WLW meaning: how it differs from sapphic and transbian

WLW means women loving women: a woman who is attracted to women, whether or not she is also attracted to other genders. Sapphic covers the same ground and a little more, because it also takes in non-binary people who are attracted to women. Transbian is the narrowest of the three: it names a trans woman who is a lesbian. The first two describe where attraction goes, the third describes a person, and that difference explains most of how they get used.

The three words side by side

Each word has its own glossary page. This one puts them next to each other.

• WLW (women loving women). It says two things: you are a woman, and you are attracted to women. It says nothing about whether women are the only people you are attracted to, so lesbians, bisexual women and pansexual women can all use it.
• Sapphic. It says where your attraction goes, towards women, and leaves your own gender open. That is what makes it useful for groups that include non-binary people.
• Transbian. It says who you are: a trans woman, and a lesbian. It is not a third orientation next to lesbian. It is lesbian, with the trans part describing her rather than her attraction.

Trans women are WLW and sapphic on exactly the same terms as cis women, and transbian is a word of their own. What changes from one word to the next is how much it says about the speaker, and whether it implies that women are the only people she is drawn to.

Where each word comes from

WLW: an acronym from the Usenet era

The earliest use we could find dates from 1996. Wiktionary records WLW in a post from October that year to soc.women.lesbian-and-bi, a Usenet discussion group for lesbian and bisexual women.

PFLAG, the American support and advocacy organisation, says the term is often used in communities of colour, and that it grew out of an older assumption that any woman with women partners was a lesbian. As understanding of sexuality widened, PFLAG writes, WLW largely replaced lesbian as a unifying term. How it travelled from Usenet to today's bios is not well documented, and we found no reliable account of it.

Sapphic: a poet's name, reused more than once

Sappho was a poet on the island of Lesbos, and both lesbian and sapphic trace back to her. Her dates are uncertain: PinkNews places her around the end of the seventh century BC and the start of the sixth, while NBC News gives 630 to 570 BC.

In English the adjective started out as a literary word. Etymonline dates Sapphic to around 1500, meaning of Sappho or her poems, especially their metre; the sense of sexual relations between women only appears in the 1890s.

It resurfaced in lesbian print: NBC News notes that several lesbian publications of the 1970s and 1980s put Sappho in their names. Online interest came later and unevenly: according to the same report, Google searches for sapphic peaked in December 2005, fell for about fifteen years, and have risen steadily since 2020. The meaning that came back with that rise is the wide one, covering lesbians, bisexual and pansexual women, and trans and non-binary people.

Transbian: a blend with a short paper trail

Transbian joins trans and lesbian, and Wiktionary labels it informal. Its written record is thin. The oldest dated uses Wiktionary collects are academic: the literary scholar Virginia Blain used it in articles on Victorian poetry in 2003 and 2004. That is the oldest use in print we found, which does not prove the word started there.

Later citations move closer to everyday life. In a 2010 book by Red Jordan Arobateau, a trans meeting at a clinic breaks up after a discussion about transbians. A Philadelphia Gay News article quoted it in 2014, and a 2015 dissertation at Stony Brook University records a 69-year-old trans woman describing herself as a transbian. The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary now has an entry for it.

What each word includes, and what it leaves out

Exclusivity is where the words part ways. Wiktionary defines WLW as a woman attracted, not necessarily exclusively, to other women, and PFLAG's definition of sapphic covers lesbian, bisexual, pansexual and otherwise same-gender loving women. Neither word asks whether women are the only people you want.

Transbian contains lesbian, so it carries whatever lesbian means to the woman using it. That is less fixed than it sounds. In a 2024 study of 25 sapphic dating app users, Michael Ann DeVito and colleagues note that lesbian has sometimes been defined strictly, but that the boundaries of the category have historically been in flux. Their participants described their own sexualities in words that included bi lesbian and sapphic asexual, alongside lesbian, pansexual and T4T.

Attraction here does not have to be sexual either. PFLAG defines a lesbian as a woman who is emotionally, romantically and/or physically attracted to other women, which is why an asexual person can be sapphic without contradiction.

Then there is who can say each word about themselves. A cis woman can be WLW, sapphic or a lesbian, but not a transbian, because the trans part is the point. And WLW, unlike sapphic, puts the speaker's womanhood inside the word itself, which matters for the next question.

Where non-binary people fit

This is where the three words differ most.

WLW begins with W for women, yet in practice it stretches: PinkNews, for one, describes women who love women as including non-binary people. Some non-binary people would still rather not claim a gender that does not quite fit, and use NBLW, non-binary loving women, which the LGBTQIA+ Wiki lists as another name for trixic.

