What's In A Label?
The label discourse to end 2024 and what it reveals about the queer community.
If you've been active on queer Twitter for the past few days, you may already have context for this piece. For those blissfully unaware, a summary:
A screenshot of a young unlabelled person’s TikTok was posted on Twitter with the caption “this is so exciting to me”. The screenshot read “When I say I’m unlabeled but I really wanna say I’m lesbian but I’m still attracted to guys but I don’t want to date a guy or end up marrying one but idc about a label but I feel awkward w/o one”1.
Another screenshot showed the comment section of the TikTok with a user saying “febfem is be (sic) the term you’re looking for”.
There were replies to this comment from three different users in the second screenshot. User 1 said “Wow I never knew we had so many labels and terms this is actually so cool tho”, user 2 said “Thats sucha pretty flag omg” and user 3 commented “i loooooove you [heart emoji] you literally saved me oh my days”.
I am choosing not to post the above images for the privacy of the original TikTok user who did not have anything to do with the ensuing conversation on Twitter, which elicited multiple different streams of commentary. I do, however, want to share a few personal thoughts on this discourse. First, what is a FEBfem?
FEBfem and its Origins
FEBfem, an abbreviation of ‘female-exclusive bisexual female’, is a term that originated on February 12th 2017 on the Tumblr blog ‘bi-women-confess’. It was an ask sent by the account xliaxheartlock, now long deactivated, wondering if the term ‘female-exclusive bisexual’ could be abbreviated to FEB [Image 1]. This was in response to other conversations on being ‘female-exclusive’ that had previously occurred on the blog, as can be seen in an anonymous ask sent to bi-women-confessions on February 7th 2017 where an 18-year-old user talks about wanting to be female-exclusive [Image 2], or in another anonymous ask sent to the blog on January 26th 2017 where a user expresses the desire to become a ‘female-exclusive bisexual’ in response to male abuse [Image 3].
The Connection with Transphobia
Bi-women-confess, a blog that remains active to this day, positions itself as an account that platforms bisexual women’s voices ‘across the political spectrum’. This, in turn, has allowed them to platform the voices of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) consistently. A post by an account called ‘trans’ dated June 2nd 2021 [Image 4] warns users to block this blog as it is marked red by Shinigami Eyes, a browser extension that highlights transphobic and trans-friendly social network pages/users with red and green respectively. The account also pointed out that bi-women-confess reblogs regularly from TERFs.
In addition to this, the blog’s response to an ask that called them a ‘terf blog’ included that they are less inclined to take people seriously if they use the term ‘TERF’ and are instead more inclined to assume they are a ‘rape apologist’ [Image 5]. A side note on the same post states that if FEBfems include trans women in their dating pool, then “realistically no one can stop” them [Image 6].
Beyond the actual blog on which this term was born, the accounts that immediately picked it up to use for themselves were also transphobic radical feminist accounts. A quick browse on the blogs febfem, febfems and women-loving all reveal transphobia. It is evident that FEBfem was specifically created amongst, popularised by, and used by transphobic radical feminists. This pattern has continued over the 7 years it has been in use, with the self-identifier often serving as a marker for trans people and their allies for potential transphobia.
However, due to the recent rise in popularity of radical feminism, especially on Twitter, and more women increasingly identifying as ‘TIRFs’ (trans-inclusive radical feminists), there has been a free flow of a variety of information between TERFs and TIRFs as many of them share online communities, despite seemingly opposing views on trans rights, which likely has included the use of this label. For what it’s worth, the maintenance of this community with transphobic people is in itself a suspect act to me.
The Possibility of Reclamation
A significant portion of the conversation around the encouragement to use FEBfem was that it signals transphobia and therefore, should not be used. Many people pushed back on this, proposing the idea that, if this were true, the term should be “reclaimed” from transphobes and made trans-inclusive. To this, I say “realistically no one can stop you”. However, willingly associating with a label that instantly signals to people that you are transphobic and/or obscuring the difference between a transphobe and trans ally does not make life harder for transphobic people. It may, however, make it more difficult for a trans person to be able to tell the difference between a trans ally and a transphobe.
Obviously, I do not want to say anything about the choice of trans people picking up this label as a self-identifier as I am cis and I’m sure a trans person would have greater capacity to make appropriate commentary on this.
Alternative Labels
Bisexual women excluding cishet men from their partnerships is by no means a new phenomenon and dates back at least to the 70s, and likely prior to that as well. There are a myriad of reasons for this, ranging from a clear preference for women to wanting self-preservation as a result of trauma. The second wave of feminism saw the list grow to include a political commitment to feminism, and sometimes, more than one reason existed. Before second-wave feminism, labels did not necessarily pose an issue as the term ‘lesbian’ denoted behavior, and all queer women were considered lesbians. This changed in the 70s with second-wave lesbian feminists redefining the label through their debates on feminism and lesbianism. Given that this was also the era of lesbian separatism and political lesbianism, many women who would have been considered bisexual by identity and/or behavior retained the lesbian label, eschewing cishet men from their lives. Others used terms like ‘lesbian-identified bisexual woman’ to denote their commitment to lesbian feminism while acknowledging their bisexuality, which in itself was emerging as a label.
