[Parker]

Originally Posted by aishah

butch voices' website clearly says

"What identities are under the BUTCH Voices umbrella?
Butch, Stud, Aggressive (AG), Macha, Dom, Tomboi, genderqueer, two-spirit, Trans men who identify as Masculine of Center and all other similar identities."

the first descriptor on the list is "butch." "masculine of center" is added onto a list of identities. to me, the term is self-selecting - like queer. if i hated the term queer and didn't want it used in reference to me, BUT it was commonly understood that queer spaces were inclusive of me as a same-gender-loving person and/or those spaces said "we welcome queer people, same-gender loving people, lesbians, gays..." - at that point, to me, it is semantics. masculine of center applies to anyone who wants to identify that way. some people use it to be inclusive of butches, studs, aggressives, etc. when speaking. not everyone likes it. not everyone likes gender non-conforming, but if i say the words "gender non-conforming" people will more or less get that i mean folks who transgress gender boundaries and that is inclusive of trans and butch people. it doesn't mean everyone has to like it or use it in reference to themselves. welcome to alphabet soup land - everyone constantly bitches about which word to use.

this term was also used before butch voices chose to adopt it, and is used in many communities outside of butch voices, and in my understanding, this thread was to talk about the term itself, not butch voices. if a lot of butches don't want butch voices to use the term...that is an internal conversation to have in the butch voices community. but that doesn't have any bearing on how the term is used outside of butch voices.

i've been researching the history of the arguments over the term, and i am repeatedly struck by the fact that this is a term that is predominantly meaningful in poc queer communities, and many qpoc feel alienated in white lesbian, queer, and trans* spaces, and almost all of the backlash against the term has happened AFTER predominantly white spaces have started using it in an effort to be more inclusive of qpoc, and the majority of the backlash is from white folks.

While I was responding to this, my browser crashed, which gave me a chance to think about whether I really wanted to respond in the way that I was and I do not.

Perhaps I am sorely misunderstanding you, but this post of yours felt like you just told me that I am bitching about semantics and if I dont like the term masculine of center then not only should I just not use it, but I should just suck it up when others use it to describe me because we ALL have to deal with that.

Or as Monica Gellar once said, "Welcome to the real world, it sucks."

If I understood you correctly, you could see why that could be a little off-putting for a woman who is a butch to hear a woman who is not a butch say that about a term that is sometimes used to describe butches.

It also sounded like you told me what I could and could not talk about in this thread and forum, re: Butch Voices. To clarify, I spoke about BV in part because speaking about BV provided what I felt was a relevant example to my dislike at using that term as an umbrella for all of us to sit under, happily.



Someone created a thread about the term masculine of center and asked us what we all thought and felt about the term, do we like it, would we use it, etc and I was responding to that.

But I dont seem to be making my point clear about how my objections are not based on what terms POC do or do not use or even about whether others use the term, masculine of center to include POC in their writings, organizations, etc.; my objections stem from people using this term to describe ME without my consent. Not POC, not people who like the term, ME.