PSA: Please don't go into lesbian subs asking for validation
Tldr: internet strangers have no idea what they're talking about. Posing inflammatory questions about hot topics where the vast majority of people responding have no idea what they're talking about will hurt your (and all the rest of our) feelings and bring further divisions between us and cis folks. Go outside for your validation, it's much healthier out there!
This is already a huge problem in lesbian subs for pretty much anything that any lesbian, cis trans nb or otherwise, might be insecure about, be that age, weight, race, body hair, whatever. It's especially true for genitals.
Here's what I've learned in my several years of experience in both online and irl spaces. Cis lesbians that have never had an experience with trans women (which is a majority of them), when asked about genitals, will probably mostly say "I don't like people with penises, it's just not for me."
But the thing is, people that have never encountered a feminine penis truly have no idea what they are or what they're like. The public and political discourse around us makes us seem like we're men with men's bodies that just """identify""" as women. And for a person who has no first hand experience with trans women, either as friends or as more than friends, it can be very easy to implicitly accept that premise even if they're otherwise perfectly tolerant and accepting and welcoming of trans women. This describes a majority of cis lesbians, in my experience.
But when a person does encounter a trans woman for the first time, suddenly the idea that we have men's bodies becomes so obviously ludicrous. And when it comes to down there, people learn that it's actually a very different organ that works in very different ways, very feminine ways even.
So my point is that people that don't know what trans women are like don't have any idea what they're talking about. And just by the numbers, a big majority of random people assembled online will fall into that category. So if you go in there asking for validation on something we already know that they know nothing about, and the only thing they have to default to is implicitly transphobic rhetoric (even when the majority of these people are not themselves transphobic and mostly quite the opposite), they're gonna say some shit that's gonna upset you. And then we're gonna have a big fight about it, and then it's gonna come off like we're denying people the right to have preferences, which the worst of people (TERFs) are gonna construe as trans women forcing themselves onto cis lesbians.
So let's please not do that! It's bad for all of us, and if you go and do that validation hunting you're gonna feel way worse in the end.
So what do we do instead? Well, for one, don't source your validation from internet strangers. Mostly you should be sourcing your validation from within your own self. But when it comes to getting validation from others, you should really go outside for that. Meet people in person, they'll see the your fullness as a person and they'll realize if they hadn't before that you're a beautiful woman, that you're everything a woman should be. They can see you in a way they internet strangers can't and therefore never will. And if one of them wants to date you, they'll be happy to touch all of you and love all of you, and you'll feel whole again.
Okay okay okay I know, easier said than done. We're all here in this online forum because there's limits to what we can do and accomplish outside. But nevertheless that's still the goal here, to get outside and to live a real life with real people who know the real you. This is truly the path to happiness, self love, validation and harmony with those around you.
Edit: Some good feedback about the diversity and variety of trans women's parts. Obviously, some are post op so nothing I said with the word penis in it applies of course. And for pre and non op folks, there's folks that do HRT and folks that don't. And even among those that do there's different ways of doing HRT that have different effects, and even the same form of HRT can have different effects on different bodies. In short, everybody's got something unique going on there. For context, I'm pre op on 2.5 years of HRT so what I wrote above about how trans women's penises work is a reflection of what I've got going on. I recognize that's not going to apply to everyone, and I encourage folks to share the different and divergent ways yours work so we can get the fullest representation of the full diversity of experiences!
