User:Emhart34/sandbox

Appearance and Mannerisms
Many lesbians are associated with typical tomboy appearances and mannerisms, including but not limited to short hair, wearing baggy clothes and playing sports. This representation is largely due to the portrayal of lesbians in mainstream news and media. Much of the news coverage on LGBT issues reinforces stereotyped portrayals of lesbians. Often news broadcasts highlight stories on more "masculine" lesbians and fail to give equal coverage to other more faceted lesbian identities. The way lesbians are portrayed leads many populations who receive information about the lesbian community from media to make assumptions about individuals in everyday life.

Categorization in line with Heteronormative Gender and Sexual Role
In response to the increasing visibility of same sex relationships, many lesbian couples face societal imposition of heteronormative gender roles on their own relationships. Many populations outside of the LGBT community with little to no prior exposure to lesbian relationships or sexual encounters attempt to make sense of them by labelling one participant as "the man" and one as "the woman" of these relationship. These stereotypes often coincide with or amplify the categorization of lesbians as "butch and femme". Butch lesbians dress and behave in a more masculine manner than other women. Furthermore, butches tend to face heavier discrimination and harassment for their outward non-conformism to heteronormative gender roles.

Femme lesbians are associated with "hyper-femininity". Femme women are considered more likely to “pass” as straight due to their conformity to traditional female gender roles. However, while they may consequently face reduced discrimination from populations outside of the LGBT community, these stereotypes play out within the LGBTIQ+ community itself, with many women reporting feeling rejected by the queer community for not appearing or acting in the accepted way.

While these labels are often used for stereotyping or deriding lesbian relationships, many members of the lesbian community consider their self-imposed designation as butch or femme to be a part of their identity. In this way, these labels are similar to the categorization of "dyke", another pejorative term that the Lesbian community has reclaimed (to an extent). "Dykes" are now considered members of a community composed of strong and outspoken advocates in wider society.

Masculinity and Trauma
Stereotypes suggesting hyper-masculinity in lesbians can be traced back to the “gender inversion” theory supported by Freud and his contemporaries, which suggested that homosexuals took on the characteristics of heterosexuals of the opposite gender (i.e. lesbians behaved like straight men). In subsequent decades, studies examining these perceptions have repeatedly affirmed that lesbian are viewed as more masculine and less feminine than heterosexual females and gay men.

Additionally, another common stereotype suggests that lesbianism results from some sort of undesirable or traumatic experience from men, such as sexual abuse, physical abuse, poor relationships with their fathers, or repeated relationship failures. Studies reject that sexual abuse is a casual factor in lesbianism, as the majority of childhood sexual abuse survivors identify as heterosexual.

Moreover, these assumptions also contribute to the stereotype of the “man-hating”, or androphobic, lesbian who has had a bad experience with men that causes her to resent and shun them in favor of other women.

Dismissal Through Erasure
Many of these lesbian stereotypes that predominate today exist due to the lack of visibility of lesbians within traditionally dominant historical narratives. In 1989, an academic cohort called the Lesbian History Group wrote:"'Because of society's reluctance to admit that lesbians exist, a high degree of certainty is expected before historians or biographers are allowed to use the label. Evidence that would suffice in any other situation is inadequate here... A woman who never married, who lived with another woman, whose friends were mostly women, or who moved in known lesbian or mixed gay circles, may well have been a lesbian. ... But this sort of evidence is not 'proof'. What our critics want is incontrovertible evidence of sexual activity between women. This is almost impossible to find.'"Furthermore, as a result of discourse on the fluidity of sexuality, it is often suggested that lesbians are just “going through a phase” and cannot be certain that they are exclusively attracted to women or will continue to only be attracted to women in the future. This misconception predominantly affects younger members of the lesbian community whose sexuality can be dismissed as immature experimentation, and thus, effectively "erased" from consideration.