butch / trans / masculinity

[lukeboi]

I had an off-day yesterday in therapy, I guess I just didn't really feel like talking about anything, but somehow we ended up talking about living as butch versus taking the hormone plunge. It got me thinking, and I actually meant to write some of this down right then, but I was too busy (busy getting nothing done, as usual, but that's another

Comments

[kpscapes]

Hey-
Great post, you're writing about a lot of thing I have definitely felt (now and in the past). I have always felt that butch, and in my framework, mainly "capital-B-Butch" can really only be drawn from female experience. Butch to me has a lot to do with defiant female masculinity. It's about expressing masculinity in a way that is not neccessarily male, not just dumped onto you because it is what is expected, but is fought for and deciphered and understood by someone who wasn't given those same cues their whole life. I don't know if that's making sense. But that is why it's always felt to me like it would be really hard for a male-bodied person to be a butch in the same sense of the word that I think female bodied people use it. It just feels different.

When I very first came out, or was starting to understand trans stuff in terms of my own life, one of the things that was hardest for me to get around was the feeling of "I am not strong enough to live as a butch woman". I have so much respect for, and identify very much with, the butches who I see in the world now and those who came before us. And while butch is still very much a part of who I am, I had to give a big piece of that up when I made the decision to transition. Whether you call it butch or not, there is something very special and very different about female bodied masculinity than male bodied masculinity, and even from the way I am percieved now that I am transitioning.

I think you hit the nail right on the head about some of that, too, with another point you made about how you'd be percieved if you were being read as male rather than female... I see the same thing all the time. It has DEFINITELY been a mind trip to go from being seen basically as super-masculine as a female bodied person to being seen as kind of average or probably more often, "faggy" (whatever that means). It's not something I'm not okay with, but it fucks with my own self-perception and brings a lot of things into question for me. Nothing about how I present myself to the world has changed except my body, and I am seen and treated very differently now. I think I could (should?)probably write a lot more about this but I'll save it for someplace that's not in your journal. ;)

Anyway thanks for making this post. It's good to see your thoughts on it and have an opportunity to get some of mine out.

Peace.

[lukeboi]

Thanks.

I know you've written about these issues in the past, but you know I'm always down to read more.