#and im not even talking about the mistakes the butch love interest for a man thing. thats fun. it can be hot.

[partialbirthabortion]

I still have yet to find any lesbian bodice rippers outside of Tristan Taormino anthologies. I tried to pick up When Katie Met Cassidy today because at least the love interest is actually butch even though I knew the sex scenes were fade to black and it was so offensively bad that I literally returned it to the library within the hour.

[star-anise]

do you have any sources on the claims you made? im always willing to change my stance if you have legitimate backing for it haha

So first, I’m sorry for blowing up at you the way that I did. I’m not proud that I reacted in such a kneejerk, aggressive fashion. Thank you for being open to hearing what I have to say. I’m sorry for mistaking you for a TERF, and I’m sorry my response has caused other people to direct their own hostility towards you.

So, here’s the thing. “You can’t call bi women femmes” is pretty intrinsically a radfem thing to say, and I am deeply opposed to letting radfems tell me what to do. I’m trying to write this during a weekend packed with childcare and work. I’ll try to hit all the high notes.

The one thing I am having trouble finding is the longass post I talked about in my reply, that was a history of butch/femme relationships in lesbian bars, which had frequent biphobic asides and talked about “the lesbophobic myth of the bi-rejecting lesbian”; the friend who reblogged it without reading it thoroughly has deleted it, and I can’t find it on any of the tags she remembers looking at around that time. If anyone can find it, I’ll put up a link.

As far as possible, I’m linking to really widely accessible sources, because you shouldn’t intrinsically trust a random post on Tumblr as secret privileged knowledge. People have talked about this at length in reputable publications that your local library either has, or can get through interlibrary loan; you can look up any of the people here, read their work, and decide for yourself. This is a narrative of perspectives, and while I obviously have a perspective, many people disagree with me. At the end of the day, the only reason I need for calling bi women femmes is that You Are Not The Boss Of Me. There is no centralized authority on LGBT+ word usage, nor do I think there should be. Hopefully this post will give you a better sense of what the arguments are, and how to evaluate peoples’ claims in the future.

I looked up “butch” and “femme” with my library’s subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary because that’s where you find the most evidence of etymology and early use, and found:

“Femme” is the French word for “woman”.  It’s been a loanword in English for about 200 years, and in the late 19th century in America it was just a slangy word for “women”, as in, “There were lots of femmes there for the boys to dance with”

“Butch” has been used in American English to mean a tough, masculine man since the late 19th century; in the 1930s and 1940s it came to apply to a short masculine haircut, and shortly thereafter, a woman who wore such a haircut. It’s still used as a nickname for masculine cis guys–my godfather’s name is Martin, but his family calls him Butch. By the 1960s in Britain, “butch” was slang for the penetrating partner of a pair of gay men.

Butch/femme as a dichotomy for women arose specifically in the American lesbian bar scene around, enh, about the 1940s, to enh, about the 1960s. Closet-keys has a pretty extensive butch/femme history reader. This scene was predominantly working-class women, and many spaces in it were predominantly for women of colour. This was a time when “lesbian” literally meant anyone who identified as a woman, and who was sexually or romantically interested in other women. A lot of the women in these spaces were closeted in the rest of their lives, and outside of their safe spaces, they had to dress normatively, were financially dependent on husbands, etc. Both modern lesbians, and modern bisexual women, can see themselves represented in this historical period.

These spaces cross-pollinated heavily with ball culture and drag culture, and were largely about working-class POC creating spaces where they could explore different gender expressions, gender as a construct and a performance, and engage in a variety of relationships. Butch/femme was a binary, but it worked as well as most binaries to do with sex and gender do, which is to say, it broke down a lot, despite the best efforts of people to enforce it. It became used by people of many different genders and orientations whose common denominator was the need for safety and discretion. “Butch” and “femme” were words with meanings, not owners.

Lesbianism as distinct from bisexuality comes from the second wave of feminism, which began in, enh, the 1960s, until about, enh, maybe the 1980s, maybe never by the way Tumblr is going. “Radical” feminism means not just that this is a new and more exciting form of feminism compared to the early 20th century suffrage movement; as one self-identified radfem professor of mine liked to tell us every single lecture, it shares an etymology with the word “root”, meaning that sex discrimination is at the root of all oppression.

