There is something amazing in the physicality of a butch. The way she moves, the way he is strong, the way they–we–can be more forward and more open in our love and sexuality much of the time. In fact, in many situations, this physicality and aggression is what draws us to butchness, what draws femmes to us, and often what allows us to protect femmes and other queer people, and to be mentors. We as butches are always visible - our hair, our fashion, even our way of talking, reveals us to the world as “butch”.
Chivalry, strength, love, grace - all of these are words I attribute to being butch, and it traces it back to something I have found that not only I but others experience in many ways. Many of us who are trans women describe, as youth, hearing for the first time the word “lesbian” and understanding that it was our word; a very close friend of mine holds this memory very close–she may not have understood that she was a woman, but she knew that somehow she was meant to be a lesbian. I did not have this understanding; instead I spent years searching for what my version of queerness was, even after coming out as a trans woman, even after knowing I was lesbian. And for me, that same sense of discovery came with the word “butch”: I heard it and knew it was mine.
And this discovery broke me, for a few weeks. Because, deep down, I knew I could not embody those things–I was not strong, I was not at home in my body, I could barely even stand up by myself at this point. I spent 6 months completely bedridden, and another 3 or 4 barely being able to make it up and down a set of stairs before needing rest. To this day I sometimes have a cane on me, although a certain kind of internalized ableism keeps me from using it day by day. Because, as I thought when I first had this discovery, how could I be butch if I couldn’t have that movement?
It’s a question most of us have–after all, even if the chivalry and physicality of a butch are “stereotypes”, they are a driving force for many of us to move towards butchness, to grow into ourselves. To be able to hold the door for a femme, to help carry the heavy things she can’t, to be called on to help a friend move house, to be able to do repairs on a car or a house: all of these things are amazing, and to be strong enough to do them helps me feel more at home in my body as a butch.
But, when I first heard the word, when I first knew it was mine, I spiraled for weeks. How could I hold the door if I was also holding a cane, a bag, and my femme’s hand? How could I be there to help someone move if moving my body caused my joints to scream in pain? And while many would be willing to acknowledge my butchness if my disability had come from doing those hard things, would they recognize it the same if I was born with it, or would I get told to simply work harder the same way people already told me to?
Of course, I am blessed. My wheelchair and my cane both wait for me, but I have been able to manage several disorders to the point where I can start to do some exercise, or to be able to shower alone–both things that were completely unimaginable for me at this time last year. And while that is a blessing, I cannot deny that some of the reason that I worked so hard to be able to reach this point was the feeling that I could never be a good butch if I didn’t; that I would never have the strength of “a butch”, although looking back I am not even sure what that means. Instead, my time was focused more on other things - I cut my hair, I started to alter my fashion. It still felt like reaching an impossible goal, but my mind focused hard on one word. Grace.
I struggle, and always will, with selective mutism. In a stressful situation, or an unfamiliar one, I cannot speak. Some people assume this means I don’t want to, but instead it is a physical feeling: my throat closes up, words will refuse to come out, and attempting to force words out when they do not want to come out can often be physically painful, if not at least uncomfortable. I learned to talk, as in my family and culture it was considered rude to be silent, but it always hurt, and I always sought out situations where I didn’t have to. But a lot of my butch journey was focused on this: after all, if I can’t be the one to lift things, to move things, what can I do? I can drive, I can talk, and I can find other useful skills to perform to stay needed around me. And one of those was talking–both in my work with kids, and to my family, and to people I might meet. After all, something often said about bigots is that, for example, “a lot of ignorant transphobes will soften when they meet even one trans person”; and if I couldn’t be the butch who protected by being strong, maybe I could be the one who protected by being soft. If I can’t move physically, I have to find some way to be useful.
Now, of course, this all sounds a little bit melodramatic. Being able to diffuse a heated moment, being able to bear the brunt of verbal abuse, being able to carry an air of calm, all of that is good; what the hell does it have to do with butchness? And the answer here is simple: dysphoria.
Not the same kind of dysphoria as with transness, but a similar kind: after all, butchness and lesbian identity are often considered gender identities, and butch identity carries with it those stereotypes and expectations that I was not able to fill. It felt not dissimilar to the gender dysphoria I had experienced prior to transition–a feeling of being out of place, of wanting a different role, of spiraling when I felt like I would never be able to fill it. Of course, rationally, I don’t need to be everyone’s chauffeur, or everyone’s heavy lifter; most butches simply fill the role of a friend who occasionally performs acts of service when the need arises. But so much of the butchness that I saw was focused on these aspects–even in the way they were desired physically–that I felt I needed to.
And it combined in my head with everything else–after all, even when I was not butch I was still brown, I was still a trans woman, I still had a very strong disability–and so I went through my discovery phase of butchness worrying about this visibility, this hyper-scrutiny. After all, everything I did in life was already over-analyzed and over-critiqued; at the job I had had just prior, I had once walked out of meeting where I was chastised for a minor mistake to discover one of my white coworkers asleep on the job, something he did often and was never once called out for. This treatment had been a heavy weight on both my body and mind, the drive to over-perform being what drove my mental and physical health to deteriorate, and this dysphoria of wanting to be butch and feeling held back by my disability exacerbated it tenfold. I felt I needed to be perfect, I needed to perform that butchness, and that I would never properly be able to.
Of course, at this point, I feel as though I have managed to snap out of it to a certain extent–there is no immutable “butchness”, there is no one way to be butch, it is something that we are and can be while also trying to enjoy life instead of worrying about being judged for every small movement. But the worry is still there, and I think is especially valid for those of us trying to navigate butchness and some kind of disability or anything else that affects us. After all, I could one day have a relapse of pain where I once again can’t move, does that mean I lose that butchness? Or, say, is it invalid for me to worry that I will not be acknowledged and treated like a woman because I choose to be butch? Many of us who are trans or BIPOC already face degendering and masculinization, and living in conservative states makes that feeling much stronger.
The answer for us—in my opinion at the very least—is to focus on our immediate communities instead of the state of the world around us: we are still butches, we are still lesbians, and whatever complicated form that takes, it is much better for us to focus on the love of those around us instead of the scrutiny from those who will scrutinize us no matter what. It does not get better from worrying, it gets better from accepting who we are even through complicated disabilities and backgrounds and try to just find out place instead.