Anyone else get irritated by this?
Maybe this is me being really picky or sensitive, but sometimes it really irritates me when people call characters butch or femme who aren't labelled as such/identify that way in the text.
Hear me out: I find that sometimes people can compartmentalise characters into either butch or femme just by like how they dress for example. This has always irked me because gender expression within lesbians is incredibly diverse so it feels reductive sometimes to reduce characters to either one or the other. Add in the fact butch and femme are ways of identifying, not just an aesthetic thing.
For example, I've seen a lot of people label Isabel from the Safekeep as 'femme' when to me she's quite a masculine character, and I feel this is because she often wears feminine clothing (even though for that time, wearing masculine clothing exclusively would have been a lot more stigmatising). I suppose my issue here is that calling her femme robs a lot of nuance in regards to the characters gender expression etc.
Of course, I know people can often read or headcanon characters as being butch or femme which I think is totally valid. But to me thats different from saying a character IS that. If anything, actual butch / femme characters feel kind of rare and need to be represented more.
Anyway, let me know what you think, maybe I'm being super petty about it
A few notable replies:
Sadie1525: People often use butch/femme as synonymous with masc/fem these days—ignoring the fact that butch and femme are identities rather than forms of gender expression. It’s unfortunate. I think that it’s perfectly fine to headcannon a character as butch or femme, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think people just aren’t being careful with their language or genuinely don’t know the difference. It happens in real life too. I’m masc and I get called butch sometimes. I don’t exactly mind, like I’m not offended, but it does feel kinda weird. Like someone deciding to call an orange, a tangerine. Like it’s close… but not the same.
AssistantPlastic1355: I agree with you, it waters down the meaning of the terms butch/femme. Like you said, sometimes I like to headcannon characters as butch/femme because I like to imagine it that way. BUT overall I think you are right, most books don't have butch/femme characters and calling them that is a disservice
Avesday: yeah they are political/gender identities and it depends if the character themselves or the author describes them as such in the canon. however i feel like if a femme sees themself in that character then why can't they be femme? femmes also have complicated relationships to gender and how they express that.
_antique_cakery_: I totally get your point, and I agree that it's annoying when any lesbian character who's just feminine in a default woman way is labelled as femme. The idea of anyone saying Isabel from the Safekeep is a femme is absurd! At the same time, my understanding is that the terms butch and femme were only invented in the '50s, and they only became widely used around the world much later than that.. So if a book is set before then, it would be historically inaccurate for the characters to call themselves butch or femme. I think the terms butch and femme are modern labels for modes of lesbianism that have existed since long before the 50s. So I believe it's fine to describe characters as butch or femme even if it would have been impossible for them to call themselves butch or femme. It's like calling historical characters queer or trans even though they couldn't have used those words to describe themselves. Another factor is that butch representation is so rare. If a butch friend of mine says they value seeing a butch represented in Nan from Tipping The Velvet (for example), what good would come from me telling them they're wrong? But you still have to be careful to use the terms butch and femme accurately when describing historical characters, lest one makes a blunder like calling Isabel from The Safekeep a femme!
Technical-Street-171: People honestly don’t seem interested in reading or learning beyond a character beings surface level fluff and while that’s totally ok, it doesn’t make that literary fantasy law. The number of times i get the feeling, oh that characters definitely hard femme like me or if I’m appreciating what I see as gender fluidity, ill go online and read people’s two dimensional takes on the same characters and i feel sad. I feel erased a bit bcs what i saw as dynamic, others put FIRMLY (read, aggressively) into a neat little box that might feel wrong to me. That kind of hard line, narrow labelling, it can feel so reductive and i think it’s a shame when people double down
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Originally shared by Commercial_Chard1457 on r/LesbianBookClub on July 7th, 2026 at 10:40 PM UTC.
