My goodness, this article is so good. And you always write about exactly what I needed to hear at that very moment. I've been reading a lot of "classical lesbian literature" recently an JoAnn Loulan has to be my favorite so far.
Thank you for also discussing the pressure on butches to hate ourselves. At first, when people would talk to me with that assumption, I thought I had missed some memo. Apparently most women look in the mirror and critique their appearance instead of smiling and winking at themselves. Who knew?
Allow me to trauma dump, if you will. Recently my grandfather died and I decided not to go to the funeral. An estranged aunt noticed I wasn't there and started texting me with questions. She assumed I didn't attend, in her words, "because of the gender identity thing". She then proceeded to tell me stories about me as a young child always telling people I was a boy (completely made up). All this mental gymnastics to explain how, in my misogynistic family, I could possibly survive without a man. It must be because I want to be a man. Very strange logic.
Firstly, my deep condolences about your grandfather.
Secondly, why is it always the aunts who get into everyone’s business? They specifically love to pick on (suspected) lesbians in the family, I noticed.
Deeply strange and problematic assumption to make about you just for not showing up to the funeral… best you can do in these situations is just ignore/dismiss them, not feed into the deeply flawed logic. That’s what I have learned.
Thank you for sharing your experience! Appreciate it.
PS: what other JoAnn Loulan (and other classic lesbian authors’) books have you been reading recently?
Phenomenal post, as always. Thank you!!! I was a little disappointed…the preamble at the top for optional section reading made me think it was going to be a much longer piece, which I was fully ready for! Color me perpetually excited to read a long form post written by you, friend.
From my own experience, having read Stone Butch Blues toward the beginning of my detransitioning process, I was deeply moved and changed by it. It showcased what I was running away from, contextualized my own internalized homophobia and misogyny, my life, in a way that didn’t allow it to be rewritten as a “trans” experience. For me, it took diving into what I didn’t want, what I was afraid of, via Leslie’s lived narrative, to see that:
had I been exposed to SBB before I dove down the rabbit hole of medicalizing etc. (read: had anything prompted me to view my experience as one of wholeness, no possibility of being female wrong) the likelihood of my sexually-traumatized-femme to medicalized-lesbian-in-hiding-being-seen-as-a-jolly-harmless-gay-man pipeline wouldn’t have had the steam to take off.
As always, so much to nod along with while I read. Much love. 💕
I look forward to reading that deepening of topics! Your voice has an easy-conversation-feel, and it’s so easy to read. Also: deeply loving the perspective of the Femme in your life.
I absolutely respect where you’re coming from around SBB—it’s a complex read, both intentionally and unintentionally. (I also deeply appreciated the firm boundaried Femme). I could see exactly why Leslie fell into being with a trans identified male—having internalized her own otherness, continuing to treat it like the mark of Cain, and her empathy became weaponizeable in ways I recognize from much of my own lived experience while captured. Reading it when I did, I was disappointed by how often she betrayed herself, and took stock of the countless times I remember having done the same. She tunneled into the pain. So many of us have/do.
You did read that right! I hadn’t considered my perspective to be a less common combo, but when you lay it out like that I suppose it is. I went the “nonbinary” route for a good decade+. For half of it, I never intended to medicalize. I fell in with a charismatic and controlling “friend” who convinced me over time that I was miserable because medicalizing was the answer.
Ended up on testosterone, and took it far longer than intended. One day I looked in the mirror, and all I could see was the abusive man I’d been avoiding most of my life, and I could no longer see my mother.
I had a double mastectomy and, horrifically, a female surgeon removed my tubes and ovaries and didn’t tell me I’d still have a cycle if I ever went on exogenous estrogen and progesterone. Wild surprise during my detransition process. (I had always had difficult cycles, regularly lasting over a month, with a flow I could only describe in graphic terms, and saw no solutions. The doctors always made it worse.)
It was a long and winding road to see how I was primed and ready to step into coercive dynamics, having come from a high control household/cult of one. My closest friends and lovers while in the cult of trans were all cult survivors—took me long enough to understand why!
