There is a fairly well-known overlap between butch identity and transmasculine identity, with various people whose gender expression we deeply admire - he/him lesbians, some trans men, some cis/ish gnc queer women, all that good stuff - falling in that general area of gender experiences. Of course there is infinite variety to what this looks like and who does or doesn't choose to identify that way, that's the beauty of queerness and gender! However, we think that focusing solely on that overlap can risk dismissing the experiences of other butches who don't also identify as transmasc. Thus, we'd like to talk a bit about our own experiences with the butch label from an amab / transfeminine perspective.
To be clear, we are saying this to try and contribute to the conversation and culture, not to talk over others. Queer people are stronger when we stand together, and we have more in common than we think!
Although it is far from our only identity in terms of gender, being butch is an identity we (Sonya) hold close. More commonly we identify ourself as futch (femme-butch), but specifically in a "has butch aspects and femme aspects, both very real parts of us" way rather than a "found solely at a point between femme and butch" way. But enough introduction, let's get to it!
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Butch is an ultimatum, one of our weapons of choice in the war against forced gender conformity. Through it we are saying, even though we claim the name "woman" for ourself, we will not - cannot - perfectly perform the ideal of femininity. We will demonstrate "masculine" or "unladylike" traits sometimes, and that is not a "failure to be a woman," it is a deliberate part of our approach to being a woman.
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Butch is a shield, something that helps us stand up to the ways the world can hurt us. When we are perceived as masculine, called "he" and "him" and "sir," we can dispel some of the hurt and the wrongness of that by mentally reframing it through the lens of queer, butch masculinity rather than the traditional masculinity society at large perceives and refers to. We can say, "Oh, they mean that in a lesbian way," and it doesn't stop the blow but it cushions it.
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Butch is a shorthand, a cultural reference point that even cishet people may know which we can use to better explain ourself. (Obviously this may carry with it some negative perceptions, but that is our burden to bear and our situational safety decision to make.) When they ask their foolish questions, we're sure you can imagine the ones, it's a shorter way to tell them we look kinda masculine "but" (the but is in their eyes and minds not ours) are in fact a lesbian.
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Butch is metal AF. We think of it like this - there is that taxonomy out there where male = ♂ = Mars = alchemical Iron and female = ♀️= Venus = alchemical Copper. In this system, being butch to us means that we are an advanced tungsten carbide alloy we engineered ourself. Go figure.
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Butch is a reminder: "Use your masculine-perceived privilege for good." In real life, we are rather tall (and perhaps a little intimidating? not sure about that one). The opportunity for this to become relevant hasn't really arisen yet, but we make sure to keep an eye out. Other queer women, lesbians, and butches have talked about wanting to be "knightly" in a sense, stand up for women, queer people, and/or others who may not be able to stand up for themselves. We feel that same pull, and we believe and hope we would feel it deeply and intensely were a bad situation to arise where our help could be of use.
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Butch is a reminder: "Watch your perfectionist streak." This is certainly something we're still working on! Part of the meaning of being butch, for us, is that it is okay to mess up, to be imperfect, because there is a deep beauty in pushing through to the best of your ability even when bad things happen. Also, we see it as something of an antidote to the unattainably idealized "anime girl hyperfemininity" that permeates certain online transfem spaces - a particular expression of perfectionism and desire for some ...pureness? that we think does more harm than good in the end.
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Butch is a reminder: "You are not separate from the rest of queerness." We talked about this a bit in our introduction, our feelings of respect and connection and admiration for other butches whose particular experiences of the identity may vary. We find it interesting that butch as an identity goes further back in queer history, while many of our other identities (ex. genderqueer, void/paradox, neopronoun user, etc.) are more recent developments. It feels as if it poses us a task - remember and honor the striving, suffering, and joy of those who came before. Honestly we need to do more of this, been meaning to read more queer history nonfiction sometime.
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Butch just feels right. Aside from all the deep meaning we've just gone over, even on a surface level being butch just holds an... ineffable appeal to us. It's like how we as a trans woman feel about women in general, or how we as a Rose feel about the various people in our life named Rose. When we see butch presentations and people, we feel an admiration that verges on aspiration - "We like that, in a way where we want to be that." That feeling has never steered us wrong before.
Thank you for reading our gender feelings analysis! We hope you've found something meaningful to take away from it. Above all, we feel, and try our best to cultivate, an abiding respect and sense of unity with our butch, gender non-conforming, and other queer siblings. Again, we have more in common than we have different.
May this forward the queer conversation while honoring the past.
