At Slate, a piece titled Why I’m Still a Butch Lesbian.
Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart says she first started wearing what she calls “men’s clothing” a few years ago.
(Me, I would just call them clothes. I wear jeans – black ones when I need to clean up – and T shirts or turtlenecks, sweatshirts or sweaters. I don’t think of them as men’s clothes. Then again I don’t wear neckties – I guess I do think of them as men’s clothes. Why? Well…uh…I guess because I don’t wear them. Is this a little bit circular?)
VVU felt as if she’d been wearing an uncomfortable, ill-fitting costume her whole life, until she started wearing “men’s clothing.”
As I adjusted to this new information, it was hard not to notice that many of the people who shared my preference for the men’s section and my subtly masculine mannerisms had gone a step further and stopped identifying as women entirely. At times, it almost seemed as if, by not throwing my lot in with these pronoun creators and binary-rejecters, I might be just a little bit behind the times—a little square, uncool, perhaps even cis-sexist. Facebook has more than 50 possible gender identifiers. So why have I, a female-bodied person who wears men’s clothing, decided to stick with the increasingly old-fashioned “butch lesbian woman”?
Because why not?
In part, it’s because the language of gender identity has always been a bit bewildering to me—I’ve felt hungry, happy, gassy, and anxious, but never male or female. Even so, it has been tempting to interpret my experience in ways that separated it from that of other women. This is especially true because cis-gendered women have a distinct tendency to define themselves in ways that don’t include me. I hear women throw out things like, “As women, we all know how important it is to feel pretty,” or “We, as women, are naturally more tender and nurturing,” statements that never seem to include women like me. Not only do I dislike feeling pretty and prefer arguing to nurturing, I don’t even particularly like eating chocolate. Popular culture, and women themselves, often imply that I lack many of the most essential qualities of womanhood.
Me, I see that far more in popular culture than I do in women themselves. Maybe I just know all the wrong women, but I don’t think I know any who would say something as dipshit as “As women, we all know how important it is to feel pretty.” Pop culture on the other hand – dear god it’s all over it.
So in the past I’ve been quite tempted by the idea that perhaps I’m not a woman after all. I mean, I’m masculine in all sorts of ways—I am ambitious, logical, aggressive, strong, and highly competitive. And I’m certainly not silly, frivolous, dainty, weak, or overly emotional … Oh dear. That’s where I run into a major problem, isn’t it? When I start listing traits of mine that I’d call masculine, they’re always positive. They’re points of pride. Whereas when I list traits I lack that I’d call feminine, they’re negatives. It seems I can’t consider my own masculinity or lack of femininity without relying on some of the worst and most pernicious sex-based stereotypes. This suggests to me that the enterprise itself is suspect.
Exactly. There have to be women who have those traits that are put in the “masculine” box so that other women can feel “normal” and acceptable having them. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen, but it’s what I would like to happen. (Does the same apply to traits like silly and weak? No. Those aren’t qualities to aspire to. If women are generally seen as being that…we need to keep on struggling.)
As girls grow up, they are bombarded by rules and restrictions governing the ways that they can be. I know I was—otherwise I wouldn’t have been a fully grown adult before I started wearing clothes that I found comfortable. These gendered rules confine girls’ choices and constrain their self-expression. Perhaps one day the gender binary will be dismantled totally, and we’ll all stop limiting our children by bringing them up as either males or females. But, in the meantime, gender continues to be one of the first things children learn to recognize about themselves and others, and for that reason I think it’s important to keep the boundaries of what can and can’t potentially be male or female propped open as wide as possible. It’s wonderful that people who feel uncomfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth are gaining strength and visibility. But, it’s just as important that young people, girls and boys and genderqueers alike, can have as many examples as possible of men and women who don’t conform to gender stereotypes. I like to think I’m doing my part for that by living as an aggressive, competitive, logical, and strong butch woman.
That’s how I think about the subject too.
Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart has a cartoon strip, Tiny Butch Adventure.
I hear a lot of women mimicking it. “Women love chocolate!” Women love shoes!” Why no one is marketing chocolate shoes to these women is beyond comprehension. It seems like it would be a sure hit.
Anyway, I notice it on Facebook a lot in those shared memes (you know, all those posts about “real women”) and I wonder (1) how are these people are on my friends list and (2) have they blocked me yet because they cannot be reading my stuff.
Shoe-shaped chocolate might be a hit, too.
I actually don’t know those shared memes about “real women” – I guess I’m not enough of a real woman!
