I have washed a tutorial on claiming the bitcoin cash from Electrum, but it looks like I need to have the bitcoin still in my Electrum wallet. Does this mean that I have lost my bitcoin cash?
Luckily for you, you're wrong
After the fork, your Bitcoin has nothing to do with your Bitcoin Cash anymore. What is important, is that you've moved your Bitcoin out of Electrum before exposing your private keys to another wallet.
Depending on the amount of Bitcoins you had, and the number of addresses, you have several options. You can probably use your (12) seed phrase words and use them directly in
Electron Cash. For safety, I prefer to run Electron Cash in a VM, or at least not on my normal PC. Once you've exposed your seed to another wallet, you should setup a new wallet with a new seed for your Bitcoin wallet (Electrum).
As an alternative, if you only had a few addresses with balance during the fork, you can export the private keys from Electrum, and import them one by one into Electron Cash. Or, my own personal favourite for low amounts: import the private keys into Coinomi on Android. You can then do the same to claim Bitcoin Gold and Bitcore.
