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This is where it all started. One snapback is all it takes.
“My sister read your blog,” my mother remarked to me a couple years ago, referring to a series of guest posts that I had been writing for Bitch magazine. She was teasing me, but she relayed something that my aunt had apparently told her in earnest: “She showed [her husband] and he said he’s afraid of you now, since you’re such a ‘militant butch lesbian.’”
Now, I am all of five feet tall and pudgy. With my penchant for pastels and bright complementary colors, I look more like a giant Easter egg than like whatever it was my aunt and uncle were picturing when they read the word “butch.” My blog posts weren’t even about being butch. I probably used the word once, but that was enough to set straight imaginations ablaze with terrifying images of…I don’t even know. Then again, maybe I do look scary. Maybe that’s why strange men laugh or snarl at me and call me a “fucking dyke” in the street and on the bus.
It isn’t only men and straight people who make me feel a bit like a monster. Don’t get me wrong—it’s mostly men and straight people. But there are also little recurring experiences that sometimes make me feel unwelcome even among other queer women. Back when I was a senior at Wellesley, I took a seminar on queer theory. During class discussion one day, one of my peers chimed in brightly with, “I’m really glad we’re beyond the whole butch/femme thing and everyone is just sort of androgynous.” The observation applied specifically to the lesbian culture on campus, and more generally to the culture of young lesbians as my classmate understood it at the time.
The remark has stuck with me vividly because I keep encountering a similar sentiment among certain circles of fellow queer millennials. Specifically there is, among some young lesbians and other queer women, a distinct hostility to butchness. Butch identity is often viewed as passé, as a relic of some bygone era when lesbian gender expressions and relationships were trying to ape heterosexuality. Sometimes it is regarded as downright damaging or oppressive, as if butchness is inherently an imitation of manhood.
I do think that there is a conversation to be had about internalized misogyny and transphobia within queer communities. These forces combine to produce the dual attitude that, in order to be authentically genderqueer or trans, AFAB people must be “masculine” and AMAB people must be “feminine.” AFAB “masculinity” does carry a certain amount of cachet in some LGBT spaces, in the form of not having to defend or justify one’s place in the queer community. It’s not necessarily “privilege” in any meaningful sense, but it is a real phenomenon.
With that acknowledged, however, the butch hate that I encounter among other queer women is more often than not a reflection of internalized misogyny. It mirrors the overwhelming hostility to butchness endemic to straight culture. Gender expression is so heavily and openly policed, especially for girls and women, that simply remarking on it feels redundant. But no matter how many times we draw attention to this gender policing and to how much it hurts us, collectively we just can’t seem to stop.
Because of that constant gender policing, growing up as a little baby butchling was often confusing and painful. Now, I am very much a social constructivist; I do not buy into the “born this way” notion. I do not think that butchness is somehow stamped into my DNA, and I certainly don’t believe that I have a “masculine” brain or that any such thing exists. But the seeds of my identity were definitely sown early, even if in many ways my girlhood didn’t follow a “typical” transmasculine narrative wherein I always felt some inborn aversion to femininity. I mean, I actually liked dresses and jewelry just fine when I was little. There was an awkward stretch of my adolescence when I was really into long suede skirts and earth-toned capes. You know how sometimes, as a young lesbian, you get a little bit confused between the kind of woman you want to be and the kind of woman you want to be with? Well, when I was fifteen I hadn’t quite worked out that I wanted to date some kind of bohemian Earth-mama Hobbit witch.
As the careworn mantra goes, “All gender is drag.” Drag, of course, is a performance. You don’t just put on an outfit, you construct an entire character, informed by what your audience expects to see. That expectation is crucial. Gender lies in how you declare yourself and in what society expects from and parses within your performance. It isn’t somehow located in your dress or behavior itself. There are no inherently “masculine” or “feminine” traits. But we’re born into a culture that acts as though there are and so, well before I consistently dressed the part, as it were, I was read as a “tomboy.” I embraced the label—as I now embrace “butch”—because humans have an irrepressible need to name ourselves. I got made fun of, I felt like an outsider, but I had an identity. I was a pretty physical child; I liked playing sports, mainly because they provided ample opportunity to hurl myself repeatedly into the ground or at another person’s legs. I was and am assertive, vocal, and even—dare I say—aggressive in ways that would be totally normal and therefore invisible in a man, but that are hypervisible and distinctly “mannish” in a woman. A fat, abrasive man is just a fat, abrasive man. A fat, abrasive woman can be a lot of things, none of them flattering. At best, a shrew. At worst, a dyke.
