A bit of a digression, but it relates here: There was a lot of debate in online lesbian circles in the late 2000s over the definition of “lesbian” and the role of trans people in lesbian spaces. (Non-binary people weren’t mentioned much back then.) There were basically three different positions:
1.) Lesbians are people who only date women, regardless of what they have between their legs. Therefore you can date a non-op trans woman and still call yourself a lesbian.
2.) Lesbians are people who are only into those who have vaginas, therefore you can date a trans man and still call yourself a lesbian.
3.) Lesbians are people who only date women with vaginas, so trans people are right out. Post-op trans women don’t count, because [transphobic reasons].
In the end, the ones who took positions 1 and 2 mostly came to an agreement; having a strong preference for women or a genital preference for vaginas or *both* were all sufficient reasons to legitimately identify as “lesbian”. Most of group 3 took this badly, wildly misinterpreting what was being said, even to the point of claiming that they were being shamed for not running out and having sex with lots of trans people and similarly ludicrous claims. It was also the beginning of TERF/GC types being banned from mainstream lesbian places, even if most people hadn’t heard of those terms yet. (Or at least, those terms didn’t come up during those discussions, and I didn’t hear about those terms until 2014, I think. Also I’m only a Kinsey 2, so I stayed out of those discussions myself.)
In the end, nothing has changed (unsurprisingly). People like this don’t want to know anything because it involves premises that they refuse to accept, so any explanation that they come up with is likely to be wildly off. And for all that they call trans people perverts, they manage to do a good job of making themselves look perverse.
