Confession: I stopped following this circle months ago because it depresses me . . . It depresses me so deeply as someone who was abused and traumatized as a child and missed out on being an out butch lesbian because of comphet and not being able to accept myself. It depresses me as someone who is secretly a hopeless romantic (I mean, I'm a poet) and yet, has never experienced real love and devotion.

I wandered back here today because I stumbled across some goldstar lesbians online (not this website) who kept insisting in this forum thread that non-goldstar lesbians were not lesbians but febfems/bisexuals. The argument was that you must be attracted to men if you willingly sleep with one. It was so painful to read through that thread and see how many lesbians -- my own people -- were dismissing my experiences with comphet. You would think other lesbians would understand but . .. I guess not.

This alongside trans craziness makes me feel so isolated within my community because I didn't fully accept myself as a lesbian until 30. And even then, I still didn't embrace being butch for a couple more years.

I don't understand why goldstars have no empathy or understanding. I didn't sleep with a man because I was attracted to him. I slept with him because I had been made to think from the time I was small that being a lesbian wasn't real (aka my feelings were invalid) and that finding men disgusting was normal (my mother hated my father, and a lot of straight women around me hated men), so I thought it was completely normal to be disgusted by men and not enjoy sex with them.

Then when I slept with a man for the first time . . . nothing happened. Nothing. I didn't get aroused. It was like my vagina was dead. I felt nothing for him (and to this day, I've never felt anything for any man, so I am indeed a lesbian). But I went through with the sex anyway because I thought . . . it was normal. I thought it was normal to have bad sex with men because so many straight women around me were and never stopped talking about it!!!

That, and my family was abusive, I was bullied at school so I had no friends after high school. I had no one but this guy who wanted to date me. I was desperate for friendship and affection, even if it wasn't real. I was so, so alone in those days . .. Not that things have changed much.

So I spent my life in misery and confusion. I dated that guy for five years and only had sex with him like . . . twice. (Yeah, I was totally attracted to him /s) He joined the navy and we were separated for long periods after high school, but I didn't really care about never seeing him and not having sex with him. Obviously, I wasn't attracted to him, and he soon proved to be an asshole, so didn't even miss his fake friendship.

We broke up when I was about twenty. Then I started dating women in my twenties, but I never really came out as a lesbian. And my abusive family was still in my life, so that made it hard.

This is going to sound really dorky, but the reason I finally accepted myself was because . . . I played a butch lesbian in a video game. The character I played was in a really sweet romance with a woman, and by being myself in a fictional world, it made it much easier to translate those feelings over to the real world. Suddenly, being an out butch lesbian felt like something I could do, and not just this thing in the back of my mind that I daydreamed about. . .

I'm sharing this story because I'm 1) sad and want to vent and 2) I feel like we should share our stories because it would further understanding between goldstars and non-goldstars and build solidarity between lesbians.

With genderism destroying our community, now is not the time to fight each other.