Butch, Please: Female Masculinity & Its Significance to Lesbian Culture
Butch lesbians have paved the way for political and social change and helped redefine ‘womanhood’ in a patriarchal world.
During police raids on lesbian bars in the 50s and 60s, any woman caught not wearing at least 3 pieces of female attire was arrested for cross-dressing. Socks not included.
Butch.
The term given to a certain type of lesbian.
It evokes images of Lea DeLaria, k. d. lang, Anne Lister, Ellen DeGeneres. Of black motorcycle jackets, baseball caps, makeup-free faces, and flat, sensible shoes.
Butches are the visible lesbians, the ones who challenge the narrow definition of what it means to be a woman.
They’re the type a lot of people don’t want to see, but find difficult to ignore — a challenge for men to fetishise and, therefore, an object of scrutiny and scorn.
“Nattie, are you going to become butch?”
My mother asked me this question when I came out as a lesbian in my twenties.
It was the very first thing she had to say about the matter, followed by a sigh of relief and a -thank God- once I reassured her that I would not be sporting a shag haircut or starting a collection of carabiners.
Nowadays, that would sound like an outdated assumption, but given that she was born to Irish Catholic parents in the 1950s, it’s understandable.
Like her, I also grew up with next to no awareness of the nuances of queer female identity.
Stud, Boi, Bollera, Dyke, Daddy, Marimacha, Bulldagger— none of it meant anything to me.
Before moving to the city for university, I had always lived very rurally. So rurally, in fact, that we seldom had an internet connection and a couple of my schoolmates didn’t even have postcodes.
I spent my childhood in a farming village with 100,000 inhabitants — fewer than 2,000 of those were humans and the remaining 98,000 were sheep. And while statistics dictate that they must’ve existed, there weren’t any lesbians known to the masses.
The first identifiable lesbian I ever encountered was my sports teacher in primary school. She was butch. Of course, in those days, I had no idea what a lesbian was, but, for some reason, my infantile mind deduced just from looking at her that she liked women.
And she did. She kept a framed photograph of her wife on the wall in her office — a place I frequented as a child thanks to a cardiac arrhythmia and a distaste for running track.
Interestingly, from then until early adulthood, the only openly queer women I ever came across were butch.
Butches with buzzcuts or mullets, sleeveless vests revealing upper arm tattoos, utility boots with soles as thick as tractor tyres, and a wide-gait swagger that, if imitated by me, would look like I was powerwalking over a sheet of ice.
They exuded a coolness, a rogue individuality, a sense of power and sexiness.
It was an elusive world to which I didn’t belong but would grow to admire very deeply as my sexuality took shape.
The butch identity is fraught with misunderstandings from both in and outside the LGBTQ community.
It’s commonly oversimplified — reduced to body hair, flannel shirts, and chopping wood in the forest with an axe.
But it is so much more profound and wide-reaching than that. There are as many ways to be butch as there are butches.
It isn’t just about style of dress or the aesthetic a woman presents to surrounding spectators, it’s the visceral embodiment of her essence.
It’s how she both harnesses her female masculinity and leaves it unbridled and free-flowing at the same time.
Each butch woman is a unique blend of characteristics that, although visually recognisable, are oftentimes difficult to categorise.
Butchness is the audacious rejection of the male gaze — a not-so-subtle middle finger to male dominance and its stifling grip around the confines of what womanhood should be.
It takes tremendous bravery to confront and actively renounce patriarchal ideals. To frontload your masculinity while boldly claiming the title of “woman” is to stretch the boundaries of that binary, and to risk aggravating people on the wrong side of the razor’s edge who don’t exactly jive with your identity.
Going against convention is a feat for the valiant. It’s isolating and can all too often make you an easy target for attack.
Violence towards butch women plagues lesbian communities all over the world.
Masculine lesbians in South Africa are frequently subjected to corrective rape for their appearance. Butch lesbians are disproportionately targeted and killed in Chile’s Fifth region.
It requires confidence and perhaps the slightest hint of madness, too. But above all, an overarching sense of devotion to oneself.
The Western contemporary idea of butchness was formally christened in American underground lesbian bars in the 1940s and 1950s; however, it wasn’t until the 1960s and early 1970s that butches became a more visible and established community. They found themselves stationed at the intersection between the civil, gay, and women’s rights movements of the time.
During police raids on lesbian bars in the 50s and 60s, any woman not wearing at least 3 pieces of female attire was liable to be arrested for cross-dressing. Socks not included.
This became known as the three-piece law.
Why is it so difficult for people to see butch women as women?
A woman is a myriad of things — a multiplicity of identities that stretches as far as the limits of the human mind. There are heterosexual women who are butch, there are lesbians who are super feminine, and a vast expanse of women in between.
Transgender acceptance, while a necessary and beautiful movement, has had a hand in reaffirming the binary which has made butch identity a lot harder to protect. Just stumble across any online content featuring a butch lesbian and you’ll see comments to the tune of:
“Why don’t you just transition?”
“Why not become a man since you dress like one?”
Comedian Hannah Gadsby recalls, in her Netflix stand-up show, Nanette:
“I got a letter…it said: ‘You owe it to your community to come out as transgender.’ I don’t identify as transgender.”
Dressing in masculine clothing or engaging in stereotypically masculine interests is some butch women’s way of being just that — a woman enjoying the masculine.
But a woman nonetheless.
For others, their gender identity is leagues away from feminine, and the way they present is just one way of being butch, not another way of necessarily being a woman.
While the comments encouraging transitioning may be well-meaning, gender identity and gender expression are not mutually exclusive, and this is a concept that is taking some time to be widely understood and accepted.
Butches get the opportunity to consider the type of masculine that they’d like to embody — a privilege that is, sadly, not typically extended to many men.
The main benefit being their ability to eschew a lot of hard-and-fast gendered rules, such as the expectation of being the breadwinner, or the assumption that they won’t bear children.
There are a plethora of expressions of masculinity from a plethora of individuals, and not all of them fit neatly into the categories and labels we currently have available.
But one thing is certain:
Butches are the cornerstone of the lesbian community.
They have suffered at the hands of a misogynistic, violent oppressor and they have used their identities to encourage dialogue and bring about positive political and social change — the vestiges of which are still felt and enjoyed by many to this day.
Thanks to their bravery and boldness, women have been able to push back against the patriarchy and loosen the reins it has held over womankind since time immemorial.
I take my hat off to them and proudly display my admiration as a fellow member of the lesbian collective.
As femme as I am, I simply wouldn’t be (allowed to be) who I am today without a little touch of butch.
Thank you very much for reading! If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below.
If you enjoyed this read and are feeling generous, please consider buying me a coffee as a token of your appreciation. I will send you positive vibes with every single sip. ☕🌸
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