Musing On Feminism
My journey to radical feminism, being butch & discovering “gender dysphoria” is fake.
Dear lesbian reader,
Did you miss me? What’s going on in lesbianland?
There’s muuuch speculation out there about what it means to be a feminist, or who does or doesn’t qualify as one.
I have been thinking a lot about where I stand in respect to it.
Admittedly, some cohorts of radical feminists haven’t been too welcoming to butch and femme dykes.
To this day, there’s a lot of criticizing and policing how we should be and what we shouldn’t do with our sexual and romantic lives… I find that terribly boring.
Despite that, I cannot help but have a fundamentally Radical Feminist analysis of society and women’s oppression.
This might shake some boots. “You’re butch and a radical feminist?” Yes, we exist! But it took me a while to get here.
As a teenager & young adult, I struggled with what many define as “gender dysphoria” — I was uncomfortable with my body and the expectations placed upon me as a female. Not a special thing at all, but sadly one that many young girls go through.
When my high school friends begun to get boyfriends, I couldn’t catch up — I tried to look as feminine as I could, failing at the behavioral bit. I never could bring myself to be anywhere near a male — let alone date one.
My internal struggles with realizing I was exclusively same-sex-attracted and therefore gender-non-conforming brought me to one conclusion: “something must be wrong with me — I am an incorrect woman.”
Luckily, I don’t come from a time-place where gender ideology was a thing. When its media exposure grew, it deeply affected me.
It provided a new, misleading explanation for my long-suppressed issues: I was not a woman at all, and therefore I needed to make radical changes to my body.
The thing is… that didn’t sit right with me either.
The widespread Liberal Feminism didn’t provide any meaningful analysis; and everything they stand for is fundamentally against my values, so I quickly discarded it.
I was keenly aware I was Butch, and that I was into Femmes, and it seemed like neither ideological side was particularly understanding of what that meant — I felt utterly misplaced.
Still, I persisted and investigated. I asked questions nobody would ask, and I researched. Eventually, I came to find out that there were other women who thought like me.
I was lucky enough not to go through with any procedure to alter my body before I encountered Radical Feminist theory.
It clicked instantly — everything I felt, all the discomfort, pain and insecurity about being a “masculine” lesbian…
It told me something fundamentally important: that there was something wrong with the world, not with me.
I consider myself a Radical Feminist, or at least, aligned to it: I am gender critical; I am against pornography, prostitution and surrogacy. Tick! tick! tick!
As for the radical feminists who have critiques of Butch & Femme culture — it’s not my primary interest to “prove them wrong”.
I am fairly comfortable with engaging with different arguments and still — you’ll be shocked by this — not agree.
Frankly, I am not here to be part of a girly club and pretend we can all be androgynous political/fake lesbians together; or that female separatism can work — inevitably creating a feminine hierarchy where those who fail are at the bottom, or worse, kicked out.
Feminism is not for disaffected heterosexual women who are tired of men to create play-houses and pretend to be lesbians for a minute before they go back to their boyfriends.
And I doooon’t care about the big bad scolding matron policing us on how to dress, behave, and who we should partner with.
If I wanted that, I’d have gone ahead with my 13-year-old-self plan to join a nunnery…
… A story for another day, I guess?
I am a dyke — and I don’t mean it as a fucking political statement. I enjoy sex with females, and only females — with Femmes. I sometimes wear shirts and ties.
It’s fun, and I like to have fun. Big fuuuucking deal.
Thought we all agreed we have bigger fish to catch, so why don’t we get the rod and start pulling?
Jokes aside, in an increasingly polarized society, we need to make greater efforts to hear each other out without getting butt-hurt; understand where the other comes from.
Especially with the recent successes of the Gender Critical movement — people are waking up! The only thing standing in the way between us and victory is our own silly in-fighting.
Feminism is an important tool for all women to understand the complex patriarchal system that lies behind our sex-based oppression.
Can we put our crap aside for a second so that we can achieve meaningful change? We don’t have to like each other, let alone be friends — that’s not what this is about.
If anything Radical Feminism could do better is to get our message out there, reach out to more women and girls — we have to recognize our own failure to do so, pushing some away in the false comfort of gender ideology’s claws.
I find it especially important to hold open space for detransitioned lesbians’ experiences, providing them with a strong support system; as well as not isolating and ostracizing butches and femmes — lesbians of any stripe, really.
Being able to hold more than one thought in our minds at once is a necessary step to maturity.
I don’t care if someone calls me and my Femme lover “unfeminist”.
I don’t deny any part of my butchness by being a feminist, and I don’t deny any part of my feminism by being butch: there is no other way for me to be.
Of course, that’s my own unique recipe — each of us has her own.
I ask you, now, my dear readers, which parts of radical feminism resonate with you and which don’t?1
What do you think, if anything, we could do better?
Lastly, I have found it important through this journey to be able to disconnect — have hobbies, sources of enjoyment and fulfillment.
Radical Feminism brings up important issues, but they can just as easily be infuriating and draining.
How do you still find balance and joyfulness in your life?
- The Critical Butch
Find out more about Different Types of Feminism
Or
Take this quiz — but don’t take it as face value. Read and make up your own mind about what you stand for.
gender criticism/terfery (and my own journey to trans and back again) led me to radical feminism: not “radical” as in extreme, but radical as in “radix”, meaning “root.” at the root of woman-hating is our bodies, our unique biological abilities. “patriarchy” does not mean “rule by men”, it means “rule by fathers”, a usurpation of the mother, taking the control of her reproductive functions away from her, and assuming the mantle of “provider” (of what?) and labeling the mother a “helpmeet”.
so about butches: there’s always been room for us in radical feminism. we’re just as woman as the rest of them, and we don’t need to prettify or shrink ourselves in order to be that. feminism is supposed to help us understand reality, and our reality is female.
Sick of radfems criticizing my butch/femme sexuality when embracing my butchness, especially the sexual side of it, is what has ultimately brought me the most healing with my relationship to my womanhood. I will never be a sexless androgynous lesbian