#anyway butch femme realness

[finalgirlfailure]

Bumblebee tf is like a woman to me

[vividbaddogs]

my hot take is that if xie lian was a lesbian she'd be butch

[waitineedaname]

mxtx characters who, in my humble butch opinion, should be butch

Luo Binghe: listen. look me in the eyes. in a genderswap situation, Binghe should get to be butch. one of the key themes in SVSSS is gender, and one of the things that distinguishes SVSSS!Binghe from PIDW!Binghe is that he's not the hypermasculine protagonist and instead is allowed to enjoy more feminine things (like being Shizun's housewife). that's why he's specifically called Bing-mei and it's also why im on my transfemme Binghe soapbox all the time, but that's a whole other topic. what im saying is if we're reversing the gender situation, then fem!Binghe in SVSSS should get to enjoy more masculine things. it's what she deserves. she strikes me as the kind of butch that gets a thrill out of doing gentlemanly things like giving SQQ her coat when she's cold. she should be the Bing-di to PIDW's Bing-jie

Shang Qinghua: this one is deeply self-indulgent projection but don't fucking worry about that okay. SQH is a very specific flavor of low effort butch nerd. SQH is the cookie monster pajamas to butch pipeline. SQH cuts her own hair with regular scissors for convenience and Shen Yuan is dying to get her to just buy some goddamn clippers. SQH is running off of four red bulls and spite. She inexplicably has game and she's just as confused about this as you are

Xie Lian: imagine this for me. you go to one of those volunteering events where you're cleaning trash out of a creek or something. there is a woman there in cargo pants or maybe overalls, something with a shit ton of pockets. she has not shaved in months, maybe years. her hair is in the messiest bun possible, or maybe tied back under a baseball cap. she is somehow the most beautiful woman you've ever seen. after taking away all the trash and informing everyone how to sort the recycling, she is picked up by another woman who appears to be the definition of high camp. you leave this encounter feeling like you might have been converted to something. perhaps to lesbianism. this is what an encounter with butch Xie Lian is like.

[snixx]

good GOD can we stop gendering everything. I swear some of y'all just took the futch scale and decided to run with it as gender roles 2.0 (yassified edition)

[perfectlyripeclementine]

idk why i thought of this today but something that basically dissolved various identity crises for me is to think about sex & gender as things i do rather than things i am.

this is why the only label that feels comfortable to me really is queer. it’s really broad. it could mean anything.

i find other labels kinda break down if i look at them too closely. woman? like sure, in that i experience the pay gap, but also not really. trans? sure, in that i’m not cis, but i also don’t rly feel like i’m transitioning. lesbian? sure, i feel like i partake in lesbian culture and i’ve not been dating cis men for a while. but i do occasionally feel attracted to them. bisexual? sure, but a lot of people (both in & outside of the queer community) hear that and they think it means like, queer lite, easy mode. all of these definitions vary and i totally understand why it can be super affirming to find a label that fits right but ultimately, for me, trying to find a Definition for my Identity(tm) always ends up going down these super semantic wormholes that honestly … don’t feel super important.

what’s more useful to me than having a Certified Gender(tm) is finding what makes me feel gender. in no particular order, a list of things that feel absolutely gender: velvet, in general, and especially on a blazer; layered necklaces; a particular ring; short skorts; when someone bites into food i’ve cooked and they enjoy it; writing in a notebook i’ve almost finished.

it is a lot easier to define myself by things i do (or wear or choose) than to try and articulate some sort of innate authentic self.

it also kind of nixes a lot insecurity from often hearing the wrong name or pronouns. like … you can she/her me all you want but the strap felt pretty real when my partner was coming on it the other night. 🤷

so yeah. idk who needs to hear this but you Do Not Need labels if the process of finding one is spinning you in circles. you can just like, live here & vibe.