All that to say: it’s been a wild ride! I’m taking it one day at a time, and so deeply appreciative of many perspectives, including yours. My wife and I met while we were both captured, and she began detransitioning a few months after I did. The facade unraveled big huge the more we read, and we are solidly delighted to be largely on the other side of this informative, but difficult, mess.
You’re spot-on with defining trans as a “cult” mainly targeting vulnerable people who were primed to be susceptible.
Your perspective is an incredibly important one. Too often people focus on the Butch experience with gender-ideology and forget that Femmes, as homosexuals, are vulnerable to it too—whether it’s being heartbroken by their Butches transitioning or navigating their own trauma & complex feelings about womanhood and non-conformity. Such as you described.
I am definitely familiar with the phenomenon of Femme Lesbians identifying as “non-binary”—something I thought about writing about at some point.
What happened with your surgery—& the fact that the doctor didn’t give you any guidance—is horrible. I truly do hope that all the medical professionals who were complicit in the lies and deceit of the transgender medical scandal will be held accountable one day. One can hope.
Thank you for your honesty & thoughtfulness! I’m really happy to hear that you and your wife can support each other through this journey. Sending much love to you both & would be happy to hear from you again.
Substack has limits, so at some point I had to cut back. But you’ll be happy to know I’ll be deepening some of these topics very soon.
I can sympathize with your experience in reading SBB—even when I first read it (around the time of becoming a TERF) I had hopes that the end might provide more… constructive insights. Making the main character end up with a trans-identidied-male was the final strand for me to despise it. However, there were aspects of the book I appreciated (such as the Femme setting a firm boundary that she wasn’t okay with her Butch transitioning). But I think it was mostly me reading through the lines critically and not really the author’s intention—as Feinberg was fully sold into the trans discourse.
I do think it’s a dangerous book to read for young lesbians in a vulnerable, confusionary state, which I think is the case for most of them. But it can be sure helpful—when you’re a little older and able to see it critically—to realize how harmful transition for lesbians actually is.
Did I understand correctly that you recognize yourself as a Femme lesbian now, post-detransition? If so, that’s an interesting perspective & not one we hear often.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I think the most frustrating thing about that interaction is that my family is rewriting my history without my consent. Instead of accepting I am a woman who has been married to a woman for nearly 20 years, they'd rather rationalize that by saying I've always wanted to be a man. My wife can't come around if we are both women, but if I become a man, we will be tolerated. I come from a conservative evangelical family in the Bible Belt of the US. In any case, I've finally gone full no-contact.
I've read everything JoAnn Loulan I could get my hands on. Lesbian Sex, Lesbian Passion, and The Lesbian Erotic Dance. I read JoAnn's books cover to cover. But I've been reading, off and on; SomeBody to Love by Leslea Newman, Call Me Lesbian by Julia Penelope, and The Lesbian Path by Margaret Cruikshank. This whole "Classic Lesbian Reading Journey" was kicked off by watching the documentary Framing Lesbian Fashion. It's not easy to find, but my local library had it on the Kanopy streaming service. Highly recommend.
Lovely piece, as a butch who loves another butch, it's so good to see butches' femaleness celebrated. It's gender ideology's silly insistence on the gender binary that makes out that butch women are somehow masculine. No we are not! We are women, who reject traditional femininity and tend to be gender-non-conforming in how we dress. I am a weightlifter, and my muscles go with my female curves- nothing masculine about that.
I’ve always been attracted to and had crushes on butch women, even when I was young (before puberty had kicked in)!! I also concur- strong arms, legs and breasts are absolute butch assets.
It’s taken me YEARS to work out how my bisexuality works, and accept that I have femme tastes when it comes to my attraction to women. I’ve hated that nearly every butch woman I know now identifies as a ‘trans-man’ or ‘non-binary’ 😢
I love my breasts as a butch, they make me feel fucking powerful. I feel so fucking lucky i didn’t have that experience taken from me. Thank you for this post!