Chocolate shoes
Let me start by saying: my friend list on Facebook is partially driven by my work. We use social media to stay in touch with our members and I was encouraged to sign on to FB as a result. I can’t be bothered to keep separate work and personal FB pages so I have the one. That’s what opens me up to, frankly, shocking memes being shared by people that I thought were more thoughtful or questioning than their FB shares would make it appear.
Now, there is the “share this photo and you can win the diamond jewelry in the photo!” meme that confuses me every time it shows up on my newsfeed. There are the “real women are strong but like a man to take care of them too” memes that make me throw up in my mouth a little. There is this one I came across today:
Shudder.
Anyway, as I mentioned, I see a lot of gender essentialist, heteronormative bullshit on my FB feed and I’ve learned to block reasonably effectively.
I googled chocolate shoes and they are available (as in shoe-shaped chocolate treats).
sambarge, @5:
It is common to have that kind of ‘multiple personalities’ – ie displaying different behavioral patterns depending on social context. For instance many people go back to being the mental age they left home when they reunite with their parents after a long while apart. Then they return to their normal selves once away from their parents.
Children often behave very differently at home and at school – someone can be the youngest sibling at home, but the oldest, or tallest kid in their peer group – they’ll be in very different contexts, people around them will treat them very differently, so they’ll develop different ways of responding, and so forth. And that is just one easy example for how this can happen.
The problem with the quote is in the assumption of heteronormativity. Also, the implication this is something that is specific to ‘girls’ (probably women, but then despite being deep into middle age I tend to be more comfortable with ‘girl’ than ‘woman’. Even moreso in Hebrew where ‘banot’ – originally ‘daughters’ came to mean ‘female people of any age’.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_%28psychology%29
The ‘butch-to-femme’ scale, the Kinsey scale, and (potentially) binary gender identity. Are all operating simultaneously.
No actual person is really very likely to match up to some Platonic ideal of a specific ‘role.’
Knowing that bronze-age standards are hopeless should teach us NOT to run around policing terms who’s applicability is never going to settle.
Writing as a heterosexual, femme, top, cis-gendered, male…so far this morning.
Yeah. I know why it’s problematic.
I think there’s a confusion between “masculine” and “corporate arsehole” here. ☺
I happen to know women who are solid feminists but really embrace the ‘girly’ aspects of culturally-dominant womanhood. There’s plenty of variety.
I think the author was describing what constituted her personality, not her feminism.
I suppose I should feel like a ‘real man’. I’m cisgender, heterosexual and all the other boring adjectives you can come up with, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what it feels like to be male. It’s a total non sequitur as far as I’m concerned. I’m really into women sexually, but can get turned on by gay porn. I always imagine being a woman during fantasies, but role-playing that would be a turn-off. I’m not in the least threatened or repulsed by sexualities and gender-identities other than mine, though the way society treats the non-normative often makes me sick.
What I’m trying to say is that even for someone who is probably near the summit of any bell-curve you care to draw, gender-identity can be a consideration so insignificant as to be almost entirely meaningless. I’ve no doubt some people feel very strongly male or female, but there’s plenty people in between.
Asking anyone whether trans women are women; yes-or-no, sounds to me as though you’re asking for a blanket judgement about all women in general and trans women in specific. Refusing to answering such a question was the only sensible thing to do in my opinion, and anyone who cannot see the difference between ‘no’ and a rejection of the question needs to dial down the contrast knob on their world view.
I don’t think not wearing neckties is necessarily thinking of them as men’s clothes. I don’t wear neckties for the same reason I don’t wear girdles. They serve no practical purpose, and they are extremely uncomfortable to the point of being suffocating. (Bras? Some would argue they serve a practical purpose. I’m not sure of that. I think they were made by men to “lift and separate”.)
I can definitely relate with much of that article. Never identified with all the traits I was expected to or liked all the things I was supposed to. I hear the “we women” stuff fairly regularly – please “we women” women, don’t assume I agree with this false dichotomy you try so hard to enforce – but more often it’s women and men stuff. I envy the people who don’t have to listen to gender essentialist nonsense on a daily freaking basis from their own peers. There’s always someone at work making a matter-of-fact comment. “He’s all boy”. (speaking of a hyper kid) “Women are so emotional at work.” (feel free to say that you’re a pain in the ass to work with, but don’t bring me and every other woman down with you by generalizing) “He complains like a woman, ha.” (he’s a man, and he was complaining, doesn’t that mean he was complaining like a man?) “Men, they’re so disorganized.” (that man, yes, why not leave it at that?) “Girls are harder to raise, boys are so much easier.” (I’m sure your daughters feel so good about themselves to hear you say that.) My reasons for not wanting kids of my own have morphed over the years, but one of many reasons now is that I don’t want a front row seat to the gender policing. I’m depressed enough watching it in my nephews, I couldn’t bear it with my own kids.