A fat, abrasive dyke is exactly what I was destined to become, and so in high school my “tomboy” identity rapidly started to wear thin. Tomboys are supposed to “grow out of it.” They’re supposed to hit puberty and then discover boys and heterosexuality and settle into “normal” behavior and relationships. I didn’t metamorphose into anything except a lonely lesbian. And so I’m going to say something right here, in the middle of this heartfelt essay, that’s going to seem like a complete non-sequitur: Thank God for Girl Scout Camp.
You see, in mainstream media there are no role models for butch lesbians. When you’re a kid (and an adult, and a human in general), media is vitally important to your understanding of what is good, and right, and possible. In popular media, butch women are monsters. We’re portrayed as objects of revulsion, mockery, and pity. As an adolescent I didn’t have Autostraddle or Tumblr, I hadn’t heard of Alison Bechdel, I hadn’t read Stone Butch Blues or Female Masculinity. I didn’t have a butch mom, or aunt, or family friend to look up to. I had movies and television and I had Girl Scout Camp. Every summer from when I was about six to when I was eighteen, I spent a few weeks at an overnight camp where it seemed as though 99% of the staff were lesbians. I was a counselor there myself during the summer between high school and college. Thanks to this seasonal community, I grew up with butch women who taught me and took care of me, women whom I admired and wanted to emulate. Without Camp, it would have been that much harder to envision a livable future for myself.
And then I went to college, and I did read Stone Butch Blues and Female Masculinity and Zami and a million other things because during my first semester I took a course called “Gay Writing from Sappho to Stonewall.” There was a vibrant and visible LGBT community on campus. I found friends and comrades and a girlfriend. But every now and then I bumped up against the attitude that I’ve mentioned, the idea that butchness is an assimilationist relic. Sometimes I still do. Sometimes, despite myself, I still get a sense of unease, an anxious feeling that my gender is somehow bad or wrong.
And so here I am. One of those fat, hairy, angry butch lesbians whom everyone seems to hate. Too “radical” for men and straight people, too “normative” for some queer people.
The idea that butchness is somehow normative or assimilationist, or in itself oppressive, is just wrong. There is no other way to put it. My gender presentation, as I’ve elucidated, doesn’t earn me any brownie points with men or with straight people. It doesn’t afford me any power. It makes me a target. The fact is that all women are targets of gender policing. We’re punished when we don’t conform to femininity, because we’ve stepped outside of our “place.” We’re punished when we are feminine, because femininity is understood as inferiority. When I get uneasy about being butch, it’s because I’m anxious about whether I’m performing gender in a way that hurts other women. How do I avoid that if I’m “masculine,” being that masculinity is defined by its diametric opposition to femininity?
After agonizing over the matter and consulting and commiserating with other butch women, I’ve come to realize that butchness doesn’t need to be understood as “masculinity” at all. Its form and substance don’t have to be defined by its opposition to femininity.
Sometimes I like to think of butchness as a kind of satire. Not as a parody–not as a clownish imitation of manhood–but as part of a purposeful endeavor to dismantle the popular conception of masculinity and the hegemony that it represents. Flannel and bowties and buzzcuts and muscle shirts and mean un-made-up mugs are not inherently “masculine.” And so butchness works to deconstruct maleness and masculinity by co-opting behaviors and aesthetics that men have tried to monopolize. Butch is a trickster gender—and so, in a similar way, is femme. Lesbian gender expressions do not emulate heteropatriarchy, they subvert it. Femme removes femininity from the discursive shadow of masculinity and thereby strips from it any connotation of subordination or inferiority. Butch takes markers of “masculinity” and divests them of their association with maleness or manhood. Butchness works against the gender binary—the masculine/feminine paradigm—and reclaims for women the full breadth of possibilities when it comes to gender expression.
