The Sartorial Butch

I’m very grateful to beelisty for pointing me toward The Sartorial Butch, a really fun blog for, of course, well-dressed butches. SB is smart and funny and has great, butch-specific (and general) style advice. Check it out.

A Note On Male Privilege And “Passing”

Some quick thoughts spurred by recent posts over at Rebecca’s…

If this is male privilege — seeing things from the perspective of the male “gazer,” thereby failing to fully empathize with a female “gazee” — then there is some extent to which I have it; I could easily have made the mistake Rebecca did, and have, more or less.

I have male (masculine) privilege in other ways, too — people tend to respect my personal space, I don’t get catcalled or similarly hassled, people listen to what I say. I noticed a definite shift when, all those years ago, I first cut my hair short, and I’ve noticed a deeper, though subtler, shift now, as I’m more and more often read as male,** and more and more seen as closer to being “one of the guys” than “one of the girls” by my friends.

[**Just for the record, when dealing with strangers I seem to get male pronouns maybe a quarter of the time, that is, of the time that I get pronouns at all, which isn't that often, given how circumscribed such interactions are. I have no idea how many of the pronoun-free interactions have me gendered male, and I definitely get some long looks as people try to figure it out. I'm being perceived as female a majority of the time, no doubt, but that 25% or so has a pretty huge impact on my experience given that most adults get read as the other sex, what, less than 1% of the time? Never?]

I can’t deny that most of these things make me happy; I’ve worked pretty hard for them. But I wish they didn’t come with a negative flip-side for more feminine women. At the same time, many of them have negative side effects for me, too, since I’m not actually male — I don’t get catcalled, but I do get harassed for being a dyke. People tend to automatically respect my personal space, but that doesn’t stop them from making stupid, puzzled comments about my gender. And I live in anxious anticipation of the day when being read as male isn’t just a fun affirmation of my presentation. It’s all well and good to get a “he” or a “sir” in the checkout line, in hallways, etc.; what happens when I get one in a public bathroom? What happens when a cashier calls me “young man” and then notices the name on my credit card?

You Are Here

I don’t feel male and certainly cannot say I’ve always felt that way, but these days being a woman feels like an old car I can’t sell, can’t give away, and there is no bus, there is no train, so I just keep fixing it and fixing it. I love this car because we’ve been so many places together, I’ve had it for so long, I had my first kiss in it maybe, it belonged to my mother before me, and there are whole weeks and even months when everything works, it takes me everywhere I need to go and I even like it, like the look of it. But then goddamn it’s gone and broken down again and this time late at night in a bad neighborhood, and this time in the middle of an intersection, and this time by the side of the highway so far out of cell phone reach I’m going to have to wait and wait and hope that someone saves me.

I don’t feel like a man but I don’t feel like a woman either, and these days it feels like a waiting game, “How long can she last this way?” And I have no idea what to do here. Make peace? Revolt? I’d like a rulebook. I’d like a map with clear, bold lines dividing each thing from the others, and a big yellow arrow, YOU ARE HERE. I’d like to know exactly what is possible. Can I live this way? Can I live this way my whole life? I’d like you to put me through to your manager. I’d like to talk to someone who can answer my questions.

Like is it normal to feel like your sex is a freaky accident you do your best to accept? Should you then accept it, or refuse to? Should you change it? Would the other one be any better? Is it an old car you should take to the junkyard? Or is it an in-law, a relative you learn to love although you didn’t choose them?

Everything You Know About Lesbianism Is Wrong

This is a smorgasbord sort of post.

I recently read Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity and loved it. I am deeply grateful to Halberstam for documenting the reality that female masculinity has a lineage, a long history, and I smiled at how similar some of those historical accounts are to mine.

I also have to admit I found some of the defunct frameworks of identity to be more accurate than the ones we have now, identities like “female husband” that are based on an eroticism of female masculinity and gender (role) difference, or “invert,” the masculine, female-assigned person who partners with the feminine, female “bisexual” — designations that catelogue a diversity of experiences instead of collapsing everyone into the class “lesbian.”

That conflation of dozens of identities with each other under the “lesbian” heading is really a strange thing. Why, why do we have one measly word that’s supposed to be able to stretch to describe the experiences of, say, butch dykes who like femmes, femmes who like queer masculinity in the form of butches, bois, queer guys, etc., androdykes who only like other androdykes, and separatists for whom lesbianism is largely political ideology?

Which brings me back to what I was talking about in the last post: the legend I’m using to read the map of my body is totally different from the one most women use, different from the one I use to read other women’s bodies, so there is nothing of the mutuality, the reciprocity, the sameness that is supposed to characterize lesbian sex in my life. I’m mad as hell that all the lives of others like me have been erased, subsumed into the hostile and highly politicized feminist construction of what love between female-assigned people should be, never mind what it is.

