#I’m happy with my genderqueer gender identity rn

[scared-robot]

I wish my lungs were good enough to occasionally bind, but also it’s probably good because I feel like the Trans Realization I’ve kept partially stomped down will pop fully out and I don’t have the bandwidth, money, or anything else to deal with that realization.

[a-flickering-soul]

feel free to ignore this but i recently discovered myself to be a lesbian and i’m a bit confused about femme and butch. is there a specific definition for them? or is it more of something vague like gender?

Hi!! First off--congratulations on realizing you were a lesbian! Welcome! I am so happy for you that you made that discovery! Congrats!!!

I am going to make an obligatory disclaimer here that I am far from the end-all be-all of butch/femme identity--this is all just going to be from my own knowledge/experience, and I'm too sleepy rn to cite my sources.

Femme and butch are in my opinion a little more vague since they are entire identities in and of themselves. Definitely you can approach them as meaning "feminine lesbian" and "masculine lesbian" and just leave it as that, but in my opinion and in my experience I have found both butch and femme to be their own forms of gender, societal, and sexual identities. They are most often seen as identities that pair with each other and compliment each other-- a relationship born out of the beauty of differences.

Certainly there are femmes that are feminine in a conventional, cishetero-white way. There are also femmes that look masculine, femmes that are feminine in decolonized ways, femmes that are genderqueer. The same may be said for butches-- there are butches that are masculine in a conventional way, butches that are feminine, butches that are masculine in a genderfucking way, butches that are masculine in a nonwhite way. There is no one singular way to look femme or butch, but in my experience it is more of a way you carry yourself and a way in which you interact with other femmes and butches. Many may (and have) perceived me in a more masculine sense who were not queer, and I still consider myself femme, because of the way I comport myself and the way I interact with my community.

This is a very long way to answer your question-- my ultimate answer is no! There is no specific definition for them, as far as I know. To me, butch and femme identities are a mix of presentation, genderfucking, deconstruction of the heteropatriarchal society we live in, and red hot lesbian sex. So I guess in that sense they are more like gender identities, where each identity is unique to the person constructing it.

There's many better places to find more about butch/femme identity and culture-- I thoroughly recommend going through @goldxnfemme's wonderful 'sharing the knowledge series' tag, as well as reading 'The Persistent Desire', 'Stone Butch Blues' (mind the warnings for graphic rape, police brutality, homo/transphobia, and racism), and 'Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme', if you're interested in learning more in a better way that's not me exhausted at 7:08pm.

[miss-n-the-lesbienne]

2, 18, 20, 26?

2) How did you discover your sexuality, tell your story?

Eeeeeh I started questioning my straightness when I was around 13 (maybe even before), when I was a little kid I didn’t even know girls could be gay lmao. I went through a few labels during my teenage years, I identified as questioning, then bi, then sapphic, then lesbian. It took me a long time to figure out that I wasn’t attracted to men at all, because I had a lot of crushes and male fictional characters (I still do sometimes now, but much less often). What confirmed that I was attracted to girls was that HUGE crush on a girl from art class that I had when I was around 16-17 (I never told her lol) and I figured out that I wasn’t attracted to guys because when I tried to imagine myself dating a guy, it would always be a fictional character, but when I tried to imagine myself dating a girl, even if I had no specific person in mind, I imagined a real person. Honestly now I’m really glad that I’m more confident in my orientation, I don’t like being questioning, which is what is happening with my gender rn but that’s another story.

18) What is your favourite lgbt+ book?

I tried really hard to find one but I don’t think I’ve ever read a good lgbt+ book (or maybe I forgot). There’s this comic called “The Infinite Loop” that was pretty good with two sapphic main characters and a genderqueer kid too ; I do have some issues with it though.

20) Your Favorite lgbt+ movie or show?

Right now I think it’s She-Ra. Scorpia is a disaster lesbian and must be protected and Catra deserves a happy gay ending. My favorite lgbt+ movie’s probably Thelma, it has everything I love : horror, fantasy, and lesbians. It also has a happy ending and I recommend it to everyone who likes that sort of stuff.

26) What identity advice would you give your younger self?

You are not attracted to guys. That guy you think is handsome? You’re not attracted to him. And it’s fine, you’ll feel so much more liberated once you accept that.