Other times, honestly, I just don’t like to think about my gender as a conscious political undertaking at all. I know that “the personal is political.” I know that no action or belief can possibly be apolitical because every social institution on every scale is steeped in ideology. But sometimes I just get so tired. Sometimes I want to just be. Understanding that my gender has nothing to do with maleness or men helps with that. I’m not a man. I’m not trying to be like a man. I’m not aligned with men in any way. I’m just…well, butch. Butch is a legible identity in itself.
Certainly my own butchness is not predicated on seeing myself as more logical or confident or competent than other women. It isn’t defined by a rejection of femininity and all things “feminine.” I’m emotional. I cry when I’m angry and coo over baby animals. My assertiveness is ultimately limp-wristed. I like pastels and flowers and glitter. My closet is full of men’s button-downs and I don’t own a skirt but I do have a drawer full of beautiful velvet scarves and jeweled brooches. I am a particular sub-subspecies of dandy butch that I refer to as “sparklebutch” in the privacy of my own head. There are as many ways to be butch as there are women and facets of masculinity for us to steal and repurpose. While I’ve touched upon the isolation and pain that come with being a butch woman in a heteropatriarchal society, I don’t want to give the impression that there is anything tragic about my gender identity. My gender is deliberate and playful. I love it. I’m proud to be butch. If nothing else I hope that, somewhere, another girl finding her way toward butchness might read this and feel proud too.
Tags: butches, butchness, caroline narby, identity, lgbt, politics
“AFAB “masculinity” does carry a certain amount of cachet in some LGBT spaces, in the form of not having to defend or justify one’s place in the queer community. It’s not necessarily “privilege” in any meaningful sense, but it is a real phenomenon.”
Ah. Thanks for unpicking this with so much care. This issue has been cropping up around the edges of discussions amongst friends recently and I’ve been struggling to figure out how I feel about it, but reading that sentence has made some things come into focus.
“You know how sometimes, as a young lesbian, you get a little bit confused between the kind of woman you want to be and the kind of woman you want to be with?”
Hahahaha….I mean, no. What? I have no idea what you’re talking about 😉
Wonderful piece. Thanks so much for writing it.
on the one hand, I observe a lot of centering of white afab masculinity as the idealized sexual other, especially in femme community, and I am skeptical.
also, I appreciate that this is an article about butchness that does not talk about butch flight, because that is suuuuuuuuuperbullshit.
I would also add that within professional circles, my masculinity has, I believe, lent me a handful of privilege. At least in terms of how our culture unconsciously privileges statements/suggestions from masculine positions. (I mean, on the other hand, I know I’ve been turned down for jobs because my presentation makes some people uncomfortable, so: double-edged sword.)
yes double edged for sure.
Is butch flight the thing that my body does right after I hit some gravel while braking and turning on my bike (pro tip: pick any 2)?
Or is there finally a phrase to describe the 5 times a year (since about 2006) someone asks me if I’m a dude “yet”? Because a concept describing the ‘why’ behind that…that would be really useful.
Or some other, 3rd thing?
nope, it’s the second thing, though if you have the secret of flight, maybe we could have a skillshare. I would attend that. I might even bring baked goods.
Idk why people ask you that except that maybe they have really poor analyses of how sex and gender and identity are all different spinning plates. Also because transphobia and misogyny and the usual bullshit.
There’s something about the way privilege gets disavowed in that statement that really bothers me, but I can’t really pinpoint it.
However, this statement is perfect for articulating exactly why I love being femme:
“Femme removes femininity from the discursive shadow of masculinity and thereby strips from it any connotation of subordination or inferiority.” Yes.
“Sparklebutch.” SPARKLEBUTCH!
Please let us make that a bedazzled, bow-tied thing.
A trans friend of mine, in response to FB’s real-name bullshit, tried to change his fb name to “Grizzly McSparklepants.” I think it has much the same effect.
I saw “sparklebutch” and “dandy butch” and my brain just went YES THIS IS WHAT WE ARE GOING FOR. So, <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
“Butch is a trickster gender—and so, in a similar way, is femme. Lesbian gender expressions do not emulate heteropatriarchy, they subvert it. Femme removes femininity from the discursive shadow of masculinity and thereby strips from it any connotation of subordination or inferiority. Butch takes markers of “masculinity” and divests them of their association with maleness or manhood.”
