Lesbian Visibility Week (LVW) was created in 1990 by a group of activists in West Hollywood who were sick of watching the city’s massive Pride events celebrate gay men while they got treated like an afterthought. The week regained momentum around 2020 because, even in an era of rainbow corporate logos and “Love is Love” t-shirts, we were still left out. Despite the history and the very obvious name, year after year I watch bisexual women treat our one dedicated week like an open invitation.  

This pattern became impossible to ignore during Lesbian Visibility Week of 2024, which kicked off at the London Stock Exchange Group’s New York headquarters with a press release celebrating “LGBTQ+ women and nonbinary people.” In 2022, GLAAD—one of the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations in the country—marked the occasion by posting on X that the week should “show solidarity with all LGBTQ+ women and nonbinary people.” This erasure was so blatant that in 2024, the UK Parliament held its first-ever debate on Lesbian Visibility week. The official motion? Recognizing “LGBTQIA women and non-binary people.” An entire parliamentary debate about our visibility, and the motion could not even say the word lesbian. 

For reference, bisexual people make up the largest single demographic of the LGBTQ+ community. According to Gallup’s 2026 polling, 5.3% of US women identify as bisexual compared to the 1.4% that identify as lesbian—that is a nearly fourfold difference. This is not a problem itself—everyone deserves to exist and be seen no matter what. The issue is that instead of using that privilege to empower groups with less weight, this much larger group—one with access to heterosexual relationships along with the social capital that comes with them—continuously colonizes the few spaces and labels a much smaller group fought for.  

To understand what we are losing, you have to understand the history. Lesbians have not just been historically underrepresented—we have been actively erased while simultaneously creating the backbone of what you think of as queer culture. This issue is wonderfully detailed in Bonnie J Morris’s book The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture. During the AIDS crisis, it was lesbians who showed up when gay men were abandoned by the government and their own families: we organized blood drives, provided care, fought for research funding. The feminist bookstores, the women’s music festivals, the underground bars where you could hold your girlfriend’s hand without getting arrested? Lesbians built those things while navigating a society that was hostile to women in general—especially those who had no use for men.  

Nowhere is that history more alive than in the words butch and femme. These are not interchangeable with “masculine-presenting” and “feminine-presenting.” They are specific, hard-won identities that emerged from lesbian communities in the 1940s and 1950s.  

A butch is a woman whose visible masculinity was a full-body refusal to conform to a world that demanded her submission to men. In the 1940s and 50s, that visibility was dangerous. Under anti-masquerading laws, police departments across the country arrested these women for wearing masculine clothing; As detailed in Hugh Ryan’s article “How Dressing in Drag Was Labeled a Crime in the 20th Century,” informal mandates like the “three-article rule” allowed police to legally stop you if you were not wearing three pieces of clothing deemed appropriate for your assigned sex. For example, the documentary “Nancy from Eastside Clover” tells the story of Nancy Valverde, a Chicana butch in Los Angeles who was repeatedly arrested starting at age 17 and once served three months in jail simply for wearing pants. When officers told her “I want to see you in a dress,” she would shoot back “Sit down and wait ‘cause you’re gonna get tired.” This defiance is what butch means—not a fashion statement, but a refusal so complete that it was worth going to jail for.  

A femme was no less essential; while butches took the brunt of public violence, femmes wielded a different kind of survival tool. Because a femme could pass as straight, she was often the one who dealt with landlords, walked through protests and navigated hostile institutions to protect her butch partner. Historians have documented how femmes “employed creative solutions to understand themselves as queer beings and assert membership in lesbian communities, manipulating dominant construction of postwar femininity to produce distinctly queer gender identities” ( Alix Genter’s “Pass Right By Your People: Femme Invisibility and Postwar Lesbian History”). Her femininity was not an embrace of patriarchal norms—it was a radical reclamation of womanhood entirely on her own terms.  

So, when a bisexual woman calls herself a “femme” because she likes wearing lipstick and heels, she is not expanding a definition. She’s bulldozing a historical site. She takes all of that history and waters it down to “I look pretty.” She takes a word that carries the weight of survival—of walking into a police station to bail out your butch girlfriend while performing straightness well enough that no one asks questions—and reduces it to an aesthetic. When a bisexual woman calls herself butch because she has short hair, she takes a word paid for in jail cells and police beatings and turns it into a haircut. And when lesbians have the audacity to object, we get called gatekeepers, exclusionary and mean.  

What makes this especially frustrating is that bisexual women have their own language. Sapphic is a beautiful, inclusive term for any woman who loves women, regardless of whether she also loves men (Yes, this includes non-binary people.) WLW (women-loving-women) serves the exact same umbrella function.  

No one is asking bi women to be invisible or to stop celebrating their identities. The request is much simpler: use the words that were built for you instead of taking the few that were built exclusively by us, for us. If you feel seen by the sapphic label, lean into it. Post about it during Bi Visibility Week (which exists, by the way). You have options. We have a handful of words and one dedicated week a year. Let us keep them intact.  

The damage of this appropriation is not theoretical. When LVW gets rebranded as a celebration for all WLW, we lose the ability to address the specific, often brutal realities that target lesbians exclusively. We face barriers in reproductive healthcare, fetishization, corrective rape and so much more. And then there’s the quieter exhaustion: The constant, low-grade labor of having to explain over and over why a word matters, why a week matters, why I do not want to feel like a guest in a house that my predecessors helped build. That is what erasure feels like: not a door slammed in your face, but a room where the walls keep expanding until you cannot find yourself anymore.  

Here is what I need my bisexual sisters and siblings need to understand: you can support us without centering yourself. Show up, absolutely—but show up as backup, not the headliner. If being told that you are not a femme stings, sit with that. Ask yourself why you feel so entitled to something that was never yours to begin with. Take the time to understand the history behind what you’re trying to take. The most helpful thing you can do right now? Be quiet, step aside and let us have this one.