Here come the lesbians, here come the leaping lesbians...

[Slater]

Originally Posted by Heart

It's interesting that they have replaced "butch," a historically lesbian/female identity, with the word "masculine." I suppose they think it's more "inclusive." I see this over and over. Being inclusive results in deleting references to women/female.

I don't know enough about the particulars to know what the intentions or motives are, though like you I suspect it is about inclusiveness. So since I don't know exactly what happened or exactly what the motivations were, I will only comment on what I do know, that the mission statement was changed to "masculine of center."

1. I don't like the phrase "masculine of center" to begin with. I will tolerate it as shorthand in casual conversation where someone is referring to butches, studs, transmen, FtMs and all the symantic variations thereof. But in a mission statement? It feels flippant and dismissive at best. For one thing, it implicitly places the entirety of gender identity (or at least the only parts worth noting) onto a single axis with, presumably, "completely feminine" on one end and "completely masculine" on the other end. Besides being ridiculously oversimplistic, it also reinforces the same old more/less bullshit that I railed about (freaking incessantly, I know) over on dash 7-8 years ago.
It's concerning the leadership of the organization is so tone deaf to these issues that they either did not recognize the problem with the language or did not care.

2. When was it decreed that everything has to include everyone all the time. Among it's other problems, "masculine of center" is so broad as to be virtually meaningless. My dad could fit into that 'category' but I'm pretty damn sure that my experience of the world is so utterly different than his that putting us into the same 'category' is absurd.

3. Change the name of the organization. If you don't care about #1 and #2, call the organization Masculine Voices or something. Otherwise it feels like appropriation. You're calling the org Butch Voices at the same time as you are saying it's not really about butches, per se. Have your organization be whatever you want it to be, just don't call it something it's not.

Many years ago, when I worked at the Lesbian Resource Center we had a discussion about changing our mission statement to include bisexual women. I argued against it because I knew we didn't have the resources to develop programming specifically for bisexual women and just adding them into the mission statement felt like tokenism. I argued instead that we should make it clear that bisexual women were welcome to participate in any of the things we were already doing that might interest them. It seemed to me then, and it does now, that the name, the mission statement, and the activities of an organization should all align and if they don't something needs to be re-thought.


P.S. Hi Heart!

[Heart]

Originally Posted by Slater

...it implicitly places the entirety of gender identity (or at least the only parts worth noting) onto a single axis with, presumably, "completely feminine" on one end and "completely masculine" on the other end. Besides being ridiculously oversimplistic, it also reinforces the same old more/less bullshit that I railed about (freaking incessantly, I know) over on dash 7-8 years ago.

Yes, this is one of the things that sticks in my craw... the whole continuum thing where some are "further along" than others. Calling it masculine-of- center implies that masculine is the desired direction, so presumably the more masculine, the better. Once again masculine is forgrounded and woman/female is backgrounded.

I've been insisting for awhile now that gender is a landscape, not a line.

Heart
(Hi Slater!)

[Slater]

Originally Posted by Heart

gender is a landscape, not a line.

I'm totally stealing that.


And just so I'm adding something resembling content and not just posting a confession of word-theft:

I'm a little bit of a mixed bag when it comes to identifiers. I prefer female pronouns (though am not bothered if male pronouns are applied to me in an online setting) but I prefer traditionally male terms like 'boy' and 'mister' over their female counterparts. I identify as a lesbian (though I like 'dyke' better for its one-syllable convenience and auditory impact) but am less sure about 'woman'. I kinda feel like 'butch' goes in the 'woman' slot. Erm ... you know what I mean. Instead of butch being a type of woman (though I do understand that usage, I can't quite make it work for me in my head), butch exists alongside woman.