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
Yesyesyes- the butch/femme dichotomy is absolutely not assimilation, it is subversion, because it is so very loudly proclaiming that it is entirely about women wearing what they want to wear and getting each other’s attention, and dudes get so angry and baffled at the idea that a woman might clearly, consciously, put thought and effort into her appearance while completely ignoring men’s opinions of the result.
Yes. YES. This just explained so much to me about why I love non-traditional gender expression!
I’m the last person who should be voicing his opinion on any of these issues, so I won’t. Instead, I will say that “sparklebutch” is the best thing ever and that you are awesome.
Thank you thank you thank you! Sending this to my BFF ASAP 🙂
I’ve never met you, but I really want to be friends.
For those wondering (I had to look it up): AFAB/AMAB = assigned female at birth/assigned male at birth
ETA: and also if you read it fast it looks like ABFAB, which is pretty fab.
I was like “this is certainly something I know what means” but I couldn’t parse/remember it, so thanks for being google <3
p.s. This is wonderful! Thank you for this fantastic meditation on butchness.
“I hope that, somewhere, another girl finding her way toward butchness might read this and feel proud too” I am that girl, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. This piece resonated with me so strongly I cried. Thank you so, so much.
I cried, too! This was absolutely wonderful.
This was enlightening! And I’m absolutely loving the concept of “sparklebutch” so THANK YOU for bringing that into the world!
This was wonderful! Sending warm fuzzies to all my favourite butches.
Thank you so much for saying it: THERE ARE NO WINNERS in the gender-policing game. The earnest college lesbians of the mid-90s were also declaring butch/femme an antiquated, embarrassing artifact of the past, and I watched basically everyone I know deal with constant anxiety about their gender presentation. High heels: too assimilationist, endorsing femininity as the act of enduring physical pain to perform sexual availability, a capitalist trap to siphon away women’s financial futures? Probably! Flannel shirts: a stereotype that sets The Gays back, a type of self-segregating, a subtle way of equating lesbianism with appropriating male privilege and denial of solidarity with our straight sisters’ oppression? I mean, clearly! Christ, when I think how much energy we all expended living in mortal fear that another woman would Send the Wrong Message, and trying to shame each other out of literally any choice we might ever make, it just makes me retroactively *exhausted.*
Kids Today: just — do literally anything else with your time than that. It’s a bad game.
I wish this essay could be mandatory reading for all humans. Especially young ones. As an older feminist, I wish a lot of young queer people would be more flexible about masculine womanhood and feminine manhood instead of jumping straight into trans* because it’s trendy. I also notice a lot of straight and bi girls going through the “trying to be who you want to be with” phase, with more slippery gender lines. Being young is so difficult. I think the internet makes it easier in so many ways, but also makes people rush to define themselves before they are really mature enough to do so.
Huge caveat: I don’t believe anyone else can judge what’s in another person’s heart and mind and body, and God bless all trans* and genderqueer homies all over the world. But also God bless everyone who is making the definition of womanhood broader instead of narrower, and still claiming it as actual womanhood. Keep on fighting the good fight!
I don’t think being trans is really “trendy” enough to outweigh the harassment and discrimination trans people regularly face. I wish it were, but it’s just not even plausible to me that that is the case. Given the historic and ongoing discrimination against trans folks, it’s likely that many people, now and in the past, force themselves into masculine womanhood or feminine manhood who would be more comfortable leaving womanhood or manhood entirely. And these people don’t owe it to anyone to work on expanding those boundaries; it’s people who fit neatly into womanhood/manhood, if anyone, who should be extra-aware of the need to do that work.
Whoa wait what trans identities are not trendy.
You sound like Kit speaking to Max on the L Word. That is not supportive or affirming to trans or cis individuals.
Hey, I’m the author.
Just want to jump in here to remark that I am NOT trying to perpetuate any concept of transness as “trendy.” Please don’t look for anything like that in this piece. I don’t think any young people are in fact being “pressured,” by their peers, parents, or anyone else, into trans identities.
I have a problem with how you’re positioning gender-nonconforming binary identities as more mature and real than non-binary ones.
You’re right, that was poorly phrased on my part. Sorry! I was thinking of a specific young person I know quite well, and then speaking as if it were a general problem, which I agree is neither helpful nor fair.
