A reader writes: “I was having a conversation with my mother the other night about Newt Gingrich and how I was really tired of all the GOP discussion that is constantly in the news. She brought up a fact I had forgotten about. She stated that Newt had a lesbian sister who definitely did not agree with his politics.
“Then she said, ‘She looks just like you.’ I think my mother was trying to describe the fact that many lesbians tend to lean way over pretty close to the male spectrum in appearance and dress, and she has not come to complete terms with the fact that the main difference between me and butch lesbians is that I relate as a male and not a female.
“My daughter had been at a bar the night before and ran into a butch lesbian, and my daughter told her I was transitioning. The lesbian told my daughter she did not understand why I needed to be that way and why couldn’t I just be a butch? So I want your perspective on why is it so difficult for some butch lesbians to understand trans men and why some find it so easy to bash trans men within our own community.”
I am aware that this has been an ongoing issue in some, but certainly not all, lesbian communities for at least the past fifteen years, because I heard about this type of non-acceptance when I was first transitioning (I am speaking now of non-trans lesbians). Because I was never in the larger “lesbian community,” nor was I involved in any smaller lesbian communities, I have never experienced this phenomenon first-hand.
Most of the lesbians I know well are women I met after transition, and I have never had any of them question me about my reasons for transition or criticize me for doing so. I have felt completely accepted and in no way judged by the lesbians I know, and I know quite a few.
However, I do know that, in some places, there has been some friction between lesbians and trans men. Because I have never spent a lot of time in lesbian communities, I’m not sure if this friction occurs across the board, if it is found primarily in white communities or if there is similar friction in communities of color, if it is related in any way to social or economic class, or what other factors might be involved, so I can only speculate from my personal perspective. I hope to hear from readers who have more experience with and more knowledge of this than I do.
From what I have seen, I would say that this friction has its roots in the unequal distribution of privilege in Western culture (there is unequal distribution of privilege in many other cultures as well, but I am talking about my culture). I think that, in some lesbian communities, there is a sense of betrayal and rejection that is felt, particularly when members of that community transition. It’s possible that I have not experienced this directly because I was never in a community where members felt that I was turning my back on them.
There seems to be an assumption among some lesbians (and other people, as well) that female-to-male transition is undertaken in order to gain male privilege. There seems to be another assumption that trans men are “rejecting” a female identity because it is somehow not good enough – that transition indicates that there’s something “wrong” with being female in general, rather than “there’s something wrong with me being female.”
This simply reflects the fact that lesbians (and gay men and bisexual people) don’t necessarily understand transition any better than straight non-trans people do. The “T” on the end of LGBT doesn’t translate to “getting it.” So I think this friction is based primarily in misunderstanding, and that misunderstanding has caused enough hurt that it has dampened any desire to understand.
Women have been marginalized in our culture, and lesbians have been particularly marginalized. So what some lesbians might feel when someone who they have seen as a member of their community transitions is that the person has joined with the oppressor. This type of response might be more prevalent in white communities because of the position of power that white men hold in the culture, but I’m only guessing.
Regardless, I think that deep hurts are slow to heal, and a lifetime of marginalization can sometimes result in misplaced anger and resentment. Plus I don’t doubt that there have been instances where trans men who have transitioned into privilege have used that privilege to negatively affect certain lesbians or lesbian communities, either intentionally or unintentionally. So there’s probably some stuff going on in both directions that isn’t conducive to good community relations.
But from where I sit, a major basis of this phenomenon is a misunderstanding of what trans really is and what being trans encompasses. That is one perspective. I am interested in hearing others, and so I open it up to the readers. Take it away!
I would imagine there could be a sense of betrayal similar to what happens in a couple when one person divulges that they’ve identified with the other sex/gender all along, and are going to transition. In short, sometimes people feel they’ve been lied to, and now that they’re being forced into a heterosexual friendship/relationship when before they had been led to believe they were building a friendship/relationship with another lesbian. After transition, the shared experience of being lesbians cannot go forward. Maybe the friendship/relationship can go forward, and of course the memories will remain, but not the shared experience of being two lesbians making their way through this male-dominated, heterosexist world. People will grieve when they lose what they thought was an integral aspect of someone else’s identity.
Something else I could see happening, is that lesbians will feel they’ll be looked at as pre-transitioned trans men. A guilt by association sort of thing. Society already tells lesbians that they have penis envy. A lesbian transitioning into a man could validate that stereotype in some peoples minds and make life harder for lesbians.
I’ve never been in the situation to observe first-hand the possible reactions of lesbians to the news that one of their group was transitioning, so I base my thoughts above on general observations and a knowledge of how bisexual woman are treated in the lesbian/bisexual community.
