Labels should serve us, not become a new cage we confine ourselves into while pushing away our comrades.

The label lesbian serves me by plainly describing my sexual orientation to the world. Clearly defining my sexual boundaries doesn’t confine me unless you think having sexual boundaries is confining.

Citation needed for the claim that trans people are LGB people’s comrades. (Also, using the language of a regime that criminalized homosexuality and sent many LGB people to prison camps isn’t exactly a great way to say you’ve got our best interests at heart.)

A label should be a cane, not a ball and chain.

Repetitive. Please revise.

If you think annunciating sexual boundaries is a “ball and chain” that says a lot more about you than it does me. Neither myself nor any other lesbian is sitting around thinking “it’d be great to ride some dick, but I can’t because I use the lesbian label.” We don’t feel confined by a label because it describes the full spectrum of what we honestly desire. I hear therapy is good for working through unresolved issues with yourself and know some people if you need help.

Do not presume that others who use the same label as you differently than you do are applying their label to you.

If I call myself a transwoman and say it means a biological female with an avid interest in re-enacting the lifestyles of the Transalpine Gauls, this would be perfectly fine, correct? After all, you couldn’t assume I’m using a label the same way as others and it would be audacious to tell me how to define myself.

Words have always been allowed to have many meanings. That’s language.

Sure, a cat can mean any feline creature or a cool guy in 1956. That doesn’t mean pointing at a Komodo dragon and calling it cat will make it cat though. (If you think it would, please try petting it.)

Sometimes words can have different usages. Most often, these differences are merely slang. Calling something by a different name won’t change what it actually is.

”Words mean things and you’re watering down what it means to be [insert identity]” isn’t an argument

How should people clearly state anything then? This is like mixing all the soda pops at the Subway drink machine and then trying to figure out how to just have Sprite.

I presume most of us know what thesauruses and dictionaries are for, yes?

Genuinely curious—if words can mean whatever any individual wants, how would dictionaries and thesauruses be formatted and printed? If I decide “atrocious” means “that pleasant feeling of sleeping in on a Sunday morning,” how would the OED go about including that along with everyone else’s take on “atrocious?”

Respectability politics won’t save us.

Correct. But it will save LGB people. It’s what we have to thank for nearly all of our progress. I do see how relying on a narrative of commonality might be difficult for a community that relies on lying, delusion, bullying, and sexist stereotypes to persist. Best of luck with that.

The rest of your community isn’t the problem, the problem is societal expectations placed on all of us

Teensy problem here. The societal expectation is that people ought to be straight. What you’re demanding is LGB people magically make ourselves straight. You are the problem, unfortunately.

This is so dumb. Labels don't constrain anyone. They're just descriptors. You either fit the definition or you don't. The word lesbian doesn't constrain anyone, it's a description of a type of woman. If you fit that description you're a lesbian, whether you like it or not, and if you don't then you aren't no matter what you do.

I'm still at a loss for why people want to claim being something that they clearly aren't.