And this person is only 17. We’re all immature when we’re that age–looking for things to be black and white instead of gray, looking for someone to tell us the “right” way to do or be. So when I say trendy, I guess I mean the desire to define yourself by other people’s experiences instead of your own experience. Like, if I associate myself with this movement and use all the right words and follow all the steps, I’ll be a valid person because I fit in. I think everyone feels that way when they’re young, and then the identity that comes from inside is something you find when you’re older.
I don’t think people ever really lose the desire to fit in, and I don’t think it’s especially true that young people, even people as young as 17, don’t have (or don’t listen to?) an identity that comes from within. I’d like to think we all get more mature as we age, but we’re not all in the same place at the same time, you know? And even when we are at our very most needing-to-fit-in, the particular choice of group we’re trying to fit in with is probably at least influenced by our internal identities.
What really gets me is that we seem to get told “you’ll find your true identity within you later” in proportion to how outside-the-norms our apparent identity is, at least during adolescence and the teenage years. When I started dating girls, my mom told me that might be a phase and I’d know for sure when I was 18. When my brother started dating girls, at a younger age, no one told him that was likely a phase. My mom’s great, actually, but we all perceive nonconforming identities as more likely to be mistaken than conforming ones, even though the truth is probably the opposite.
You could be right about the specific 17 year old of your acquaintance. But you could be wrong, too, and I feel like either way you’re continuing to do a disservice to any number of other 17 year olds.
wonderful, wonderful, wonderful
Thank you SO MUCH for SparkleButch!!! It describes a thing I have been honing for a while, and is epitomized by my riding helmet which I have PAVED with rhinestones. I trot around the ring on the sweet gray horse and people gasp and are blinded.
Needs moar pix. 🙂
girl scout camp butches!!!! I have not been that, but i have worked at girl scout camp and befriended and dated many such charming folks, and no other time in my life have I been able to ask somebody to teach a knot-tying and hatchet safety workshop to teenagers as a way of establishing flirtation.
Oh, my goodness. I’m too tired to write a solid comment to this in any kind of time, so I’m going to substitute a pack of hearts and tears, because: yeah. This. Excuse me, I have to go sort my scarf collection.
This was so much more than I was expecting, wow.
Most reassuring article I’ve read this month. “You know how sometimes, as a young lesbian, you get a little bit confused between the kind of woman you want to be and the kind of woman you want to be with?” This was one of the most helpful questions I could be (even if rhetorically) asked right now. And despite my not being butch, this article was super reassuring to my own gender anxieties. And then I got all full up with emoshunz at the end of this.
Girl Scout Camp, though. I only went a few times, but this is also where I learned a lot about Existing While Gay. “Former Scouts” queer meet-up anyone?
For those interested and not already familiar – if you want to read more about Butchness, head on over to Autostraddle and read the Butch Please columns.
Thank you Caroline for this piece, and to the Toast for continuing to publish things 1000% relevant to my life.
I’ve come to think that there is something really ableist about the idea that gender is a performance. If gender is a performance that means that some people do it “better” than others or that there is nothing innate about it. The sooner we disavow that idea, the more comfortable we’ll all feel in our skin.
I perform my gender better now than I did when I was a teenager. Any type of self-expression works that way: you can feel it deep inside, but your earliest efforts to show other people how you feel are usually clumsy and derivative of what you’ve observed other people doing. I do feel like it takes time and practice and self-awareness to be able to communicate, and gender expression is a type of social communication. For me, it’s definitely an innate thing that I had to learn how to do skillfully, just like writing is an innate expression of who I am that I’ve learned how to do more skillfully over time. *Not* developing those skills would definitely not have made me feel more comfortable in my own skin, though of course YMMV.
I totally agree with this. I’ve gotten much better at expressing all different parts of my identity since I was a teenager, including my gender. But the idea that gender is drag, that it is something that we must put on rather than something innate is deeply troubling to me. There are some people who can not perform gender. Are disabled people less gendered than those who are able-bodied? Are trans people who can not present as their innate gender less men or women. I used to read Judith Butler too and nod, but lately this concept has not rung as true for me. And I’m still trying to parse why that is.