Radical feminism blossomed among college-educated women, which also meant, predominantly white, middle- or upper-class women whose first sexual encounters with women happened at elite all-girls schools or universities. Most of these women broke open the field of “women’s studies” and the leading lights of radical feminism often achieved careers as prominent scholars and tenured professors.

Radical feminism established itself as counter to “The Patriarchy”, and one of the things many early radfems believed was, all men were the enemy. All men perpetuated patriarchy and were damaging to women. So the logical decision was for women to withdraw from men in all manner and circumstances–financially, legally, politically, socially, and sexually. “Political lesbianism” wasn’t united by its sexual desire for women; many of its members were asexual, or heterosexual women who decided to live celibate lives. This was because associating with men in any form was essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.

Look, I’ll just literally quote Wikipedia quoting an influential early lesbian separatist/radical feminist commune: “The Furies recommended that Lesbian Separatists relate “only (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege” and suggest that “as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will at some point have to betray their sisters, especially Lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits”“

This cross-pollinated with the average experience of WLW undergraduates, who were attending school at a time when women weren’t expected to have academic careers; college for women was primarily seen as a place to meet eligible men to eventually marry. So there were definitely women who had relationships with other women, but then, partly due to the pressure of economic reality and heteronormativity, married men. This led to the phrase LUG, or “lesbian until graduation”, which is the kind of thing that still got flung at me in the 00s as an openly bisexual undergrad. Calling someone a LUG was basically an invitation to fight.

The assumption was that women who marry men when they’re 22, or women who don’t stay in the feminist academic sphere, end up betraying their ideals and failing to have solidarity with their sisters. Which seriously erases the many contributions of bi, het, and ace women to feminism and queer liberation. For one, I want to point to Brenda Howard, the bisexual woman who worked to turn Pride from the spontaneous riots in 1969 to the nationwide organized protests and parades that began in 1970 and continue to this day. She spent the majority of her life to a male partner, but that didn’t diminish her contribution to the LGBT+ community.

Lesbian separatists, and radical feminists, hated Butch/Femme terminology. They felt it was a replication of unnecessarily heteronormative ideals. Butch/femme existed in an LGBT+ context, where gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people understood themselves to have more in common with each other than with, say, cis feminists who just hated men more than they loved women. 

The other main stream of feminist thought at the time was Liberal Feminism, which was like, “What if we can change society without totally rejecting men?” and had prominent figures like Gloria Steinem, who ran Ms magazine. Even today, you’ll hear radfems railing against “libfems” and I’m like, my good women, liberal feminism got replaced thirty years ago. Please update your internal schema of “the enemy”

Lesbian separatism was… plagued by infighting. To maintain a “woman-only” space, they had to kick out trans women (thus, TERFs), women who slept with men (thus, biphobia), women who enjoyed kinky sex or pornography or engaged in sex work (thus, SWERFS) and they really struggled to raise their male children in a way that was… um… anti-oppressive. (I’m biased; I know people who were raised in lesbian separatist communes and did not have great childhoods.) At the same time, they had other members they very much wanted to keep, even though their behaviour deviated from the expected program, so you ended up with spectacles like Andrea Dworkin self-identifying as a lesbian despite being deeply in love with and married to a self-identified gay man for twenty years, despite beng famous for the theory that no woman could ever have consensual sex with a man, because all she could ever do was acquiesce to her own rape.

There’s a reason radical feminism stopped being a major part of the public discourse, and also a reason why it survives today: While its proponents became increasingly obsolete, they were respected scholars and tenured university professors. This meant people like Camille Paglia and Mary Daly, despite their transphobia and racism, were considered important people to read and guaranteed jobs educating young people who had probably just moved into a space where they could meet other LGBT people for the very first time. So a lot of modern LGBT people (including me) were educated by radical feminist professors or assigned radical feminist books to read in class.

The person I want to point to as a great exemplar is Alison Bechdel, a white woman who discovered she was a lesbian in college, was educated in the second-wave feminist tradition, but also identified as a butch and made art about the butch/femme dichotomy’s persistence and fluidity. You can see part of that tension in her comic; she knows the official lesbian establishment frowns on butch/femme divisions, but it’s relevant to her lived experience.