[cowdragons]

hmm

[boingopilled69]

i think a big reason why i hate the term masc as a “replacement” of butch is cause it’s like. damn you strayed up neutered the term butch. by god you took his BALLS. for the comfort of the public of all things. literally disgusting

[blueberrycowboy]

i’m the first bisexual lesbian because i like butches and femmes

[vamptoll]

Mad about political lesbianism again, it will happen again, ok, so

For class I was presenting the week of queer identities and one of the readings was Walters "Why can't a woman be more like a fag". And I had to keep correcting people on basic concepts of what she's actually talking about.

Like her argument is queer theory is bad because it's associated with gay men, and so many people nodded their head and said of course that must be her thesis, and she's a lesbian, so she's defending lesbianism against gay men. and then I had to sit there and explain that she's not talking about gay men in the article.

The list of things she hates in the article is Butch/Femme, Dildos, and On Our Backs. And like I understand that the straight people might not have understood the context, but even a fellow homo didn't get that she was talking about lesbians?

Like the reason why poli Les sucks is it takes a straight women's ideals about lesbianism and defines that as Lesbianism! This woman can write an article about how much she hates lesbians and everyone in the room says "Wow, she must be really dedicated to saving lesbians" because no one else knows what Lesbianism even means I guess.

And Walters is allowed to write her article, it's FINE, but what's frustrating is that bc so few people actually know what dykes do, her vision of lesbianism becomes everyone's ideas bc she's a professional author who gets published in magazines. And that just sucks?

[boygirlswag]

i wanna be a butch househusband. doing all the chores for my husband or wife, saying baby no let me take care of that youve had a hard day at work do you want anything from the store? i got you those snacks you like, here ill go get you a bowl, make you some tea while im up. nah you take it easy i already took out the trash. things like that. and having a lil side job so i can buy them tickets to the concert theyve been wanting to see, or that jacket they've been thinking about that was just too damn expensive. wouldnt that be nice

[genderqueerdykes]

i'm going to continue talking about what trans men experience and transandrophobia until we finally break the silence forced upon transmasculine people and trans men. we are no longer tolerating being invisible, pushed aside, mocked, abandoned, disrespected, questioned, harassed, and denied the right to be addressed correctly with respect and grace.

trans men and mascs are going to exist no matter how hard you try to deny our identities, or abuse us out of them. there will always be transmascs and men no matter how hard you try to prevent us from talking about it, publicly sharing our identities, or finding community. no matter what, trans men and mascs will always be here and it's best to just let us carve out spaces for each other because trying to silence us permanently isn't working.

we are trans. we are queer. our masculinity and manhood is not a threat to you. we are not inherently dangerous. we are not "ruining our bodies with testosterone". we're not confused. we're not stepping on trans women's and transfemme's toes when we create spaces for ourselves and talk about our issues. we're not taking resources away from other queer people.

we need resources, too. just because someone is a man or masc does not mean they will have an easy time making a lot of money. it's still hard for transmascs in transition to find well paying, stable jobs. workplace discrimination still exists- "female" deadnames and F markers are still going to get in the way- especially now that they know you are trans. intersex trans men struggle to have our identities addressed correctly. workplaces can still fire trans people for them being trans, especially in states where at-will employment is in place. they can claim they fired you for one reason, but it was really because you are trans.

policing the verbiage and identities of transmascs and men is not going to make us stop identifying with them. trans men are allowed to call ourselves trannies- we are trannies. we're allowed to call ourselves dykes and butches and lesbians. we're allowed to have multiple genders, including being women, without that invalidating our masculinity and/or manhood. we're allowed to be and dress femme. we are allowed to choose whether or not HRT and surgery is right for us.

regardless of how much someone hates these things- they're still going to happen. you can tell us that we can't be "real men" or that we can't be wholly or partially women, genderfluid, closeted, detrans, non binary, genderqueer, butches, femmes, dykes, lesbians, or sapphic- but we're still going to be those things anyway.

resistance won't make us go away- it just makes us angrier, and it makes us fight harder for our rights, and the rights of our brothers, siblings, partners, husbands, fathers, relatives, and every transmasc and man out there.

