'Where Have All the Butches Gone?'
“In today’s terminology, their gender expression is masculine, and their gender identity is female…
One of the mistakes that we made as lesbian feminists was combining sexual orientation and gender expression into an androgynous dyke ideal: short hair, no makeup, able to fix a car or bake bread with equal ease, frequently accused of being in the wrong public restroom (much to our outrage). ”
Man, yay for @thehuffingtonpostpost!
I remember growing up with this imagery that lesbians fit into the above description, which was one of the reasons I remember being surprised in my adolescence when I found out an older, very feminine, cousin of mine was a lesbian. It just didn’t fit. The way she looked put her in the bracket of ‘bisexual’ as far as I thought, which is ridiculous because both lesbian and bisexual describe sexuality, not looks.
This article also does another thing I love, and acknowledges one of the very real reasons that stopped me progressing or examining my own gender queer status any further in my early 20s, only 10 years ago: “the idea of becoming a man – with all the unearned, unexamined privilege that the idea suggests – is especially incomprehensible; it’s a betrayal of trust”
I’m okay with that now. I’m happy to wear my skirts and identify with female pronouns. But, hell, this article spoke to me.
This is an amazingly written article from beginning to end. Everyone has different stories, but this is a conscientious analysis of some of them applying to sexuality and gender from a certain generation.
