Men with boobs.

[Gayla]

Originally Posted by June

No, puddin' it wasn't you, although you are dear to me as well, even though you're not coming down to game night

I very much remember meeting you for the first time and asking, and you said it didn't matter. And I can totally respect that. When it happened, it didn't make me think less of the person, it made me sad, and only because I felt like it was so they wouldn't be "less than".

And I don't mean to sound condescending, I really do feel sad when people are afraid to express themselves because of what other people might think.

this leads me to another point, which is a tad off topic, but someone mentioned it to me today in a rep, how Butch and Trans bottoms are also seen as "less than" Snowy touched on it, but I wish someone would start that conversation in a thread.

I really, really, really wish I could make it but right now the making money thing is really, really, really important, too. Not to mention, I just had some major dental work done so I'm a little scared of those cupcakes. <3

There's been a lot of really good stuff in this thread and I've probably started a good dozen comments but them deleted them because I got sidetracked and went off on tangents. I've learned a lot from the "men with boobs" part and now that we've evolved here, it's given me even more to think about.

I have never not been butch. With a couple of brief exceptions, my relationships have always been with women who ID'd as femme. I've been "out" for 30 plus years so it's not something I just discovered about myself when I found a website. During those years I've also been "boy" or "Sir" or "Daddy" so ID'ing in some way that is publicly seen as male is also not something I discovered from a website.

I've been "Sir" longer than I've been "hy" and it's a place where I'm really comfortable. I don't think I ever gave it much thought or put any real concrete theories behind it until I found the dash site, ummm, I think 8 or 9 years ago now. It was there, in chat, that I had "hy" thrust upon me. I'm not real fond of made up words so I wasn't sure what to think but then it just became the norm so I got used to it.

The theoretical evolution of my gender started there and, to be honest, the pronoun / MID / FID / etc. issues around butch gender are something I've only seen online. With the exception of people I've met through the dash site, I've never had a conversation with another butch about pronouns, ID or any of the other issues we so often discuss here. I also don't know any butches in r/t, again other than those I met through b-f, that use male pronouns offline.

But online, on that site, at that time, it was a must. Butch=hy, femme=she and that's how, at least in chat, we could tell each other apart. For so many people, finding butch-femme community online is the start of the exploration and education process. We've all seen it. The newbies who start off at "but we're all just girls" and learn to understand why that statement is so offensive to many of us.

We're linear people living in a linear world. We grow, chronologically, along a linear scale - 15 is "less than" 20 when talking about age - so it's easy for me to see how some people can view what they used to be as being "less than" what they are now. Especially when what they used to be was something they didn't like or weren't comfortable with. That process of evolution from "just me" to "butch" to "stone butch" to "TG butch", etc. is very linear for most people so "just me" becomes less than "TG butch" for them. I think the issues come in when people can't see that the process is an individual one and not everyone evolves at the same rate or even to the same place.

I've spent a lot of time in the last 8 year's trying to define my own identity. Really, truly, in my heart of heart's I probably fall more into the "just me" category because I do see my gender as a fluid, ever changing kind of thing. I fall more to the male ID'd side of things, and it's where I'm most comfortable on a public level, but there's so much more to me then just that.

This got way more rambly then I intended and I don't think I even really said what I thought I wanted to say when I started but.. well yeah. I don't agree with the "less than" theory of things but I can see where it may have come from in this situation.