idk if this has been posted yet but i read this thread by @teamarimo and found it SUPER interesting and thorough and thought itâd be good to share it
This is good, just wish it wasnât posted as a Twitter essay, theyâre so hard to read.
[Caption: a series of tweets by twitter user @teamarimo. It reads:
the debate on who can use the terms âbutch/femmeâ keeps coming up so i did a ton of research & iâd like to weigh in on the issue. iâll post sources at the end
too many people credit anne lister (a historical lesbian) with coining femme in her journals but she was speaking french and âfemmeâ has been a french word forever
going in chronological order of gay words in the english-speaking world, âlesbianâ began as a synonym for tribade. âtribadismâ = scissoring; both words meant women who slept with women & the sexual act itself. this was long before IDpolitics
so lesbian/tribade was something you did, not something you IDd as, bc they were labeled by their sexual activity since IDpol hadnât come around yet. there was no concept of who was or wasnât exclusively attracted to women. thatâs why bi women are closer to lesbians than bi men
tribade dominated the 17th-mid 19th centuries until sapphic & lesbian took prominence. it wasnât until 1892 that a neurologist used bisexual to describe sexuality. from then until the 1960s, bi was used only in academic contexts. it still wasnât an identity yet
bi women have always been here but shared community with & organized under âlesbianâ until (and even into) the 60s. before then, any text or study that said âlesbianâ meant gay & bi women unless it (on the rare occasion) specifies otherwise, so context matters
butch/femme began in gay bars in the 40s-60s. women-only gay bars were frequented by lesbian & bi women. so for the first decades of butch/femme history, âlesbianâ includes bi women bc there was no bi or âwomen-exclusiveâ yet & they were at the bars, participating in the culture
in the 70s, lesbian separatism begins with 12 white cis lesbians, the furies. They suggest that women engage âonly (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege⊠as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they willâŠ
at some point have to betray their sisters, especially lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits.â demon TERF sheila jeffreys says âour definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men.â this marks the split between bi & lesbian women
lesbian separatism others bi women who shared space, identity & oppression with lesbians centuries prior. it deems trans women as inextricable from male privilege they (donât) have. it others lgbt woc who share oppression with men & therefore canât exclude men from their politics
tldr itâs bad lol. with events like stonewall (1969) & increasing anti-gay violence in the 70s, anyone with proximity to heterosexuality in gay spaces was viewed as a threat & shunned. so bi groups begin to pop up, since they had no place in straight or gay communities anymore
in the 80s, 2nd-wave bi organizing was feminist bi orgs forming bc lesbians posited bisexuality as anti-feminist. by 1988, LGB officially separates lesbian & bi. now lesbians are invested in specific lesbian history & everything before the 60s says âlesbian.â see the problem here
texts with the word âlesbianâ before the 60s are also referring to bi women but modern meanings of old words are applied to them, & consequently, bi women are denied a massive chunk of our history, including butch/femme culture
in the 60s, ball culture emerges in houses created as safe spaces for black & latinx queer youth. the genders are butch queen, femme queen, butch & women. here, butch & femme embody: the intersections of race, gender & sexuality; the freedom of it; and the resulting persecution
in the 70s, lesbian separatists say any form of masculinity harms women, materializing against butch & trans women. femmes are framed as wanting to reap benefits of heterosexuality while still toying with women (this is heavily wrapped in biphobic rhetoric too, if you canât tell)
butch/femme is framed as heteronormative, anti-lesbian & anti-feminist. so androgyny is proposed as the lesbian ideal. now lesbian feminism is centered on white, middle class, androgynous lesbians at the expense of working class + nonwhite lesbians, bi women, and butches & femmes
butch/femme fall out of popular use, only kept alive by the same working class & nonwhite women who are ousted by white lesbians. butch/femme usage among queer youth of color includes lesbians & nonlesbians as it had since 60s ball culture & since 40s gay bars with gay & bi women
itâs interesting that people say butch/femme is for lesbians only when the beginning of lesbian as an exclusively-woman attracted identity & the downfall of butch/femme go hand-in-hand. it was queer youth of color who kept that culture alive, lesbian or not
white lesbian TERFs who demonized the culture embraced it again when genderfluidity became trendy in the late 80s. they claimed it as theirs, and stripped it of its history with bi women, trans women & queer youth of color that they wanted no association with
so that history was lost among many, and now well-meaning lesbians who definitely are not TERFs donât even know butch/femmeâs roots in race, trans/gnc identity, & class struggle, or its origins among gay & bi women as one group
tldr: TERFs suck, bi & lesbian womenâs history is inextricable, and bi women were using butch/femme before the bi identity even existed. historically, âlesbianâ encompassed a set of behaviors & became an identity later
Sources:
gay & bi women going to the same clubs: Source 1, Source 2
bisexual etymology: Source
lesbian separatism: Source
tribade: Source
butch/femme: Source
more on butch/femme; Source
origins of bi movements: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3
lady with history & womenâs studies + LGBT studies degrees: Source
ball culture: Source
hi hereâs a trans lesbian (homojabi@tumblr) saying exactly what I just said from a trans perspective for the âeveryoneâs trying to steal from lesbiansâ crowd. Iâm going back to sleep
https://confideânemini.tumblr.com/post/149527067504/is-it-okay-for-bi-girls-to-refer-to-themselves-as
end caption]
additionally:
the word âgenderqueerâ didnât exist before the 90s. the word ânon-binaryâ didnât exist before the 2000s. even the word âtransgenderâ didnât get popularized until the 90s; it was primarily âtranssexualâ until then. for a long time âgender non-conformingâ was perhaps the best umbrella
which means there were always people in the âlesbianâ community who werenât binary women and who used butch and femme, and our history has long, shared roots too
just look at Leslie Feinberg and hir books âStone Butch Bluesâ and âTransgender Liberation.â look at S. Bear Bergman and âButch Is A Noun.â also look at Joan Nestleâs âThe Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Readerâ and its argument that butch and femme can be gender identities in themselves (and its documentation of the 40s and 50s)
there have also long been âborder warsâ between butch women and trans men; halberstam and c. jacob hale have some very informative joint writing with opposing views that both acknowledge the historical contention
finally, and what i know least about, while butch and femme certainly originated in lesbian (before bi or nb were words) spaces, they have also historically been used by gay (again before bi was a word) men, though not to the same extent. thatâs a whole argument about boundaries i donât wanna get into but it has certainly happened
all of which is to say: yes, butch and femme emerged in a wlw context, but that context always already included bi women and nblw, was always complicated by trans men, and was also used by gay and bi men too. any historical argument about them being sapphic-only is actually ahistorical wishful thinking, so find another argument
bonus: âasexualâ also didnât exist as a word til the 2000s and thereâs lots of documentation that we were under the bi umbrella - which again means before âbiâ was a word, we were under the âlesbianâ umbrella
