The Sartorial Habitat of the Non-binary Female

A Butch Lesbian Travels Through Familiar But Captured Territory.

This piece came about when I happened to mention to our WhatsApp Women Are Real group that I was making a pirate shirt and there were so many tutorials on pirate shirts by non-binary-identified females that I felt I must be a candidate for this category. This was during a thread about how so many lesbians were going by they/them pronouns now.

“I’m a pirate, not some transbian fakery. Arrghh Matey.” I declared. Then a mom whose desister daughter was a sewer and cosplayer piped up.

“My daughter was a trans pirate. Also a vampire trans - a Transylvanian of sorts, a Hawaiian trans. Victorian trans. That’s their uniform.”

These were all sartorial genres I had explored just not as trans. I was dismayed at having fallen into such a non-binary cliché, but then I realized that this was the territory of a butch lesbian, not the standard issue ones, but ones who liked to dress up. This had always put me at odds with my lesbian peers who did not do costumes. Was I even a lesbian? I wondered. When Laura Becker wrote a piece on the weird creative girls who were being hijacked into being trans, I knew I was onto something.

I did not post the piece to my usual FB contacts because I did not trust them anymore with such personal revelations. Those who did support me, I knew would not comment because of the trans criticism, and this silence I found too chilling. So I read it to my women’s writers group to break in the three new members we just acquired. They gave me the warm reception and appreciation I needed to keep writing these personal stories.

Lesbian Erasure

I adopted a tomboy uniform about the time that waistlines on women’s pants dropped so low I could easily survey that every woman at a building workshop I attended was wearing thong underwear. You could hardly buy women’s underwear that covered your butt then.

In the ’70’s I had bought Underoos, boys' superhero t-shirts and briefs emulating a comic book hero, Superman and the Flash with a lightning bolt on a red shirt. When the movie Bound came out in 1996 showing the butch lesbian heroine wearing tighty whities and a wife beater undershirt it was a bit over the top for no lesbians I knew wore men’s underwear just organic cotton briefs, but I loved it and immediately outfitted myself with boys Fruit of the Loom briefs. I found pants with more coverage as well as decent size pockets as my Asian figure could fit into boys' school uniform pants made by Dickie’s. That’s when I started refashioning men’s shirts into pirate shirts with a little ruffled cuff and the v neckline with floppy collars.

Fast forward a dozen years and I now find myself in the territory of the non-binary identity— people who claim that their “gender identity” is neither male nor female. This was a variation of a “trans” identity. On the YouTube dressmaking channels, they were females who were investigating historical men’s costumes and offering tutorials on YouTube instructions on how to make 18th-century men’s shirts, more romantically known as the pirate shirt. As I listened to their tutorials I felt I had a lot in common with them as we mined this sartorial vein of historical male clothing. But why did they have to be non-binary and not butch or tomboy? I wanted to know. I couldn’t help but think back to my memories of not wanting to look like a dyke.

I remember one visceral sartorial memory involving a jean jacket. I needed a winter jacket so I carefully sewed a quilted lining into this jacket that had a picture of an evening sky with stars and possibly an angel printed on the satin fabric that I hoped would give the jacket a feminine touch inside this iconic Levi’s jacket. When I finally finished the project and put it on I was horrified that the jacket made me look like a dyke. The lining wasn’t visible in a way that would alleviate the masculine jean jacket. I couldn’t bear to wear it and sold it at the nearest consignment shop where it looked good on a hangar and was soon snatched up.

When I reflected on this reaction I knew it was about my internalized lesbophobia. I had accepted my homosexuality from the start as being a beautiful thing to love a woman, but I was not ok with being associated with the local lesbian scene. The rude remarks by the men at my college dorm about lesbians didn’t help either. Nor did these lesbians trust me because I didn’t wear the uniform or cut my hair. I found my dates among the bisexual and bi-curious. I didn’t even want to use the word lesbian. I told people I was gay and took my political cues from gay men. This matched my tomboy aversion to being a girl and fulfilling society's expectations of me as a woman.

Luckily I had my Thai upbringing to offer me an alternative. Recently I spent twelve days in Thailand with two Chinese lesbians who fit the butch/femme mold. The butch had taken the English name Aleks and spoke English. I was eager to ask her some burning questions. Were there lesbians in China who wanted to be men? Yes. Did they want to take testosterone and cut off their breasts? “No,” she said in her careful, studied English, “they want to pay for dinner when they go on a date”. I laughed with relief. They were just like the Thai Tomboys with their boy haircuts and button-up shirts. It was enough to present this alternative masculine woman to society and play the male role. I saw a short video of such a woman in Japan meeting a woman for the first time and taking her to a restaurant for dinner. It made things easy, in Asian societies, to know what role each would play and who was expected to do what like pay for dinner. She reminded me of female escorts for women which was a thing in Japan.

I couldn’t help wondering if these American non-binary girls were suffering an aversion to being perceived as lesbians because there was no such alternative societal model in the States. To be a lesbian was somehow to be a broken woman. One that couldn’t “handle” men as has been said of lesbians by men. (For men, it was all about the woman being able to accommodate them.) At the time straight women feared association with women who looked like dykes in case people thought they were lesbians too. The non-binary and trans options seemed to quell this fear because now people could explain a cross-dressing presentation as a diagnosis of a person being born in the wrong body. This science-y sounding explanation swept under the rug the homophobia that had been associated with cross-dressing presentations before.