And similarly, I laughed, bitterly, reading the following passage:

For [FtM theorist Henry] Rubin, the division that is most meaningful is between transsexuals and transgenders: “Although it is often assumed that ‘transgender’ is an umbrella term that refers to cross-dressers, drag queens, butch dykes, gender blenders, and transsexuals, among others, there is a tension between transsexuals and transgenders.” For Rubin, the tension lies between the transsexuals quest for “‘home,’ a place of belonging to one sex or the other,” and the transgender quest for “a world without gender.” (Halberstam 166)

If it’s not one thing it’s the fucking other. Either feminists are kicking butches out of the women’s movement for aping patriarchy and being too invested in gender, or transsexuals are kicking butches out of their movement for not being invested enough, for wanting a world without it.

Some Thoughts On The Labels I’m Using: “(Transgender) Butch (Woman)”

(The usual caveat: I’m talking about myself here, nothing more. Please don’t construe this as a comment on your journey, identity, or gender.)

I decided awhile back that I officially identify as transgender; this post explains why, and what that means to me.

First, to be clear, my primary identity, gender wise, is butch. In terms of significance and the kind of statement I want to make, my identity is something like “(transgender) butch (woman).” Both parenthetical terms are critically important, but they’re both also ancillary in that, in my case, their tenor and tone can only be conveyed in conjunction with “butch.”

I affiliate with “transgender” both as an acknowledgement that butch identity falls under that umbrella, and as a modifier to butch, an adjective that more specifically locates the kind of butch that I am. In a sea of descriptors like “soft” and “stone,” I don’t want to describe my butchness in terms of differences of degree or what I do and don’t do in bed. I disavow, as a concept, the idea that some butch-identified people are more butch than others — I favor a conversation about differences in culture, attitude and style over differences in intensity, authenticity or realness.

So what transgender does here is articulate the particular tensions inherent in my gender. When I pair “transgender” with “butch (woman),” my intention is to indicate a queer, masculine gender that happens on a cissexual female body. What does it mean to be transgender and cissexual?

It means that I identify with my female body, so long as its a landscape I can chart with a butch cartography. It means that the legend I’m using to read the map of my body is totally different from the one most women use, indeed different from the one I generally use to read other women’s bodies. It means that I’m happy with my female chest, both bound (in public) and loose (in private), and that I use that word, chest instead of breasts. In an entirely different way, I appreciate my girlfriend’s breasts, and use words like that for them. Same factory model; different diagram. Different handbook. It means I have putatively lesbian sex that is not symmetrical, that is not directly reciprocal, because my body is not the same, conceptually or experientially, as most other women’s bodies.

Butch/Fag: Some Thoughts On Passing, Limits & Masculinity

I am still thinking about the language we use to describe our identities, specifically the language we use to talk about queer (trans)masculinity. That is, I’m still thinking about the use of the word “butch” versus the word “fag.”

As I said in my last post, I think (and Ariel agrees) that the appeal of words like “fag” for people who aren’t exactly fags is that they explicitly bypass the macho contest. They refer to non-passing masculinity that fails the test because it disagrees with the question.

On the other hand, there is a sense that “butch” very much subscribes to such standards — that in order to use the word, one must enter herself in a high-stakes pass/fail macho contest of Real Butchness. “Fag” seems wide open by comparison. Even S. Bear Bergman thinks so.

There’s also the fact that some people we might classify as dykes (who in fact have a range of identities) have lived experiences that are sometimes closer to those of gay men. People who, whatever their identities, are widely perceived as masculine/male, who partner with other masculine/male people, are likely to be read as gay men and to experience the special serving of bashing and bigotry reserved for, well, faggots — for people who break masculinity’s most basic taboo by having sex and falling in love with other male/masculine people. In addition, some dykes’ appearances may be most often parsed as “faggot” rather than “butch dyke,” because their particular blend of gender cues adds up, in the eyes of onlookers, to “feminine man” more often than it adds up to “masculine woman.”

This largely explains who I side so squarely with “butch” to describe my gender: I’m only attracted to femmes. I can’t predict the future, of course, but I can say with as much certainty as is possible for a person that my attractions are to feminine (queer) women alone. It’s femmes who make my heart melt, my knees weaken, my head turn, and it’s been that way all my life. I’ve never had so much as a proper crush on a butch or any other manner of masculine creature. So although I’m in some ways effeminate and do my best to reject macho posturing, my masculinity is in no sense faggotry because it just doesn’t break that particular interdiction.

