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Originally Posted by D-Money

okay, back to serious ...

for years, claiming 'femme' was very much a part of who i thought i was.

on other butch/femme sites (i don't feel the need to specify) i was that bitch who grilled non-label-lovers who came to the site claiming they didn't label themselves. "this site is for butches and femmes! if you don't identify, wtf are you doing here?! go find your own site, you ... you LESBIAN!" i didn't even realize my own need at the time to label them ... or even that i was doing it.

i was so wrapped up in how important my own label was to me that i didn't even listen to where they might have been coming from- i was blind to everything but what i perceived to be an attack on my own labeling of myself.

in light of the course of my own journey in recent years, i can see myself on the other side of that controversy. i probably deserve it ... (i really was a bitch)

I agree that in many cases, it's for our own benefit that we want/expect others to ID one way or another. I have to say though that one of the reasons I prefer to know how someone IDs is that I don't want to offend them by referring to them in a way that makes them uncomfortable and I would imagine that that's fairly common. So, in a way, it can be a no win situation. Ask them how they ID and make them feel pressured into IDing one way or another, or not ask them, and possibly insult them by assuming?

Make sense?