My femme wife wholeheartedly agrees with your fiancé’s comments: “when I inquire about it—she refers to visible breasts, biceps and strong-looking legs as “butch assets”¹.
She also finds it hilarious when ‘straight’ women fall over their heels/ walk into lamp posts whilst ogling me backwards trying to figure it out after they’ve walked past us 🤣
I enjoyed this and I agree mostly. However, in my experience of being in radical feminism spaces, the political lesbian and butch femme as role playing trans like identities is not a small minority.
I’ve had a number of lesbians I know back away from me and go quite because I publicly identified as butch. I recently declined a speaking invite because the feminist group was going to have a presentation on “butch and femme as another gender identity “ and talk about the virtues of political lesbianism. It’s very alive and well, listen to my recent interview with a radfem. You will hear me ask twice for her to define what she means by butch femme inequality only to have her fail to define it but stand by that often our relationship have inequality in them.
There sure are Radical Feminists who don’t understand Butch-Femme and I don’t think it’s their fault. Frankly, real Butches and Femmes have failed to articulate ourselves, removed ourselves from feminist discourse, and allowed queers & bisexuals to appropriate those terms and bastardize their meaning for a long time. The same way Political Lesbians have bastardized the meaning of lesbianism and even Radical Feminism. I’ll write more about this soon.
Wow Carol, this is scary because it is the exact same environment in which I came out when I was 17 in 1977, Women’s Studies at Wash. U in St Louis!! We didn’t know our history and worse yet, we didn’t ask but assumed the relationship was a heteronormative imitation. And our internalized sexism dismissed Joan Nestle. (Heels, makeup? She’s not a Lesbian feminist) The Persistent Desire, and Boots of Leather Slippers of Gold should be required reading for every Lesbian.
My goodness, this article is so good. And you always write about exactly what I needed to hear at that very moment. I've been reading a lot of "classical lesbian literature" recently an JoAnn Loulan has to be my favorite so far.
Thank you for also discussing the pressure on butches to hate ourselves. At first, when people would talk to me with that assumption, I thought I had missed some memo. Apparently most women look in the mirror and critique their appearance instead of smiling and winking at themselves. Who knew?
Allow me to trauma dump, if you will. Recently my grandfather died and I decided not to go to the funeral. An estranged aunt noticed I wasn't there and started texting me with questions. She assumed I didn't attend, in her words, "because of the gender identity thing". She then proceeded to tell me stories about me as a young child always telling people I was a boy (completely made up). All this mental gymnastics to explain how, in my misogynistic family, I could possibly survive without a man. It must be because I want to be a man. Very strange logic.
Firstly, my deep condolences about your grandfather.
Secondly, why is it always the aunts who get into everyone’s business? They specifically love to pick on (suspected) lesbians in the family, I noticed.
Deeply strange and problematic assumption to make about you just for not showing up to the funeral… best you can do in these situations is just ignore/dismiss them, not feed into the deeply flawed logic. That’s what I have learned.
Thank you for sharing your experience! Appreciate it.
PS: what other JoAnn Loulan (and other classic lesbian authors’) books have you been reading recently?
Phenomenal post, as always. Thank you!!! I was a little disappointed…the preamble at the top for optional section reading made me think it was going to be a much longer piece, which I was fully ready for! Color me perpetually excited to read a long form post written by you, friend.
From my own experience, having read Stone Butch Blues toward the beginning of my detransitioning process, I was deeply moved and changed by it. It showcased what I was running away from, contextualized my own internalized homophobia and misogyny, my life, in a way that didn’t allow it to be rewritten as a “trans” experience. For me, it took diving into what I didn’t want, what I was afraid of, via Leslie’s lived narrative, to see that:
had I been exposed to SBB before I dove down the rabbit hole of medicalizing etc. (read: had anything prompted me to view my experience as one of wholeness, no possibility of being female wrong) the likelihood of my sexually-traumatized-femme to medicalized-lesbian-in-hiding-being-seen-as-a-jolly-harmless-gay-man pipeline wouldn’t have had the steam to take off.