While I agree that this is probably a predominantly out-dated stereotype (if nothing else, the lesbian community is a very different place than it was in the eighties), there are two other possibilities, specifically related to butch women:
We can encounter social pressure to transition ourselves, and resent people we see as having “given into” that social pressure or as contributing to people’s expectations that masculine women are really men. The coercive pressure of the binary can be exhausting and I have met individual trans men who contribute to that pressure, even though the vast majority don’t. Some assume butches are just pre-trans men and ask things like, “so, when are you starting hormones?”
We can also be in competition for femme-identified women with trans men, and fear that they will seduce femme women straight. Since you are a gay man, if this was the case you wouldn’t be in competition anyway and would never encounter this. It often feels like there are few femmes out there, probably because of femme invisibility. While I consciously know that femmes are fully capable of making their own decisions about who they will love and it is chauvinistic to not trust them to do so, it doesn’t mean I don’t get scared I’ll never find anyone to care for. In that scarcity-mindset I have at times started to see other butches and trans men around me as competition instead of companions. If a femme pairs up with another butch she will still be in the community, but there is the worry that trans men can offer her more than I can, especially straight privilege.
Wow, that is a persoective i had not thought of or encountered, competition for femme id’d lesbians. I did not realize there is a perceived shortage of them. This is why I bring questions like this up. The more I know about the entire LGBT community, the more I understand each segments plight and can be there for support and acceptance of everyone in our community.
There’s a problem with this, though. Femme lesbians may be attractive, sure, but I’d never want to date one. Why? Because they are attracted to WOMEN. I know that if a lesbian ever fell for me, it would be because she thought of me as a woman, and that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to get away from all this time. She would have to admit to being at least bi, if not straight herself, to be with me. It would be like me going for a straight man. Sure there are cute straight guys out there, but I wouldn’t want to date one because they would think of me, once again, as a woman. The way a person identifies me in a relationship is at LEAST as important to me as the way I see them. Nobody wants to be in a relationship where they’re thought of as something that they’re not.
And for the record, I don’t believe there’s anything “wrong” with being female. It’s just not who I am. There’s nothing wrong with fire trucks. But you don’t deliver ice cream out of them, you put fires out with them. There’s nothing wrong with pizza delivery trucks, but you don’t answer ambulance calls with them. There’s nothing wrong with a race car but you wouldn’t plow a field with one. It’s not about the car you’re in being “bad” or “wrong” or “inferior”; it’s about matching the vehicle with the passenger.
If I’m supposed to deliver ice cream, then I want an ice cream truck, not a fire truck. And I’m not turning my back on all fire fighters by giving up my fire truck- in fact, I have the highest level of respect for them, having tried to be one in the past.
YOU GO, FIREFIGHTERS!
lesbians bash transsexual women too i have experiences of this.I was told by lesbians that I am hurting women because Im not a real woman.that I am a feminized castrated man.I also was bashed by gay men who said transsexual women are really gay men pretending to be women.
To me, that is just ignorance of the plight of trangender/transexual people.
I’d say that there are lots and lots of factors that go into this.
I came out as a gay trans man before I came out as a bi trans man… when I was gay and before I transitioned I didn’t really have a connection to the lesbian community (or any LGBT community before that point), so at that time I really didn’t get much of this. I -did- see it thrust upon trans men who -were- in the lesbian community, though. On a personal level I think it’s the same reaction most people get when they transition, “I thought I knew you!” or, more commonly, “No, you’re wrong, -I- know you better than that.” Not-so-oddly, as well, it was usually trans men who were the more “desirable” ones that got flack for it. If nobody thought he was attractive as a woman, butch or otherwise, nobody cared.
There’s two-way social pressure that creates a lot of tension. What Meg says above does happen among more binary-hugging trans men… if a woman is sufficiently butch, she must clearly not be a woman, so she is pressured to transition. I don’t know very many trans men who are actively and openly like this, but it’s the same story with everybody else in a minority community… we all represent each other whether we want to or not, so when one person does something stupid, suddenly trans men in general are viewed as pressuring butches to transition. That goes the other way, too. I didn’t get this much before, but when I started pursuing women suddenly lesbians were there pushing their half-assed theories on me and trying to get me to go “back” to being a “happy butch,” when I never was a “happy butch” to begin with.
Which is the last thing that I always think about when this subject comes up… radical communities are really into theory (they simultaneously hate theory, but that’s a different story). People like that can’t just believe “I have a male brain” or “I was born this way,” because everything has to have some social cause, and all of those have to support their already-present belief systems. So they see people who formerly identified as butch women transition, whether due to better visibility or resources or whatever else, and that scares them into hating transition. Rather than admit that they’re scared, though, they drag theory into it. So you get these great tomes of absolute BS about how trans men have mastectomies to avoid the male gaze and trans men transition to get male privilege or trans men exist because people hate lesbians and so on. Which certainly isn’t helped by the few men who do pressure butches to transition.
