I never felt like I could actually interact in butch femme space because (gasp!) I’m bi and the masc one is NOT SUPPOSED to be bi (in some spaces the femme one can be, since that would mean she’s just attracted to mascs and might someday see the light of lesbianism… even if the masc person likes feminine women AND feminine men, it’s a weird double standard. biphobia is truly wack) but I silently lurked online on and off for years
And this is exactly correct.
When I first lurked in those spaces, I expected to find “lesbians,” by which I mean people who called themselves women, where each preferred a different role. I hoped this would help me feel more comfortable with my female body, actually, as I felt a LITTLE weird but to be “transsexual” you had to use he for yourself at three, so the stereotype went.
Instead I found a lot of people I’d call, in the terminology of today, trans masculine nonbinary.
While very few of them called themselves (again, parlance of the times) FTMs, most of them described gender issues and sex dysphoria.
Don’t touch me, just let me use my strap. I promise I won’t feel deprived.
Touch me, but not this way or that way, it puts me in a bad headspace.
Don’t call me a lesbian or even a woman. Call me a butch instead.
Can butch be a gender? I think it’s my gender.
They even had pronouns. Few of them used “he,” as they didn’t quite see themselves as straight men. But most of them used “hy/hym/hys” and liked the femmes to call them “Daddi.”
From what I saw, this was a constant source of tension between the butches and the femmes.
The femmes mostly saw themselves as lesbians, or if they’d felt rejected from spaces where butch/femme was considered passé, WLW at least.
They saw the butches pretty differently than the butches saw themselves. They seemed to think of the masculine dress and manners as a kind of drag, and that once the butch came home with them they’d have the sexy thrill of “unwrapping” a woman beneath the masculine trappings.
The butches, having what id now call some amount of sex dysphoria, didn’t like this. It made them uncomfortable and uneasy.
It kind of put me off the whole subculture, personally, at least as that forum presented it. It just seemed like a bunch of people who were looking for partners, sometimes for life, but who had wildly differing ideas of who those partners would actually be when they got them.
Because of all this, my strong suspicion is that butch has often been a parking spot for transmasc enbies who don’t transition or who worried transition wouldn’t be available to them because they wouldn’t immediately blend in as stealth Straight men.
That a lot of people that got called “butch women” accepted the idea they were women only because they didn’t think asserting they were something else would get uptake.
That many if not most would’ve said “I’m not a woman” or “I’m only sort of a woman” if they felt they could say it and not be deemed crazy.
