What are your hopes for the butch community moving forward?
I hope that we can continue to persist and find ourselves. I hope that we can continue to create community and be understanding and accepting of our differences across race, gender, class, ability, etc. I hope that we can get less harassed, insulted, attacked, etc. by other folks inside and outside the LGBTQ community. I do wanna see a bigger move towards embracing and looking to build community and squash stereotypes and validate. I think professionally for myself, I work in technology, I’m a mid-level manager, I’m in this place now where I’ve got younger people who are coming into the workplace and need visibility and I’ve always been out at work. My first job out of college, I wasn’t necessarily planning on coming out, but I was out’ed. It’s not a negative thing; it’s a funny story. I started working at this software company that my friend already worked at and his boss was gay and he basically you should hire this girl because she’s also gay. I’m not gonna say he hired me because I’m gay but it is funny that I came into that job, my first real job after college. I was so lucky instead of a situation where I didn’t feel comfortable. This was in 1998 and not a lot of people felt truly comfortable people out at work. So it’s always been really important to me to be visible. I’ve gotten to a point where I can be a little bit more of a role model to younger people. The challenge for me is that I don’t necessarily have people above me who are role models. There are lesbians who work at that higher executive level. I haven’t worked at a company that had any lesbians in that executive level. In some ways that’s the direction that I’m moving. I would love more; I’m very focused professionally with visibility and creating space for that visibility. That’s for me that’s the next step in building community, making sure I continue to stay as a whole as visible as possible and I’m not, at this point you come out of the closet and you don’t want to go back in the closet, in some ways in terms of your gender expression. I’m not going back. I’ll continue to work on that professionally and more local communities. I want us to stay strong. I definitely want to keep a good understanding of tradition. I definitely want good dialogue about gender. I want to make sure that trans butches are fully embraced. I think generally in my communities that’s pretty well done. I mostly run in I guess very specific online spaces that are created and reinforced. I could go for more in person community, but I think that’s more that I have to take initiative for things that are existing. Keeping roots and moving forward. Totally to be better, have a better relationship to the rest of the queer community. I don’t know what that’s gonna take because we’re untrusted. But I also think that non-binary folk and women who present a little more masculine or butch and that’s the posture they walk around in the world with, they have a really specific and helpful insight into the world right now. I wish that we could talk about that. I wish we could talk about that we are paving our own way and discovering this thing of being masculine without having to be misogynist, without having to invalidate femmes or feminine traits or take advantage of them. That is not intrinsic to it at all and I wish we could talk about that. Because everyone is like there’s no hope for men, they just give up on making men try and having high expectations for them, because they’re like oh its impossible for someone to be not fem and if you’re not fem there’s no hope for you. We are figuring this out everyday of our lives and we have a lot of insight into this and it does take a lot of work and we have been socialized in a way that gives us way more knowledge on that and they’re gonna have to do a lot of work that they haven’t done, but there is a secret way that we have paved. I wish that was valued a little bit more. The way we’re saying masc vs. fem, the idea of masculinity and the idea of femininity are totally intrinsically to dominate one another, that’s bullshit. And we’re evidence of that. I would love that to be part of the conversation and I don’t owe men a lesson, but I wish that we were at least framed as options. To continue to be visible and strong, so that young MOC women can find role models. Increased visibility and education, breaking down stigma and misconceptions and increasing love and acceptance and understanding. Acceptance and love. To be an open an accepting support system for any person who identifies as butch. That there is pride in butchness, and it is a butchness that is open to variety and beautiful diversity. That we have room to be butch whether or not we identify as female, male, trans, non-binary, genderqueer, whatever feels right. That young women stop hesitating to claim butch because they're not sure if they're butch enough. And that being stone butch is acknowledged as a healthy accepted identify of gender and sexuality. |
I think just continue levels of understanding because I do know there is still this great misunderstanding of butch folks right now. There’s a lot especially from the heterosexual community, butch women you wanna be a man, like no. Just that they’re understood I think, but also that they can you know love who they wanna love and be who they want to be whatever that looks like. But I don't think that any different from what I wish for every person. Its just what freedom to be themselves and I do hope, like I have a sense of pride in my butch identity, and I do hope that it's never eradicated from the history of the queer movement in this country and around the world because I think butch women played a vital role in that. And I hope that’s never lost, but I also recognize it's really almost geographical in terms of where you are. I remember I lived in Maine for a time and I get up to Maine and I see all these butch women know right. Mainers same thing in northern Michigan, right like women have a more butch type of look right just because that's what it’s like in the states like you're off the land. It is intense up there and so it took me a long time to get away like what are my own misconceptions of folks and how they identity. Those are just like my internal thoughts I think that we all have had. I hope as were moving through the world, I hope that we're aware of oh I just came to an assumption on that let me dial that back a little bit and see like what do I need to look within me for that. I hope that the butch community continues to thrive. I mean we need more things like dykes on bikes for sure you know, but I think we’re especially here in California we are really fortunate you know that butch queers, whomever, can just be themselves and in most places there, I'm not naïve enough to think that its everywhere, but where really fortunate geographically to be here and be here and be queer. I don't think butches need to take over the world or anything not that that would be a bad thing if we had an all bunch of administration in this country that wouldn't be terrible because they're very kind very compassionate, get things done, build things well. I think one of the biggest things is like how full circle we’ve come about like representation. Obviously this is not everywhere in this is in like super liberal circles, for some reason in both liberal and conservative circles it is really really hard for people to wrap their heads around just like truly gender non-conforming people, no I'm still a woman or I'm woman-aligned or I’m a man or man-aligned. I just want to be feminine or masculine like it's not that I am in trans, it’s not that I am this. I personally like ID as non-binary but like if that obviously doesn't apply to every butch lesbian I think that's one of the biggest things of like I feel like the entire lesbian community—particularly the butch lesbian community, kinda got almost skipped over in the last five years. Never in trying to be really good about like trans people and non-binary people existing but like there was almost like we never got mentioned previously or now and I would just like to see, especially like better media representation would be really great. And particularly like I would love to see more companies like not even necessarily cater to us but like fucking use butch models for men’s wear like there's no reason that we can’t. Yeah I would love to see things like that, but also like yeah moving forward I hope that like collectively we can, I think the part of the internet has some things that I hope that we can hope to better represent to be a gender non-conforming woman and that’s not necessarily indicative of being something else like I just don't want to be done up all the time like I just want to fucking exist as a person and not have to think about every fucking move all the time. I guess just more acceptance in general. I feel like I want us to continue doing our thing, connecting with each other. I think that it is important to form communities of support and remind people that we’re all in it. I think that there can be a lot of pressure from other parts of the queer community to disidentify with womanhood or lesbian identity like if you’re a certain amount of gender non-conforming that might be controversial. And not that there aren’t lesbians and butches who don’t identify with womanhood. And also let people know that it’s OK to be like this and that these communities continue to exist and grow stronger. That we can all express ourselves without judgment. More opportunity for connection, it can be very isolating. We can be nicer to each other and that old school butches continue to exist. That we find community and solidarity with trans men, who often have so many shared experiences with us as masculine female/AFAB people. The connections I've made with trans men in my life have always been so heartwarming and genuine. I hope we’ll be a little more visible, and united too. There’s a deep reverence for personal identification and difference in experiences that gives the illusion in this community that there are hard lines between butch and trans that don’t overlap so there’s no overarching label that fits the spectrum of people who are masculine yet socially seen as female so it’s hard to feel safety in numbers or numbers at all. I don’t know the solution, but I wish there was something that fit us all so we could retain that valued individuality while still banding together. |