#butch elders

[thenatureofbutch]

And THIS is why it is so special to be in a time where we can listen to our elders speak openly. So we better take advantage and LISTEN.

Sometimes I get comments or asks or whatever from the identity police about who can be called butch.

Well, dear sweets, firstly get to know your history, watch this video to the end, respect your elders and then digest the fact that nature is as it does. So, you staring at a natural truth, and telling it, that it's wrong, only shows something unnatural of you- work on it my babycakes.

You can also read more of what I personally (so not those featured in the above video) have to rant say if you feel so inclined...

I myself remember how butchness was well known as a spectrum of how masculinity looked on those who were not cis men. I remember how that spectrum included butches who would further their masculinity/Adorn their masculinity with hormones/surger(ies), I remember how butcheness extended to those who were queer but not lesbian, and their role within the butch world was never questioned or even pondered at. Because to be seen in the world as butch, is a very specific thing, with specific ostrasisations, and specific ways to understand what gender is and specific ways of being made to feel ugly for not adhering to the way the west pictures women. To be butch is a very specific feeling starting in our earliest memories for most of us we have that feeling before we even develop sexual desire, because its entirely its own thing, and it creates a very specific bond. A bond of butchhood.

I was very young when witnessing just a little of this time period, the solidarity within it still was strong enough to hit me and captivate me. It's been sad to see just how much of that has changed into a relentless need for over specification, dissecting the community left right and centre, policing eachother. Do we not remember the enchanted connection of anti police anti state moral with queerness? Please let us do better, please let us help one another do better.

[edwardallenpoe]

There's something about vintage dykes that make me so happy. Like. They're so beautiful to me. Idk. It's just so refreshing to see these people being Dykes and Femmes and Butches and Both and Neither in these older photos and just being Themselves compared to how the Internet is these days. Like yeah I know the internet isn't real life, I've met real life dykes that are Normal about queerness but just seeing dykes like me being open and themselves in their spaces when living in a time where I supposedly can't call myself a dyke because I'm also half man on my father's side is so. Sigh. Y'know? It's just so nice.

[mx-montero]

I’m finally seeing some butch Wolverine art on screen but some of you guys aren’t going butch enough. I need butch Logan to be a whiskey-swiggin’, cigar-chewin’, card-carryin’, he/him-havin’, capital “B” Butch lesbian. Logan “The X-Man” Wolverine has an adamantium strap that makes you ugly cry while he blows cigar smoke in your face. That is the butch Wolverine we deserve.

[ahtal-ka]

bonus points to whoever knows which stupid post i got this from

[mostwantedpotato404]

I'm quite crazy about fallout franchise (old drawings)

[cowboyjen68]

The day before Christmas Eve, with the help of many, I met a new lesbian friend off of TikTok. She needed a new car battery and I know how to change a battery and found out she was only an hour away! Got to meet an elder and break out my tools and get her some much needed supplies! My community, on and off line, is nothing short of incredible. New battery installation complete!!

[that-butch-archivist]

"Joan Nestle and Mabel Hampton" by Morgan Gwenwald

source: The Wild Good: Lesbian Photographs & Writings on Love, edited by Beatrix Gates

[kirisclangen]

Downyblaze

she/her, 157 moons, cis molly

[i-am-the-quintessential-queer]

I saw an older lesbian couple of a handsome butch and an eccentric femme having breakfast this morning at the small town diner I was at today and I had to stop myself from just staring at them because of how peaceful their presence made me

Community is everywhere, even when you’re hungover in a diner in a small ass town

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[lostryu]

hi i’m a 29 year old queer elder and i TOTALLY know what lesbianism is and what lesbian genders are! i may not be a lesbian but i know better than them. did you know that butches, masc presenting lesbians are actually men! i’m going to call a trans man a woman now. lesbians also love fucking cisgender men as a kink thing, and actually love men in general. i love thinking about that every day. i also am going to ignore nblw and how non-binary isn’t actually a 3rd gender for the sake of this argument. did i also mention that this is before an extremely gender essentialist and transphobic paragraph?

[not-another-robin]

I should draw the Penguin more, he is dear to me. He's a weird uncle who let's you have wine at family functions. He is transgener and was a patently weird girl.

[choco-pudding]

"This is the butch scale in real time"

[knyxves]

Playing Skyrim to see my beautiful wife Serana is the highlight of my life 😇🙏

[sothasil]

Any ideas on lgbt (mostly gay stuff) in khajiiti culture?

Canon sources of LGBT khajiit are rare from what I know of, encountered some gay NPCs when I was playing ESO which was never commented upon (this was before the Elsweyr expansion which I haven't played), and years ago, sex jokes from Daggerfall were often brought up as crumbs of representation but I believe they're less lore-y and more fantasy flavor takes on basic jokes. Gender is very important to the notions of what makes LGBT- khajiit culture, judging by the creation myth in Words of Clan Mother Ahnissi as well as by the honorifics they use in their naming conventions, seem to go for a male/female binary. There are no transgender or gender non-conforming khajiit mentioned that I know of, although I cannot name any culturally relevant sexism either, so it's fair to assume it's not much of a thing. Historically, the real life cultures I've read about that strictly see gender as male or female seem to inch for both sides of the same coin approaches, or seeing them as two separate things, and given khajiit motives of duality and seeing outside of it I would assume it's the first. I also believe people outside that strict biological binary have and will always exist, although in video games representation it is not fair to read much into their absence because those people are rarely if ever represented in mainstream media.

This being out of the way, here's the headcanons portion! I'll be referring to khajiit and elsweyri culture interchangeably (a can of worms for another day)

My main idea would be that khajiit are very lax about sex, do not consider it a taboo topic and in their culture, have a lot of freedom around it. Ostracizing someone for homosexual relationships would be considered an attack. The times it could be a big deal would be surrounding situations where someone wants biological children, should it be of their own desire or because of peer pressure, which would be niche situations more depending on individuals than culture as a whole. However, I also believe that in using our modern terms, the social norm would be bisexuality and that someone displaying exclusive preference should it be gay or het might raise a few eyebrows. Given this, I do not believe that the born and raised elsweyri have specific gay subcultures as is the case in our modern world. Same sex marriages would also happen (more in my marriage post).

Regarding transgender people, with the strong binary I mentioned above I think gender non-conformity and transgender identities would be understood closely to our modern world. It'd be easier to understand to a khajiit that someone would transition from male to female and the other way around, but more complex personal expressions of gender would be outsides of the social norm and broadly characterized as "third other" or by less gentle people, as a combination of traits of each, the basic "x soul y body" or whatnot phrases you sometimes hear. This could be both rejected and reclaimed by people! And contrary to gay stuff, it's likely that GNC individuals would group up to find in each other respite from the social norm.

But if you're to ask LBGT questions to a khajiit the most likely answer would be in the lines of "why is this your business?", or adjacent 😺

[femmeoutoffocus]

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