would indicate that the concept of gender identity is not a stable and unchanging concept, but is contingent and dependent on socially and culturally prevalent notions of gender.

Les lesbiennes trans et leur·s partenaire·s peuvent baiser de plein de supers manières qui impliquent le pénis et les testicules, sans forcément engendrer de dysphorie.

Queer women probably don’t cruise because it is simply too unsafe for us to do so. It’s why Woolf is so careful to close her doors; it’s why Lorde sticks to lesbian bars, spaces created for and by queer women. Queer women’s sexuality is such a threat to patriarchal, heterosexual control that for many centuries its existence was completely denied, or deliberately hidden. The oppression levered against queer women is one of violent control: keeping us trapped, denying our existence, struggling to remake us. And even now, to be a woman in public is to be harassed—catcalled or followed home, leered at or abused. The threat of violence is inseparable from the idea of lesbian cruising.

Chelsea G. Summers considers the ways in which outwardly ‘progressive’ men like former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman use kink as a cover for abuse.

Around three years ago, I came out by writing about biphobia for Archer, and the article was then picked up the Sydney Morning Herald. Considering the article talked about people treating bisexuality as a phase, I was wracked with guilt about how what I’m about to write might contribute to that.

Earlier this year, after a lot of introspection and a come-to-Jesus talk with a dear friend, I realised that I’m not bi, I’m a lesbian. […]

My realising this doesn’t make bisexuality as an identity invalid, or a phase. The reality is that a lot of gay people, especially lesbians, first acknowledge their same-gender attraction by coming out as bi, but eventually realise that isn’t the label for them. Ultimately, I think my original article was too naïve, and didn’t allow for the nuances of the wide variety of queer experiences.

For the longest time, I thought I needed these stories told always and everywhere until everyone realized how important they were, even as they reopened traumatic wounds that haven’t yet healed and probably never will. But now I realize that I only ever needed our stories to stop being erased. And there is very big a difference. A story does not need to be told to everyone to not be erased.

Black women have the unique experience of being subjected to both misogynistic and anti-Black violence, but are never positioned equally amongst non-Black women or Black non-women. Black women experience all of the pain their counterparts do and yet are somehow regarded as second-class.

This history and its legacy leave me feeling that my anger about the world ascribing femininity to my body without my consent borders on betrayal to Black women. How can I claim to support Black women when there are times I resent the fact that I am perceived as one? Can I do both? The more steps I take to be comfortable in the body my spirit occupies, the more it feels like my transness and my Blackness stand in opposition to one another.

BBW is a euphemism for “fat,” but it also implies that not all “big” women may be “beautiful,” according to societal standards. In other words, the BBW category only includes women who society considers acceptably fat: That often only includes white, cis, straight or commercially plus-sized women, and leaves everyone else out.

There has been no significant statistical improvement in the representation of women, people of color, LGBT characters, or characters with disability in film over the last decade.