I don’t find it particularly confusing. In terms of PIV, I’m a virgin and I’m not really bothered by that. If someone asked me, “Are you a virgin?” I would say no, assuming in the absence of further conversation that they are attempting to ascertain my level of sexual familiarity.
Interesting username/post combo.
By the way, why is the thread title spelled the way Gollum would say it?
I’m straight, but this is the definition I would use.
You really want me to define the word penetration? Seriously?
Yeah. Define how deep it is and what you can do it with. Hey, it’s a legit question, esp for a lesbian.
What on earth are you talking about? There is no ‘how deep’ when I’m saying that lesbian oral sex doesn’t usually involve penetration at all. Note I say ‘usually’ because there are always outliers, but I don’t think most women insert their tongue up their partner’s vagina. And I’m not sure what you mean by ‘what you can do it with’ when there are only two body parts involved in oral sex.
I really don’t need to post the joke, do I?
The mathemetician in me wants a very unambiguous defnition of virgin - I think ‘attempting to have an orgasm while with another person’ is the best.
But, in reality humans group things into categories, with some things being good examples, some being ‘kind ofs’, and some things being absolutely not in the category.
My parents, always very cut-to-the-chase people, defined virginity as:
“If you do it and you don’t want to tell us about it or for us to find out about it, you have lost your virginity.”
They were very extreme Catholics but in many ways it is a simple of a definition as possible. Virgin can mean pure and they applied the “pure/chaste/clean” rule not only to technical intercourse but all other non-pure concepts. I guess it is similar to the pornography, “I know it when I see it” definition.
The preaching came afterward with “we hope and trust that you will wait until after marriage to experience intimacy”. So I had lots of non-virgin activities but I tried really hard not to be intimate with my bedfellows 
One of my closest female friends is a lesbian, and she’s brought up the puzzling subject of lesbian virginity multiple times. So no, it’s not just a straight thing. Not to her, anyway.
What I find myself wondering is: how do strap-ons fit into all of this (tee hee)? If a lesbian penetrates a lesbian with a strap-on dildo, could that qualify as the loss of one (or both) v-cards?
We do insert tongue, apparently more than you imagined. (see book “Going Down”) also, fingers are used in oral sex
This makes a lot of sense.
The problem is that you’re saying that anyone who hasn’t had hetero sex is “technically” a virgin. So the only way a gay/lesbian person can lose their virginity is to have sex with someone of a gender we’re not attracted to. That’s not exactly in the spirit of what this thread is about.
I’ll be mortified if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure SciFiSam doesn’t need to imagine it.
You can’t tell me a lesbian is making those assertions. (Oh, honey, come to mama.)
I always try to do my best to do so, and I’m straight! Nah but seriously oral is more than just clit sucking.
Even though I’m gay, I tend to think of the idea of the virginity test as “penis in vagina”, just because it’s simple and clean and cut and dry. As people have brought up, the idea of virginity really has to do with procreation and it’s completely silly to me for people to talk about gay virginity. But, that’s just to me. If others feel it is important to talk about their virginity having to do with same-sex relations, go for it. I, myself, would never use the term if I was curious about someone’s sexuality. I would just ask, “have you ever had oral/vaginal/anal sex?”
If someone asked me, “are you a virgin?” then I would respond, “what is your definition of virgin?”
As people have pointed out, gays and lesbians engage in all kinds of different sex. Some gays never do anal at all, some lesbians never use strapons, etc. But, I’m willing to assume that all or nearly all heterosexuals who are capable of penile/vaginal intercourse do engage in it regularly or consider it the “main” type of sex. So it’s useful to define virginity as never having had a penis in your vagina, or never having put your penis into a vagina.
As another lesbian joining in to act as referee, I think you’re probably both defining penetration differently. Scifisam probably doesn’t regard poking around with the tip of a tongue as particularly ‘penetrating’, compared to fingers or a dildo. If I’m wrong, I’m sure she will correct me.
I can see both sides and probably lean a little more towards ScifiSam’s assertions. But maybe I’ve just got a really small tongue.
I’m sorry, Scifisam. I mistook you for a guy asserting the boundaries of lesbian sex. Mine are a bit… deeper. Ha ha! Ha. Ha…? 
I came out in the 80s at the University of California. We were all sitting around on the floor in the Women’s Center looking at ourselves and each other with speculums.
Anyway, a fun book about oral sex with women is Going Down by SomepersonwhosenameIforget. It broadened my “practices.” I’m not saying anyone else’s need to be broadened, just that the book is a good read.
Where I come from (small town in Northern Spain), anal and oral both count as sex and we find it very strange that there are cultures where it’s considered “less than sex unless it’s among gays/lesbians, at which point it becomes sinful sex”; anybody who’s having oral or anal before PiV on account of “I want to keep my virginity!” is called “virgin in the ear” and considered a hypocrite. That’s a location where oral sex with someone of the same sex would count as losing your cherry, whether hymens were involved or not.
So, are you interested in wordlwide views, anglos only, US only…? Because like so many other things, the answers change by location/culture.