F, 38
embracing masculinity had nothing to do with inherent maleness or anything like that...
⏎ interviews⏎Q: How do you describe your identity in your own words?
A: I see myself as... technically a trans woman, but I'm butch with it because I don't personally see masculinity and butchness to be something inherent to like cis masculinity, and I never saw myself as a boy for my whole life.
So, to me, embracing masculinity had nothing to do with like inherent maleness or anything like that. So, I just simply see myself as a masculine woman who happens to be a trans woman.
Q: So, you do identify as butch and then also trans femme. What objects, aesthetics, or everyday practices do you feel reaffirm your identity?
A: I... I guess that's the part where it gets a little hard to describe.
It's like you're performing masculinity, but you know how to perform it in a way that people kind of register as that's not a cis man. That's not a straight person. You know, it's just everything from, you know, it's like you're doing masculinity, but you're being kind of a bit gay with it.
So, it's always like, you know, shirts that fit just a certain way, certain kind of jewelry, like, you know, cis dudes still don't do like the big thick chain jewelry and stuff like that from like fucking Home Depot. And, you know, there's a lot of that going on. Then, I mix up a little bit of like some of the older lesbian fashion motifs like the carabiner and where to place it on your belt loop to indicate who you are in a sexual relationship.
And like that's another one of those, if you know, you know. And if you don't know, then ...it's not for you.
Q: So are there like, when you wake up in the morning, are there things you do where you're like, this makes me feel more at home in my body and who I am?
A: Well, hormones helped. So for me specifically, I kind of just dress how I feel like dressing, but it feels nice because it's not obvious from this perspective.
But like, you know, the hormones changed my body enough ... my hips changed, my figure changed, my chest changed. So I just kind of dress like a guy.
And if some people see me as a guy, then whatever. But a lot of people don't think I'm a trans man.
Q: How does this ... confusion, do you feel good about it? Like is that what you're going for?
A: For the most part, yeah. Sometimes it's annoying, but that's just, you know, how it is being trans and gay.
Sometimes being visible is nice and sometimes being visible, it isn't.
Q: What first drew you to the butch identity?
A: It gets into a weird kind of like back and forth for me. It all started in childhood where I was the classic. I knew what I was when I was a child and everyone else kind of knew what I was and then... adulthood beat me back into what gender they wanted me to be.
The only difference is uh, most trans women they tend to kind of idolize more feminine women growing up. But me, I grew up mostly in New York, so for a long time... and I was a kid in the 90s.... I felt like there seemed to have been more masculine lesbians just walking around and stuff and tomboy girls were a little bit more like way more boyish with it.
So what I was looking at was like, man, I wish I was a tomboy girl, you know?
...And I was. And half of the time, I was read as that because I just looked a certain way and acted a certain way. So, everyone's like that's just a girl with a short haircut and wears boy clothes a lot. So, I felt like I was still kind of like always kind of dancing between two worlds. Yeah, I guess I'm technically a boy because everyone tells me I'm a boy but I also don't mind the fact that everyone's reading me as a girl like 50-50 percent of the time.
So, I was always just idolizing the masculine leaning girls who were my age, and then, once in a blue moon, when I would like see an actual masculine woman, I'd be like, ‘wow, hope I can do that one day.’
Q: That's so funny that I didn't know you grew up in New York, where'd you grow up?
A: I was actually born in New York City, and I was in Queens up until like right before I turned like 11. It was right before my adolescence, I would say. Then long story short, my mom kind of lost her mind and became a religious Christian per that and moved us upstate to be in like northern Appalachia and the Catskill region.
But, yeah, I lived in New York City for first part of my childhood and then I spent most of the rest of my teens and my 20s in upstate New York kind of between kind of little town named Margaretville like 30 minutes outside of Woodstock. I went through the SUNY college system. So I was kind of all over the place like Albany and Schenectady and all that.
Now... I’m in Johnson City.
Q: Were there things that held you back from identifying as butch?
A: A combo of I was mostly dealing with transphobia of it all and being in the closet for a while because of it... like, while I was in the closet ,I happened upon this in the 2010s, between 2012 and 2015.
I'm re-remembering who I am, re-embracing who I am, and I'm at a point now where I think I'm not really into feminine performance all that much.
Sexuality wise, I've always been lesbian-leaning. So, I was just kind of wondering if there's a thing of masculine lesbian trans women out there
... and then there were like little pockets around the internet that were like, yeah, you can be that. It's not gonna be fun and most people don't like it, but you can be that. So, I was just like, ‘okay I'll be that, and that was when I was like 25’.
Q: Can you share the journey of how your identity has evolved over time?
A: Yes I mean, it's more of like you just realized yeah kind of just realized stuff.
I did have a brief period when I lived in Asheville for two years. My wife and I only lived together In Asheville for like six months. For a brief moment of time, I don't know... that particular set of like queer community kind of made it weird. It probably has to do a little bit with being Southern and stuff, where a lot of people made it kind of clear that they weren't really into the whole butch trans woman thing.