Oh my goodness, tell me about it. I have a daughter and all my acquaintances had sons (my 3 close friends are childless by choice). First off, I had to put up with what can only be described as sympathy at the birth of my daughter. Usually, there was an uncomfortable smile and then some comment about how my partner was going to have to get a shotgun or “you’ll have to watch out for boys when she gets a little older.” Sigh. I finally started telling them that if they watched their sons, my daughter would be safe. I got invited to fewer mommy & me events. Win-win.
Anyway, when BabyBarge was 2 yrs old (maybe 3 yrs old) we went to the birthday party of the son of a work acquaintance. My daughter was the only girl there. At one point or another during the afternoon, EVERY. SINGLE. BOY. in the room was running to his mother crying. At one point, with the noise overwhelming and at least 2 boys crying, my daughter walked over to sit in my lap. She just wanted a break from the fucking insanity. She wasn’t crying. She was, literally not figuratively, the only child that day that didn’t cry. All the mothers who had up to this point failed to notice their sons were crying, emotional and upset, instantly focused on my daughter coming to sit in my lap. “Oh, girls are so cuddly.” “They need to be soothed more than boys.” “Yeah, they get so emotional. It’s sweet now but wait until she’s a teenager,” says the mother whose son is screeching because the birthday boy won’t share his toy with him. Yeah. Wait until your little charmer is a teenager.*
When my partner and I got in the car to go home, I said that was it. No more work/family parties (it was his work). He agreed and that was it.
But the gender policing really kicked off when she went to school.
*They are all teenagers now. I have no idea what the little charmer is up to but my daughter is not overly emotional. She gets angry about social justice issues but she is pragmatic and generally a content person. Even with all those girl hormones. Go figure, huh.
Ties are not clothes, let alone men’s clothes. They’re torture devices, designed to inflict suffering, misery, and a constant, low level (at the very best of times – quite high at the middlinglyest, physically unbearable at the worst) discomfort in formal environments.
I will never understand humans who choose to wear ties. They are strange beings who clearly do not love their necks.
Ties are a crime against humanity.
No! Holy fuck, no. I hope that’s not something she seriously believes. It is not cis-sexist to claim your own gender identity. It is cis-sexist to look at others claiming their own gender identity and deride them for it, denying their self-determination and demanding they adhere to your assessment of their gender, but that’s not what you’re doing when you simply don’t adopt the labels that other people use for your own identifiers.
Call yourself something because it resonates with you – not because you think it’s old fashioned or implies a prejudice not to. I don’t reject the idea that I’m a man because I’m emotional, nurturing and artistic (although I am… along with logical, calm, and somewhat handy with a hammer when the situation calls for it). I reject it because “man,” more than simply being a label that doesn’t mean much to me, is one that is deeply bizarre and alien to me, which often brings ideas I find personally incompatible and offensive about how I ought to be acting around other people with it. And it’s not because of my immense hippitude (which is immense, I assure you) that I call myself agender – it’s because it’s the term which actually does seem to best describe my inner sense of self. If those other terms don’t resonate with you in any way, then maybe you’re a cis person who’s just noticing the ways in which a lot of our ideas about how and what men and women and no other options are or should be are nonsense with little to no basis in reality.
Hey now, being dainty is perfectly fine to aspire to! But ya, those limiting conceptions of masculinity (logical!) and femininity (not logical!) need to go away.
HA! Yes, this. It’s always confused me why I have to have a random piece of cloth hanging from my neck in order to be “formal”. I only have one tie that I like: a purple one covered with pink images of pigs rooting about and enjoying themselves, which was given to me by my sister to wear to my first job interview as a teenager. Parents vetoed that, but I still have the tie.
My father told me a story about how when he was a boy, he overheard his mother and his sister oohing and ahhing over some piece of ladies’ undergarment. He didn’t understand why they would be so appreciative of something that would never even be seen when it was being worn, and he asked his mother about that. “It’s because when you know you are wearing something pretty, it makes you feel pretty!”, she replied.
