butch (25)

books - queer bdsm - video games - chemist - bone marrow transplant survivor

[butchhooker]

hey all, my name is tori (she/her/husbutch). welcome to my new tumblr blog!! it’s a mix of plants, science, butch/nb representation, and reading/literature. sometimes writing. happily married. stay a while 🍒

updated photos 12March2024 because I love myself through every phase of myself. here to represent the butches who are disabled. you’re handsome and strong as you are.

[trans-boy-yearning]

[lesserfires-deactivated20210628]

[gnomewoman]

the girls are all here

[z1z]

2020 Commemorative custom Blueberry guitar for Aurelio Voltaire

[introvert-time-art]

"being trans is a choice" do you honestly think i would CHOOSE to get gender euphoria from wearing knee-length basketball shorts?? that's humiliating

[persvphone]

kermit and miss piggy are a butchfemme couple

[ripleylarue]

A butch curling their femme wife’s hair before bed

[depsidase]

[monkeyislandtwo]

what a nice cast of characters! why are all of them skinny

[marciies]

a while back there was a picture of a butchfemme couple on a train circulating and the butch was sitting and the femme was standing. in the quotes people in the butchfemme community were saying things like “this is disgusting. why would you sit and let your femme stand” etc. it upset me so badly because 1) some butches are disabled and 2) femmes take care of their butches too, especially in public. i’ve seen so many femmes talk about how they hold their butch’s hand tighter in public, stand in front of us for protection, and are hyperaware of the surroundings. i hate that people ignore this.

i feel like there needs to be an honest conversation about these kinds of things because it’s so disrespectful to both butches and femmes and such a reductive thing to say about how care and safety efforts operate in butchfemme relationships/communities.

[roadtonothing]

[butterflyfemmme-deactivated2025]

for sure a dyke

[forestnymphomaniac]

Need to find the butch knight to my femme princess

[littlewickedthings]

Srta Dolores

[p3achyang3l]

give me that butch kinda lovin <33

[phoebecollingsjamesart]

Cunt, 2014, Oil on salvage denim

228 x 80 cm

[aliosne]

Saw a post about working class butches in physical labour jobs and wanted to make my own, so: I love you butches who do childcare or early education. I love you butch nurses. I love you butch house cleaners and janitorial staff. I love you service industry butches. I love you butches who do sex work. I love you working class butches who do “feminine” jobs you are cool as hell

[troublefemme]

So, I saw the sentiment, justifiably so, of frustration with butch being associated with protection, with strength, with manual labor and that got me thinking about why that could be, where could those things potentially come from.

And I arrived at a few guesses.

I’ll say beforehand that I’m not assigning morality or right or wrongs to any of these qualities, because I think some of these things (being fond of being a protector/perceived as one; as strong; working manual labor etc) fit some butches, some of these things don’t fit other butches, these aren’t necessarily requirements/butch criteria. This is not a critique, its an attempt of contextualization. Now we can move on to my guesses:

The idea of butch being associated with protection of others:

I would think that this unfortunately heavily associated with the idea that butches are also aggressive/violent, they are potentially two sides of a stereotypical spectrum.

I’d guess the context it comes from likely is the butch/femme bar culture of the 1950s (I’m specific about this, because, for example, in the 1940s there were signs that this wouldn’t have happened, I’d go into detail but I don’t want to derail, but let me know if you want a specific post about that) in which the violence against gays/lesbians was growing rapidly and the butches especially didn’t hesitate on picking a fight to protect “their girl”, to protect their spaces, to protect their rights to exist as they were. So much so that these butches would even be named “the tough bar lesbians”.

In this particular decade, you see butches being more defensive and much more active in that defense, in fact, the ones we read about were extremely protective because they got tired of being treated like absolute garbage, so as a reaction sometimes they’d pick fights, they’d try to conquer spaces, they’d get physical about it and it all makes sense with context, but as oral history gets passed down, in some cases it loses almost all its contexts and then you’re left with bareboned stereotypes.

Further context to this decade is now lesbians are moving away from that separation between work/family and social life and moving towards wanting more and more to have access to being/presenting as who they are outside of the bars as well, entering the public eye, no longer hiding.

All that goes hand in hand with the notion of butches being strong, a lot of what was taken into account were just those butches who participated in fights. And it’s important to mention that the notion of butches being femme protectors but not otherwise, highlights an aspect of femme invisibility in the community, when you don’t take into account that, in those same times, femmes would absolutely distract people to avoid fights, or get in the way to do so, there was a lot of active femme participation to be able to protect their partner, as well as community organization, to this day there is that, but not as much recognition per se. Not just physically but also heavily financially.

Femmes at this time, and today aren’t recognized as lesbians a lot of the time, so they’d then be able to have access to and keep, for example secretarial jobs, and butches who now presented as such all the time, instead of just in the bars, had a harder time getting hired and keeping those jobs, so a lot of the time femmes would be breadwinners.

That also dismisses the long, heavy history of femme sex workers, who would “pull tricks” to help out their partners, to keep a roof over their heads, to be able to buy a drink, etc. Femmes that would sometimes risk their own safety to help them both get by.

That matters and leads me right to the last point, that because butches usually wouldn’t be afforded those same secretarial jobs or wouldn’t be able to keep up with the appearances those jobs wanted from them, it led them to a period there where they couldn’t get jobs* and later a space in the job market that would take them, but not always be necessarily more “accepting” or nicer: manual labor, working in industries, blue collar jobs in general, because then their appearance didn’t matter as much to the job, but it doesn’t mean it was easy.

To this day you still see many butches working those kinds of jobs.

Its also worth mentioning that the association of butches (and sometimes femmes) to manual labor in a way makes sense considering these identities are heavily built by working class individuals.

All this to say, there’s a chance people took important historical points in the subculture’s past and turned them into milestones/“requirements” with no context, that left no room for the diversity in the community and butches and femmes who find themselves in different circumstances/levels of accessibility of those points.

*lets be honest here, that still happens today and butches still suffer prejudice against for their gender presentation/their sexuality and a lot of the time still do have a hard time getting jobs, etc.

[2sexy4thisworld]