The value of visibility
If you are part of a majority, everyone sees you. The world is shaped for your convenience. Everyone assumes correctly how you experience the world and approves of your existence. Sadly, anyone who finds themselves members of a minority, like lesbians (women who are sexually or romantically attracted to other women), knows what an enviable privilege this is.
For minorities everywhere, visibility is life. To be seen is to be able to be fairly and accurately represented so it is harder for those who hate you to tell people that you are a monster to be shunned, hated, and killed. It is to make your basic needs known. It is to remind the majority of our common humanity, and that any action that harms any one of us threatens all of us in time.
For those born LGBTQ+, who will grow up being taught to expect to live a stereotypical family life and have to make sense of how their feelings, experiences and desire differ from what they have been raised to expect, and who at their most vulnerable discover they belong to a group society has already spent years telling them on every side is to be hated and driven out and must come to accept themselves and come round to the fact they will have to variously conceal, own and defend their identity and right to exist for the rest of their lives, in addition to all the other challenges life throws at everyone.
Intersectional minorities have a harder time still, since media representation tends to focus on characters and people belonging to a single minority group at a time, based on the assumption that audiences cannot cope with the concept that someone can be an engineer while also being a woman AND Black AND a lesbian. Indeed, how could someone hope to be accepted when indulging themselves while flaunting such intersectional minority status?! Sadly, such a person could expect routinely to face racism from other LGBTQ+ people, homophobia from other Black people, and sexism from other engineers. Those who find themselves representing a number of minority groups at once rarely find anyone who can understand all that they are and may find themselves having to explain different aspects of themselves to different groups.
The burden of being a 'non-standard' human
Minorities - and I mean this in the widest possible sense, from neurodivergent people, those People of the Global Majority (who are not white) in those countries populated with White people, women in professions dominated by men, and so on - face a 'diversity tax': the exhausting need to combat venomous and groundless stereotypes about them and that stereotypes represent only a tiny minority within their social group. This is complicated by many out-and-proud lesbians (and LGBTQ+ people in general) conforming to stereotypes to some extent in order to increase their visibility, find romantic partners more easily in everyday life and foster a sense of community and connection with other LGBTQ+ people.
Concealment or coming out – a tyranny of choice
The burden of LGBTQ+ people who 'pass for straight' - who are not obviously LGBTQ+ or nonbinary - face a different challenge. While experiencing less direct discrimination than visible minorities, they have to assess whether it is safe to come out and then correct expectations repeatedly or face their identity being erased by all those assuming they are cisgender and heterosexual by default. Anyone who is concealing their identity face a minefield in the office and elsewhere, having to avoid or finesse conversations about how they spent their free time, about their partner, family, and so on. People promote those who fit the culture, and who they feel closer to, and so the person who refuses to share anything about their life outside of work or who generalises and obfuscates every time conversations about family comes up tend to get passed over and marginalised.
Neurodivergent people who 'pass for neurotypical' face similar challenges. LGBTQ+ people tend to be neurodivergent more often than average, as well, and this combination of trying to appear normal to neurotypical people and represent yourself in a warm and genuine way while concealing all those aspects of your life that might not be accepted, adjusting what you say depending on who you are talking with, makes what for others is a relaxing social chat into an exhausting minefield of social calculation and performativity.
How you can help
Most people have one aspect of themselves that marks them out as a minority, and most people have privilege from some parts of their identity that they can use to uphold and defend other minorities. If we all pull together and look out for one another, the world becomes a safer place for all of us.
Here are some simple steps that make you a more effective ally for lesbians and any other minority identity group:
Be an active bystander - Hold society to a higher standard. Call out discrimination , bigotry, and prejudice wherever it is safe to do so - online, in person, and at work, and where this is not possible, offer discreet support to the person being targeted afterwards and support them in taking action, reporting hate incidents and hate crimes.
Speak out - Call out hate speech and discrimination. Leverage your privilege - if people tend to listen to you, speak out on behalf of those society ignores. All that is necessary for bigots to triumph is for good people like you to be silent. Social media creates echo chambers that convince many people that the world agrees with them and that their freedom of expression is under attack. They need regularly to be reminded that nothing could be further from the truth. They need the disinformation and lies they are routinely fed to be corrected. They need to be challenged to remind them their opinion is not law.
Examine your biases - Growing up in any society leaves a person deeply biased against many groups. Recognising how and where you selectively notice evidence that reinforces your existing beliefs (confirmation bias), favour people who remind you of yourself (affinity bias), and letting one aspect of a person influence how you see them in the round (the halo/horns effect) are common biases that lead good people to make prejudiced decisions. Working to objective standards and noticing when you are trying to bend the facts to give you the outcome you want is an important step in becoming the change you want to see.
Be a safe person - Having someone who just listens to minorities, who takes an interest without fetishising, condemning, or gossiping, is in itself valuable, particularly if you are also a MHFAider or similar - someone they can go to when they need to blow off steam.