re: being butch and transfem is weird sometimes

so my last writing on this topic (or on this blog in general, whoops) is over two years in the past now. figured to commemorate me reaching the 7 year-milestone on estrogen i might revisit this whole topic with all the insight i’ve gained since then.

since then, a lot in my own performance of gender has shifted – where two years ago i was agonizing myself over the thought of getting a buzzcut or not for months (until i just did it), these days i’ll just go visit my barber to get a fresh fade cut every 2 months or so; where i was in discomfort over being percieved “masc” or showing male-associated behaviour, i am now freely calling myself masc, presenting more stereotypically “masculine” and feeling good about it, feeling like this is a genuine expression of my gender and identity.

also, a lot of the fears i had about presenting more masc and butch haven’t really come true – first of all i stopped concerning myself with how palatable or understandable my gender expression is to random cis people i encounter on the street or something, so i’m not really keeping track of how and when i pass, and even then if someone percieves me as male, there is a palpable air of percieving me as lesser-male, akin to how they’d interact with a teenage boy. certainly something butch lesbians of all assigned origins of gender can relate to i guess.

over that time i definitely found a new way to view my own masculinity, and found to a new one, instead of the one i grew up with, that was forced upon me. the years of trying to be a woman, with my first years of transitioning carrying the wish to one day really be a woman deep in my heart & simultaneously the years of reconfiguring my body with hormones, cleared up the way for me to re-discover masculinity not as something forceful (both in how it was applied to me, but also in how it wanted me to act), but as something that can also be kind, gentle and caring. This certainly isn’t the same masculinity the cis-hetero-patriarchal matrix tried to induce upon me, and it certainly isn’t the same masculinity usually portrayed in media.

i’m still trying to find a way to aptly describe this other, decidedly non-male masculinity; is it neutered? Sublated? Destituted?

nontheless, it is at it’s core a take on masculinity informed by lived experience as a woman (or, if we’re being completely deconstructivist and butlerite here, lived experience of trying to perform a societal ideal of womanhood), of inhabiting a body outside of the sphere of male bodies, of trying to take typically masculine ideals and subverting them and deterritorializing them, trying to give them some kind of spin to make it a masculinity not built on devalueing other less-male subjectivities or based on harmful and toxic core beliefs.

all that being said, over dropping the femme thing and becoming butch, i feel like i lost some community with other transfems. there’s no longer this instantaneous thing of recognizing each other as part of the same group, while i still usually clock other transfems, they – if they don’t already know me – rarely do so back, i still get read as queer & some kind of gender-fuckery, but i’m usually approached with the same carefulness and unease i too reserve for queers i assume to not be affected and targeted by transmisogyny, there’s definitely a reason why we do that, and i do understand why other dolls do that in regards to me, but no longer being recognized by them as basically one of them does sting a little sometimes. not sure what to do about it, i think this is just something i kind of ended up with now, and have to find a way to deal with it – usually, dropping hints in a conversation that i’m on E & prog does help to warm the situation up though. most (femme) transfems are still kind of confused about what exactly the deal with my gender is though. i kinda get it.

maybe the next time someone’s confused about my gender i’ll just tell them something like:

i’m a butch; i get gender euphoria from using power tools, lifting heavy things, building up furniture and having sore muscles; on the average day i look like yet another antifa-macker with a kink for sports brands, except i got huge tits; at this point no one even knows what gender i could have even been assigned at birth, and on multiple occasions have people assumed that i’m transmasc & that i’m on T; most men are lowkey scared of me (and kinda don’t really know why they do themselves) & i dig that; 7 years on estrogen made me go from boy to girl only for me to circle back to boy-ish (but lesbian about it) and i love everything about it.

god is trans and she gave us cross sex hormones for a reason.

transsexualism is sacred.

(mirrored from my old page as blackblogs is sadly shutting down soon)

trying to come to terms with my identity as a butch lesbian while also navigating the hellscape that is cisheteropatriarchal society as a transfem person is again and again proving itself to be a complicated and messy struggle, already starting with the nomenclature of identity, for example “transfem” is fine, especially as a marker of direction of transition, being called feminine is already grounds to mixed feelings depending on context, and “femme” just feels wrong. on the other hand though, in most settings im also deeply uncomfortable with being described as “masc”, and the gen z-queer tendency to no longer consider themselves butches, but “mascs” instead does not help with that. (that being said, i do acknowledge that that development also helped many transmascs come to terms with their identity, and also helped to show that the line between transness/transmasculinity and butchness is often blurry at best)

another part of at least my struggle in completely finding myself in my lesbian identity was the years i spent in queer, but mostly bi-/pansexual circles, with attraction to men being to some extent expected, reinforcing the link between femininity and attraction to men leading to myself feeling like an imposter for not being interested in men, especially because of my “male” socialization meaning that i was always taught to be attracted to “women”, regardless of the fact that my lesbian attraction and desire is everything straight attraction can and will never be.
and thats only the part of the struggle confined to queer spaces, those well-versed in terminology regarding lesbian and trans identity, if we now also take into account that, sadly, i have to exist outside of those spaces and circles too occasionally, the mess becomes even worse.