What actually replaced radical feminism was not liberal feminism, but intersectional feminism and the “Third Wave”. Black radical feminists, like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, pointed out that many white radical feminists were ignoring race as a possible cause of oppression, and failing to notice how their experiences differed from Black womens’. Which led to a proliferation of feminists talking about other oppressions they faced: Disabled feminists, Latina feminists, queer feminists, working-class feminists. It became clear that even if you eliminated the gender binary from society, there was still a lot of bad shit that you had to unlearn–and also, a lot of oppression that still happened in lesbian separatist spaces.

I’ve talked before about how working in women-only second-wave spaces really destroyed my faith in them and reinforced my belief in intersectional feminism

Meanwhile, back in the broader queer community, “queer” stuck as a label because how people identified was really fluid. Part of it is that you learn by experience, and sometimes the only way to know if something works for you is to try it out, and part of it is that, as society changed, a lot more people became able to take on new identities without as much fear. So for example, you have people like Pat Califia, who identified as a lesbian in the 70s and 80s, found far more in common with gay leather daddies than sex-negative lesbians, and these days identifies as a bisexual trans man.

Another reason radical feminists hate the word “queer”, by the way, is queer theory, which wants to go beyond the concept of men oppressing women, or straights oppressing gays, but to question this entire system we’ve built, of sex, and gender, and orientation. It talks about “queering” things to mean “to deviate from heteronormativity” more than “to be homosexual”. A man who is married to a woman, who stays at home and raises their children while she works, is viewed as “queer” inasmuch as he deviates from heteronormativity, and is discriminated against for it.

So, I love queer theory, but I will agree that it can be infuriating to hear somebody say that as a single (cis het) man he is “queer” in the same way being a trans lesbian of colour is “queer”, and get very upset and precious about being told they’re not actually the same thing. I think that actually, “queer as a slur” originated as the kind of thing you want to scream when listening to too much academic bloviating, like, “This is a slur! Don’t reclaim it if it didn’t originally apply to you! It’s like poor white people trying to call themselves the n-word!” so you should make sure you are speaking about a group actually discriminated against before calling them “queer”. On the other hand, queer theory is where the theory of “toxic masculinity” came from and we realized that we don’t have to eliminate all men from the universe to reduce gender violence; if we actually pay attention to the pressures that make men so shitty, we can reduce or reverse-engineer them and encourage them to be better, less sexist, men.

But since radfems and queer theorists are basically mortal enemies in academia, radical feminists quite welcomed the “queer as a slur” phenomenon as a way to silence and exclude people they wanted silenced and excluded, because frankly until that came along they’ve been losing the culture wars.

This is kind of bad news for lesbians who just want to float off to a happy land of only loving women and not getting sexually harrassed by men. As it turns out, you can’t just turn on your lesbianism and opt out of living in society. Society will follow you wherever you go. If you want to end men saying gross things to lesbians, you can’t just defend lesbianism as meaning “don’t hit on me”; you have to end men saying gross things to all women, including bi and other queer women.  And if you do want a lesbian-only space, you either have to accept that you will have to exclude and discriminate against some people, including members of your community whose identities or partners change in the future, or accept that the cost of not being a TERF and a biphobe is putting up with people in your space whose desires don’t always resemble yours.

Good god, this got extensive and I’ve been writing for two hours.

So here’s the other thing.

My girlfriend is a femme bi woman. She’s married to a man.

She’s also married to two women.

And dating a man.

And dating me (a woman).

When you throw monogamy out the window, it becomes EVEN MORE obvious that “being married to a man” does not exclude a woman from participation in the queer community as a queer woman, a woman whose presentation is relevant in WLW contexts. Like, this woman is in more relationships with women at the moment than some lesbians on this site have been in for their entire lives.

You can start out with really clear-cut ideas about “THIS is what my life is gonna be like” but then your best friend’s sexual orientation changes, or your lover starts to transition, and things in real life are so much messier than they look when you’re planning your future. It’s easy to be cruel, exclusionary, or dismissive to people you don’t know; it’s a lot harder when it’s people you have real relationships with.

