Dykes are not fragile flowers. Many femmes wear the flaming rose. It's a flower, but it'll fight back if you try to crush it. What tough flower would symbolize us butches?
Or do we fear that butches are the fragile ones, anxious to leave dykespace?
We fear men will undo us, erase us; that we must guard against their entrance into our spaces, or our sister's pants. But men have been part of butch-femme for as long as I can remember. Pre-electrical lesbian spaces contained trans-spectrum men who feared presenting as male in public, and butches who feared looking mannish because of laws, written and unwritten, that prohibited putting a vagina in a pair of pants. Medical transition has been around since the 1930s, and it has not destroyed us. There were gay men who shared our bar scene, and their business kept many of "our" bars afloat. The lesbian communities that most feared men were those that also feared femmes, butches, transsexuals, and every other stripe of gender freedom.
Butch-femme is tough. We are tough.
Our culture has survived alcoholism, homophobia, beatings, corrupt vice squads, pov-erty, and the sex wars-plus all the other problems of living. I think we can survive transgender medicine.
The happiest butch-femme spaces I've seen are those that embrace the gender spec-trum. There we find butches and femmes who go by "she" and love their unmodified bodies. We have FtMs who've done the works—T, top, and crotch-who may be men or butch or femme or more. They include me and others who transitioned into being butches. They include femmes without questioning their taste in lovers. And it works.
Men will not undo us. But an unchecked fear of men—of becoming a man, dating a man, having been forced to be one, looking too much like one, being too attractive to men in general, or aiding and abetting any of the above-can and will make our community unliveable if we let it. But we should not fear or police ourselves. If we did that, there'd be no butch or femme in the first place.”
The fears that haunt us stem from mistakenly equating female with femininity and male with masculinity. When we do this, we see butch misdefined as a waiting lounge for the next flight to manhood.
If butch is just pre-male, then all cissexed butches are looking for a way out. And MtF butches? We don't exist —we can't exist. So were invisible, even to ourselves. It's stupid and it's silencing. Yet many people live in butchspace happily; some growing into it, others arriving after a long journey through other genders.
Amy Fox, "Changed Sex. Grew Boobs. Started Wearing a Tie.," Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme (Eds. Ivan E. Coyote & Zena Sharman)
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