
None of this makes the identities meaningless tho. They still communicate that you’re part of those community and you align yourself with these people and experiences. They have meaning on a personal level and are still effectively used to describe your experiences with attraction in relation to your gender. It’s just such a non-issue.
The identity label of lesbian is used both because people feel a personal connection to the community and also to describe your experiences with attraction to others. If someone feels their experiences with attraction are best described as lesbian then that’s how it’s best described. And T-boys identifying as lesbian does not change the power of the word lesbian to describe sapphic relationships or an alignment with the lesbian community.
Okay but my question is how can you say your experiences with attraction are best described as lesbian if none of us can come to an understanding on what lesbian even means? Like what about how you experience attraction makes you a lesbian if it's not that you're a girl who only likes girls? And this isn't even me trying to be combative, this is just genuinely where the disconnect is.
I think a big disconnect here is the idea that identity labels have to have clear definitions. They don’t, living beings can’t be easily categorized like that, there is always nuance and exceptions. If you’ve met lesbians, or read things posted by lesbians, or read books about lesbians, or seen movies about lesbians then you have an idea of what lesbian experiences look like. What I assume when someone says they’re a lesbian is that they’ve probably experienced some amount of discrimination
The big thing really is that the person feels they belong to the lesbian community. If they identify with this label, then this is the group of people that they belong to. There’s no reason to gatekeep that community from other queers who are just existing and being respectful community members, even if their experiences don’t fit perfectly into the definitions on the lgbt wiki