Maybe it’s my Teaching Nerd Background, but I think I’m uncomfortable with casting too much value judgement on “lacks certain skills.” A person who was disabled in a way that made it difficult for them to communicate their internal gender identity would not be “as good at” performing their felt sense of gender as someone without those same disabilities, but they’re also probably not as good at, I don’t know, baking? I think the whole point of trying not to be ableist is being able to say, “Hey, your inherent value as a person is not dependent on being able to do everything, and even if you are *never* good at certain things, you deserve as much respect and happiness as people who are good at those things.”
The more I think about it, the more I think we’re arguing different things, though. I think you’re saying “gender can’t be performative because it exists even when it isn’t being performed,” which does make sense to me as far as that goes. I guess I’m making more of a Schrodinger’s box sort of argument, which is that we can’t really understand what it subjectively feels like to have anyone else’s gender identity, so there’s not much point in discussing it. “Gender is performative,” to me, really means that everything I have access to about anyone else’s individual gender, as well as about collective cultural ideas of gender, comes from the way it’s externalized and communicated — the way it’s performed. And it’s valuable to me to remember that what I’m seeing is a series of conscious or unconscious choices designed to reveal or hide someone’s invisible subjective experience. What I’m seeing is never really the truth of them, and what they see of me is never really the truth of me. It’s just a construction made out of signs and signifiers and endlessly open to interpretation/misinterpretation.
It’s been a loooong time since they made me read Butler in women’s studies, so I have no idea if that’s how she deployed the concept or not, but that’s definitely what it’s come to mean to me.
I guess the way I always think about it is: yes, now I wear makeup and dresses and present in a very feminine way, people recognize me as a woman. But what if I became bed-ridden and wasn’t able to do those things, would I be less of a woman? When I’m sleeping and am not performing anything, am I less of a woman? When I drink beer and watch football (things I do in fact do), am I less of a woman? I’m thinking of all of the trans women who are denied access to ladies’ restrooms and dressing rooms, because they can not perform their gender any “better.” Are they less women?
Yes, if you want to reduce gender to “skirts and makeup,” which is like trying to reduce affluence to the amount of money a person has.
I’m not reducing gender to skirts and makeup. That’s my whole point. By saying “gender is performance,” we’re only focusing on the external symbols of gender. And I agree there is so much more to all of us than that! But by the same token, I don’t think that everyone has the same access to perform their gender or to have their gender identity accepted. I just want to look at the phrase “gender is performance” critically, and to recognize all the people who can’t perform their gender or to all the people whose gender performance is not recognized as “good enough” by society.
I don’t think that’s what she was saying at all? I don’t know, I feel that by saying that gender is a performance you are reducing it, in part, to external markers, which for some people may be skirts and makeup and for others may be jeans and t shirts and for others it may be a suit and tie. But if there are certain things you need to perform it implies that people who are unable to do those things (either because society wont let them, or they don’t have access to resources that allow them to do it) aren’t performing gender as well. If certain individuals feel that their gender is a performance that’s great and it’s so important to include those who don’t feel like they are attached to any one particular gender but treating it like that’s true for everyone (because so often ‘gender is performance’ is used as a rule) can be very hard on people who feel they are innately their gender but are unable to perform it in the way society says they have to or even just in the way that they would like to. I loved it in the context of this piece but often I see it in very terf-y context in ways that are used to dismiss trans people who do feel like they are truly their gender and not just performing something and I think that’s really important to not brush aside.
Ah yes, this! So much more eloquent and well put than what I was bumbling-ly saying!
I, on the other hand, feel that insisting that gender is innate is, well, not ablist b/c I honestly don’t see where you’re coming from there. But taking gender as innate leads straight to assuming everyone has one, and from there that anyone unable to find and articulate theirs satisfactorily (to others; it doesn’t count if you can only explain it to yourself) is either broken or not trying hard enough. I can tell you from experience that neither of those outcomes leads to feeling more comfortable in one’s skin.
While there is certainly an aspect of judgement in performing gender, the larger part of performativity is that by doing in front of others, we create. Happens whether we try to or not. Being aware of that inevitability is both trapping and freeing.
♡♡♡♡ Wonderful wonderful.
I am a baby soft butch (think…season 2 of SVU Olivia Benson? Aspirationally speaking) and i was feeling really horrid yesterday about being a fat, hairy, ugly dyke…this is exactly what i needed to read. Bless you!
