There are many philosophical pitfalls in the desire to categorize historic individuals or concepts in western culture as "lesbian" as we moderns understand and use the term--I say this despite my own use of the word as a shorthand in this project. (A shorthand I have no intention in abandoning for a variety of reasons.) Many of those pitfalls revolve around historic shifts in the understanding of the nature of physiological sex, the relationship of sex to performative gender, and the relationship of both of those to erotic and romantic desire.
One of the challenges I encounter regularly in summarizing and discussing research on this topic is the conflict between discussing historic texts and data in a precise and unambiguous way, and the emerging modern social ethics around discussing sex, gender, and sexuality--especially around transgender topics. If I were talking about a contemporary, a statement like, "At age 18, Mary Smith began living as a man under the name John Clark until her physiological sex was discovered ten years later, after which she returned to a female presentation" would contain any number of elements considered to be rude and offensive. But when describing a person living several centuries in the past, not only can we not know that person's motivations and understanding of their life and actions, but we can only guess at what options and categories they had for that understanding. Further, in order to try to understand how sex and gender were constructed in the society that Mary Smith/John Clark lived in, we need to acknowledge and examine those elements of the story.
There are a lot aspects to historical views of sex and gender that are casually offensive to the modern mind. That doesn't mean that they don't provide useful frameworks both for understanding historic societies and people and for finding identification with them. The medieval theory that all bodies were mutable in sexual expression is of great interest to those looking for historic models of the transgender experience--at the same time, the component of that theory that bodies could only change from female to male because male bodies were "more perfect" is deeply misogynistic, and creates a different experience for those looking for models of a transmasculine experience and those looking for a transfeminine one. Similarly, the medieval and Renaissance model of erotic desire that held that one's "true" gender could be identified in opposition to the gender of the person you desire aligns with some modern experiences of a transgender heterosexual experience, but is erasive of the concept (in historic societies) of a cisgender homosexual experience.
It's a terminological dilemma that I struggle with constantly, even within the parameters of this project that explicitly uses the lens of "lesbian potential" as opposed to "lesbian fact". I know I hammer away at this aspect a bit too regularly, but if I didn't do so, it would be too easy to read my commentary as "these persons and experiences were lesbian" rather than as "these persons and experiences provide a basis on which lesbian fictional characters could be built."
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