Butches are Disappearing
https://youtu.be/ryUktDRu15k
The Argument
I’ve had many people tell me that they’re sad that butches are disappearing and that this is just another way to “convert us into heteronormative boxes.”
00:13 Physical Transition and Bodily Autonomy
I have some fundamental core values which I will not compromise. One of these values is bodily autonomy. As long as you aren’t harming anyone else, you can do what you want with your body, because it’s yours, no one else should tell me what to do with my body. Trans-exclusionary feminists seem to have this idea that transgender people are influencing butches to transition. I have never in my life seen or heard anyone telling anyone else to transition. Ever. You know what I have heard, plenty of trans-exclusionary radical feminists telling people not to transition. When a community tells a group of people what to do with their own bodies, that sends up major red flags for me. Now I know I said “as long as you’re not harming anyone,” and I understand that some people think transitioning is harming oneself, now this is arguably subjective, but at the end of the day, look I’m good and healthy, not in pain right now yay me.
I’m still butch. I’m not “disappearing,” I’m not going anywhere. I will never be heterosexual, I will never be straight, I will sure as hell never be heteronormative. You know what /is/ sad, is that my period almost killed me, twice. Because of the body I was born into, I could have been wiped off the face of the planet far too early, all for a set of organs I will never ever use for anything. And whenever I tried to address this, medical practitioners made it all about future babies and preserving fertility. That’s what’s really fucked up. My diction for top surgery was made partially because of gender reasons, partially because of non-gender medical reasons. Anti-trans feminists seemed horrified that I removed “perfectly healthy body parts,” but mine weren’t perfectly healthy. And also even if they had been, there would be a higher chance that one day they wouldn’t be. Now I don’t have that concern. Additionally this rhetoric doesn’t take into account the wonders that surgery for the right person can do to their mental health. There were a lot of factors that contributed to my choice; no decision is ever made in a void.
02:08 Peer Pressure
I see so many TERFs talk about butches being “pressured” into taking T. I don’t know who these people hang out with, but that isn’t safe, it isn’t nice, and it sure as hell is neither my experience nor does it reflect the ideologies of the community as a whole. I have never seen or heard of anyone being pressured to take hormones. While I have heard many trans people and medical practitioners to caution people and to tell them to take their time and really think about things before making any irrevocable decisions.
Anti-trans people advocating for the “preservation of butches” talk about how the transgender movement “pressures” butches into transitioning. The only pressure I have ever felt from anyone in regards to transitioning, has been the deliberate and consistent pressure from anti-trans people to not transition in any way. I have never felt pressure from any trans person, association, or movement, to transition. In fact I have felt very rigid forms of gender and sexual policing within lesbian spaces (Wear a push up bra or a sports bra, but never a binder. Date femmes, not butches. Be monogamous. Don’t date trans women, only date cis women. Dating someone double your age is unacceptable and frowned upon, even though you’re well into your twenties and a mature adult who can make their own decisions. You have to love your breasts, you have to love your period and bleeding with the moon, even though both these things clearly make you miserable. Even some old-school lesbians have said that using a strap-on means that I want a penis, and that the only “real” lesbian sex is without any toys.) A while ago, before I really identified myself as non-binary, I went out to a lesbian bar, and the lesbians thought I was a man, as though I can be butch, but not /too/ butch. Here’s another example, I am butch, and I am attracted mostly to other butch people, sometimes femmes but less frequently. But after a few times of hitting on butches in lesbian spaces I learned very quickly that that was not ok. Butches would react to me the same way a homophobic straight man might react to a gay man hitting on him, they seemed repulsed, they didn’t just politely reject my advances, they seemed incredibly offended that another butch would find them attractive, as though I was “threatening their masculinity” or something. In my eyes that kind of behaviour reenforces the heteronormative (homonormative) binary way more than taking hormones does.
Ironically- or perhaps not at all so- I have found far more acceptance for alternative modes of being and modes of desire in trans spaces than lesbian spaces. I have always felt and received such unconditional acceptance from the trans community.
04:40 The Trans Cult
I also see a lot of TERFs refer to the trans movement as a cult, yet a defining feature of a cult is cutting off social ties with people outside of the cult, and conforming to the cults standards of being. As I said earlier, I have received far more pressure from lesbians to conform to a certain standard and to be a certain way. All the advice I’ve gotten from trans people is “You do you. Figure out what you want to do with your life. Don’t make decisions to quickly, take your time. Find support people outside of the trans community.” None of this is cult-like behaviour. And it seems to me that to this certain group of anti-trans people, you can’t question your gender, you can’t have that freedom, they seem vehemently against people having trans friends, I’ve seen them actively trying to persuade people not to transition. Their behaviour reminds me of the Christians standing on the side of the street handing out gay conversion therapy leaflets to queers walking by.
05:39 Being Butch and Trans
Much academia supports the idea that Butches have always been trans. That’s not to say trans men, or that butches are interested in what we understand today as ‘transitioning.’ But that the concept of being transgender has often and largely incorporated gender non-conforming people. This also highlights the fact that they aren’t necessarily two distinct categories. See Ivan Coyote, Leslie Feinberg, Jack Halberstam, these people are butch and trans.
06:13 Forgetting Butch Trans Women
The other problem with this argument is that you refuse to acknowledge that butch trans women exist too. (List a few: Ricki Wilchins, Jo-I-Dunno, and I know a few wonderful butch trans women personally who I’m not going to out here). So you may feel like you're loosing some butch women because they come out as trans women, but some other people are trans women who are butch lesbians, and if you refuse to acknowledge that they are women too then you’re transphobic plain and simple. And if you acknowledge that they are women, but that you would never date them and so don’t count them in your pool of eligible butches, then you’re looking at butches as objects for your own sexual gratification, and that’s really fucked up.