Elizabeth Reba Weise writes of this era in the introduction of the anthology Closer to Home: Feminism and Bisexuality:
Feminism is a radical political theory, a method of analysis, a call for revolution and change. Lesbianism is a practice, something that arises from desire. Politics and desire were, some of us found, unhappy bedmates.
In the canon of lesbian life, one was supposed to lead to the other. For many women, it did. Some were primarily attracted to women. Others made a conscious choice to be with women despite the fact that they also sexually desired men or perhaps only desired men. Lesbian communities were extremely strict about this point in the seventies.
Therefore, bisexual women who refuse partnerships with cishet men have existed for a long time and after a distinction was made between lesbian and bisexual, have used a few different labels to denote their disinterest in pursuing cishet men.
In a homophobic and biphobic society, enabling such bisexual women who want to forge sexual and/or romantic relationships primarily or exclusively with other women is important, and ensuring these communities get support and validation is crucial. I do, however, also fear that the creation of a label that effectively draws distinctions between bisexual women who form relationships with cishet men and those who do not could result in the creation of a dichotomy of the “good bisexual” vs “bad bisexual”. In a society where misogyny against bisexual women is so rampant that victim blaming them for their abuse at the hands of their intimate partners is considered normal—“bi women have such high rates of IPV because they date men”—I worry that forming a sub identity could further entrench this rhetoric, leading to justification for their abandonment by the queer community. This is, after all, not an unfounded fear given the history of lesbian separatism & imposition of strict homosexuality upon bisexual women if they were to continue having access to lesbian spaces, communities that they too had built, as mentioned above.
On the other hand, I understand the need for bisexual women who are uninterested in pursuing cishet men to have an identifier to discuss this specific aspect of their sexuality with other similarly inclined bisexual women. I have, in fact, already also seen several bisexual women, deeply passionate about the bisexual community, use terms like bisexual sapphic as an identifier while continuing to advocate for all bisexual women and speak up against biphobia of all forms. So I suppose the solution is not depriving them of a label if they so desire, but rather to select one that includes the term ‘bisexual’ and to encourage them to build a consciousness that is proud of their bisexuality and empathetic to the struggles of fellow bisexual people.
Other Reactions
Beyond the internal debates of bisexual people, other queer people also decided that this was their opportunity to share their (frankly unwanted) opinions. Of course, a lot of the people in the discussions mentioned above were also non-bisexual, unaware of the origin of the word or its connotations but freely justifying its use because it costs $0 per tweet, but there were also monosexual people in the quote retweets of the original post (with the TikTok screenshot) taking the discussion into a different direction by implying that bisexual people have so much internalised biphobia that they will use any other label except bisexual itself. This is likely true, but the interesting part is that this was neither expressed with empathy nor was it an acknowledgment of the rampant biphobia that bisexual people have to deal with on a daily basis. Instead, it was expressed with contempt and framed as the fault of bisexual people. When the TikTok user said “I really want to say I’m lesbian”, this was framed as proof of an inclination that bisexual people have to “steal” things rather than taken as an opportunity to consider why bisexual people may feel so uncomfortable with the label and what non-bisexual people may be doing to contribute to this.
Overall, the way the queer community online managed to spin what they saw as a potential bisexual person2 being unable to claim the bisexual label into a problem entirely with that person rather than something that they could be contributing to via the stigmatisation of bisexuality to the degree that people are actively choosing other labels, or choosing to be unlabelled, is truly infuriating.
I had certain lesbians come into my mentions when I tweeted critically of the FEBfem label and try to school me about support and solidarity with bisexual women. None of these people had ever spoken up about the misogyny bisexual women get subjected to on a daily basis from other queer people nor had they ever defended us against accusations calling us liars. They have never defended us when we are being accused of faking our sexuality nor have they ever engaged in learning about the material conditions of the bisexual community.
The combination of the absolute silence against biphobia from queer people, speaking over us in this specific scenario, and then framing us as the villains who are out to get our own people, was repulsive to witness. If anyone, as a queer person, is genuinely so keen for bisexual people to accept their sexuality, then start by interrogating your attitudes towards bisexual people and cease being biphobic.
idc - I don’t care, w/o - without
I say ‘what they saw’ because I do not want to impose a label on an unlabelled person and because it is the reactions, not the person’s sexuality, that I’m discussing