***
Just like a fish can’t see the water, I suspect most of our obsession with assigning gender to everybody we see is just a matter of thoughtless habit. I remember in the ’60s my mom seeing a young person on the other side of the street with long hair, and announcing (even though nobody had asked her opinion), “I can’t even tell if that is a boy or a girl!” I was sorely tempted to ask her why she needed to know this information, but I knew better than to say it out loud.
At least we English speakers don’t have to deal with a fundamentally gendered language like Spanish. Even inanimate objects must be assigned a gender, and often it is utterly ridiculous. ‘The village’ is ‘el pueblo’ (masculine) while ‘the city’ is ‘la ciudad’ (feminine). El policia refers to a particular police officer (male or female) while ‘la policia’ refers to the entire police force. ‘El Papa’ is the Pope, while ‘la papa’ is ‘the potato’! A Spanish-speaking person trying to express transgendered ideas must be just about tied up in knots.
The idea that all women love shoes seems to be a relatively recent one. I don’t remember the idea being around 30 years ago, when Imelda Marcos became infamous for her shoe collection. I don’t remember hearing stories of women envying her collection.
The idea that men are more logical than women makes me wonder if some of the people claiming its truth have ever met any men.
Ties are not torture devices if you don’t pull them too tight – they’re not meant to cut off the circulation! They should be a harmless adornment which lets you wear little bits of knot theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_85_Ways_to_Tie_a_Tie ). I think my wife looks spectacular when she wears a tie, BTW.
sawells@21:
“Harmless” does not equal useful. I’m a climber, I know how to tie a couple of hundred knots; I don’t ties to educate me. They are useless pieces of crap. It’s very nice that you think that your wife looks great in one; good for you both.
Who thinks ‘aggressive’ and ‘highly competitive’ are positive traits? The others she lists are a bit iffy too, logic is only really good if its applied well, Genghis Khan was very logical in his approach to military strategy, I wouldn’t consider that a good thing. Ambition is similar, what are your ambitions, how do you hope to achieve them?
@sawells, 21
It is my thoroughly considered and objectively true(tm) opinion that this is too tight. My neck gets claustrophobic.
My shirts are decently well fitted, and I have that recommended two-finger gap between the collar and my neck when buttoned up, and that’s already too tight for my comfort. It just makes me feel penned in. Add a tie to that, add a stressful environment, and heat from the fact that the room you’re sitting in apparently is the heat dump for the building’s AC on that already horribly hot summer’s day… ties will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. Mark my words!
Still, I recognise that some people can pull them off in ways other to the way I pull them off (as quickly as possible, and then throwing them to the ground, recoiling in abject horror) and are somehow not horrified by the demonic clothmonsters that are trying to suffocate them, and I think it’s very kind of them to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of humanity.
I don’t wear ties because they are one piece of useless clothing that,I am not obliged to wear by work or social dress codes. No one is going to say “I can’t believe Sam didn’t wear a tie to the hearing!” For that, I am grateful and I will not be pulling an Annie Hall-style revolution in clothing. I mean, I wear pant-suits all the time but no stupid ties or fedoras.
Ah, ties… Does any other article of clothing inspire such strong feelings? Personally, I quite like them – but only now that they’re entirely optional in my life. I rarely wear one at work, but I wear them quite often outside work.
Oh, and I love shoes. Good shoes are a joy. I have a Pintrest board with hundreds of pictures of shoes… I could spend my entire salary on shoes.
A key problem with ties is that to get a properly fit shirt without going to a higher-end men’s clothing store, you have to accept off-the-rack neck sizes that are completely ridiculous. Most men tie the tie to match the collar, or tighter if the collar is loose, so the whole thing becomes a constant irritation. That said, I’d sooner spend the rest of my life in ill-fit ties than a single evening in high-heel shoes–gendered clothing is still far, far imbalanced against women.
Athywren, none of the above should be taken as stating you’re somehow ‘wrong’ for not liking ties. My wife feels the same way about anything remotely in the vicinity of her throat, to the point where she’s had to take necklaces she’s gotten as gifts and remove the pendant, to put on a longer chain so it won’t even remotely come close to the front half of her neck. Her shirts, likewise, need at least a v-neck.
On another hand, the Three Piece Suit is awsome.
When my partner puts one on, he has something like 14 pockets which can store:
wallet, all the keys, handkerchief, tissues, small packages, lip-balm, you name it.
My equivalent lady-clothes have 4 pockets, none of which are big enough for a lipstick.