“But from where I sit, a major basis of this phenomenon is a misunderstanding of what trans really is and what being trans encompasses.”
You said it for me.
My only experiences of being bashed were from the GL cisgender folks, so I’ve chosen to have nothing to do with them and life has been so much better.
Like Matt I transitioned over 15 years ago and things have changed…some for the better, others not so much. Also like Matt I was never part of the lesbian community although I had friends who were lesbians and I participated in sports with many lesbians. I even had opportunities to engage in more than one lesbian relationship, and was flattered by the attention, although it just wasn’t for me. Since transitioning I’ve been “bashed” by natal women, lesbians, transwomen, and genderqueer/androgynous people. And in nearly every instance it was about white-male-privilege.
It’s been a learning experience but not from the perspective that you might imagine. I’ve had to learn how to accept having white-male-privilege (WMP) whether I liked it, asked for it, used it or not. What I have discovered is that there aren’t really any means available to mitigate, ameliorate, or resolve the issues that others have, particularly the aforementioned groups, surrounding the perception of MWP. In my case I look like a middle-aged, white, male, cop. It doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do, say or don’t say, how I dress, walk, talk or eat…the instant that I walk into a room I am GIVEN WMP by the people in that room and it is ASSUMED that I expect to have it and will use it.. Again, all of this happens before I say a single word.
The point I’m trying to make is really pretty simple, check your own personal response to how YOU react to someone, particularly before you’ve met them personally or have done anything other than just look at them. Are YOU attributing things to them or are they asking for them? Most people just react to what they see and their response will always be a reflection of what they fear, hate, envy, or covet the most.
WMP does exist, there is no doubt, especially in this country. However there are many men who didn’t ask for it nor do they want it. Those men that do want it can only have it if others give it to them. WMP isn’t something that can be taken, it can only be given.
Sorry…I’m not really anonymous but my laptop IS cantankerous this morning.
Thank you for being a cop. I know it has nothing to do with this conversation.
I appreciate the thanks, but I’ve never been a civilian cop…I was in the U.S.M.C. Military Police. I am, however, married to a civilian cop who also happens to be transwoman. I will be happy to pass your thanks on to the many trans cops that I do know…they’ll appreciate it….so thank you for thinking of them.
Thanks for your service and for passing along my thanks.
WMP is something I am just not comfortable with. I get it now all the time and I dont like the feeling of it. Here in the South it is called being a “Gobber” (Good ol’ boy). To me it assumes me to be a racist bigot. I most certainly am not. I extend respect to everyone until they give me reason not to and then it is on an individual’s behavior toward me as a person. I don’t give a crap what your race is, male, female, gender neutral or anywhere you choose to id yourself on the gender spectrum or the sexual id spectrum. I first and foremost see people just as people and I give all due respect. My one down fall in respecting others is when they are just out right ignorant. I dont have time for it, i will be polite but I am quite done with interacting with that individual.
Although there are numerous ethnicities, there is only one race. It’s the human race. Use of that word has been a way for the white elites to keep oppressing and ‘otherizing’ those with darker skin tones.
I never spent time in the lesbian community; I didn’t realize I was attracted to people other than men until not long before I started my social/medical transition and didn’t date any women until well into that process. So I didn’t have a lot of push-back from my queer community, but I did have one conversation that hurt me a lot; I went to the same body piercer for several years and was casual friends with her outside of work since we went to some of the same queer events in town. She identified very strongly as a butch lesbian.
When I told her I was going to take testosterone, change my pronouns, etc. she was pretty upset by it which I was not expecting at all. She had a few main points: she felt like her lesbian community was “losing” a lot of butches to transition, that she already faced a lot of assumptions from other people that she was a man (the example she gave was “wrong bathroom” incidents) and worried that more trans men would exaggerate the problem, and that people who transitioned were maybe doing it because they couldn’t understand that there are lots of ways to be butch/non-traditional women.
Like I said above I have no experience in lesbian spaces, but I’ve heard that first argument since then and it almost feels like the people who make it have a weird sense of ownership of trans men. When women say “our butches are leaving!” I want to explain that if they’re transitioning, maybe they were never “your” butches to begin with (or butches at all – not all trans men “start out” as butch lesbians even if they spend time in lesbian spaces). I understand that it is difficult to have the nature of your relationship with someone change, but I would hate to think that someone might put off transition so as not to lose friends in a particular community. There’s a large part of me that wishes I’d understood my attraction to women earlier in life so I could have had the experience of being with a woman as a pretty-much-female-identified person, but I’m kind of glad that I didn’t have to face this resentment/abandonment/whatever you want to call it from more than one person.
