The Femme Continuum: The "Highs" and "Lows" of Visibility

[blush]

Originally Posted by Nat

Thanks

In the men with boobs thread, butch women were stating once again that they want their gender to be respected, and a few said femmes were often more likely to use an incorrect pronoun or indicate in other ways a lack of respect for butch women. What I heard was a demand for more deference than they already get from me. And I had a hard time with that because whether or not I show deference to butches, I give them more weight than I do other femme voices or even my own. So requests for more deference feel overwhelming and upsetting for me.

But after wrestling with it, reading reactions to the post where I voiced this as well as reactions to a few other frustrated femmes, it seems to me like I have been mishearing this whole time due to my own limitations. There is an ocean of difference between respect and deference, and I suspect giving respect would not wear a person out the way deference might. And if I am deferring to butch and male and masculine voices over femme voices, that sucks regarding my relationship to other femmes and women and with myself as well.

For me, it starts to feel like deference when femmes are policed more on and held more accountable for pronoun mistakes.

Let me be clear, I'm not at all saying that I don't see the desperate need for everyone to determine their own pronoun and have it respected. I'm addressing the trend I've seen that in the majority of apocryphal stories told about misuse of pronouns (intentional or not), the femme is always "getting it wrong." Why is that? Are femmes the only ones who do this? No. And that is when it starts to feel like deference to me.