[aronarchy]

Really sick of all the suggestions re the recent transmisogynistic policy against Sarah McBride to bring in “buff trans men to use the women’s restroom to make the cis women there/cis men outside feel uncomfortable and see that actual scary masculine men don’t belong in women’s restrooms so they’ll understand why the AGAB-restricted policy needs to be reversed” or for her to use the men’s restroom as a protest and ostentatiously “acting ‘femininely’/‘like a woman’” (e.g. putting on makeup or doing her hair) “to make the Republican cis men in there uncomfortable because she’s ‘very visibly presenting as a woman’ so they’ll admit she doesn’t belong in the men’s restroom and will be so uncomfortable they’ll want to reverse the policies and let her use the women’s restroom.”

Like, how do you not realize this still relies on a cissexist/transphobic/binarist/complementarian/oppositional view of gender, still portrays trans people as genuinely threatening or uncomfortable to cis people in restrooms, implicitly misgenders/denies the equal rights of trans people who don’t “pass” well enough and are less “respectable”/“presentable,” reaffirms the notion that gender non-conformity or the proximity of “the opposite gender”/associated social rituals in gendered spaces is necessarily cringe-inducing/disgusting/repulsive/undesirable, reaffirms the validity of judging people’s right to use the restroom they want to use based on their gendered characteristics instead of just affirming their autonomy, validates cis (gender-conforming) people as the rightful judges of who is/isn’t allowed / as the ones who ultimately deserve to be specially accommodated/who set the standard, erases femme men and butch women (cis or trans) as well as trans people who may want to choose to use the restroom aligning with their AGAB despite appearing visibly nonconforming already for whatever reason (including safety or convenience in some respects), and places obligation on and trivializes the danger of trans people putting their bodies on the line in protest (in an undignified and almost exploitative/objectifying way) when we all know full well that Republican cis men and women already don’t actually want trans women or trans men in the same restrooms with them, respectively? We already know they would react with hatred against trans people who use the “right” restroom too. This has played out elsewhere in real life plenty of times before, where trans people trying to comply with such regulations have been questioned, policed, harassed, and kicked out by security anyway.

(And nonbinary people are always forgotten and left out of the conversation completely because of course.)

[quillkiller]

omg i reached the tag limit theres so much MORE!!!! i think about this fic all the time:((((

everyone has that one specific fic idea that lives in their head that they will never get around to writing but are completely & unreasonably & unfathomably obsessed with right

[makiquas]

Its Butchtober. Bear with me for a second as I rant about children's cartoon ships, butchphobia, the conditional acceptance of butches in sapphic spaces on the basis of desirability, and feeling erased as a butch kid.

It's so funny that I realised early on as a 2000-2010s teen/kid how a lot of so called "sapphics" of social media are really, really anti butch4butch, only by interacting with certain subsets of Catradora and Appledash haters. It may be flippant to connect butchphobia with children's cartoons, but you cannot deny it is there. We finally had two canon butch4butch and masc4masc lesbian animated ships. And the fandoms decided that the best possible reaction to this is to violently hate on the ships for bullshit reasons and write up masterdocs about how the butch character actually looks better with a femme character instead (in both cases–Rarity and Glimmer, who is arguably feminine but not femme, but that's a conversation for another day, how the SPOP fandom waters down gender identities for aesthetics).

This is not just about two cartoon ships; this mindset of seeing two masc lesbians and immediately going "actually they act like bros; but this BUTCHFEMME couple has real chemistry" comes off sounding really, really bad in 2024 when you have no idea how butch identity operates, outside of depicting us as pants-wearing sexually aggressive muscular women. Butches ARE bros, even the ones who kiss each other. Camaraderie and tomboyish swagger *is* a part of their life. It's not our fault you are too fanfic trope-pilled to read these interactions are sexless friendship bantering.