As always, so much to nod along with while I read. Much love. 💕
I look forward to reading that deepening of topics! Your voice has an easy-conversation-feel, and it’s so easy to read. Also: deeply loving the perspective of the Femme in your life.
I absolutely respect where you’re coming from around SBB—it’s a complex read, both intentionally and unintentionally. (I also deeply appreciated the firm boundaried Femme). I could see exactly why Leslie fell into being with a trans identified male—having internalized her own otherness, continuing to treat it like the mark of Cain, and her empathy became weaponizeable in ways I recognize from much of my own lived experience while captured. Reading it when I did, I was disappointed by how often she betrayed herself, and took stock of the countless times I remember having done the same. She tunneled into the pain. So many of us have/do.
You did read that right! I hadn’t considered my perspective to be a less common combo, but when you lay it out like that I suppose it is. I went the “nonbinary” route for a good decade+. For half of it, I never intended to medicalize. I fell in with a charismatic and controlling “friend” who convinced me over time that I was miserable because medicalizing was the answer.
Ended up on testosterone, and took it far longer than intended. One day I looked in the mirror, and all I could see was the abusive man I’d been avoiding most of my life, and I could no longer see my mother.
I had a double mastectomy and, horrifically, a female surgeon removed my tubes and ovaries and didn’t tell me I’d still have a cycle if I ever went on exogenous estrogen and progesterone. Wild surprise during my detransition process. (I had always had difficult cycles, regularly lasting over a month, with a flow I could only describe in graphic terms, and saw no solutions. The doctors always made it worse.)
It was a long and winding road to see how I was primed and ready to step into coercive dynamics, having come from a high control household/cult of one. My closest friends and lovers while in the cult of trans were all cult survivors—took me long enough to understand why!
All that to say: it’s been a wild ride! I’m taking it one day at a time, and so deeply appreciative of many perspectives, including yours. My wife and I met while we were both captured, and she began detransitioning a few months after I did. The facade unraveled big huge the more we read, and we are solidly delighted to be largely on the other side of this informative, but difficult, mess.
You’re spot-on with defining trans as a “cult” mainly targeting vulnerable people who were primed to be susceptible.
Your perspective is an incredibly important one. Too often people focus on the Butch experience with gender-ideology and forget that Femmes, as homosexuals, are vulnerable to it too—whether it’s being heartbroken by their Butches transitioning or navigating their own trauma & complex feelings about womanhood and non-conformity. Such as you described.
I am definitely familiar with the phenomenon of Femme Lesbians identifying as “non-binary”—something I thought about writing about at some point.
What happened with your surgery—& the fact that the doctor didn’t give you any guidance—is horrible. I truly do hope that all the medical professionals who were complicit in the lies and deceit of the transgender medical scandal will be held accountable one day. One can hope.
Thank you for your honesty & thoughtfulness! I’m really happy to hear that you and your wife can support each other through this journey. Sending much love to you both & would be happy to hear from you again.
Thank you very much for your comment!
Substack has limits, so at some point I had to cut back. But you’ll be happy to know I’ll be deepening some of these topics very soon.
I can sympathize with your experience in reading SBB—even when I first read it (around the time of becoming a TERF) I had hopes that the end might provide more… constructive insights. Making the main character end up with a trans-identidied-male was the final strand for me to despise it. However, there were aspects of the book I appreciated (such as the Femme setting a firm boundary that she wasn’t okay with her Butch transitioning). But I think it was mostly me reading through the lines critically and not really the author’s intention—as Feinberg was fully sold into the trans discourse.
I do think it’s a dangerous book to read for young lesbians in a vulnerable, confusionary state, which I think is the case for most of them. But it can be sure helpful—when you’re a little older and able to see it critically—to realize how harmful transition for lesbians actually is.