for a large part of society, “butch” is not a term, especially not one referring to gender (neither is “lesbian” in that regard), and while they might have heard of trans and non-binary people by this point, we still exist inside their binary framework, and are only ever thought of in relation to “male” and “female”. for me as someone who has a deeply traumatic relationship to being percieved “male” and depending on social context, and will go to great lengths to minimize the possibility of being misgendered and mistaken for a cis guy this means that i can never ever present as butch as i want, as long as i have to exist in the hell of cisheteropatriarchy, because getting a buzzcut will just inevitably lead to cis people (as progressive and trans-inclusive as they think of themselves) to categorize myself into the box of “male” inside of their head.

on that note, respecting pronouns and identity is the bare minimum, true complicity (or “allyship”) for cis people is breaking down the boxes inside your head and truly understanding queer, trans, non binary and agender identites – its very likely you’re not really cis anymore when you’re done with that though.

now, back to topic: knowing that i have to conform to the societal expectations for “women” at least to some degree in order to “pass”, simply because out of the two options to get put into by society (and through that, by most people), it is the less violent and traumatic one for me, fills me with rage (although, that is ever present these days anyways), grief and sadness, but also envy to all those butches and mascs, who had the luck of not growing up with the implicit expectation placed upon them to become a man later on and thus associating the thought of even being associated with manhood and (traditional concepts of) masculinity with violence. they can feel much more free in exploring their identites, not always having to carry the trauma of being raised to become a “man”. i do feel a slight sting of envy every time someone i know shaves their head or gets a short haircut for the first time, knowing that if i were to do that, it would be met with ontological violence by society. another sometimes very confusing part of all this is the way i dress and express myself, essentially feeling some sort of (mild) dysphoria over myself in dresses, skirts, etc., while knowing that i look good wearing them, and getting external validation over looking feminine, but feeling a disconnect between the way i feel and the way i look in the mirror. of course not as severe when comparing this feeling back to my days of trying to present “male”, but it still feels dysphoric.

its also an interesting feeling to think about shaving my head, getting a buzzcut or just any short haircut, because back when i originally started figuring my trans identity out and rejected any and all connection to manhood, growing my hair out was an important part of that struggle too, but now, after years of transitioning and almost becoming complacent in the box of “being a woman” (as far removed i feel from womanhood, be it because of my radical and violent rejection of both the “male” socialization i was subjected to or the boxes of “woman” and “man”, or my complete lack of sexual and romantic attraction and/or interest in men, it is the societal box that is linked with less violence and trauma to my experience) , i feel like ive reached a similar point to the one many (c)AFAB¹ butches are, before they plunge into butchness, shave their heads and all of that. in my personal experience though, the rejection of the male gaze and the pressure to be attractive to men never was something i considered, with dodging the patriarchal conditioning to be attractive and available to men being one of the few upsides to being coercively assigned “male” at birth and being socialized as such. still, the pressure to be feminine is something i experience too, even if it comes from a different pressure than the one (c)AFAB butches experience.

of course its also naive to narrow down butchness to just short hair or a certain way of dressing and presenting gender, and trying to make up norms for something like lesbianism and queerness that, at least in the way i experience and live it, is the radical destruction and rejection of any and all norms and normative thought would fundamentally contradict itself.

all this being said though, finally coming more and more to terms with being butch is also incredibly freeing for myself, realizing and working on dismantling my internalized pressures to be feminine, be it in presentation or mannerisms, starting to associate positive, but “masculine” parts of myself and my personality no longer with the manhood i continuously distance myself from, but butchness and finally integrating them into myself instead of trying to fight them. its a hard, but healing process to acknowledge that, and to, even after years of being out as trans and transitioning, still figure out my identity more and more. what makes this all the more difficult to even grasp is the complete and utter lack of any transfem butch rolemodels, even though im deeply rooted in queer circles and spaces, i dont think i personally know a single transfem butch, making this identity all the more hard to grasp for myself, maybe writing this text and publicizing it will aid some queer sibling in feeling seen and understood and help them accept that its completely fine to be butch, no matter their relationship to masculinity and femininity or whatever gender society decided to pressure them into.

now to be pathetic and end on a quote, i chose one someone on twitter once used to describe transfem existance in general, and one i found especially true of being a transfem butch.

“We don’t exactly fit in. Anywhere. And we’ve made that our greatest strength.” – Faith, Mirrors Edge

¹ (c)AFAB/(c)AMAB – coercively assigned (gender) at birth

(originally written in may 2023)

[ ]

quick incoherent rambles to celebrate 7 years of being a tr@nny

the transfem butchs lament

“We don’t exactly fit in. Anywhere. And we’ve made that our greatest strength.” – Faith, Mirrors Edge