Content Warning: Discussion of transphobia, transmisogyny
Spoilers for I Wanna Be Your Girl
Yuri is a growing genre, increasingly depicting more and more varied stories about sapphic love. As yuri continues to get queerer, the existence of trans people in these stories would be one way to provide validation for trans readers in their gender and sexuality while also helping cis people understand and internalize our long standing place in the sapphic community. Yuri works featuring trans characters do exist, though their history is complex and they remain relatively few.
A Slice of Reality
Trans people are rooted in the sapphic community and have been a core part of it for as long as it could be called a community. Lesbians, by their very sexuality, defy the gender binary which was so strictly defined by heterosexuality, and in many cases they lose access to their conditional womanhood. This is furthered by the very long history of people engaged in the sapphic community who actively defied gender norms by presenting masculine, be that as a Butch, a Stud, lacking a label or some other label. Following from this, there is plenty of evidence of gender-defying companionship between lesbians and trans people in historical documentation, such as the works of Mariette Pathy Allen, who has chronicled transgender people for over 40 years as a photographer and released several books of her work. This is also present in fiction: for example, Alison Bechdel’s classic comic series Dykes To Watch Out For (1983) features a strip talking about the need for cis lesbians to have solidarity with trans women.