Another, stranger angle on it is that I think I sort of want that macho contest, those rules. I don’t want to leave anyone out unfairly, shame people about their genders, have some people be “real butches” and others not, have winners and losers, etc. — not at all. At the same time, if I’m honest with myself, there is an extent to which I want my gender to be something I have to work at, something defined and specific, something I have to achieve in addition to something that I am. This was one of the major reasons I knew femininity wasn’t right for me; I had no interest whatsoever in engaging in the various ventures of femininity, but I knew I wanted to work at something, in the way I saw my male peers working at becoming men.

A Note On Pronouns

Just for the record, my official policy is to use feminine pronouns (she & her) as the neutral when writing sentences about hypothetical people or people in general, i.e. “One ought to brush her teeth twice a day.” I sometimes vary from this when the implication would be somehow off or when it would draw more attention to sexism to use masculine pronouns. When referring to a particular person, I of course use her preferred pronoun whenever possible (that is, whenever I know what it is), or gender neutral pronouns (ze & hir) when I have no idea.

Feel free to use this thread to air any thoughts you may have about gender pronouns, proper protocol for referring to (hypothetical/general) persons of unspecific sex (he, she, s/he, he or she, they, ze?), your preferred gender pronoun, your thoughts about gender-neutral pronouns (the singular they? ze & hir or something else?), how you tackle these issues in your writing and speech, etc., etc.

I use feminine pronouns, but I get masculine ones pretty regularly (the frequency is only increasing) and they don’t bother me a bit.

A Review Of The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, Or, S. Bear Bergman’s Identity & Me

I’m about halfway into The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, the latest book by the inimitable S. Bear Bergman. To be honest, as much as I’ve been looking forward to starting it — as demonstrated by the fact that I’ve done nothing but read it since it came in the mail today — I was also nervous as hell. One way or another I knew there had been various changes in Bergman’s life since Butch Is A Noun, and given how important that book is to me, how much space it made in my world, I felt protective, wary of letting anything (yes, preposterously enough, even the author), change what Butch Is A Noun is for me. How could I go on living as a butch when the person who convinced me I could start in the first place may have changed hir mind? Narcissistic as it is, I was very afraid of what the book might tell about myself, what it might say about me.

I dove in despite my fears and so far have not been at all disappointed. Bergman’s thoughts on gender and Jewishness resonate with me completely, and my worst fear — that Bergman’s move away from butch identity would somehow have implications for my identity — hasn’t been born out in the slightest. Instead, reading about Bergman’s reasons for moving from somewhere around butch dyke to somewhere around trans guy and fag clarified for me why I do belong in the former space and why I don’t belong in the latter. (A question that has, of course, been on my mind.)

After talking about the ways ze has never been a “real butch” — no taste for beer, no skills in the trades, attraction to other butches — Bergman writes:

When I finally stepped back and looked at the pieces, trying to figure out which gender really seemed like the best fit, the one most satisfyingly for me, I kept circling back to faggotry. Queer men can be fashionable and cry while simultaneously being burly and wearing suits. [...] No queer man has ever looked at me funny when I said I collected vintage cufflinks. [...] For a long time I said that I was definitely never going to transition to male, because I wouldn’t be any better at being Man than I was at being Woman; that if I transitioned I would have to buy tutus, so I might as well save the money and be a gender outlaw in my original sex and butch gender. [...]

But I didn’t quite stay there. Party, I couldn’t seem to make my point about butch as a gender, and people kept insisting I was a butch woman or, more problematically, a butch lesbian. More than one charming femme actually said to me, “I’m so glad you’re staying a lesbian,” and each time my heart sank; each time I felt like I had been erased. (Bergman 71)

The clarity and honesty of this passage came as a great, if selfish, relief to me, because, hey! I don’t have any of those problems!

Nouveau Butch

I just now stumbled across this site, and I am so excited about it. How had I not seen this before? Nouveau Butch seems a lot like The Art of Manliness for butches, at long last.

I haven’t explored it enough to have a real comment on it yet, but I’m very much looking forward to doing so. I don’t see how I couldn’t love a blog that declares that the Nouveau Butch the perfect gentleman meets Ms Manners. Hell yes.

Tinkerbell & Superdyke

Via this great and hilarious post at Alas, I’ve discovered that Disney has a new butch character! Impossible you say? Well, actually, yes; the character in question is Tinkerbell (least butch character ever?) and the uproar is over her new autumn wardrobe.

Yes, that is “Tinkerbell gone butch.”

If that’s the baseline for pearl-clutching levels of female masculinity, I guess I can stop worrying about being butch enough and go ahead and claim the title of superdyke.