A lot of trans masculine history got absorbed into butch lesbian history because for a really long time there just was not safe language for a lot of people to separate those experiences cleanly. And obviously butch lesbians are their own thing.
They have their own history and culture and identity. This is not “all butches are secretly trans men” because that would be insane and disrespectful.
But there absolutely were trans masculine people who existed in lesbian spaces because that was the closest thing available to them socially and culturally at the time.
Especially when transition either was not accessible or would have genuinely ruined somebody’s life.
I think people also really underestimate what the AIDS epidemic did to queer history in general. We lost entire generations of people. Elders died. Community memory died. A lot of the people who would have been able to explain the nuance between butchness, trans masculinity, passing women, drag culture, early transition, all of that, were just gone.
Then history gets rewritten afterward by institutions that want everything in neat little boxes.
So now you have decades of masculine AFAB people in archives getting labeled as “women” or “lesbians” because that was easier for historians to process than admitting gender variance has always existed in messy complicated ways.
And honestly I think that is part of why so many trans masculine people and trans men joke about the “butch lesbian to trans man pipeline.” Not because they are the same thing, but because a lot of us did spend time in those spaces before realizing “oh this is not just masculinity. this is gender.”
Meanwhile some people stay butch forever and never transition and they are completely happy that way. Both experiences are real. They are just different timelines that cross over sometimes.
I also think transandrophobia makes these conversations harder because people either flatten trans men back into womanhood or immediately treat us like identical copies of cis men the second we transition.
And neither of those are accurate.
A lot of trans masculine people grew up dealing with misogyny, homophobia, being seen as threatening for masculinity, being called slurs, being unsafe in bathrooms, all of that stuff, before we even had language for ourselves. Transition does not magically erase that history from somebody’s body or memory.
I just think people need to let trans masculine people talk about our own histories more without immediately assuming we are attacking butches or trying to rewrite lesbian history every single time the overlap gets mentioned.