And my married-to-a-man girlfriend? Uses “butch” and “femme” for reasons very relevant to her queerness and often fairly unique to femme bi women, like, “I was out with my husband and looking pretty femme, so I guess they didn’t clock me as a queer” or “I was the least butch person there, so they didn’t expect me to be the only one who uses power tools.” Being a femme bi woman is a lot about invisibility, which is worth talking about as a queer experience instead of being assumed to exclude us from the queer community.

[groundramon]

Statement

I didnt want to write this but I’m too fucking tired to respond to anymore people who go into my ask box. I’ve already gotten 4. Leave me alone. Also I apologize for not censoring @ ‘s.  Obviously, do not send hate to anyone.  Because I, unlike Peri, do not endorse that.  Your white knighting will not hurt Peri and it will not help me - it will just help Peri feel more justified.  So seriously, to any of my friends/mutuals/followers reading this - do not.

DISCLAIMER: I knew peri back when he still used they/them pronouns. If I ever accidentally refer to him with those pronouns, please don’t hone in on that, but please DO tell me about my mistake so I can go and fix that. This is not an excuse, its still wrong of me to do and i apologize if I accidentally do it anywhere in this post - it is an explanation and an invitation to hold me accountable without using it to destroy the whole point of my post.

DISCLAIMER #2: there is a lot of nuances to our relationship that I will never be able to describe in text. Such as the fact that as little kids, Peri and our other friends were the ones who “corrupted” my sense of humor (not in a problematic way, I was just a really naive little kid). We always made jokes about me being the least mature out of the group despite being the oldest.

DISCLAIMER #3: Yes, I made mistakes. No, I did not put out a callout about Peri “just to start shit”.  I have apologized for my mistakes and learned better, and would be happy to write another apology genuinely outlining what I did wrong if Peri didn’t lie about me at every given opportunity.

I never put a callout on Peri until now.  Maybe once when this first happened, i told people to unfollow him...I genuinely cant remember.  I know I added him to my carrd as DNI, but he did it first, and I did it in response to that.  And I removed it long ago.  He also mocked me for calling him my abuser after one of his friends block evaded me to tell me to fuck off, and I found out said friend did that because Peri had been calling me “a danger to minors”, a racist (Peri is white and kept making Hetalia jokes up to a few months before we stopped being friends even though literally I never did) and a lesbophobe (ok peri is a lesbian), and more important, accusing me of stalking.  His definition of stalking was to check his twitter profile obsessively.  I know he did this to me, because he mentioned one of my discourse threads about SPOP and misrepresented my argument (he said I called Catra abusive - I called Catradora toxic and clarified that Catra is not an abuser).  I’m not here to debate the definition of stalking, but heres the thing - at that point, it had been...I think 3 months after we broke off?  And I hadnt checked his twitter since a week after we broke up.  Literally.  I’m sure I have no way of proving that now, OVER A YEAR LATER, but it’s true. I have proof about the hetalia joke.  It was literally just a joke about my piccrews looking like America.  But considering years ago, Peri (and our shared abuser who I dont plan on discussing very much publicly for obvious reasons) were the ones who got me into Hetalia, it hits a very sore spot with me to call me a racist right alongside our shared abuser who would go by japanese names for the ~aesthetic~.  And thats the thing throughout all of this - did I do wrong by Peri? Absolutely, and I’m not going to remember everything flawlessly either. I’m not a flawless person and we were friends for like 7 years.  But Peri is acting like he’s never done anything wrong in his life.

He also has a pattern of doing this - he accused me and his ex-friend Rainy (me and Rainy are friends) of making fun of our abuser’s art constantly and probably now making fun of Peri’s art constantly (we did make fun of the abuser’s art, but tbh it was gallows humor, and still not something I’m proud of.  I have literally never made fun of Peri’s art.  In fact, it makes me feel awful that I have a pit in my stomach whenever I see it, because I always enjoyed Peri’s unique art style up until the day we split.)  He’s hurt so, SO many other people too.  I can think of 13 just off the top of my head.  The person who block evaded me to yell at me about something I literally never did?  Literally went through the same shit me and Rainy did.  Most of these people are not going to like me, and yet I could probably ask for their testimony and it would match my experience very closely, except the key difference being Peri gave up on them already.

Peri talked about me THREE TIMES in the last week (I believe - I didnt check dates and i literally found peri’s account accidentally while going through chicken smoothie. yes, it was my choice to scroll down and look for my name, but i was like, the second post on his tumblr and i was just trying to see if the posts were recent or old bc i thought he was inactive on here.

