Yeah militant lesbians being really defensive about the term only applying to wlw exclusively is what gives me pause identifying as a lesbian. You still hear about drama in the lesbian community when someone dates/fucks a man (or so I’ve heard).

Same, I don't really want to alienate lesbians for whom that is an important distinction. But ... on the other hand, I've never slept with a man and don't plan to, so ... I dunno, sometimes I feel like it's not that crazy to identify as a lesbian when that's at least how I exist in a social sense. (Though, a lot of times my partner and I are viewed as two straight women - people will assume we're relatives or roommates rather than lovers. So even getting to the point of being viewed as lesbians is a struggle sometimes.)

Also, there is so much drama and toxicity about men in some of these "militant lesbian" spaces, like the idea of "gold star" lesbians, the idea that a lesbian is somehow "less" of a lesbian if they have ever slept with a man. I tend to just experience a lot of this as unnecessarily alienating to both actual lesbians and bisexual women. Like, get over yourself - women are subject to heteronormativity like everyone else, not everyone is equally privileged with access to tools of interpretation to understand their sexuality, and many of us have been coerced into heterosexual relationships by church, family, and society. Let's not shit on other queer women, please. (Not to in any way diminish the legitimate hurt some lesbians feel when they're cheated on by their partner with a man, for example - but then the focus probably belongs on the sexual immorality rather than the gender.)

I’ve heard people make the claim that bisexual is transphobic but that never really sat right with me because it’s a literalist interpretation of the word and in the end just feels like an unnecessarily anal semantic argument at best, and another example of bi erasure at worst.

I don't think it came from an overly literal interpretation, instead I think it was around when pansexual as a term came out to indicate openness to dating trans people that some bisexuals were starting to intentionally use the term to specify they weren't open to dating trans people, so ... bisexual became more associated with transphobia during that time, but I think there was a big backlash and now we just ignore that transphobic use of the term. I tend to think of bisexual as not literally meaning "attracted to two genders / sexes" but more just being a general-use umbrella term for sexual orientations that don't fall on either extreme of homo- or hetero-sexual.

Honestly at this point I don’t think I’ll be dating anyone who isn’t queer anyway, so any confusion would be pretty easy to resolve. The only option for me dating someone who isn’t queer would be cishet men and they are the group I’m least interested in lol.

theoretically I would be open to dating non-queer people, but ... yeah, the only non-queer option for me is also cishet men. I think there probably are men out there who I would want to date, maybe even cishet men, but ... I dunno, I don't see it as likely.

i use "bi" specifically because i feel like it excludes androgyny since im attracted to gender binary presentation, trans inclusive, as long as you're convincingly masculine or feminine in your presentation. not a hard line exclusion ofc but it is my preference and so it's what i use