Butch

One of the advantages of attending Expensive Nursing Graduate School at Very Prestigious University is that on the rare occasion that the stars are right and an event fits in my schedule, I'm not completely exhausted, and I actually find out about something before it happens, I get the opportunity to see people speak I otherwise would never have the opportunity to see. Back in September, I saw Cherríe Moraga talk, and it was a pretty incredible experience. One thing that struck me was how vulnerable she made herself, talking in front of what was a room of mostly much younger queers than her - who have entirely different experiences of queerness. There were a few times when she started to say something that sounded transphobic, and then it immediately turned into her own personal struggles with gender and how to best support queer youth who have very different options and experiences than her.

Hearing how she struggled with gender was like a lightbulb turning on in my head that let me stop overanalyzing my gender and realized that, for years, I had insisted on gender neutral pronouns, not because I was trying to assert a positive non-binary identity, but because I felt like I flunked out of womanhood. This started to lead to a lot more uncomfortable internal conflict when my niece (who turns three in less than a month, so this was a long time coming) was born, and as she's gotten older and has a much more verbal view of the world, I worried about what sort of message I was sending if she saw that someone like me felt they had failed at gender.

Being constantly questioned as to my lesbian credentials made it more irritating, I admit.

I want everyone to find an identity and embodiment that feels comfortable for them, and that's not something that comes out of feeling one isn't good enough to be one thing, so one has to default to something else - it's about finding something that speaks to your heart and soul in a positive way.

I've spent time in multi-generational butch/femme communities (and Goddess knows there are problems, but I miss them, because never have I felt more like I was coming home), and, ultimately, the problem was not the older members - it was the younger members who fetishized the 50s. I got tired of hiding the fact that enforcement of an intricate gender fetish on one hand, and patriarchal messages on the other were fucking me up behind an intricate wall of overly academic queer theory justifications. Who someone is isn't primarily about what's in their head - that's how we figure out how to articulate it - but what's in their heart. And ultimately, my butch heart is that of a women-loving-woman whose masculinity is not a caveat to her womanhood, but an expression of it. And that's a fucking hard thing in this world, and no amount of over-intellectualizing to blame myself is going to change that.

At least when I was in my early and mid-20s, we would have all benefited from reading less academic queer theory while working shitty service industry jobs and instead doing a hell of a lot more listening to our elders, but maybe I'm just old and cantankerous at this point. But, instead, we had to separate ourselves from our elders and pretend we were smarter than them, better than them, and obviously we had it all figured out. Not shocking given the age range, and something that has been true of every generation since the Paleolithic, most likely.

It helps worlds that I'm with someone who cares about and wants to be with who I am. It helps that she's so incredibly strong that I can put aside the "butch armor" and that I can remember I'm strong, when so much of the time the outside world makes me feel spent, battered, and drained. Given how I was treated in some of my past relationships, this is even more of a blessing. I'm really glad I figured it out before getting close with her, and I'm really glad that I was in a healthy place on my own, but it's refreshing to be in a relationship that makes me healthier, not worse. And it's nice to just be understood, for a change.

Speaking of the butch armor, the older I get, the more the straight world grates on me. Partly, when I was young, I did shit jobs, could mostly pick whom I was around, and in general could fade into the woodwork. Now, I feel like I have no choice but to constantly explain myself to a world that no longer believes I exist. I'm not talking about butch flight - if I have to debunk the idea that "all the butches are becoming trans men" ever again, it'll be too soon - I'm talking about how the mainstream LGBT movement has systemically erased all but the "straight-acting" (and I'm not saying femme here - femme is anything but straight-acting), shoved trans people, when visible at all, into neatly contained gender normative boxes, and thrown everyone else under the bus. Straight people can think of me as a man (or, in their eyes, "someone who wants to be a man") - only if they can criticize all the ways I fail at it - but not as a butch woman, because our herstory has literally been erased in a quest for some semblance of acceptance. A lesbian who doesn't look like one you'd see on TV no longer exists in the minds of most of the world. And this isn't being misread, but an impossibility of looking at a body known to be female, seeing gender being performed a certain way, and not stripping away the womanhood. But, hell, we can get married now, so everything is great.

Returning to Cherríe Moraga, the question becomes not only how do we resist that, but, and this may be a "get off my lawn" moment, how do we get masculine of center queer youth to stop disrespecting femmes and other feminine people, get them to realize how incredibly hard and dangerous it is to be feminine in this world, and get them to stop fetishizing the "butch armor" as some sort of badge of toughness - because it's not. It's the accumulated weight of the constant micro and macroaggressions, and it sucks. It sucks to have an enormous amount of trouble trusting. It sucks to always be distant, to not let people in, to be stoic when all you want to do is cry and let people know you're hurt, and to always try to pretend that you're not human and don't have emotional needs. I remember being young, and being jealous of the older butches (and I'm talking 30-something and 40-something - there's something about being butch that makes you age fast, in this way) who never seemed to be upset, who never seemed to be sad, who never seemed to let the world get to them. And I wasn't that at the time, and I don't know how lucky I was when I was young.

I don't think I would have really gotten this then, but now that I'm in my 30s, I understand that reserve, that unreadableness, that lack of outward show of emotion was not a mark of their butchness, but rather a mark of everything the world had done to them and everything they had done to survive. And I couldn't really understand until I was there, and every day I try to not build that armor up more, but try to learn to take risks and put a little bit of it aside. And it's hard, and I don't want the generation after me to grow up believing that's what it means to be butch - that something born out of hurt, and pain, and fear is a mark of strength. And believing that is a mark of strength is part of what makes masculine of center queers think femmes are their caretakers, that they're responsible for their well-being, because mimicking decades of hurt without understanding involves cutting oneself off from one's own emotional life - and displacing it onto feminine people (who, of course, "naturally" get emotions and do caregiving work. Of course). Mix that with the fratboy culture too many twenty-something MOC queers have going on these days and you have a recipe for a bunch of misogyny and a bunch of fetishized emotional immaturity.