Starting off simply, here’s a timeline of the history of “butch,” exploring its roots in working class queer women of color’s bars (remember, the word lesbian just meant “woman who has sex with women” until the 70s). The 80s is when the author first starts talking about the use of butch by queer men. Specifically, urban men of color.
And, while I hate to play the “defer to authority” card, when it comes to butch identity, there are few people who would know more about it than Butch Voices, the largest butch activist organization in the world. Which specifically refuses to exclude men, and more than that explicitly includes trans men.
Gay men often describe themselves (check out these personals ads), their partners or their friends in terms of being femme or butch, not just in casual contexts, but in research ones. That’s how deeply these identities are felt. Again and again, the term used to describe all queer masculinity is butch.
And while most definitions by queer organizations welcome and acknowledge the fact that butch was popularized in post-WWII women’s spaces, you’ll note an absence of gender limitations on the definitions themselves.
That’s because butch identity, by its very nature, is a violation of gender norms (one that some people say is outdated and antiquated, though I strongly disagree).
And so, too, are all forms of queerness ultimately a violation of gender normativity, of strict definition and categorization.
That’s why major butch authors, for example, hesitate to even use traditional gender pronouns such as “he” or “she” when writing about the hypothetical butch. Because a butch may be a woman, but womanhood is not a necessary component of butchness. And I do apologize for that link, I know it only shows scraps of the whole book, but it does at least include a couple of the more relevant essays about the complexity of trying to assign a gender to butch identity.
For all queer people–including the men–butch identity is an act of reclamation of masculine performance, in the same way that for all queer people–including the women–femme identity is a reclamation of feminine performance, ripping it out of the hands of the cisheteronormative hegemony and saying, hey, fuck you, you don’t get to decide who counts as what, who gets to do what, get fucked. And this can be fumbled, of course, but so can anything. Performance is what it is, and we all make missteps.
Now, as for the other half of my conclusion: that the constant claims about butch (and femme) being “lesbian exclusive” are TERF propaganda.
The following links require content warnings far in excess of just “these talk about queer history and the evolution of terminology.”
These are links to TERF news articles written and intended for non-TERF audiences. That means they present TERF talking points in positive language. Be careful when you approach them, be careful when you read them.
Since at least the 1980s, when masculinizing medical transition started becoming more accessible on a larger scale, trans-exclusionary feminists and trans-exclusionary lesbian separatists have been going out of their way to erase, shame, and punish their trans brothers and lovers for “betraying” them,.
A great many people who had previously identified as hard-butch lesbians because it was the only word they new moved into identifying as trans men. And because radical feminist, lesbian separatist theory had no place for any kind of men, the only way that kind of act could be frames was as treachery. The men who did so, some of whom had been stalwart feminists for decades, some of whom had even been powerful voices in second wave feminist movements, were suddenly treated as abusers, drug peddlers, and sexual criminals.
And that is why it is imperative that we refuse to let TERFs define who does and does not get to be butch. They never got to before, and they sure as hell don’t get to now.
