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can you stop being essentialist for a sec

In the gay and lesbian communities you'll find the term "gold star", as in "gold star gay" and "gold star lesbian", in both cases having the meaning of someone who has never had sex with the opposite gender. I may be very late to this discourse, but I have a deep disdain for the term "gold star lesbian" in particular, and the kind of person who would earnestly use the term.

"Gold star lesbian" in particular has the meaning of "lesbian who has never had sex with a man", highlighting that they are in some way elevated above other lesbians for not having had any sort of sexual intimacy with a man. The term is first and foremost a heinous value judgment, with the "gold star" signifying some superior quality that others lack, and a corollary inferior position to contrast it. In our heteronormative society that by default presumes and enforces that women should be in heterosexual relationships with men and be sexually available to them, a lot of lesbians end up having sexual relationships with men before they realise they're lesbian. To suggest that these lesbians - which may comprise a significant portion of all lesbians - are in some way lesser than other lesbians, is a distinction that serves only to demean and devalue.

In order to be a value judgment in the first place, the term needs to have a basis in some kind of social mechanism to create that perceived value. The term assumes that manhood and sexual relations with men is in some way impure and irreversibly taints those it affects, rendering them lesser than those who are untouched by these things. As a big ol' man-hating lesbian, I don't have an issue with wanting to distance oneself from men, but I am wary of this vilification of male sexuality and penises and how interacting with these seemingly transfer that value judgment onto others. This hatred of men is in turn used to demean women who appear to voluntarily interact with men, which I think is just unfair.

There is a considerable overlap between people who care about "gold star lesbian" as a term and people who conflate penises with masculinity. This is often heard in how they will use penises as a symbol for masculinity in particular when stating some kind of disdain for men, e.g. "I'm a lesbian, I don't want a dick anywhere near me". These lesbians have very clearly either not considered the existence of trans women or choose to deliberately group them together with men. Both sentiments are in their own ways transmisogynistic by either ignoring the possibility of trans women participating in lesbian culture or using their transness to disqualify them from womanhood.

This same mindset of gender essentialism within lesbian culture also excludes and ignores lesbians who aren't women to begin with. Many trans men will hold onto their lesbian identities after transitioning, or in some other way find their place in lesbian culture while also identifying as men. "Gold star" people will find less issue with these men though, as their supposed connection to womanhood through their "female socializing" exempts them from the same judgment of cis men in their eyes. At the same time, I've heard from many trans women that they essentially identified as lesbians long before coming out as trans, denouncing the male sexuality imposed on them by our society and finding themselves aligning much more with lesbian models of attraction. Some cis men may also align with lesbians in this way, but gender essentialism in the lesbian community often categorically excludes anyone who was assigned male at birth as a consequence of the aforementioned vilification of masculinity and perceived male sexuality. Those who care about the "gold star" qualification very obviously do not take into account these kinds of lesbians, because doing so would undermine the underlying misandric sentiment. It follows that there is considerable overlap between "gold star lesbian" users and those who use transmisogyny to exclude trans women from lesbian culture.

I myself am a woman and a lesbian, albeit a trans one. I have been exclusively attracted to women my whole life, and have only ever been in relationships with women both before and after transitioning, even if for a large portion of that, I was treated as a straight man. Do you honestly think these pretentious lesbians would go along with it to grant me a gold star, despite fitting the definition completely?