Did I understand correctly that you recognize yourself as a Femme lesbian now, post-detransition? If so, that’s an interesting perspective & not one we hear often.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I think the most frustrating thing about that interaction is that my family is rewriting my history without my consent. Instead of accepting I am a woman who has been married to a woman for nearly 20 years, they'd rather rationalize that by saying I've always wanted to be a man. My wife can't come around if we are both women, but if I become a man, we will be tolerated. I come from a conservative evangelical family in the Bible Belt of the US. In any case, I've finally gone full no-contact.
I've read everything JoAnn Loulan I could get my hands on. Lesbian Sex, Lesbian Passion, and The Lesbian Erotic Dance. I read JoAnn's books cover to cover. But I've been reading, off and on; SomeBody to Love by Leslea Newman, Call Me Lesbian by Julia Penelope, and The Lesbian Path by Margaret Cruikshank. This whole "Classic Lesbian Reading Journey" was kicked off by watching the documentary Framing Lesbian Fashion. It's not easy to find, but my local library had it on the Kanopy streaming service. Highly recommend.
Edit: I have no idea why I replied on the incorrect reply. I will blame Substack for this error.
Lovely piece, as a butch who loves another butch, it's so good to see butches' femaleness celebrated. It's gender ideology's silly insistence on the gender binary that makes out that butch women are somehow masculine. No we are not! We are women, who reject traditional femininity and tend to be gender-non-conforming in how we dress. I am a weightlifter, and my muscles go with my female curves- nothing masculine about that.
I’ve always been attracted to and had crushes on butch women, even when I was young (before puberty had kicked in)!! I also concur- strong arms, legs and breasts are absolute butch assets.
It’s taken me YEARS to work out how my bisexuality works, and accept that I have femme tastes when it comes to my attraction to women. I’ve hated that nearly every butch woman I know now identifies as a ‘trans-man’ or ‘non-binary’ 😢
Bring ‘being a butch women is HOT 🔥’ baaaaaaaaack
I love my breasts as a butch, they make me feel fucking powerful. I feel so fucking lucky i didn’t have that experience taken from me. Thank you for this post!
All power to the butch breast! Thank you for your comment.
{I love the way the voice says butt-ches}
That’s so funny! I hadn’t noticed it before.
My femme wife wholeheartedly agrees with your fiancé’s comments: “when I inquire about it—she refers to visible breasts, biceps and strong-looking legs as “butch assets”¹.
She also finds it hilarious when ‘straight’ women fall over their heels/ walk into lamp posts whilst ogling me backwards trying to figure it out after they’ve walked past us 🤣
My fiancée will be happy to hear that. Nothing turns crowds’ heads as much as a Butch walking out in the street, lol.
I enjoyed this and I agree mostly. However, in my experience of being in radical feminism spaces, the political lesbian and butch femme as role playing trans like identities is not a small minority.
I’ve had a number of lesbians I know back away from me and go quite because I publicly identified as butch. I recently declined a speaking invite because the feminist group was going to have a presentation on “butch and femme as another gender identity “ and talk about the virtues of political lesbianism. It’s very alive and well, listen to my recent interview with a radfem. You will hear me ask twice for her to define what she means by butch femme inequality only to have her fail to define it but stand by that often our relationship have inequality in them.
There sure are Radical Feminists who don’t understand Butch-Femme and I don’t think it’s their fault. Frankly, real Butches and Femmes have failed to articulate ourselves, removed ourselves from feminist discourse, and allowed queers & bisexuals to appropriate those terms and bastardize their meaning for a long time. The same way Political Lesbians have bastardized the meaning of lesbianism and even Radical Feminism. I’ll write more about this soon.
I think your giving them to much credit but ok. This isn’t nothing new btw, this discourse has been going on for decades.
Wow Carol, this is scary because it is the exact same environment in which I came out when I was 17 in 1977, Women’s Studies at Wash. U in St Louis!! We didn’t know our history and worse yet, we didn’t ask but assumed the relationship was a heteronormative imitation. And our internalized sexism dismissed Joan Nestle. (Heels, makeup? She’s not a Lesbian feminist) The Persistent Desire, and Boots of Leather Slippers of Gold should be required reading for every Lesbian.
Glad you enjoyed. Thank you for reading.