They wanted a feminine trans woman no matter how. Whether or not I was performing it well or enjoying performing it, that didn't really matter
It was just like yeah, but... are you sure you're that?
You know? Are you sure you're not just like still dealing with internal stuff? It was a weird. Like, let's see how we could like do a reverse psychology with you where you don't really know who you are.
So we're gonna be woke by being like ‘are you sure you haven't really truly embraced your femininity?’
So, I was briefly femme... uncomfortably, briefly femme.
Then, I was just like, oh... this is just not for me. This was also before I was on hormones so I was just kind of like, ‘this just doesn't feel good, and it took till about another two years after that, and about six months into having estrogen change my brain to be like, oh, actually, I don't care about that anymore.’
Q: How's being in or southerner being in Tennessee shaped your butch identity?
A: No, I think I think it has a little bit.
This is mostly because my wife has lived in this area between Virginia and here for their entire life. She's been here. She's going on 35 soon. It's been a while and from their perspective. It's always in this case of: the Appalachian region. In the south, there tends to be a bit more of an idea of personal freedom. Then, people would not tend to expect there to be more of a mentality. It's almost like a weird kind of: don't ask don't tell but like in a cross-cultural kind of a way.
And, apparently, we've noticed and from what they've told me, and I've noticed that there is actually for whatever reason, maybe anthropological reason, why.
There seems to be a little bit of a high tick of masculine women in general living their lives and whatever sexuality they identify with. There is like a good chunk of like butch-femme lesbians around here for whatever reason. We more or less blend in like I would say like 60-40 percent of the time.
Q: Are there things you would do in one location that you wouldn't do in another?
A: I mean because I would technically do it anywhere that I felt was a comfortable space but it's more like if I feel like a space is a bit more queer, I can probably walk around with a sports bra as a t-shirt without anybody being too weird about it. As opposed to, I probably wouldn't do that if I was going into like a small town that I knew was going to be mostly Conservative white people.
Then, in that case, it'd be just kind of more like I'm just gonna be a little bit more androgynous with it where they're just like I think that's either a really young man or a very masculine woman.
Q: Do you feel like political and cultural climates affect your comfortability being butch?
A: It depends on the city i'm currently living in. Johnson City is not the most liberal place on earth, but just has just enough pockets of like countercultural people in it. I'm just going to go blend in with these people, and there's like a separation there.
I don't know.
It's different where somewhere like Asheville, where yes, it's more liberal and they tend to be more open-minded, but they're also hyper-gentrified and not great in that way. It's just kind depends on where you happen to be and that starts like competing on whether or not you have job.
How many jobs you have access to? How many jobs you can be expressive in? How many people you can have is like your personal friend group? Feeling some semblance of community. So here, it's smaller.
The feeling is smaller, but it's not non-existent.
Q: How does being a trans femme butch interact with the queer communities where you live?
A: The only the other problem. So, the other side of that coin is my wife and I, we do see a lot of butch-femme couples a lot... for some reason, I think because of the nature of this town.
The fact is there's not a lot of organized queer spaces or organizations, so everyone kind of just like sticks to themselves.
And, they only show up in various events in various spaces, but then outside of that, there's not a lot of like big social groups. Not a lot of intermingling. Not a lot of like building community in that way.
It's just like we are all our own separate units. We're only going to come together recognize each other in certain spaces, and then we'll go fuck off and stick to ourselves and our own little groups.
We're not gonna build from there.
Q: How does your butch identity affect your relationships?
A: Well, unfortunately, I have zero contact with my family, ¸That's dead. i've been separate and no contact for like 10 years now, which has honestly been great for my mental health.
How I interact with other people is... so, I still kind of feel like i'm just old-fashioned butch enough that I still feel like a hallmark of butchness... it’s like the chivalry aspect of it all.
So, if you're not like, to me, if you're not at least a little bit chivalrous towards women in general or feminine people... and my my idea of a femme goes even beyond the lesbian community and into other people, if you're not willing to defend anybody.
Like, are you a butch?
Q: What do you want your butch identity to mean to younger people?
A: I guessthere's like a two thing here.
One, I definitely would like other trans women and trans feminine people to realize that they have more than one option in the world and how to exist, how to perform their their gender without having this problem.
With white trans women, there's this hyper focus need to be. Like, if you don't look like Hunter Schaefer, you're not really doing womanhood correctly.
Like, no. You can you can look at another way. I would like to at least think that I am doing it,...you know, living enough and existing well enough, people that other trans women, trans girls, and such can realize that, ‘oh, I can be different. I can look different. And, I could still be who I am.’
Q: How do you see butch identity evolving in the future?
A: I feel like it takes a long time for humanity to largely change big idea perspectives.
For a while, we're kind of more or less have butchness be very much like when you're a cis woman who is a lesbian who's masculine.
And, that's going to be like the general mainstream idea for probably well past our lives for another several generations or so. I feel like nowadays since there's a lot more Internet connection, even if it's fraught and doing more harm than good, there's a little silver lining where the connections and the democracy of data just being the way it is. okay.
I feel like that will slowly but surely be a thing that kind of returns over the course of you know years decades generations.