What Happened to Butch Lesbians?

My Interview with Carol

Recently a new member joined our women’s group, a butch lesbian who transitioned when she was 35 and has now detransitioned sacrificing her breasts to this gender journey.  She brought with her her YouTube channel where she had been discussing her experience and was interviewing women about trans ideology. She began to interview our lesbian members about what had peaked them, convinced them that trans was a suspect concept. I immediately recognized Carol as an important voice both for her insights and her experience in the trenches as it were. She could vouch for what happened to the lesbian community and especially to butch lesbians.

Raised in a Christian family that pushed sex role stereotypes on her, she fell for the trans narrative of being born in the wrong body. She attributeted a mass movement of butch lesbians of all ages into transition due to the erasure of lesbian culture and butch lesbian visibility since early 2000.

“When you’re a butch lesbian you wear your lesbianism on your sleeve” Carol says in an interview she did two years ago with Sinead Watson another female detransitioner. The homophobia of the culture is then released onto you on a day-to-day basis chiefly from straight women, she reports. She attributes internalized homophobia as being the chief impetus for butch lesbians transitioning.

This interview was extremely illuminating as an illustration of what happened to the gay community and how trans ideology preyed on the gender non-conforming presentations of our community. This was likely hard for my straight women contacts to hear. So much did they pride themselves in being supportive allies of the LGBTQ. It did not surprise me that straight women had helped to create a homophobic culture that was driving lesbians to transition to men. There was so much to be gained from male privilege for lesbians already, as Carol confirmed.

I had been trying to tell Americans how important it was for masculine presenting women to be visible and accepted as part of the lesbian landscape. Most did not count me as a masculine presenting woman. Because of this, straight women were willing to date me since they were not in danger of being mistaken for gay if they were with me. One such girlfriend in my twenties expressed this when she went to the city with me and one of my friends who looked more like a dyke with her short hair and butch clothing,  My girlfriend told me that she was afraid my friend would give us away and she wanted to walk ten steps behind her so it would not seem as if we knew her. This girlfriend was already a pain in the ass so I did not call her out on her homophobia and attributed it to her being a closet case. I was accustomed to paying this price for persuading bisexuality onto straight women. Lesbians had a hard time relating to my foreignness. They tended to be timid and sought out the girl next door. Bisexual women, I felt, had an affinity for moving between one culture and another, between gay and straight.

Coming out young had made me an outlaw. After four years of fearing that I would give myself away and be expelled from my tony girls’ school I wasn’t willing to accept a whole lifetime of being in the closet for the sake of pursuing a profession.  The only other classmates who acknowledged their lesbian sexuality in high school would receive mental health diagnosis by the time they finished college. They were bipolar, agoraphobic and one near catatonic. I figured you had to be a little crazy to take on a homosexual lifestyle.

Most people just wanted to be normal. I already wasn’t normal as a biracial, stranger in a strange land so why try. “You were a pioneer,” my ex told me recently. It was nice to be acknowledged for it.

I saw butch lesbians as my comrades. The whole butch/femme paradigm had been shelved by the time I came out in the ‘70s. Androgyny was the order of the day, but I liked dressing up too much and playing with sex stereotypes to relegate myself to flannel shirts and overalls. I liked the elegance of a tuxedo. I got myself a suit and some vintage cocktail dresses. In the late ’80s I welcomed the advent of the lipstick lesbian. Soon butch/femme was being revived almost single handedly by therapist and speaker JoAnn Loulan with whom I was hanging out with at the time as she was my lover’s best friend. She had written several books about lesbian sexuality. Her skill at talking off the cuff, as well as her enthusiasm and humor, her femme presence and lion’s mane of blond hair made her a popular choice for a speaker at lesbian events.

She invented the butch/femme scale. At her talks she would call up a volunteer from the audience and have everyone rate where this person was from one to ten on the scale. She used this parlor game to show us we all knew what butch was. We began to celebrate it, talk about butch bottoms and femme tops, hold events. I attended a butch/femme tennis tournament dressed as cat woman where she was the emcee.

Butch/femme was my culture of origin in Thailand. It was very rigid in terms of gender role playing, but not so rigid that some women couldn’t switch if partnered with an even more butch lover. I was pleased to see that butch lesbians were so accepted in Thai society that no one batted an eye. Their age mates from high school accepted them and they were integrated in business along with all the other businesswomen. My father and aunt began to introduce me to them. I was convinced that this acceptance would inoculate them against gender ideology. The one trans man I had heard about had homophobic parents and did not seem to fully embody a male persona.

When Thailand legalized gay marriage this week I was pleased to see a picture of a butch lesbian celebrating on the lawn of the government house.

There was also the factor that the West, especially the American West, had a huge influence on everybody the world over. All the more reason for me to unmask this movement for what it was—a homophobic and misogynistic impulse. For my network my exchange with Judith Butler went a long way towards that end. Towards showing that the cause of gender identity would deem same sex orientation moot and continue to insist that lesbians accommodate penises in our public spaces and everywhere women expected privacy.

In my interview with Carol, we talk about Thai "third gender" culture and how American society has such an aversion to cross dressing presentations that it had to invent a whole new religion to explain it. Indeed as soon as the term non-binary became a thing we began to see butch lesbians on TV rebranded as non-binary. On the Sex and the City reboot, for instance. I was thankful that she still had her breasts.

Was this trans lens the route by which we would be able to “see” butch lesbians while simultaneously having them erased as women. Such an irony. The character was phased out once the relationship with Miranda was over. Audiences found her too annoying which might well be the case for the entire concept of non-binary. Unfortunately these characters still show up in children’s shows whose audiences don’t know better.

I am seen here in my sewing room. It was the background I felt most represented myself in this context. I had pinned to my bulletin board the dress I cut up to make a vest. Said vest was one of the items stolen in my suitcase last year. Carol is in her wood working room.

Watching myself, I am impatient with how long it takes me to form an answer. It betrays my long history of being in and out of the closet having to think of all the possible repercussions of what I say not just about being gay, but about American culture. Still it was well received by Carol’s audience so I took comfort in that.

We both agreed that the really amazing and unprecedented feature of the gender critical movement was the bond that had formed between lesbians and straight women. Women of all sexual orientations, economic and social class, and political affiliations were coming together to protect our sex category. It demonstrated just how much of a threat this queering of society, this erasure of the boundaries of our sex category was to our survival. Indeed to the survival of the species. It also laid the groundwork to celebrate the uniqueness of womanhood, a recognition that had been diminished almost to non-existence over our century long fight to become equal to men. This diminishment might well have been the whole problem to begin with.