When an All-Lesbian Town Made Trans Lesbians Question Their Right to Exist

I knew my “all-lesbian town” thought experiment would stir the gatekeepers up. That’s why I created a video that focused on the fact that an all-white town had to pay for press coverage of what should be a moral outrage.

I threw a hypothetical out because I felt like stirring the pot a little in the name of science: “can you imagine if lesbians tried to create an all-lesbian town? No way in hell.” I laughed at the allegations, but one comment made me cry: “Would trans lesbians be allowed in an all-lesbian town?” (Asked by more than one trans lesbian.) 

This quiet truth bitch-slapped me so hard I had to take a knee and sit with it. Trans lesbians asked if they would be welcome in a lesbian hypothetical lesbian space. Lesbians were worried they would be excluded because they’re trans. That’s trauma.

Also if that doesn’t stop you in your tracks, you’re not listening. Trans lesbians have experienced enough to question a space that couldn’t exist without them. That’s a problem, y’all.

This Is What Power and Space Actually Look Like

In the conversations about power and space, one thing was clear: who gets to feel “default welcome” and who has to ask permission tells you everything about hierarchy. Cis lesbians, even marginalized ones, often walk into lesbian conversations assuming inclusion, but trans lesbians don’t get that luxury.

They have learned through pattern recognition and lived experience that lesbian spaces can turn hostile fast. That they may be interrogated. That they may be tolerated but not embraced. That their womanhood might be treated as conditional.

So when a trans lesbian asks, “Would I be welcome?” That is not insecurity. That’s survival logic.

Lesbians Are Not Perfect and Being Forced to Pretend We Are Is Part of Erasure

Lesbian TERFs exist. That fact makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially cis lesbians who desperately want lesbianism to be morally spotless so it can be safely defended. Expecting lesbians to be perfect is part of how we get erased.

No other orientation is required to be ideologically pure to deserve space. Straight people aren’t held to that standard. Gay men aren’t. Bisexual people aren’t.

Yet lesbians are expected to be:

• endlessly inclusive without boundaries

• politically flawless without internal conflict

• safe enough to absorb everyone else’s unresolved fear

That expectation doesn’t protect us, it hollows us out.

Acknowledging the existence of lesbian TERFs is not endorsing them. It’s naming a reality so it can be confronted instead of quietly projected onto trans women.

The Misinformation That Fuels This Harm

Here’s where the damage really comes from. There is a deliberate, dangerous conflation happening between gender identity and sexual orientation, pushed by TERF rhetoric and swallowed uncritically by people who should know better.

Let’s be clear:

• Being a lesbian is about who you’re attracted to.

• Being a woman is about who you are.

Trans lesbians do not “bend” lesbianism, they prove it. They’re women who love women, full stop. Any attempt to exclude them relies on bad biology, bad faith, and fear disguised as feminism. It pretends womanhood is fragile, as if acknowledging trans women somehow undoes cis women. What it actually undoes is safety.

If There Are No Trans Dykes, There Are No Dykes

I said this because I meant it. Lesbian history, culture, and survival have always been shaped by gender nonconformity. By women who didn’t fit. By bodies and lives that made the world uncomfortable.

Trying to purify lesbianism into something narrow, rigid, and biologically policed doesn’t preserve it. And let’s be honest for a second: Two women being able to make a baby by any means (that are honestly none of your business) is not a threat to lesbianism. It’s the dream.

If your version of a lesbian town collapses the moment trans women walk in, that town was built on exclusion, not community.

The Real Cost: Trans Lesbians Carry This Fear Everywhere

What broke my heart wasn’t disagreement. It was recognition. Trans lesbians didn’t argue. They asked.

They didn’t demand space. They checked if it was safe. That’s the cost of repeated exclusion: you stop assuming you belong, even in spaces that should be yours by definition. That’s not an abstract harm, it’s lived experience.

What Actually Needs to Change

It’s not complicated at all, we need to fix the problem.

What needs to change is this:

• Stop treating TERFs as an inevitability trans women must navigate instead of a problem lesbians must confront.

• Stop acting like trans inclusion is a favor instead of a baseline.

• Stop letting fear masquerade as feminism.

And most importantly: stop asking trans lesbians to carry the emotional burden of our internal failures. They already carry enough.

My Lesbian Town Is Not Ambiguous

So let me be unambiguous. Trans lesbians don’t need permission to exist in lesbian spaces. They don’t need to qualify their womanhood, and don’t need to prove anything.

If there are no trans dykes in my lesbian town, there is no lesbian town at all. And I will keep saying that (loudly, clearly, and without apology) because belonging should never be something you have to ask for. Especially not from your own people.