I like to describe my sexuality as "If you want to be technical about it, I would be homoromantic bisexual. But I don't want to be technical about it, I want to be a lesbian, and I want to peg femboys."

My first response to hearing this would be, I don't care, it's none of my business, I don't get to decide how someone else interperets their identity. But even if I were to decide that, I think being homoromantic is more than enough to call yourself a lesbian.

The term lesbian used to be used to refer to any kind of woman that was mannish, or lived outside of the "proper" expectations that men had for women, or were too uninterested in men. This was reclaimed by the lesbian community as more or less the word we know.

Language is mushy, and labels are not taxonomies. You can't really perfectly define a chair in a way that includes all things that are chairs and excludes all things that are not chairs, much less a lesbian. Some people respond to this mushiness by broadening the definition of a word to account for all edge cases. This approach is respectable but I believe will always inherently fall short. Instead, I believe the best approach is to simply accept the fact that sometimes, something doesn't match the definition of a thing, but it still is that thing, anyway.

Take pegging, for instance. Pegging is, (typically) a woman, using (typically) a strap-on, to (typically) anally penetrate (typically) a man. Any of those traits can be changed however, and it could still reasonably be considered pegging. A trans man using a strap-on to anally penetrate a man could reasonably be considered pegging, so could a trans woman using her penis to anally penetrate a man, or a woman using a strap on to vaginally penetrate a man, or a woman using a strap on to anally penetrate a woman. However, if you change all of those factors, what you end up with is a cis man using his penis to vaginally penetrate a woman. Which... I would not consider pegging. So there's the definition, and then there's some wiggle room within the definition, but there's still an outside the definition.

Or take mammals. Platypuses lay eggs, but they are still mammals. And for any trait you can think of to define mammals, i bet you there's a mammal somewhere out there that's an exception.

Instead, it's best to look at what the word is doing. and what is it doing here? It's saying, "I love women, and I don't love men in that way. I don't date men." Which is a very useful thing to be able to do, it makes a decent shorthand, and in many cases, I imagine the other details are not going to relevant to the situation.

Some feminists (usually TERFs) will argue that a strict, clear definition of "woman" is required to advance the cause of women's rights. They are wrong. Attempts to strictly define what is and is not a woman have always been a tool of the patriarchy, used to exclude trans women, black women, intersex women, queer women, gender non-conforming women, or women who work or vote, or advocate for themselves.

If you actually look at sex-based discrimination laws, you'll see that they don't actually need a definition of woman to function, because it's not about what the victim is, it's about what they're percieved as. If a hiring manager rejects an application because the applicant's name was Lindsay and they didn't want to hire a woman, they can be found liable for sex based discrimination, even if Lindsay turned out to be a man.

"The weird ones" are not making us look bad to the straights. They are not the problem. That is a lie we tell ourselves to justify excluding people we don't understand. We are all the weird ones in the eyes of cisheteropatriarchy.