Here are all of the posts in case he deletes them - sorry I dont have timestamps, he went private so I cant get evidence, obviously.

Admittedly, the last one is pretty understandable, I feel the same way going through my old shit and seeing Peri’s posts/art/etc. But two times after that? But no I’m the one for starting shit, even though I can disprove both of this posts.

For that first post:

1. I didn’t debate shit, I asked a question because I saw a bi woman bring up a good point about why bi women shouldn’t be allowed to use butch/femme.  Admittedly, asking your closest (not only! just closest) lesbian friend about all lesbian issues is kind of a dick move, but I was just trying to figure out how to argue against that point so I could support my lesbian friends.  Now I realize that it’s wrong of me to bother getting involved on either side and I should just support my lesbian friends and their voices instead of getting directly involved.  Yes, I was wrong, but i did not argue with a lesbian about whether or not butch/femme can be used by nonlesbians, I was ASKING A QUESTION.

2. I was trying to be a supportive friend. He was crushing on Rainy - who was identifying as a gay (trans) man at the time by the way, but I only ever see Peri use this as evidence for me being lesbophobic, not homophobic and transphobic.  Gee I wonder why?  Oh right, it’s because Peri hates Rainy and doesn’t care.  Anyways, yes, it was wrong of me.  At the time I didn’t understand a lot about comphet so I was just trying to be supportive.  I do think I expressed relief when Peri said he and Rainy had broken up and realized their feelings were platonic, as i was confused about the whole situation.  I was trying not to gatekeep Peri from his own damn community, because I’m not going to tell him his feelings are invalid when I’m not a lesbian.  You cant get mad at me for policing lesbian labels, and then not policing lesbian labels enough- what??  I don’t think I did anything wrong per say in this situation because I was telling white lies to be a good friend but I do know better now and try to emphasize that “and if you find out its comphet and you’re still a lesbian then thats totally valid!!!” and in fact I even think I did that at the time??

Both of these instances (I believe) are buried on an old server that I no longer have access to.  It’s possible they still exist.  But I didn’t think this thing with Peri would last well over a year later so I didn’t bother documenting any of it.  If peri has the screenshots, I would love to see it.  This is not sarcasm, I genuinely want to be informed what I did wrong.  I have a lot of great friends now and I would hate to hurt them by repeating mistakes I don’t even remember making.  I can’t learn if I’m not informed.  Once again, this is not sarcasm, irony, or passive aggressive.  This is genuine.  All I ever asked from Peri was to talk to me.

These are the last messages we exchanged before Peri’s goodbye message.  This is what our relationship was like.  And do NOT fucking tell me “Peri is clearly uncomfortable” - I’m autistic, Peri is neurodivergent, I do NOT read into subtext.  I have an anxiety disorder and will literally never be able to function if I read into everything as passive aggressive.  My autism does not excuse abusive behavior - but if you do not tell me about this behavior, which Peri never did, I can never get better.  I do not read that “im fine” as a silent plead for me to leave him alone when he literally was always talking about how annoyed he was by people overanalyzing his responses, seeing hostility where there was none, and he specifically said not to read into short replies as anything personal.  He said he had compassion fatigue.  Which is why I left him be until I had no choice.

The last vent I mentioned said “Shitty friends, shitty friends” on his private twitter.  I was worried it was about me and Rainy, because I figured if it wasnt, he would’ve told us who it was about.  And he never did.  So I’m pretty sure it was about us.  After disappearing for the day and making me and Rainy worried that he was suicidal, he sent us this goodbye message in our mutual server (which the only reason i have this is because i sent it to another friend because i didnt know how to feel and needed guidance)

This goodbye letter, despite seeming nice on the surface, blamed the trauma that me and Rainy faced as well as our particular interests for Peri leaving us.  One of my boundaries in our friendship was to tell me if anything was wrong so I could improve it and be a better person, and Peri broke that trust.  He was absolutely a shitty friend in that regard.  But just this goodbye letter I would’ve bought despite being disappointed...if he hadn’t called us shitty before.