“And so butchness works to deconstruct maleness and masculinity by co-opting behaviors and aesthetics that men have tried to monopolize. Butch is a trickster gender—and so, in a similar way, is femme. Lesbian gender expressions do not emulate heteropatriarchy, they subvert it. Femme removes femininity from the discursive shadow of masculinity and thereby strips from it any connotation of subordination or inferiority. Butch takes markers of “masculinity” and divests them of their association with maleness or manhood.”
THANK YOU for this. And for the following paragraph, talking about just being who you are. My queerness skews in all sorts of unpredictable, not easily categorized directions, and reading this was a breath of fresh air.
Thank you for this, and for not turning your piece into yet another lamentation of the ‘where have all the butches gone, those trans men just aren’t brave enough to be women’.
AFAB people need examples of non-toxic masculinity because it is all to easy to stray into dude-bro territory and because it can be very lonely depending on where you live.
Maybe it’s weird, but this made me feel a lot better about myself given the increasing pressure I’ve felt from people to sort of ‘declare for’ one side or another, and that to do so incorrectly/inauthentically is somehow a betrayal of whatever their ideas of me are. I might’ve grossly misread the essay, though.
But if I didn’t, you know, thanks.
I love this so much, especially the trickster bit. Thank you for articulating stuff about myself that I couldn’t–I may quote you in an email to my mom.
Gaaaaah so jealous of everyone who had amazing, queer-positive Girl Scouts experiences. As a wee queer in a very conservative town, Girl Scouts provided me with some of my first experiences of gender- & sexuality-related bullying. It was so bad that one of the worst nightmares I can recall from my callow youth was a dream about my Girl Scout blouse crawling across the floor towards me like a revenant caterpillar. Horrible.
Y’all were very lucky and I wish you had been in my Troop.
Thank you. Thank you for sharing such brave, articulate thoughts. And three cheers for camp! It literally saved my life, and then I became a counselor so I could pay it forward to other young girls. So, so important that kids have the opportunity to experience it!
I got my oil changed today by a hot baby butch (um, for real, no euphemism) and realized how long it had been since I’ve seen a real baby butch and not some genderqueer variant (perhaps because I don’t live on a coast). And here we are talking about it. Viva la Butch.
“a real baby butch and not some genderqueer variant”
i am curious as to how you would unpack this statement
Yeah, again: I’m the author of the piece and I want to just pipe up to say that I am NOT here for any “masculinity border wars” nonsense pitting butches against AFAB trans and genderqueer people. Those are not discrete groups and there is no such thing as “butch flight” where we are somehow “losing butches” to transness. Please don’t use this piece to prop up that kind of rhetoric.
Wow, okay that was not my intention at all. I simply mean that I know people that identify really specifically as “butch” and people that identify as “genderqueer” and that I tend not encounter very many younger (under 40) people who identify as “butch” (perhaps because of my geographic location having a limited queer community). I meant only to make a “yay this is a great coincidence” statement about timing of this essay and the butch woman I met earlier the same day. Not trying to pit anything against anything else.
I got my oil changed today by a hot baby butch (um, for real, no euphemism) and realized how long it had been since I've seen a real baby butch and not some genderqueer variant (perhaps because I don't live on a coast). And here we are talking about it. Viva la Butch.
Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you for this wonderful, wonderful essay. I cannot tell you how much it meant to me.
Excellent essay I am spamming all my friends with. I predict we’ll be reading it in five years, too.
So I do still feel that the butch/femme thing is still problematic and oppressive in one way: it assumes a very Western-centric view of gender. I personally skew more femme, and even that is with caveats: what gets defined as “femme” in the Western queer world, especially that decoupling-from-masculinity-thing, is to me “how all the women in my Bangladeshi family act”. My dad’s vanity would immediately get him pegged as “femme” or “metrosexual”, but back home that is exactly How You Man. It’s the butchiest thing ever to care about your appearance.
Having moved internationally, I see how uneasy it is for me to be in queer community; I don’t get *read* as queer, because I’m not B/F enough or Queer Uniform enough or something (to the point that I have been the target of vicious rumours), yet I can’t also talk about how the whole b/f thing alienates people like me because then *I’m* the one doing the alienating. When I see babyqueers back home in Malaysia or similar they often default to _Western_ ideas of butch/femme, because that’s the only language they have to parse their queerness, whether or not they actually identify with that; it seems that there is an incongruity between being queer and looking like anyone else in your country. It really does get performative.
