Vintage WLW

Help Pious Projects to distribute hygiene kits to vulnerable women in Gaza

Every single time I say that I am femme, that’s code for “I want to be home for an unapologetically butch dyke.”

“If I get read as trans at a “queer women’s event,” dykes assume I’m a straight transsexual guy. Ironically, this grants me free access. I bear no resentment toward my FtM brothers, but I do grind my teeth over women’s spaces and dyke circles that welcome them yet which exclude my transsexual sisters. I am infuriated by the underlying assumption: my brave FtM brothers, who have sacrificed to become men, are just conformist women, and my bold MtF sisters who have fought to be women, are really men with a fetish for being marginalized. Are we dykes so fragile, so afraid, that we cannot allow anyone to enter, leave, or even explore? When we imply that FtM men are still gay women, how can we also fear that “we are losing our butches”? Our butches? Whose butches? Does the dyke community own its members? Our sex lives? Our genders? Does it control us for our own good? 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, poverty, 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 spectrum. 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 or 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.”