My Butch Identity

Last week, I really appreciated Esther Newton’s discourse on the butch identity. Although an online Butch-Femme Test calls me androgyne, I still identify as butch, or at least soft butch, and I thought Newton has some really interesting answers to butch questions. I’ve had a hard time thinking about my gender in the past and locating it in a preset category, and I think that Newton’s response to my transgender question really helped me to figure that out. Like Newton, I grew up mostly as one of the boys. I admired my older brother to the point of wearing his clothes, copying his hobbies, and hanging out with his friends (being 6 years old, they weren’t always too willing, though). Today, I wear my own clothes, have my own hobbies, and hang out with my own friends, but my ‘tom-boy’ butch identity mostly remains. I don’t think I’m a hard butch, I mean, I still wear tight jeans on occasion, jackets from the women’s section of REI, and earrings, but I definitely like baggy clothes and power tools. And I like my lesbian identity, and I like being a woman, and I, like Newton, would hate to be a straight man (sorry, straight men).

What Newton mentioned that I hadn’t really thought about before is the idea that the gender queer movement is really eliminating the butch identity. Today, anyone dresses ‘like a man’ or throws off prevalent female stereotypes is supposed to identify as transgender, or at least gender queer, but, as Newton was saying, part of the butch identity, as least for many people, is actually wanting to be a woman, but a butch one.
Of course, like most things, there doesn’t really seem to be a ‘one size fits all label’ that can actually work. Many butches might identify as transgender, etc, etc, but I agree with Newton that the woman-identified butch—at least as an identity—is disappearing, and I think, in many ways, its leaving more and more girls and women confused.