The difficulty of fine-tuning lesdar (vs. gaydar) from IRL observations

First time a lesbian has followed me around a thrift store yesterday. Although with all the talk about disappearing lesbians and rise of "non-binary" types who are clearly female, maybe she was one of those.

Somewhat taller than average for a girl, early-mid 20s, cute face, flawless pale olive skin, boyishly short side-parted hairstyle from circa 1990 (NOT a gay whoosh) but with the back and sides shaved close, brunette, small boobs, thin but athletic (visible abs), midriff-baring tank top, khaki shorts just above the knee, forgot the shoes, some kind of glasses too.

She was there with another girl, who had a fashion mullet, and who I assumed were a lesbian couple out thrifting. Toward the end, I saw them both debating which woodcraft items they were going to buy to decorate their groyperesque, uh, I mean cottagecore home.

But for awhile there, the mullet one was off browsing t-shirts, and the tomboy one was clearly trailing me and trying to get me to notice her. I don't think a lesbian has ever had a clear case of the hots for me, unlike the other girls there, so maybe she was just "lesbian presenting" but actually a straight or bi girl with an edgy aesthetic.

Or she was one of the rare surviving lesbians, but was not trying to get my attention sexually. Maybe she saw someone with a cool edgy look, and wanted a fellow cool person to acknowledge her own coolness. Seeking validation as girls do, but not for their body.

However, the confusion of her signals left me wondering what she really was and what her motivation was, so I didn't actually smile at her, talk shop about thrifting, or anything like that. Perhaps for the better, as I would've inevitably asked, "So... are you a lesbian or what?"

It can be hard to tell who's lesbian and who's a low-body-count straight girl. Both have amazing skin (lack of pollution from all those different partners' germs, or whatever). Both are adorably bashful. Both dress more comfortably and sometimes alt, but in that '90s slacker way rather than the flamboyant late 2000s scene queen way.

No more exciting of a conclusion than that. More of a case study of how lesbians don't always jump out of the background, unlike gays who are always flamingly obvious (whether they're "out" or not). Fine-tuning your lesdar is way more difficult than gaydar.

And a reminder that if you're basing your intuitions about lesbians from the ones you can easily detect, you're forming a biased view since most lesbians try not to stand out in a crowd, let alone flaunt their non-hetero sexuality. Those are either the butch dyke types, or the off-the-wall bisexual types.

To get a better understanding of lesbians, you really do have to go straight to the source and listen to a variety of them, none of whom would be identifiably lesbian out in the wild. Contrast that with gays, who you can easily identify in public and just observe their mannerisms etc. to see what they're like.