This is slightly veering from your thesis but relates to it: I read an article some time back on the Fa’afafine people of Samoa, which are a not-exact-analogue of trans women. In the article, one of the interviewees talked about how in the old days, you didn’t have to perform your gender a certain way for your gender identity to be respected: if you were AMAB, and then said you were a woman/fa’afifine – ok, great! It’s your turn to do the housework. It was much more about household roles and job descriptions than anything. (See also: Albanian sworn virgins, who are women that elect to take on the mens’ roles in their community, and would probably get parsed as trans men or butch elsewhere.) When Western culture started to be more popular, suddenly gender became way more externalised – with makeup, clothing, shoes, and so on. It wasn’t enough to be a woman, you had to look the part, and you had to look a certain way.
How do we reconcile butch/femme-ness with not imposing and colonising gender?
So I do still feel that the butch/femme thing is still problematic and oppressive in one way: it assumes a very Western-centric view of gender. I personally skew more femme, and even that is with caveats: what gets defined as "femme" in the Western queer world, especially that decoupling-from-masculinity-thing, is to me "how all the women in my Bangladeshi family act". My dad's vanity would immediately get him pegged as "femme" or "metrosexual", but back home that is exactly How You Man. It's the butchiest thing ever to care about your appearance.
Having moved internationally, I see how uneasy it is for me to be in queer community; I don't get *read* as queer, because I'm not B/F enough or Queer Uniform enough or something (to the point that I have been the target of vicious rumours), yet I can't also talk about how the whole b/f thing alienates people like me because then *I'm* the one doing the alienating. When I see babyqueers back home in Malaysia or similar they often default to _Western_ ideas of butch/femme, because that's the only language they have to parse their queerness, whether or not they actually identify with that; it seems that there is an incongruity between being queer and looking like anyone else in your country. It really does get performative.
This is slightly veering from your thesis but relates to it: I read an article some time back on the Fa'afafine people of Samoa, which are a not-exact-analogue of trans women. In the article, one of the interviewees talked about how in the old days, you didn't have to perform your gender a certain way for your gender identity to be respected: if you were AMAB, and then said you were a woman/fa'afifine – ok, great! It's your turn to do the housework. It was much more about household roles and job descriptions than anything. (See also: Albanian sworn virgins, who are women that elect to take on the mens' roles in their community, and would probably get parsed as trans men or butch elsewhere.) When Western culture started to be more popular, suddenly gender became way more externalised – with makeup, clothing, shoes, and so on. It wasn't enough to be a woman, you had to look the part, and you had to look a certain way.
How do we reconcile butch/femme-ness with not imposing and colonising gender?
I'm straight, and though I am fortunate to live in a local culture that is very diverse, I can't say I have direct experience of being butch. But I just wanted to say that you articulated so many things for me that I have always believed but been unable to express in such a succint and meaningful way. I think that everyone could do with reading this article! Thank you.
"There are no inherently “masculine” or “feminine” traits."
This is central to what I believe. It was so good to see it in print, somewhere public.
"Now, I am very much a social constructivist; I do not buy into the “born this way” notion. I do not think that butchness is somehow stamped into my DNA, and I certainly don’t believe that I have a “masculine” brain or that any such thing exists. But the seeds of my identity were definitely sown early, "
Thank you again. If you like to hug, I'd hug you so much right now 🙂 People like you make understanding humans easier.
Wow, okay that was not my intention at all. I simply mean that I know people that identify really specifically as "butch" and people that identify as "genderqueer" and that I tend not encounter very many younger (under 40) people who identify as "butch" (perhaps because of my geographic location having a limited queer community). I meant only to make a "yay this is a great coincidence" statement about timing of this essay and the butch woman I met earlier the same day. Not trying to pit anything against anything else.
I am near tears right now. I’m that girl you mentioned in the last paragraph. I’m going to go out tomorrow butched up and proud. I’ve been referring to my gender expression as “baby butch.” I’ve been so afraid to be me in my skin in the world, so thank you. Thank you for putting in to worlds so many of the feelings in have been having. And for giving me perspective that I am young, and that as I grow I will grow into myself. Again, THANK YOU for writing this <3
-T