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Notes -
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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