pride.com says it’s real

Scissoring is specifically genital on genital tribbing. Some people find varying degrees of success with scissoring vs. other forms of tribbing, but it’s definitely a thing (despite what many have come to think).

No, it’s not going to look like when you made your Barbies scissor (and we know you did) because humans have joints, and fat, and can get tired in strenuous positions. But with enough practice, communication, and trouble shooting, YES it is attainable for you to scissor if you really really want to.

The podcast they link to corroborates

“People are also spreading rumors that lesbians don’t scissor, which I don’t understand,” McCafferty said. “I’m like, that’s not true.”

“It’s literally all I do,” Myrick deadpanned.

The two commiserated over apparent frustrations that even lesbians are saying scissoring isn’t a thing.

“I’m like, ‘Then what are you doing?’” Myrick fired back, before turning the blame onto the wider availability of strap-ons in the midwest.

Wikipedia mentions the debate

Some lesbian and bisexual women do not engage in the scissoring position because they find or think it would be physically uncomfortable. They may also think it is a misconception that lesbians engage in the act and is therefore not representative of lesbian sexual practices, attributing it more so to the male fantasies of the heterosexual porn industry. By contrast, some sources, including Shere Hite’s 1976 and 1981 research, indicate that women may enjoy performing the scissoring position with other women because it is a variation of vulva-to-vulva contact or can allow for maximum such contact and therefore an elevated level of intimacy.

and that scissoring is a common umbrella term, which matches my recollection

Scissoring is commonly used as an umbrella term for all forms of tribadism, and many lesbian and bisexual women are unaware that some of the sexual acts they include in their lovemaking are aspects of and are formally labeled tribadism, as tribadism is commonly omitted from mainstream sex research.

It also mentions that tribade and related words had become archaic by the 20th century. ngrams confirms tribbing was obscure until it only recently took off in the last decade: I think pretty much everyone called it scissoring or rubbing before.

No, it’s not going to look like when you made your Barbies scissor (and we know you did) because humans have joints, and fat, and can get tired in strenuous positions.

I don’t know what pride.com is, nor have I heard of the podcast they’re linking to, however! nothing you’re saying here actually disagrees with what I’ve said elsewhere in this thread. Yes, tribbing is a thing. No, the common depiction of “scissoring” is not representative of tribbing on the whole. Wikipedia even makes the argument that the use of the term “scissoring” is because the term “tribadism” (tribbing) is no longer used and use the term “scissoring” to describe the same sex acts (something I very much disagree with, and isn’t exactly supported by how the term is used extensively in the remainder of that section)

tribadism is commonly omitted from mainstream sex research. Scholar Judith Halberstam stated, “If we trace the use of the term forward into present, we find that tribadism is one of those rarely discussed but often practiced sexual activities, and the silence that surrounds it now is as puzzling as the discourse it produced in earlier centuries.” Halberstam added that Sigmund Freud “had nothing to say” with regard to the topic, “and few contemporary lesbian sex books even discuss it”.

Google Ngram Viewer isn’t a good source, btw. It’s neat, but it’s bad quality data that doesn’t control for biases and it really shouldn’t be used to indicate social trends.

The data sets of the Ngram Viewer have been criticized for their reliance upon inaccurate optical character recognition (OCR) and for including large numbers of incorrectly dated and categorized texts. Because of these errors, and because they are uncontrolled for bias (such as the increasing amount of scientific literature, which causes other terms to appear to decline in popularity), care must be taken in using the corpora to study language or test theories. Furthermore, the data sets may not reflect general linguistic or cultural change and can only hint at such an effect because they do not involve any metadata like date published, author, length, or genre, to avoid any potential copyright infringements.

As an example, a random alternative explanation for the trend seen (assuming the data is accurate which we cannot do with ngram viewer) that I’ve just made up is that papers about the details of lesbian sex were unpopular, and the body of scientific and recreational literature is catching up with the terminology used in their subject matter as the topic becomes less anathema in grant applications. This would very much line up with the dates, and explain the growing usage of the more technical terms as the broadly accepted terminology catches up with the usage of the terms in literature.

Edit:

The podcast, at least in pride’s reporting, doesn’t seem to corroborate that it’s a real thing? Or at least it doesn’t concretely do so, as they explain the podcast’s interaction as:

The back-and-forth left viewers amused as they desperately tried to parse out whether the conversation was for real or just messing around, which actually proves quite thoroughly how confused society as a whole remains about the mythology of scissoring.

Which really doesn’t seem like they’re making the definite claim that it’s real, and I’m not sure why it’s being used as a source here in light of that ambiguity?

Seriously, what is pride.com? I’ve never heard of them before, are they a known entity?

You claim anecdotally that a lesbian wouldn’t say they scissor. Pointing out that they do say it suffices. Your experience doesn’t encompass all lesbians of every generation, so we can refer to LGBT+ publications, direct anecdotes, history, & scholarly research. We have direct anecdotes from a podcast & affirming comments. The wikipedia article even calls out exactly what you’re doing & cites scholarly research. It explains with references that it is or was common for some tribadists not to recognize that word (or variants) & use scissoring more broadly to describe their activity.

Elsewhere, you add that a specific sense of scissoring (that the comic didn’t specify) of rubbing genitals together isn’t real. The cited references have some interesting quotes. In a Hite report

Sex with a woman for me has involved kissing, feeling one another completely, and basically humping – pressing mound of Venus against mound of Venus or each other’s leg.

Another cited reference explains tribade historically meant a woman taking the role of penetrator (with dildo or clitoris) before describing Anne Lister’s diary where she mentions genital to genital contact in her tribadism.

Most of their sexual activity seems to involve Anne touching Mrs. Barlow’s “queer” (as she calls the female genitals) and tribadically rubbing on her.

Anne manipulates Mrs. Barlow digitally but would prefer full-body tribadism, queer to queer, as she says elsewhere.

So, they do say they do that, too, even ages ago.

As for the ngram viewer, it’s not essential, however

• it’s true the corpora don’t reflect general language & culture, only that in a corpora including over 40 university libraries around the world
• similar trend as corpus without scientific literature indicates that’s not a source of bias
• we’re only reviewing recent texts with high quality OCR, so OCR issues don’t apply: OCR improved, not poorly printed archaic texts, tribbing doesn’t contain mistakable characters like long s ſ so OCR error should be uniform, not Chinese or a language difficult for OCR.

It indicates tribbing hasn’t historically appeared in print much.