Lesbian

The word traces back to the Greek island of Lesbos, where the poet Sappho lived some two and a half millennia ago; her surviving lyric fragments addressed to women made “lesbian” — literally “of Lesbos” — the enduring name for women who love women (the adjective “sapphic” shares the root). In Chinese, the formal written term is 女同性恋 (nü tongxinglian); the warm in-community self-reference is lala (拉拉), while les and its transliteration 蕾丝边 (“lace edge”) circulate online.

Register note: use “lesbian” or 女同性恋 in formal writing; lala and les belong to friends and community spaces. For the whole LGBTQ+ community, the Chinese umbrella word is tongzhi.

Common misuse: treating lesbians as a genre performed for straight male viewers — a gaze that turns real people into props, and one many lala communities push back on hard. Another: assuming every couple must have “one playing the man.” In Chinese communities the labels T (from “tomboy”) and P (from 婆, “wife”) exist as optional vocabulary some women use — they are not a required script, and a lesbian relationship is not an imitation of a straight one.