Sapphic makes the least fuss. NBC News and the University of California, Santa Barbara's resource centre for sexual and gender diversity both describe it as including non-binary people. When DeVito's team needed an umbrella for their study, they chose sapphic rather than women loving women, saying it was closer to the lived reality of their participants. By the researchers' own rough classification, 56 per cent of the group were non-binary, 24 per cent trans women and 20 per cent cis women.

Lesbian has room too. PFLAG has an entry for non-binary lesbian, a non-binary person whose primary attraction is to women, and notes that lesbianism has historically included people with varying relationships to the lesbian community. The Santa Barbara centre also says some non-binary people assigned female at birth use lesbian.

Transbian is the least flexible. Cambridge defines it through trans women. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki is a little wider, describing a trans person, typically transfeminine, who is a lesbian, which leaves room for transfeminine non-binary lesbians who want the word. If you are not sure it fits you, sapphic will never ask you to settle the question first.

Why some trans women choose transbian, and why some do not

Published discussion of the word itself is scarce. Much of what we found was in forum threads and social media posts, which we have not relied on here. What we did find points in both directions, sometimes from the same person.

The case for it is that it names two things at once. Pippa Catterall, a trans woman and professor of history and policy at the University of Westminster, told THEGAYUK in 2019 that the word is used to differentiate trans lesbians from cis lesbians. The writer Mey Rude made the wider point in Autostraddle in 2015, without using the word: she described herself as a lesbian and a trans woman, and wrote that she liked living in both communities rather than having to choose one over the other. A single word that holds both is one way of refusing that choice.

The case against came from Catterall as well. In the same explanation she said that not all trans women are comfortable with the term, because it can be seen as denying their transition. She added that some lesbians are hostile to it, particularly those who essentialise gender and deny that transition can happen at all. Those are two very different objections, and only the first comes from trans women themselves.

Both choices are made by trans women about their own lives, and neither is a mistake. The practical rule follows: call someone a transbian only once she has used the word herself, and if she says lesbian, she means lesbian.

What the words signal on a dating profile

On a profile, each of these words is shorthand, and shorthand gives you the direction, not the details.

• WLW or sapphic in a bio tells you the person is interested in women. It does not tell you whether women are the only people they date, and sapphic does not tell you the person's own gender. Read their pronouns and the rest of the profile before you assume either.
• Lesbian is the most specific of the orientation words, and still not a contract: people use it in their own ways, as the bi lesbians in DeVito's study show. If exclusivity matters to you, ask.
• Transbian in a bio is a disclosure as well as an orientation: it tells every reader that she is trans. Paired with t4t, it also says she would rather date other trans people.

That kind of openness has a cost, and the study is frank about it. DeVito and colleagues note that trans and non-binary sapphics face higher rates of discrimination, fetishisation and stigma from potential partners, and have to deal with chasers. One participant warned that detailed identity information on a profile could lead to more trouble with chasers, and a trans woman in the study said she no longer discloses that she is trans on dating apps, and tells people once she gets closer to them. So a profile without the word tells you nothing, and a profile with it is not an invitation to ask about anyone's body. If a match seems more interested in the label than in the person, how to tell if someone is a chaser goes through the signs.

If you are writing your own, choose the word you would be happy to be asked about on a first date, and remember you can use more than one. A participant in the same study wanted apps to let people select woman, trans and non-binary together; in a bio, nothing stops you. What to put on a dating profile covers the rest. On a trans-only space like T4TSpace, where every account is checked by a person, the trans half of transbian is already a given.

Lesbian, and the flags

Every lesbian is sapphic, and every lesbian woman is WLW. The reverse is not true, which is the whole reason the wider words exist, and why lesbian keeps its own meaning for the women who want exactly that.

A transbian is a lesbian. The word adds a detail; it does not open a separate room. Where trans women stand in lesbian community has been argued over at length, and DeVito and colleagues place much of that debate on the question of who counts as a woman. In December 2018, seven publications for lesbian, bisexual and queer women, including DIVA, Curve and Autostraddle, signed a joint statement that trans women are women and belong in their community, and that supporting trans women does not erase lesbian identities.

We found no flag specific to WLW with a documented origin. The other words have these:

• Lesbian: the orange, white and pink flag attributed to Emily Gwen in 2018, whose white stripe she described as standing for unique relationships to womanhood. The lesbian flag page has its colours, and why there are so many lesbian flags tells the longer story.
• Sapphic: pink stripes around a pale lavender centre, with violets, a flower associated with Sappho. PinkNews describes a pair of violets; the version on the sapphic flag page has one, and its designer is not reliably documented.
• Transbian: no single flag. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki lists at least six designs posted online between 2018 and 2023, and does not name one as standard. Flying the lesbian flag next to the transgender flag says the same thing without waiting for one.

None of the three words, and none of the flags, is a test. They are there for the people they fit, for as long as they fit.