Juri feeling unsafe in presenting as femme due to Ohtori being the high testosterone power play shitshow it is seems more the case to me. One reason she is so frustrated towards Utena in ep. 7 is that she had hoped to find someone to share this understanding with, whatever their sexuality/gender presentation. She is angry at Utena's naivety because it probably reminds her of her past self, a past self who did want to believe in miracles and possibly had to cope on her own with Geiger-counter alarming levels of toxic masculinity in the Student Council before Miki joined. She is angry at Utena for just doing "whatever a guy she liked told her to" and being oblivious to the axis of oppression that gender represents (and power play more broadly), while Juri herself is accepting to pay a very high personal price to maintain her high social standing.

Most of the so-called sapphic classics are either butch femme or femme4femme. Same with Japanese yuri and Korean manwha–God, I have lots to say about the lack of butch representation in modern GL, except for like maybe one or two stories, some of which are fetishizing representations. Definitely no butch4butch anywhere. Its either butches as animalistic savage masculinized women of color, or butches as predatory older women. And that's to not even speak of contemporary western romance and publishing.

Pictured here: My Date is a Total Ike Woman (manga) by natuo mutsumi, Asahi to Satsuki (manga) by fujita, The Girl I hated (manwha) by Ownte, Renai Idenshi xx (manga) by Taishi Zaou

It's just unfair of me, I know, but I zone out so badly whenever a queer theorist discusses butchness and butch identity exclusively in tandem with our relationship to femmes. I do think that butch-femme history is intertwined, inextricably so, and I love my femme comrades, sisters, and lovers, but damn, I don't think butches should be defined by our attraction to femmes, or even our need for femmes as some sort of essential step to self fulfilment. A lot of us are attracted to other butches. Sometimes exclusively, sometimes not.

And also, has anybody noticed that butch4butch stories in publishing are almost always short form online content, maybe oneshot stories, or a novella, or an afterthought addition to a collection? It's either that or a story will be exclusively based in some sort of "lesbian-normative universe" with fifty sapphic characters, and yet, all twenty five butches will be neatly stacked up like forks and spoons with twenty five femmes, with an alternative not even considered; all the butch relationships will be just platonic bros. I have been struggling to maintain the butch4butch database with almost no new stories out.