When is a Virgin Not a Virgin?

I find some interesting parallels in the concept of grouping lesbians and virgins together in a category "not women" (that is, women not sexually available to men) with the practice in some circles of the publishing world of creating projects or access campaigns on a category encompassing women, non-binary, and sometimes including trans people of all identifications. The unifying factor in the publishing approach is to recognize the historic privileged access that cis men have been given to publishing opportunities and to try to include writers who have not had access to that privilege. But on a symbolic level, the structure of these projects tends to reinforce the default centrality of cis masculinity, even when carefully avoiding defining the focus as "not cis men". It can erase the individual identities gathered under the umbrella, not only by silently defining the category in terms of what it is not, but because once you've created a heterogeneous group of "non-cis-men", the inherent and inescapable binarism in our society will result in a tendency to interact with the resulting composite category as in some way female.

In a similar way, the idea of joining virgins and lesbians into a conceptual category by virtue of their shared non-participation in the heterosexual sexual economy creates (and has historically created) some illogical conclusions, as well as reinforcing the default centrality of heterosexuality. "If you aren't having sex with men (or we a particular man) you must be / might as well be a lesbian." "If you haven't had sex with a man, then you're functionally a virgin not matter what you do with women." (One runs into this within lesbian communities sometimes. I recall one joke about how, "Being a lesbian means never being sure whether you're on a date--and never being entirely sure whether you're still a virgin or not.")

Of course, in certain segments of pre-modern society, there was official sanction for removing yourself from the heterosexual economy via virginity (religious or secular), whereas there was no such official (or even recognized) way to do it via lesbianism. This combined category of "not women", while identifying contexts that provided cover for lesbian identity, potentially erases genuine preferred virginity. And at the same time, it can erase genuine preferred lesbianism by implying that sex between women is a product of removal of access to (or by) men.

These thoughts aren't really directly relevant to the article covered here, but it sparked some ruminations that have been kicking around in my head for a while.