By the way, at the time, the only thing I could think this would be about was not trusting Peri’s gut about some randos.  Rainy and I wanted to give those people a fair shot, and Peri accused us of not trusting him because of it.  You do not get to dictate who your friends do and dont hang out with, and you dont get to guilt trip them for hanging out with someone who has literally done nothing to you except act a little bit too much like our shared abuser Moony, wtf?

Peri also accused me of saying he and Moony were the same, when I did no such thing.  Rainy did!  And I immediately chastized Rainy for it, clarifying that I thought they were two different beasts entirely.

I forgot what I was talking about uhhh.  Oh yeah!

I’m not the one still talking about you over a year later.  I’ve moved on.  Remove me from your DNFI.  I didn’t remove you from mine because I realized I was the abuser and you were the victim - I removed you because I’m fucking done with this situation.  I only brought it up with your friend because you LITERALLY BLAMED MY INTERESTS AT THE TIME IN YOUR FAKE-ASS APOLOGY.  And what were me and Rainy talking about a bunch at the time?  Digimon!!  Aka the person who I talked to’s special interest!  I told them I would fuck off if they asked and I encouraged them to talk to you about it and have a genuine conversation.  Because I, unlike you, am a good person who lets people come to their own conclusions.

Also, you were 2 weeks away from being 16, and I was a few months into being 18.  Here are some of our conversations about becoming QPPs!

Should I have entered a QPR with my 7+ year friend who literally shaped me into who I am today when they were almost 16 and I was already several months into being 18?  Probably not!  But adulthood isn’t just some switch that goes off, and I was a dumbass.  Peri’s current GF is apparently being accused of being a predator, or something, according to one of Peri’s other posts?  I dont know whats happening because im not! a fucking! stalker! but Peri of all people should know what it’s like to have a small age gap blown into something bigger than it is.  Peri and I’s relationship didn’t change a whole lot after becoming QPPs - we were still close friends.  But after literally growing up with Peri, I didn’t realize that I needed to enact healthy boundaries with someone so young when they were the one who used to “troll” me when we were kids (AKA pretend to be mad at me or pretend to be someone else and then say “haha just kidding!” just to cause problems).

Peri has clearly built me up to be some kind of villain in his head.  And that’s fine, I really don’t care.  I go months without thinking of Peri, and he’s just a bad memory whenever I do think of him - well until I found out he’s calling me a pedophile and accusing me of making callouts that I never did and generally has been a pot calling the white marble countertop grey for the past year or so.  But I dont care.  I DONT CARE.

But if you want me to stop warning people about you, its simple.  Stop spreading lies about me.  Take my name out of your public vocabulary.  Take me and Rainy off your DNFI.  I do not think about you, I do not talk to people about you very often, most of my current friends didn’t know the things you did until today because I had no reason to tell them.

For anyone uninitiated - all you need to know is that this person’s tumblr title is “an aphobic [reclaimable slur]” and so by admission they like to harass other minorities for fun.  Seriously, you don’t have to be an ace inclusionist or even believe aphobia is real to just be a nice person, what the fuck?  This post in particular is extremely telling.

Also they retweeted a post from someone with the username “panphobe” so.

Just a few notes.  Hope the asexual who stans a literal stated aphobe gets tired of licking that boot soon.  And Peri too.  Your obsession with me is more unhealthy to you than it is to me.  Just...drop it.  I will only add to this if more accusations are thrown my way.   I am done with you.  You have a repeated behavior of this shit, and I want to add more things but they’re heresay from other people so I don’t feel comfortable adding them.  But yeah.  Stop hurting people.  Stop bullying people and being angry and aggressive for fun.  You’re not as cute as you think you are.  There’s a reason this shit keeps happening to you.  Get better soon.

As for me, I think I’ll spend the next three months going back to forgetting you exist.  I liked it there.  But you can keep thinking I’m stalking you if you’d like.  I have all the proof and evidence I need that you’re a fucking liar right here.  And most of your tweets accusing me of shit are deleted too.  Now leave me the fuck alone.

PS, even if aroaces arent oppressed, sending them hate messages based on something they cant control is really shitty :) its not like we’re still a minority group or anything!  I’m also literally trans, so you’re proving the fact that the bad exclusionists always target other LGBTs who happen to be aspec for their harassment :) but keep it going keep it going, every spiteful message sent to me specifically because im aspec and part of the LGBT community just fuels my agenda.