closet-keys:

butchthoughts:

honestly i think we should start having conversations about many butch lesbians’ dysphoria because it’s something thats pretty common afaik but rarely talked about

like i wish i knew about it when i was questioning my gender bc i honestly felt like i couldnt possibly be woman aligned if i was dysphoric

Yeah, this is a thing that seems to make virtually everyone uncomfortable and so it never gets addressed. 

I think there’s a convergence of three present cultural assumptions that make this conversation difficult: 

1. terfs’ entire campaign to bully and harass trans men until they detransition leading to people to assume any CAFAB GNC person IDing as a woman must actually be trans-masculine and in the closet, 
2. people already assuming butches are somehow “like men” or “closer to men” than femmes, and
3. False notions of trans male identity in equating transness with dysphoria and equating manhood as the absence of femininity  

If we’re going to acknowledge that you don’t need to be dysphoric to be trans, we should also acknowledge that you don’t need to be trans to be dysphoric. The most important part of identity is what feels right/comfortable/accurate to the individual, and we need to respect that. Also, as certain body parts or body shapes aren’t inherently male or female, we also need to acknowledge that it’s possible for women to, for example, not want breasts. That doesn’t make them male. 

And if we’re going to understand femininity as coercive and performative within patriarchy, and acknowledge that masculinity is almost exclusively defined by denouncing anything deemed feminine in our mainstream culture, then we also need to acknowledge that gender nonconforming women are going to be seen as “masculine” or “mannish” just by not performing femininity.. it doesn’t require “emulating” or “replicating” manhood, it’s just not working actively to perform culturally recognized femininity. 

I’ve already ranted a million and one times about why it’s harmful af to equate butch women to trans men, and why it harms literally all LGBT people to do so, so I won’t get into that rant on this post. And I think trans men are the best people to speak to point one, so I’m leaving that open to them. 

But I do think this is important, because everyone (including butch women ourselves sometimes) has this knee-jerk reaction to assume if a cis woman is experiencing any sort of dysphoria or desire to have her body look unlike the cisnormative standard, then she must be trans. It’s really problematic for both cis women and trans women to equate certain bodies and presentations with gender. 

I want everyone to just collectively understand that gender is nuanced, and the person you’re talking to probably knows a hell of a lot more about their own gender than you do. 

I loooooove where this is going but one thing that I think would be a mistake to try to ‘fix’ point 2 and 3 by putting a massive seperation between butch women and trans men as if there aren’t many people who consider themselves to be in between those two exact identities and there always have been.

When butch women are treated as ‘closer to men’, it’s not enough to say that many do not experience their butchness as masculine, we must also stand by those who feel that they are indeed close to masculinity and those who do perform an explicitly masculine gender because it fits who they are and we must make it clear that there is nothing wrong with that.

It isn’t a good idea to try to ‘save’ butchness from these attacks by limiting what it can mean to be butch. To save it by enforcing a narrative where a butch must be woman-identified and must not feel connected to masculinity or transness or else be seen as less than what butch should be. It isn’t a good idea to try to save a simple concept of butchness by pretending that it never has a relationship to masculinity or to transness. Simplicity is violence.

It would be much much better idea to create a space where butchness is not assumed to be close to masculinity AND where being closer to masculinity or being butch and not identifying as a women at all or being butch and having a complicated relationship to gender is all O-KAY. Where complexity and grey areas between butch and trans experiences are seen as not just acceptable but amazing.