In Celebration of Butch Femininity

[Medusa]

Cats and straight cismen are certainly not Lesbians but women are if they love and fuck other women or fuck Queerly.

Here is where it gets sticky for me. When we start to say that "MTFs can be a Lesbian" in the same sentence as cats being a Lesbian, the separatist, transphobic slip of misandry *and* misogyny shows.

When we start to police who is a woman, we negate not only other women but we negate our OWN ability to love the woman who we are within ourselves. Think about it, if we are determining who else is a woman by sex organs and chromosomes, a vast number of women who have had hysterectomies and such are now, apparently, no longer women.

Why is "Lesbian" important to fence off if Butch or Femme or Trans is not?

[Martina]

Originally Posted by Medusa

When we start to police who is a woman, we negate not only other women but we negate our OWN ability to love the woman who we are within ourselves. Think about it, if we are determining who else is a woman by sex organs and chromosomes, a vast number of women who have had hysterectomies and such are now, apparently, no longer women.

Butler calls these "intense disavowals" and says they are cruelties that we visit on ourselves. They repudiate the other in order to create a precise definition. But there is rarely a clean line between ourselves and others, as you note.

An example: When femmes defined ourselves in opposition to straight women, those of us who were once straight women were disavowing ourselves and our pasts. Some people think of their straight pasts as a time when they just did not know themselves as queer. But not all femmes do. Some of us WERE straight at some point. Some live as straight women now, and still ID as femme.

You have to leave the edges blurred or you will exclude people you may not want to. You will also repudiate allies and even parts of yourself. And you waste your time policing boundaries, which is really just code for a struggle for dominance within a group.

[BullDog]

When someone identifies as a lesbian it is not "anything goes." If it resonates and they want to participate then they should be welcomed. If it really isn't genuinely a part of who they are it is going to fade away, but really why should I care as long as they respectful and get along? And people figure things out as they go along, that's great too. I am not threatened by others who might be different than me being lesbian. Why should I be?

When I was in my early 20s living in Santa Cruz, CA there was a male named Michael who id'd as lesbian. He was always at lesbian dances and events. He wasn't some voyeuristic straight man leering. He was quiet and unassuming. Everyone would just be oh yeah there's Michael the lesbian. I really didn't know him, just would see him at events. I have no idea what his true feelings were, but he either id'd as lesbian or liked to hang out with us and didn't cause any problems. So who cares. It didn't make any of us into a ham sandwich or a cat or not lesbians.