I did wonder if there was even a space for lesbians in American society. What space there was in the past had been created by lesbians on so little money that it made us all look as poor as church mice hiding out in the low-rent areas not yet gentrified by gay men. Gradually we lost all our lesbian spaces, the coffee shops, the bars, and the entire women’s movement as feminism in academia decided to market itself to men and pay lip service to porn and sex workers. Feminism became something your mother and grandmother did. It paled in comparison to the new Queer revolution that was intent on queering away heteronormativity. Heteronormativity had somehow become the new patriarchy. This framing made heterosexual parents a suspect class if they so much as questioned what was being taught in schools under the banner of LGBTQ inclusion. This inclusion meant all-gender bathrooms and boys playing on girls' sports teams, both sexes being bunked together at boarding schools if they said they were non-binary, and a medical treatment protocol that was called trans affirming that regularly lopped off breasts and prescribed testosterone which gave women thinly supported low voices, receding hairlines and facial hair.

The non-binary and trans options severed the old-guard lesbian lifestyle and feminist culture from young women who would normally be able to find us at women-only venues and events. Now any lesbian venues that opened felt they had to verbalize the obligatory “inclusive” policy so men would feel welcomed. Heterosexual men, turned on by the idea of themselves as women, who identified as lesbians. Woe to any lesbian who dared to say she only dated natal-born women. Such “betrayal” made the word lesbian even more distasteful to young people because they were seen as traitors to the movement.

The non-binary option seemed to offer young women a cover from being seen as a lesbian as well as a way to opt out of the sexualization of women by men. The non-binary option might have appealed to me had I been younger, but from my long struggle to live as a lesbian, I was alarmed that this category was another trans gateway into body modifications such as the double mastectomy which makes men’s shirts look so good. Women had also been binding their breasts for this effect. Such double mastectomy scars were now appearing on women in Vogue magazine profiles of non-binary celebrities. It normalized a desire to perfect one’s body to a certain body image. Non-binary identified women could get trans medical treatment by claiming their breasts gave them gender dysphoria and just like that their medical insurance would pay for their removal.

Women have lots of feelings about their breasts and the size of them, but no special diagnosis allows them to have free breast reductions or augmentation. In my twenties I, too, had wished my body was just a little more masculine, broader in the shoulders, and taller, especially taller. I would go to bed fantasizing that when I woke up my legs would be longer. Fortunately, I had a great deal of affection for my breasts which I could see were perfect in their size and symmetry. Women had admired them. One said to me, as we shared a bath, that if she had breasts like mine she would rule the world. I did not figure out how to rule the world with my breasts. Mostly I hid them to be discovered later by a delighted female lover.

I experimented a lot with gender in college. I did my own photo shoots so I could play with my image in private. When I look at these pictures now of my young feminine face all got up in a vintage black cocktail dress it evokes conflicting feelings. For one thing, I was stunningly beautiful. That was the whole point of photographs so that when I was old I would have proof of this. But at the same time, I was startled that this guileless beauty evoked in me feelings of extreme vulnerability like a kitten that is about to be eaten by a predator. I realized that I could not handle such a display let alone rule the world. A woman in a dress standing alone is asking to be approached and collected by a man. No one had taught me how to defend myself as a woman and as an Asian woman, in contrast to Asian men, I was at the top of the sexual marketplace. I just couldn’t figure out how to get anything out of it.

For me, the wearing of men’s clothes put me off limits to men by desexualizing me as a woman. This was not the same as female erasure with they/them pronouns or a male name. I was still a woman, accepting of my female body. What I was doing was drawing power from a masculine presentation. I had not managed to learn how to rule the world with my breasts, but I had earned my power by building my skills of independence and learning to fix things so I didn’t need to ask for help from a man. I had prepared myself to live a life that was not centered around men or the roles that a man could play in my life.

I finished my pirate shirt and tried it on with various vests cravats and a cap. It made me feel dapper and sharp, foppish and boyish, all at the same time. It evoked a romantic side of a lesbian and a sense that she could court a woman or wander alone navigating the world on her own terms. Dressing up my lesbian persona spoke of a willingness to engage in fashion which was of interest to women (and to me). Fashion was still a safe topic to discuss and show off. I hoped it would also improve the status of lesbians.

To my astonishment, I had met women who were resisting gender ideology and were intent on becoming allies with lesbians to the point of wanting to get to know us, our history and culture, and our way of dressing. One could claim that I was being love-bombed into the anti-gender camp, but no I came into it of my own accord in a discussion with a same-age feminist who was bisexual. She had a friend whose daughter thought she was trans and this had worried her. As soon as she pointed out to me that emerging young lesbians were being hijacked by the idea that they were born in the wrong body and should be male I was horrified that this was the option now being thrust onto the tomboy girl who would very likely grow up to be gay. It brought back all my memories of being a baby dyke tomboy. I immediately made a point of using the word lesbian instead of gay. It helped me divorce myself from gay men and the hijacked LGBTQ+ body modification cult that our movement had become. It also made me politically homeless.

Were it not for these new straight allies (and a handful of lesbians), I would have no social life to speak of. Every one of my original lesbian and gay friends had shut me up. So attached were they to the old narrative that it was the Right Wing Christian Nationalists who had once again fired up hatred against gay people. Still, it was not as if I hadn’t been here before. As a lesbian pioneer, I was used to being an outsider. And what better agent to protect the category of woman than the bold butch lesbian trained to navigate the world as an outsider on her own sartorial terms.

For more of my stories on how the past was trampled to make way for trans identity check out my book The Unexpected Penis: Conversations on the Gender Trail.