As a side note, there’s been this conversation going around about if you’re a lesbian and a trans woman discloses that she has a penis, and you choose not to have sex with her or date her any more for that reason, does that make you transphobic? The answer is no. A lot of TERFs seem to think that trans people are saying they have to fuck women who have penises or else they’re transphobic. No, no one’s saying that, in fact I’ve never ever seen or heard a trans person say or write that. You don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to have sex with, plain and simple. Consent is mandatory in all things.
But plenty of trans women have had genital surgery, and saying they’re not women, because of their assigned gender, is a shitty thing to do.
07:43 Attacking the Wrong People
Many studies on young trans kids show that social transitioning results in less feelings of depression. TERFs saying it’s because gender nonconformity is punished, and by transitioning the TERFs assume that the trans person if now being celebrated because they’re adhering to gender norms. While trans activists say that young trans people having access to early care is going to be wonderful for the future mental health of the trans community because, puberty is bad enough, imagine going through the wrong one. It seems to me that regardless of which of these is true, attacking trans people is not the answer, it’s not productive. If you’re worried that gender nonconformity isn’t being celebrated enough, then by god celebrate it! Amplify the gender nonconformity you have in your own life. Also knowing the trans people I know, they’re a lot more likely to buck the gendered expectations of their gender identity once they feel comfortable in the amount they’ve transitioned, because they’ve already had to put up with that bullshit once.
08:42 Detransitioning/Trans Regret
Some people regret transitioning. It happens. Of course it happens. For a variety of reasons. Do some people wish they’d never transitioned, yes. Are those people a large proportion of the people who transition, not at all. Does that mean we shouldn’t talk about it, no. But does that mean that we should stop everyone from transitioning because some people are sad that they did, of course not.
The stories I hear from people who detransitioned were:
They felt they had to make a decision quickly because they weren’t given breathing space to identify as ‘gender questioning’ for a while- hey you know what places don’t let you identify as gender questioning? Anti-trans spaces that’s where.
Trans and depression. Talk about transition as seeming exciting, depression is not looking to end it, it’s looking for change. If gender becomes more fluid and transition becomes normalised I believe it wont appear as an appealing out for people with depression trying to figure out how to fix themselves.
I must stress these two examples are a tiny percentage of an already tiny population. Statistical outliers, whose needs must be addressed, yes, and whose stories should be told, yes, but do not for a moment pretend that they represent a majority of experiences.
10:46 Feminism
Kids asking about gender. “Are you a boy or a girl?” When you let them know there are other options, you expand their world view. I love the idea of embodying a hormonal and surgical middle ground as a visible representation of possibilities outside of a strict gender dichotomy. Surely this can only be good for the deconstruction of harmful gender ideologies, which must be overall a positive thing for feminism.
11:15 I Love Butches
Visibility is important. But the things is, if someone who I thought previously identified as a butch cis woman comes out as trans, I’m not loosing anything in life, I’m not left here with a gaping hole in my heart. There are plenty of other butch role models for me to look to.
11:34 Afterword
It’s interesting too, I feel, that some older trans folks are worried that the increased availability of puberty blockers to young trans people, and the vast resources that allow children access to gender clinics, means that in future trans people are going to be less visibly trans. That more trans people will pass as cis, and visible trans people will start disappearing. This anxiety that the anti-trans lesbians have about butches disappearing is echoed across the LGBT communities. Gay men are worried they’re loosing men to transition, lesbian women are worried they’re loosing butches to transition, visibly trans people are worried they’re loosing young trans people to cis-passing privilege, bisexuals have never been visible so they aint worried about shit, and also many bi and pan people love people of any gender so they don’t seem too invested in this weird sexual and gender puritan ideology. The general theme is is that LGBT people seem to be worried about queer visibility being on the decline, but more people than ever are coming out as LGBT.
I myself am concerned for the future of lesbians, shunning their trans friends and allies and committing in-group fighting within the LGBT community; that is how the real enemy wins. That is how the conservatives get us. They divide and conquer.
Links: http://www.handsomerevolution.com http://www.butchwonders.com/blog/our-25-most-powerful-butches http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/10/05/record-numbers-of-young-people-are-coming-out/ Note: Yes this content doesn’t lend itself too well to a video format, it would probably be better as a written article. But this is my forum and mode of delivery. I’ve had enough of anti-trans lesbians attacking me, or trying to “save” me, which is incredibly condescending and erases the years of research and soul-searching (I actually prefer soul-creation) I have done. So I wanted to put all my thoughts down into a (big) “bite sized” chunk here to direct them to when they start to vomit a world salad at me. There are a couple more arguments that I had had hurled at me that weren’t addressed here: Equating trans gender people with “transable” people- apparently able bodied people who deliberately become amputees or blind themselves. My transition has not made me reliant long term on ability aids or other people’s help. I am just as physically and mentally capable as before so your argument falls short. It makes no sense.
TERFs arguing that the statistics of the murder rate of trans women is fabricated or exaggerated. Many trans women do get murdered just for being trans women. I personally have never quoted any numbers, fabricated or otherwise. And whether or not that is true, does not invalidate my identity. (I mean, I’d actually be glad if it weren’t true, that would mean less trans people were getting killed and that my life would actually be safer.)
