Like you look at histories of heteronormative violence against women often it’s entirely impossible to differentiate who would belong to any given identity group today. 

You have situations where women were placed in institutions for “frigidity” and otherwise refusing/being unable to conform to these ideas of wifely duties, were subjected to medicalized torture, corrective rape, often had their entire lives stolen from them. 

Some of these women were lesibans and some of them were ace/aro, or at least would probably think about themselves that way if they lived today. Some were CSA/rape survivors with trauma, and some were simply women who had been forced to marry a man who they didn’t want to have sex with. More often than not these categories overlapped.

There is no way to be sure how any one of these women would have identified. Their thoughts and feelings are lost in the past, forgotten, viewed as no value. Even if we could speak to them today the labels that we use today to understand ourselves might not make a lot of sense to them. 

We can’t differentiate between these individuals without engaging in ahistorical reification. You can’t lump everyone together and say “this is lesbian history and it is a history of violence” without violently erasing those women who were not lesbians, or even for that matter those cafab people caught up in this net who, if given the opportunity, would not have identified as women. 

The one thing that’s clear is that there is an obvious shared history here between lesbians and ace/aros, and that is a history of trauma, violence and corrective rape. Anyone who attempts to claim otherwise is being dishonest.