It's also quite concerning, given how there are only a handful of butch4butch books in the market, and almost all of them talk about the stigmatizing of relationships between two butches/studs/masc lesbians. There are many butch lesbians who themselves face internalized butchphobia because of societal standards and expectations of being turned into the "gallant" provider of femmes. Butch and femme are not always inherently complementary, butches can be attracted to other butches, there is no "natural order" model of lesbian/sapphic attraction and your thinly veiled butchphobia is really off-putting, given you guys don't seem to extend that same rhetoric to mascfemme ships like Korrasami or Caitvi, or femme-femme ships like Harlivy.

Here, I must mention relationships like Rei and Kaoru from Oniisama E, or Jess and Lupe from A League of Their Own, who have bucket loads of chemistry but still have some vehement antis only because both the lesbians are masculine. (What's funny is the new wave of lesbian Oniisama E fans are almost all Rei/Kaoru shippers despite the show putting them into two butchfemme pairings.) Something something to be butch4butch is to be failing the tests of palatability and desirability according to conventional models of societal norms. Forever.

Again, one may have valid reasons for disliking these fictional ships (what, I genuinely don't know). But it *is* weird that you guys can watch fifty white fem4fem sapphic shows in a year and read 100+ GL with the same feminine girlish blonde and brunette/pink haired archetype and not bat an eyelid, but conjure a world of made-up "platonic" dynamics just because you read every butch4butch interaction as fundamentally platonic.

A lot of you love to throw around Stone Butch Blues as a catchphrase to educate strangers on the internet about 1950s-70s blue-collar bar culture and USA butch femme history, but how many of you actually know that within the book itself, the lead character acts prejudiced and hates on another butch for being butch4butch? How many of you know that she apologizes to her friend at the end for her hateful remarks? Fun fact: when you ostracize a butch for not fitting into your butch-femme subculture aesthetic, you're no better than lesbiphobic bigots actually.

Anyway, here are some butch4butch resources if you are a baby butch4butch and feel alienated by these kinds of weird rhetoric in online and fandom queer spaces too:

Butch4Butch romance books

My Butch4Butch books masterdoc (**being updated regularly**)

Leo Wilder's Butch4Butch writing (18+)

Butch4Butch photography archive (insta)

Boyish² Butch4Butch yuri anthology (insta)

@milsae Butch4Butch artist (tumblr/insta)

This post is made by a trans masc butch of color. Terfs, racists, biphobes and radfems kindly do not derail or interact.

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Dogs

Clive Barker: now everyone i want you all to welcome a real scary story by dodie smith Poe: um clive Poe: is this really appropriate Barker: oh yeah trust me this is gonna be REAL scary Barker: for dean Poe: are you doing this to torment dean Barker: whaaaat Barker: i would never

Dodie Smith: submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of the woman who kidnaps dogs Dean Koontz: what?! Koontz: you guys Koontz: you know I like scary stories Koontz: but you didn't tell me it was gonna be THIS scary

Barker: ahh poor dean, is this too much for you? Barker: i guess you could just go to bed and leave this one for the big kids Koontz: n-no Koontz: no i can take it King: that's the spirit dean King: you can do it

Dodie Smith: so there's this woman who kidnaps dogs Koontz: that's fine, i can handle this Smith: because she wants to skin them for a coat Koontz: guysssss Koontz: guyssss i hate thisss Barker: ah ha ha Poe: oh really clive this is too much

Smith: so the important thing is there's this guy mr dearly Smith: now the government lets him live tax free for life cuz he solved a really hard math problem King: King: uh King: i don't think that's the way that works

Smith: no no that's legit i checked Smith: that's how we do it in the UK King: King: clive? Barker: That doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about math to dispute it

Smith: so anyway mr dearly marries this woman Smith: and his dog marries her dog Smith: also they both have nannies Koontz: do the nannies also get married? Smith: haha of course not dean they're both ladies Smith: nanny butch and nanny femme are just really good platonic friends

Smith: but there's a problem Smith: the dearlys adopt ANOTHER dalmatian, perdita Smith: and this dog Smith: is NOT married Barker: and that's a problem huh? Smith: OF COURSE IT'S A PROBLEM Smith: you can't just have this dog slutting it up around town!

