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I would say that the data are potentially consistent with your hypothesis, but I certainly wouldn't say they are equally consistent. If you're determined to find an explanation for lesbians reporting the highest rates of domestic violence victimisation, without accepting that lesbians might be perpetrating the largest amount of domestic violence, then your hypothesis can seem plausible. To me, it looks like an isolated demand for rigour.
I don't see why it's an isolated demand for rigour. If we lived in a world in which:
then the statement "X% of self-identified lesbians report having been abused by at least one romantic partner" would be synonymous with the statement "X% of female people who exclusively date other female people report having been abused by at least one romantic partner, who was female". But there are lots of ways in which people using language in sloppy or careless ways complicates this simple definition:
In fact, it's not "isolated" at all: I think essentially any survey of this type suffers from the lack of specificity described above. If you carried out a survey on what proportion of people with or without mental illnesses had been victimised, the self-diagnosis trend would make the data trivial to contaminate: you've no way of distinguishing between people formally diagnosed with depression by a qualified healthcare provider vs. people who diagnosed themselves (because they feel sad sometimes). Without knowing the relative rates of the truly mentally ill vs. malingerers, your data tell you essentially nothing.
Either design a survey with better questions, or collect hard data. Healthcare providers can make inaccurate diagnoses, but as a rule, statistics on how many people have been diagnosed with depression cannot be contaminated the specific way surveys can. Likewise criminological data: if I was shown evidence that the proportion of female people who've been convicted for battering a female romantic partner was twice as high as the proportion of male people who've been convicted of battering a female romantic partner, I'd be satisfied. (If such evidence was presented, someone would probably make the counter-argument that police and directors of public prosecutions look the other way when a man batters his wife, but come down like a tonne of bricks when a lesbian playfully slaps her girlfriend, because Muh Patriarchy™. I would not be the one to make that counter-argument.)
These are all weasel words. 'Many' could mean 0.001% (which still ends up being thousands of people since we're dealing with nationwide statistics).
I honestly don't believe that 1, 2, 3 and 5 have any significant effect on the numbers. 4 could well do, but the onus is on you to show that, not to preemptively dismiss a survey whose results you evidently don't like. After all, if we take the 'definitions aren't 100% clear' approach to any other survey we could perform the same kind of muddying the waters on its results.
In an effort to put hard numbers on some of my previous claims:
"many people use the word "woman" to refer to a person who is male (including themselves)" - This report from the Williams Institute says that "Of the 1.3 million adults [in the US] who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming." - annoying that they can't just list sex somewhere to make my job easier. I assumed that the GNC people were fifty-fifty male and female (which is obviously an assumption on my part). Based on this assumption, there are 686,100 trans women or gender non-conforming males in the US (or in other words, there are more than 600,000 males in the US who could be expected to refer to themselves as "women").
"many people who describe themselves as lesbians are male" - see this comment:
So of the 686,100 trans/GNC women in the US, 29% are exclusively attracted to females, or 198,969. According to this poll, 1% of Americans identify as lesbian. Hence, we can assume that 6% of the lesbian population of the US is male. 6% isn't much, but it's far from a rounding error. Also note that we aren't comparing like with like: the Gallup poll is from 2023, the NTDS survey is from 2011 and the Williams Institute report is from 2022.
"many female people who describe themselves as lesbians or bisexual have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a female person" - I admit I couldn't find hard data on this one.
"many female people who describe themselves as lesbians have been in a past romantic or sexual relationship with a male person" - my first slam dunk of this comment:
In 1999, not just a significant proportion but in fact the overwhelming majority of American women who identify themselves as "lesbian" have had sexual experiences with at least one male partner. If we scale that up to the Gallup poll estimates from 2023, of the roughly 3 million lesbians in the US, 2.31 million have had at least one male sexual partner. "Gold star" lesbians are a minority.
(I would expect that a more recent study along the same lines would find that the proportion of self-identified female lesbians who've had at least one male sexual partner has shrunk in the intervening 25 years - not because of any cultural shift in the lesbian community, but as part of the secular trend towards sexlessness which affects hetero-, homo- and bi-sexual people alike.)
Interestingly, this study was published in an effort to raise awareness among healthcare providers that just because a woman describes herself as a lesbian, doesn't mean that the healthcare provider can safely assume that she hasn't contracted an STD from penetrative sex. This seems closely related to our current discussion.
Again, not an isolated demand for rigour. Almost three-quarters of women who describe themselves as lesbians have had at least one male sexual/romantic partner. This has obvious implications when surveying lesbians about whether they've been abused by a current or former romantic partner - you cannot simply assume that all of their current or former romantic partners are female. Indeed, when conducting a survey of this type you should assume that at least one of the person's former partners was male.
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Well for starters I'd like to point out that I'm not "dismissing" this survey (certainly not "preemptively" dismissing it: I read a significant chunk of it). I'm pointing out limitations, both in how this specific survey is designed and the general concept of a survey as a tool for investigating epidemiological questions of this type. I'll do some digging and try to find estimates for what proportion of lesbians have had at least one male romantic partner etc. To reiterate, at least one finding in the study (relative rates of reported nonconsensual sexual penetration among lesbians, bisexual women and straight women) is essentially impossible to reconcile with my alternative hypothesis and far more consistent with your reading - does that sound like something I would say if I was "dismissing" this study and its relevance to the debate?
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