Her name is Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. Her family disowned her for her activism. After her first arrest, she was tested for mental illness, because Virginia law enforcement couldn’t think of any other reason why a white Virginian girl would want to fight for civil rights.
She also created the Joan Trumpauer Mullholland Foundation. Most recently, she was interviewed on Samatha Bee’s Full Frontal on February 15 for their segment on Black History Month.
Don’t reduce civil rights heroes to “teenage girl”.
This post was created after reading this. It's not an attack to OP obviously, but I think we need to change—maybe revolutionize how we see and talk about femmeness.
We definitely need to move past the "femme as in lover and protector of butches". This is not to say that we shouldn't help or be in community with butches—we should. But it's about time we center ourselves in our identity, and curate femmeness around what it means to us—not just our usefulness and accessibility to butches, studs and MoC.
We are not secondary, we are not just here for butches. We are here because we have shared history, but that doesn't mean that our femmeness revolves around them. It's not—and if a lot of you read femme history, it was never supposed to be.
A friend of mine wrote a post on High Femme and how historically, it was related to the self more than relationships dynamic. You can read it here.
Especially as BIPOC femmes, our BIPOC "virtues" are often determined by how useful we are in the community. It's tiring. It's overused—frankly, it's unsustainable on the self. When you curate your identity around external parties, it loses its significance.
So what should we do?
For the femmes, stop—and I mean this, STOP saying that you're performing femmeness for butches. Get a hold of yourself. You are a whole person, and the only person you should be catering is yourself.
Read femme history and femmephobia. Notice how I specifically said femme history? There are femmes before us who have been stressing how we are not just here to cater to butches. There are accounts and history on femmephobia that is still not talked about enough in the community.
This one is directed specifically but not limited to white/white passing butches and femmes, understand that for BIPOC femmes, claiming femininity can be just as non-conforming as claiming masculinity, due to our history with colonization. The reason I specifically called in white butchfemmes, is because I have seen you spewing rethoric like "we have superpower in being conforming!" We don't. For some of us, femmeness is closely linked to our culture and spirituality. Butches is not even in the equation when it comes to our femmeness.
I need you guys to understand that privilege through assimilation is NOT a privilege. Call it what it is: erasure.
Next, be vocal. Be vocal about your experience as femmes, your gender expression, and whatever ties to your femmeness. You have as much space in the community and deserve to speak up. No one else in the community is excited to talk about our experience, so we have to do it. If you have to annoy people in the community, if the butches around you are uncomfortable (boy, do I know the butches around me are uncomfortable with this conversation lol), do it anyway.
Lastly, for the baby femmes, find other femmes, especially BIPOC femmes, trans femmes, bisexual femmes, AroAcespec femmes, GNC femmes, he/him femmes, mspec femmes, MEN femmes, and femmes who are independent in their identity. Learn from them. Center yourself.
Important to read before you go: this is NOT to say that we should spew butchphobic rethorics. So I will not have you buffoons in my asks shitting on butches, studs, MoC, butch4butch and moc4moc. Just because I center myself and femmeness, doesn't mean I'm gonna let you shit on the people I share a community with. REMEMBER THAT this post is ABOUT and CENTER FEMMES.
from Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1994) by Madeline D. Davis & Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy
excerpt 1:
All narrators, butch and fem alike, remember and talk about the violence in relationships of the tough crowd in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was a public part of community life. This does not mean that all butches of this crowd and period hit their fems. In fact, we know some who did not. But the possibility of using violence was integrated into the culture.
Butches not only talk about others’ violence, but openly acknowledge their own, although they have neither the words nor the stomach to discuss it fully. “And there was also violence. There was a lot of violence… What will I talk about? Do you want to sit around and talk about, you know, the girl that you punched in the face because she did something wrong, you don’t want to say all that. But it was very violent” (Vic).
Violence in relationships is not only taken for granted as part of the fabric of late-1950s social life, but also is dramatically marked in people’s memories. Little Gerry, hearing a draft of our work, urges us not to cover up the violence, and immediately shares a vivid and unpleasant memory of “a butch taking her fem by the hair and bashing her head down on the bar. It was not nice.”
excerpt 2:
Vic remembers learning to hit her fem as part of the cultural package of becoming butch, like how to dress.
“When you ask that question, where do you think that people, like myself, that came out in the ’50s, where do you think I learned how to act and how to deal in the bar?… From the butches that were around from the ’40s and early ’50s, that’s where I learned. I seen them. They were gods to me. And I seen how they treated their people and I did the same thing that they did. They were the ones that would, you know, ‘Fems, don’t let her do that, you tell her to sit down, and that’s it. …’ Well how would I know, I was just coming out, how would I know that? Hit my girlfriend, I would never hit her. She might leave me and she’s the only one in the world. But then they taught me, you wear your hair short and you dress like this and your woman does this and that. They’re the ones that showed me how to—what I should be like, to be right up there with them.”
This sort of stuff is unfortunately not shocking to me at all, seeing the way that modern butchfemme community (see white, normative) continue to treat fems/femmes, BIPOC butchfemmes, and other members of the community they see as being lesser or not belonging.
gonna be honest, this isn’t nice to read as a butch, as a butch whose butch identity is very important to them, but this needs to be spoken on, brought to light and thoroughly investigated, examined, and addressed by the butch community, myself included. This violence that is spoken about in these excerpts is historical and was a well established part of the butch identity. Therefore every butch (white especially) has a moral and ethical responsibility to deconstruct the way we think about our fem/femme/fish counterparts, how we interact with them in community spaces how we speak about them, how we move throughout shared culture with them.
As a bisexual butch, who has always been excluded from larger butch culture and social spaces, i see this historical form of violence replicated in the modern day over and over, in the way that butch4butches talk about femmes, in the way that femme contribution is flatted into a one dimensional feminine cut out of butch protection as if a femme only exists for us to take out anger at the world on and then use to shield us from the oppression we do face, in the way that trans butches, bi butches, genderdiverse and man aligned sapphics are horrifically erased from history. This is a problem that is as deeply ingrained in butch culture as white supremacy is specifically because this DOES come from white supremacy.
Masculinity that does not firmly and repeatedly distance itself from white supremacy, from the centering of whiteness is doomed to replicate the violence and horror that upholds the patriarchy and white supremacy as a pillar of society. Butches, i urge you with all of the care in my heart for us and our people to really REALLY sit with this excerpt, examine how you treat fems/femmes, how you treat those different then you, how you police your spaces. None of us are free until all of us are free. It is our duty as butches to never use any other member of our communities as a punching bag, as a receptacle of our anger and frustration, as a way to bond with other butches.
we need to do better or we will never achieve liberation.
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