I don’t even use lipstick.
… you pretty much have to have them made to measure. Ready-to-wear shirts don’t fit anybody.
I figure a lot of things in life are like this. As long as no one’s saying ‘thou shalt’, it’s potentially a pleasure. Require it, and suddenly, it’s thanks, no*.
I like a lot of formal wear. But it’s rarely at all mandatory in my life, either.
(*/And if it’s ‘thou shalt not’, it becomes, ‘right.. really must try that, then’.)
This is late in the conversation, but there is a store near me that sells shoes and chocolate. I haven’t checked to see if they have chocolate shoes
Just call ’em clothes, huh? Weirdly, when I go into a store I always find the ones I want in something called the “Men’s Department” but apparently I was unnecessarily assigning labels to fabric by referring to the clothing sold in such departments as “Men’s”.
High caliber skeptical thinking to the rescue.
Fair point. (By the way I wasn’t disagreeing with you, exactly, just thinking about why I don’t see it exactly the same way.)
I shop for clothes in thrift stores (and seldom)…Now you mention it I guess I do go mostly to the men’s racks. I like loose T shirts and sweaters, not little bitty form-fitting ones…
You got me. I do wear men’s clothes. Only I think I think of them as unisex, and of the stores as weird for thinking women need little bitty flimsy form-fitting shirts to the exclusion of all other kinds.
The store is unnecessarily assigning labels to fabric, and you’re accepting those labels.
I recall fondly a Stone Soup comic sequence on the subject of gender specific children’s clothing, culminating in this strip.
elephantasy, that strip reminded me of these photos (the fifth one down is one of my favorite all-time pictures).
Well, some of it’s unisex, and some of it isn’t. Tailored menswear isn’t flimsy, but it should be form-fitting, and it’s very definitely masculine. A woman crossing that boundary (such as Sarah Ann Murray*, the fashion editor of The Rake Magazine) is making a very definite sartorial statement.
(*And she’s not actually wearing men’s clothing, she’s wearing clothing in a masculine style, but which has been cut for her figure. Actual menswear wouldn’t fit right.)
True. That’s sort of what I meant by neckties. I’ve never worn men’s suits or suits like men’s but tailored for a woman. I don’t like men’s trousers except for jeans (which, again, I think of as unisex – I don’t like jeans tailored specifically for women). I’m thoroughly mixed and confused on this subject.
And then, of course, there’s the fact that whilst Sarah Ann Murray is making a pretty bold stylistic statement there, it’s not actually transgressive, in the way that a man wearing a dress is… I have a (cis, male, heterosexual) friend who likes to wear women’s clothes and make-up, and he gets (understandably) really pissed off that that’s somehow seen as this incredibly weird thing.
I know. It’s much easier for women to cross-dress than it is for men. That’s a recent development, but it’s real.
Thinking some more about this, in the context of this rather amusing inversion of the whole “modesty” thing in Christian circles, I’ve just realised something else – I can’t think of a masculine equivalent of the the term “temptress”, in either it’s positive or negative connotations. Another one of those things that seems like it should have been obvious, once you notice it…
Good grief. It’s pieces of fabric cut into shapes and sewn together.
I’m glad you didn’t entirely disagree- I’m proud of the piece, although my thinking on the topic has actually grown a bit more nuanced since writing that article. I’ve reluctantly come to realize that I have some of what the kids are calling “dysphoria”, meaning discomfort with the shape of my body where it diverges from the male and is distinctly female (breast, hips, vagina to a lesser extent). Wearing men’s clothing is more comfortable in large part because it camouflages the female aspects of my body, and I’ve found that the same or very similar styles of clothing made for woman’s bodies actually feels quite a bit less comfortable, not more so.
How I came by this “dysphoria” thing I couldn’t tell you. I haven’t ruled out cultural factors and/or some sort of mild mental illness or dysfunction. But, if you asked me today, I’d probably be a little bit more hesitant to declare that my experience isn’t like that of trans people, although I’m also not fully comfortable using that term to describe myself.
I like the piece a lot. Do be proud of it! I was motivated to blog about it because I liked it.
I do too, really – I hate my bum and I’m not crazy about having breasts. On the other hand (I was thinking about this just a few hours ago) I do like having female skin, especially on the face, and I would not like having a beard.
I could see it all as just disliking a lot of parts of the human body, some specifically female but not all. I mean, guts – come on, who doesn’t hate guts?
And feet are good, but god damn they malfunction easily.
Culture is a thing.