Smith: so the married dogs, pongo and missus, go on a merry adventure to save their puppies from the insane woman who wants to skin them for a coat Smith: and when the adventure is over Smith: they need to buy a bigger house to home all their 97 puppies

Smith: luckily mr dearly solved another problem to help the government pay its taxes Poe: wait why does the government have to pay taxes Smith: oh we do things differently in the UK Poe: yeah, evidently

Smith: perdita's original owners come back Smith: and the dearlys are afraid that they'll want perdita back Smith: but they're all "oh we didn't actually like her all that much, you can keep her" Koontz: wait someone doesn't like a dog? Koontz: this is breaking my immersion

Smith: but then some other people come by and they have a dog too Smith: and it turns out that this is perdita's dog husband! Smith: and these people are all "oh, i guess you can have this dog" Smith: "you know, since they're already dog married"

Smith: oh also the dearlys get a cat Smith: the cat also gets married Barker: christ why are all these animals getting married Smith: what, you want them living in sin? Koontz: yeah clive you want them living in sin?? Barker: i just Koontz: that would be immoral clive!!! Barker:

Smith: anyway then everyone is matched up in a nice monogamous, hetero-sex pair Smith: just the way it should be! Piers Anthony: yeah yeah now THAT'S the way you end a story!

[snowqueen]

Let me tell you what femme has meant for me and what it could mean for everyone. Let me stretch the word.

Let's say that femme is dispossessed feminity. It's the femininity of those who aren't allowed to be real women and who have to roll their own feminine gender.

Rolling their own is what cis-femme lesbians did in the fifties. By class and by sexual preference, they were dispossessed of real womanhood. For what woman is complete without money or a man? So they learned how to improvise, how to sew; how to turn a thrift-store sow's ear into a vintage silk purse.

Rolling their own is what contemporary femme dykes do. Invisible in straight spaces and frequently trivialized in queer ones, they must voice their femininity in a way that does not get shouted down or ignored. No easy task.

Rolling their own is what drag queens and trannies do and have always done. For what woman is complete without hairless skin and a cunt? We too learned how to improvise, and when we were mocked as caricatures of real women, we often became skilled caricaturists, owning the insult, engulfing it.

And this is what femme gay men do, too. Dangerously visible in straight space and often ridiculed in gay male space, femme gay men take shit from all sides. The straights dish it to them because they're visible. Second-wave feminists dish it to them because they're both feminine and male, and have thus sinned twice. Other gay men dish it to them for acting like, well, chicks.

What these groups share, aside from a fondness for eyeliner, is the illegitimacy of their femininity. That's how I understand femme: badass, rogue, illegitimate femininity. It's the femininity of those who aren't supposed to be feminine, who aren't allowed to be, but are anyway.

Second-wave feminists used to slander both feminine dykes and transsexual women as "female impersonators." And this is true. What they missed is that female impersonation is what femme is. Femmes can only impersonate real women because we are, by rules beyond our control, not real women. But broke-ass homos, trannies, and drag queens won't be real women until patriarchy is smashed, heterosexism is on its knees, and class counts for nothing. Until then, we are other. Our cleavage is an uncanny valley. And the more passable and invisible we are—the more like real women we find ourselves seeming—the greater our supposed deception.

This sucks. We don't mean to be deceptive. But, like Jessica Rabbit, we're just drawn that way.

— Elizabeth Marston, "Rogue Femininity" from Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme (edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman, 2011)