A Grateful and Appreciated Butch
Anyway, to celebrate I thought I’d re-post my blog on Butches and add a little something; I was thinking about making a Butch T-Shirt and it would read something like this:
BUTCH: Butch Dyke, Femme Butch,T ransButch, Butch-Femme, Butch Top, Butch Bottom, Butch Boi, Butch Girl, Butch Tranny, Butch Man, Butch Switch, ButchMTF, Single Butch, Straight Butch, Butch Fag, ButchFTM, Soft Butch, Stone Butch, Hardcore Butch, AG, Stud, Bull Dagger, Masculine of Center, Butch Lesbian, Butch Fag…
I’m guessing I’m missing about 100 more self-identities. You know I’m serious about folks being able to self-identify, after all there is enough for everyone! — Can you help?
Happy Butch Appreciation Day!!
#Tie #Butch Enough #Butch – You are Butch Enough! We are Butch Enough!
If there is such a thing…
I started officially cross dressing at 15. I had a fairly athletic 145lb frame, my gait encouraged people to ask me if I had been in the service (I was not) and I was at this time and many years to follow, absolutely stone. Always broad, always strong, always butch and yet I’d have people telling me I wasn’t butch enough. Mistaken for men all the time, bouncing at clubs, fighting muggers on NYC streets in the 80s, stepping up to protect others in distress and passionately gallant – and still being told I was not butch enough.
It was tough. I hated it and for a very long time I believed it.
And what’s the difference between being told you are not being butch enough and you are not being man enough? Don’t both confine masculinity into a tight-small-angry boxes? It seemed that way to me because I was often compared to the butches who wore misogyny, sometimes, like an outer shield against the world and other times just under their shirts where they would passively hurt other women while also charming them.
My first live-in lover just could not understand why I would not hit her back. It was 1980, I was 17. At six or younger my sister and I played brother and sister games. In 2nd and 3rd grade I would hit and fight with boys for talking in class. I could see later how I was asserting my masculinity in this way – And “boys don’t hit girls!” The idea of hitting back my girlfriend never worked for me. Of course now I’m passionately nonviolent and have been for a very long time.
I learned recently that the guys who act out most aggressively and harmfully, supposedly have low testosterone levels. It’s some kind of condition that most guys don’t know about. The well-balanced, emotional guys are supposed to be considered pretty normal. I often wonder why, in any case, there are butches who want to emulate the worst guys and I wonder how many of them are told, they are not butch enough.
We who choose to be Butch in khakis, Levis, dickies and Armanis; short skirts, long dresses, doc martins, rock ports, fluevogs or tevas – we all get to self-identify as Butch. She butches, he butches, zi butches, transbutches, femme-butches and man butches, (I love my butch male friends who embrace their femininity!) And I all of those I’ve left out.
This is called freedom of expression. This is called Freedom to self-identify.
How do you identify? Is gender even a part of your identity? How diverse is your crowd/tribe? Can you go bigger?
When we are all free, we will all be free! – Butch Fresh! 10/7/2010
I’m doing that next.
