#anyways I AM like the other girls I’m just in the weird lesbian subset

[lesbianfakir]

I love when I’m released out into the wild and I’m a certified #girlfreak then I come back to tumblr and there are 10 other people even crazier than me on my dash to greet me

[borrowedfeathers]

By the way, since I haven’t been doing these every day (and doing it every day isn’t really my style anyway), here’s a new batch o’ butch answers from the Novembutch ask meme:

5. Not really on the outside, but since I knew on some level from a young age that I wasn’t quite A Girl I remember being afraid that I’d have to grow up and be a guy because there wasn’t another choice for me. Naturally, learning about nonbinary identity was a revelation for me. A few years ago I was in some social circles with a large number of trans guys and it sometimes got me thinking “but what if I’m one of them?” at times, but they never said anything to me about that, let alone actually pressured me toward it. Any time I’ve worried that I’m really a dude it’s almost exclusively been the result of my own OCD, which is a consistent thorn in my side on so many levels of my life. :(

6. I was somewhat of a tomboy but I wasn’t a classic tomboy in the sense of playing a ton of sports and being grungy, I was more of one in the sense of “weird neurodivergent kid who doesn’t really grasp the concept of gender roles any more than they do other social norms.” Any bullying I got for that was just a subset of that which I got for the other unknowingly-autistic behaviors that I exhibited as a kid. When I think of moments of pushback against being a gender nonconforming child, the one that actually sticks out to me the most is when I was about 8 or so and I liked to run around the house shirtless, and my dad told me, “I’m the only one who’s allowed to go around without a shirt here.” I scowled and grumbled as I went up to my room and put a shirt on, since I thought it was so unfair. Hell, I’m still kind of sore about not being able to go around without a shirt!

7. Nope, I’m not stone. It’s actually kind of surprising that I’m not stone, come to think of it, because I really am not a fan of being touched by most people due to my autistic hypersensitivity. I particularly loathe having my head and hair touched — I’m convinced my scalp is an erogenous zone — which makes haircuts rather onerous for me. But if I trust someone enough to let them be an intimate partner of mine, I love being touched in that way. And I do get touch-starved a lot, which can be quite a conundrum at times.

I understand stone butchness as something that’s usually borne out of either trauma or dysphoria (or both) and I figure it’s something that’s particularly prevalent among butches (trans ones especially) who haven’t yet had the opportunity to modify their bodies to be how they feel they ought to be. I can see how stoneness can go hand in hand with butchness because both reject the idea that women(-aligned people) are meant to be seen and consumed by patriarchy. But for me personally, if I tried to be stone I’d feel like I wasn’t having my needs fulfilled, especially given my insecurities about feeling undesirable. Conversely, I couldn’t be a stone bottom/pillow princess (pillow prince? Is that what you’d call a stone bottom butch?) because that would make me personally feel like I was being selfish. I’m vers through and through, essentially.

8. The only time I feel that way is when I get street harassed, most often when I’m out walking alone and some asshole in a car honks at me. I have a thought of, “Damn, I’d love to have some of that sweet, sweet male privilege so I wouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit” but I don’t consider that a matter of wanting to Be A Man as much as to have the ability to pass as one, which I see as a very distinct thing — although some people haven’t understood that, and that upsets me somewhat.

9. I started realizing I wasn’t cis in late 2009 through all of 2010, and it was in early 2011 that I started to identify as nonbinary. I identified as nonbinary (nonaligned, although alignment terminology didn’t exist at the time) and pan/bi, flipping between the two depending on my mood, for four years, 2011-15. Thankfully, I didn’t get too into MOGAI microlabels but I did identify as demisexual for a while and perhaps most embarrassingly, I called myself a “dandy femme” in terms of presentation because I, and many others then (and unfortunately, now) equated “femme” to liking a glam/flamboyant aesthetic — back then I conceived of butchness as confined to wearing boring straight dude clothes. 

In late 2015 I decided to call myself gay instead of bi because I felt dating men would bring me too much frustration, dysphoria and cognitive dissonance even if I could be aesthetically attracted to them. A year later, in late 2016, I refined this to calling myself a nonbinary lesbian, though this was somewhat hard for me at first. While I felt some affinity with lesbianism for a while I thought I’d have to surrender my nonbinariness and declare myself 100% Unambiguously Cis to do so, so I spent a lot of time freaking out about that. Seeing more and more people identify as both lesbians and non-cis while being AFAB is what eventually spurred me to embrace the label. As for butchness, as I’ve said before, the influence of my best friend @floorforever led me to it!

10. In a sense, yeah, because of my having felt alienated from a young age from traditional notions of womanhood and especially femininity. I still consider myself to be autistic before anything else (one of my older urls was autismgender, after all) because that’s had the most concrete influence on my life, but the idea of butch as a gender that’s aligned with womanhood but has the potential to be nonbinary is a very appealing one to me.

[featureenvyproductions]

 Also just a friendly note for anyone who’s just stumbled upon my page and my comic but

- All the in-frame music is actual music and not just like garbage aesthetic notes. Just assume every staff is treble clef and the time signature is 4/4 unless something else is shown (or, you know, you can just kind of infer it from looking at the measures.....). I don’t show key signatures for the in-frame stuff because it’s awkward, so just infer from the accidentals.

- I usually pick one song where I clean up the arrangement and add a good chunk of it to each print version.

- It takes place in Tokyo in the 80s.

- i’ve been working on the story and rewriting parts of it since I was about 15 (christ that’s like fuckin 18 years at this point and if that isn’t an ADHD mood I don’t know what is) , and unfortunately it sometimes shows and I’m sorry XD 

- i do all of the everything but also have a full time engineering job so sometimes it takes me forever to finish a chapter and i’m sorry about that too

- i appreciate anyone who reads this with my entire heart

- it will eventually look like boys love and you’ll be like “why isn’t this tagged as boys love” but i don’t like to call it that because 1) some characters are non binary and, though masculine-leaning, would self-identify that way if the terms to do so were available to them and so I’m reluctant to lump them under “boys” strictly. 2) since it’s not romance-focused, it’s such a slow subtle burn that no one will even confess anything for like a bajillion years

- on that note i am a guy (mostly.....I have an agender slice.....) and have only ever had a boyfriend so no one better pop into my inbox accusing me of being a fujoshi because i’ll mentally deck you (also my feelings about that are a rant for another time, but let me just tell you that I think it’s one HELL of a double-standard that women are burned at the stake for liking it when guys kiss each other and not a single goddamn precious soul ever calls out that sizable subset of straight guys who subsist on lesbian porn and even hit on and fetishize REAL LIFE lesbians they meet. also we should talk about how I’ve never met a “fujoshi” in my life who actually ended up being a straight girl....Every single one I’ve known has had BL as a stepping stone into realizing their own queer identities....Even still we should talk about the fact that women get demonized for having a sexuality and I feel like the double standard there is evidence that this is an extension of that...AND ALSO YEAH IT’S TRUE THERE ARE WOMEN WHO OBJECTIFY GAY MEN HOWEVER women will never be able to systematically objectify and degrade men in the same way men have done and continue to do to women so,,,,,Anyway just wanted to rant about this for a minute. It’s something that really rubs me the wrong way. And I’m too old and grouchy and tired for this and so I’m just gonna fucking say it)

- ok this note got considerably less friendly i guess i got in a mood sorry

- i also want to note that it’s going to stay pretty PG and occasionally PG-13. I would feel super weird writing Sexy TM stuff about teenagers, even though in the main cast everyone’s 18+....If that’s your thing you’re gonna have to rely on your imagination....