chivalry

I'm a very vulnerable butch. I'm chronically ill, invisibly physically disabled, and have a lot of mental health issues. My masculinity doesn't inherently make me more strong or powerful.

But there's a huge amount of butch culture built on butches being protective of femmes, or just being strong and working in very physically laborious jobs. It feels disheartening to be locked out of a major part of my culture, just because I'm disabled.

So here's to all the disabled butches who want, or are expected to, be strong because toxic masculinity has taught us the mascs are the protectors, but we can't be.

And before I met them, every partner I had who were more fem-aligned always expected of me to be the Strong One, to protect them. Heck, not even a month after I came out as a trans man and shaved my head (I didn't really pass then I was pre-everything), my best friend used me as a "shield" and introduced me as her "boyfriend" to a dude who was harassing her. And while I was all in to help her, it was as dangerous for me as it was for her to say "oh here's my boyfriend !" when I passed as a butch woman, at best.

I really need people to stop pushing the protector/strong role onto men and masc people. I remember when I hang out in radfem spaces how often I would hear "butches and men should be put in the first line because if they are going to be masc, they might as well make themselves useful by protecting us" and like... What ? Butches, mascs, men deserve softness, tenderness, deserve to be protected, NEED to be protected to. Masculinity isn't about being strong, it's about being masculine ffs.

The story of Stone Butch Blues goes into so much detail on the levels of sexual harassment and rape that butches go through, but these same people who think that somehow mascs are inherently the ones who're protectors will sling around Leslie's name to feign allyship with their transmasc/butch siblings.

Hell, even passing mascs (including butches who pass as men and transmascs/men) are still in danger inherently when put on the "front line", because passing is almost never absolute and always at risk of being snuffed out, should someone (for example) recognize them and shout their fem/deadname.

And then there's the blatant ignoring of our disabled status whenever it's most convenient to them, which is just straight up ableism.

It is an essential read for anyone who is queer, or is remotely interested in being an ally, or is or wants to be part of a labor movement, or wants to know anything about empathy, or queer history, or labor history. I legitimately think it should be taught in schools. We should print copies and read them and highlight them and scratch the shit out of them and beat the cops with them. And when they're tattered and ruined and impossible to read we should do it all over again forever.

"Untitled" by Laurence Jaugey-Paget, 1994

I've seen several sites mention this, it's real.

Do not make the MISTAKE of thinking you need to put your side forward. The Guardian is transphobic as fuck, and will twist your words. DO NOT ENGAGE.

I know zie considered hirself still a lesbian, and something under a trans umbrella, and while many were quick to assign “trans man” or “transmasc” onto hir, I knew that somewhere in a sense of womanhood, zie identified with a woman-adjacent label still.

I had not considered zie would combine hir sense of womanhood with the label of trans but it makes complete sense, and gives a whole new layer to hir sense of sisterhood with (amab) trans women!

Zie was a woman in a transgressive, transitional, transgender(ed) way. A trans woman.

What a concept of gender and transness that would make so many spaces spit blood. But it makes total sense!

Leslie Feinberg, 1970s 🪽

“i promise to tell you someday when we have time”

(x)dr alan j hart was the first documented transsexual male in the usa. born in 1890, his mother wrote about how he had a “desire to be a boy” from a young age and he was the first trans man to get a hysterectomy in 1917. he was a researcher into tuberculosis and wrote novels as well. he invented technology that we still use today and saved countless lives. he is not the first trans man in america, but he is the first documented transsexual. he died in 1962 of a heart falure.

I finished the first round of edits on my nonfiction history of trans rights today. It will publish with Norton in 2025, but I decided, because I feel so much of my community is here, to provide a bit of the introduction.

[begin sample]

The Institute for Sexual Sciences had offered safe haven to homosexuals and those we today consider transgender for nearly two decades. It had been built on scientific and humanitarian principles established at the end of the 19th century and which blossomed into the sexology of the early 20th. Founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish homosexual, the Institute supported tolerance, feminism, diversity, and science. As a result, it became a chief target for Nazi destruction: “It is our pride,” they declared, to strike a blow against the Institute. As for Magnus Hirschfeld, Hitler would label him the “most dangerous Jew in Germany.”6 It was his face Hitler put on his antisemitic propaganda; his likeness that became a target; his bust committed to the flames on the Opernplatz. You have seen the images. You have watched the towering inferno that roared into the night. The burning of Hirschfeld’s library has been immortalized on film reels and in photographs, representative of the Nazi imperative, symbolic of all they would destroy. Yet few remember what they were burning—or why.

Magnus Hirschfeld had built his Institute on powerful ideas, yet in their infancy: that sex and gender characteristics existed upon a vast spectrum, that people could be born this way, and that, as with any other diversity of nature, these identities should be accepted. He would call them Intermediaries.

Intermediaries carried no stigma and no shame; these sexual and Gender nonconformists had a right to live, a right to thrive. They also had a right to joy. Science would lead the way, but this history unfolds as an interwar thriller—patients and physicians risking their lives to be seen and heard even as Hitler began his rise to power. Many weren’t famous; their lives haven’t been celebrated in fiction or film. Born into a late-nineteenth-century world steeped in the “deep anxieties of men about the shifting work, social roles, and power of men over women,” they came into her own just as sexual science entered the crosshairs of prejudice and hate. The Institute’s own community faced abuse, blackmail, and political machinations; they responded with secret publishing campaigns, leaflet drops, pro-homosexual propaganda, and alignments with rebel factions of Berlin’s literati. They also developed groundbreaking gender affirmation surgeries and the first hormone cocktail for supportive gender therapy.

Nothing like the Institute for Sexual Sciences had ever existed before it opened its doors—and despite a hundred years of progress, there has been nothing like it since. Retrieving this tale has been an exercise in pursuing history at its edges and fringes, in ephemera and letters, in medal texts, in translations. Understanding why it became such a target for hatred tells us everything about our present moment, about a world that has not made peace with difference, that still refuses the light of scientific evidence most especially as it concerns sexual and reproductive rights.

[end sample]

I wanted to add a note here: so many people have come together to make this possible. Like Ralf Dose of the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft (Magnus Hirschfeld Archive), Berlin, and Erin Reed, American journalist and transgender rights activist—Katie Sutton, Heike Bauer. I am also deeply indebted to historian, filmmaker and formative theorist Susan Stryker for her feedback, scholarship, and encouragement all along the way. And Laura Helmuth, editor of Scientific American, whose enthusiasm for a short article helped bring the book into being. So many LGBTQ+ historians, archivists, librarians, and activists made the work possible, that its publication testifies to the power of the queer community and its dedication to preserving and celebrating history. But I ALSO want to mention you, folks here on tumblr who have watched and encouraged and supported over the 18 months it took to write it (among other books and projects). @neil-gaiman has been especially wonderful, and @always-coffee too: thank you.

The support of this community has been important as I’ve faced backlash in other quarters. Thank you, all.

NOTE: they are attempting to rebuild the lost library, and you can help: https://magnus-hirschfeld.de/archivzentrum/archive-center/