something i hate about the fma fandom is how many people headcanon a state alchemist like ed (which is basically an OP cop) as a butch is entirely antithetical to the identity of butchness in itself which is a very political identity. saying ed is butch is like a punk being conservative. just accept that ed is a straight cis white man and move on!!! no edwin is not "yuri" thats a girl being emotionally abused and neglected by her straight cis male childhood friend!!!
it's genuinely difficult to tell if I'm being trolled at this point because fandom debates that wrap themselves in projected identity and Serious Issues are generally ideologically incoherent to the point where it is near impossible to parody them (see: miku binder thomas jefferson), so, a few things to address here:
The reading that Edward abuses Winry is absurd on its face. He holds no coercive power over her, he doesn't take his pain out on her, he doesn't emotionally manipulate her, and his physicality with her is very clearly reciprocal on multiple occasions. They go back and forth like people who have known each other their entire lives, because they have. To read their dynamic as abusive requires inserting enormously more between them than what is on the screen. Edward is a bad friend. He would have made a worse boyfriend and a terrible (maybe even neglectful to the point of abusive!) husband, but that is a protraction of what is on the screen. There is a lot to be said about how deftly 03 subverts the "Shounen Boy and Shounen Girl who have inevitable epilogue clone babies" trope. In Edward's ultimate rejection of the passivity that defined his father's life, he also rejects falling into the same prescribed heteronuclear misery that created his family. Some day, he probably will come to understand what a shitty friend he was to Winry back when they were kids, and he'll recognize that she was reaching for a connection that he, time after time, callously rejected out of ignorance and fear. He'll probably even see shadows of his father in it, and he'll hate himself for it and be relieved he didn't subject someone he loves to that as something more than "friends growing painfully apart."
Interpersonal anguish is not necessarily abuse. Not even if it's primarily one party's fault over the other's.
Although I am someone who most people familiar with the term would describe as butch, I feel no particular affinity for the identifier because it feels so much like an aesthetic wrapper for a new gender essentialism within lesbianism that it feels like just as much a cage as the masculinity that it purports to replace. I feel quite sincerely that, at least on a theoretical or rhetorical level, lesbianism would do well to examine what that word is doing for us in 2026. But people would still call me butch for various accidents of my physicality and the fact that I'm an angry, stone dyke who does not perform femininity or suffer men.
I say all of this to hopefully portray how close this particular identity is to me when I say: an identity comprised largely of aesthetics is not inherently anything. Even in the other example you've given: there were and are plenty of fascist punks. Disdain for power is not an animus that inevitably points in a progressive direction, because personal ideology still must dictate what that power is. For an anarchist, it is the capitalist class. For a Nazi, it is a false notion of global Jewish control.
We can't No True Scottsman punk just like we can't No True Scottsman butch. No matter how liberatory it is for the individual, queer masculinity is not immune to aligning itself with power, especially when the person in question is otherwise socially privileged, which Edward very much is.
yeah it is really fucking annoying when people who have absolutely zero interest in how radically healing lesbianism can be call their m/m and their m/f "yuri." I think it's just more of the "I'm ostensibly progressive so I feel insecure about how all of my tastes in fiction map perfectly onto oppressive power structures" shit. But I don't think a queer reading of Edward Elric is antithetical to the character on the screen for the reasons stated above, especially given how much of his character's interaction with the world is not based on his gender but on his whiteness, a fact that this fandom is repeatedly uncomfortable with confronting.
There are dykes who perform masculinity as police (though not nearly as many as media would have us believe). There are closeted trans women who perceive that something is "wrong" with how she is as a man and try to fix it by doing the most masculine thing she can think of in enlisting. Marginalized people don't exist on a neatly defined ladder, and I wouldn't want my fictional depictions to, either. Ed should probably try estrogen.
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