[As a side note, I will say that I am very uncomfortable when trans men talk about continuing to spend time in explicitly lesbian-only spaces (vs. more open lesbian-focused ones that still allow others to be there). I have met a few guys here in SF who do that and I think it's really disrespectful to try to stay in those exclusive spaces when you no longer share that identity. I would absolutely understand and agree with anger from lesbians who encounter trans guys in explicitly lesbian-only spaces.]
About her second point, I don’t know what to say. I think it’s pretty fucking terrible that happily butch women feel pressure to either transition or conform to some other ideal of feminine behavior, but ultimately I can’t base my decision to transition on what will hurt the people around me less – for some trans folks that would mean No Transition Ever due to the feelings of friends and family. I think this argument is a case of someone making my decision about them when it was about what was best for me.
What hurt the most, coming from this person, was her last point; I’d spent a long time before deciding to transition trying to figure out if I could just find the “right” kind of woman to be where I wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable. I wasn’t butch. I wasn’t even that male-identified. I just knew that I couldn’t find a way to fit into a female identity that made sense to me and allowed me to be comfortable, so my choice was pretty clear. But that did sting, because I’d spent a while *so sure* there was a way for me to just discover the right way for me to be a woman and things would get better. And I finally knew, by this point, that that wasn’t the case, but to hear it from someone else was pretty upsetting. There is an infinite number of ways to be a woman. None of them worked for me, full stop.
All of the above.
I want to add that I don’t believe that some lesbians bash trans men because they are oppressed. That’s just a stupid excuse (pardon my French, Matt ^^). The same type of trans bashing exists in the older gay male community. It’s mostly a generational problem, as the generation that came out during the 70s and 80s internalized a lot of transphobic shit. Society in general was very transphobic during those years and the queer communities even more so. Go and read The Transexual Empire. That was what was commonly believed about trans people, even by feminist gay men. I’ve been there, I remember it.
So it’s mostly older lesbians who cling to the separatist ideology of those years who are transphobic.
Trans people don’t fit into separatism and threaten that black/white world view.
With some lesbians I get the feeling that envy might be involved. I have seen some hardcore separatist lesbians transition very late in life, as they had no opportunity earlier on. It just wasn’t done back then. You would have lost everybody. And if you couldn’t transition yourself, it’s pretty tough to look at the kids today, and the freedom they have.
Another point that I can relate to is that they are afraid to loose potential partners or that people they feel attracted to might transition. That makes sense to me. But that’s true for other people as well. I’ve known an older gay guy who was strongly opposed to transitiong because he was in love with a gay man/trans woman and had talked her out of transitioning.
This topic certainly brought out many responses. I can’t identify with a lesbian, having never identified as a lesbian. On the other hand I can’t identify with a gay man, having never been one. I explain myself as being a woman who had a rather hideous birth defect, my clitoris was on the outside. Now being involved with the GLBT community you would think I would understand certain things. I once asked my therapist, why would someone go thru the expense and pain of SRS to only see another woman as their sexual partner. My therapist explained, that gender identity, and sexual orientation are two very different things. I still don’t understand it. Me, I was asexual before my transition and corrective surgery. Now I date men, and am very happy being heterosexual.
First I want to thank you for posting about this. I’m a queer, white, cis woman, and I have been struggling with troubling feelings ever since a friend whom I had known for many years as a lesbian woman came out as a straight trans man. I know that my emotions are transphobic and wrong, and I’m actively working to get rid of them, but it still hasn’t completely worked. This is something I’ve been working through on my own, because I’ve been afraid that sharing it might spread hatred, and I don’t want to do anything that might further marginalize trans people. So this discussion has been important to me. Thank you for having it, and thank you to the other commenters for sharing.
I’d had trans male acquaintances, but never close friends, as I’d had with cis men, trans and cis women, and genderqueer folks. So I know that ignorance has been a significant part of my embarrassing emotional reaction to my friend’s transition.
That said, I’ll try to explain several of the factors causing me trouble. And I’ll just reiterate that these are/were my *feelings*, and as such do not reflect what I believe, but instead the transphobic culture I’ve been soaking in my whole life.
Part of it was a fear that he had internalized misogyny. I’d spent so much of myself working toward spreading the message that there’s no wrong way to be a woman. So it felt as though he must feel that something fundamental about being a woman wasn’t good enough for him. And it made me wonder what that meant about what he thought of other women, and how it might affect how they thought of themselves.
Another part of it was the shift in privilege. Suddenly he had straight white male privilege, which tilted the power dynamic in his direction. This put me in a vulnerable position, not just because of the new inequality, but because in the past, I had opened myself up to him and shared things with him that I would not have, had I known he was a man, because it wouldn’t have felt safe.
Another part was identity threat. I’ve experienced a lot of open hostility and biphobia in my local lesbian community for dating men. It’s been hard not to internalize the messages that I must not really be queer, and that I’m not welcome. The friend in question is someone that I was attracted to when I thought he was female. Since he was really male all along, does that mean I’m really not queer?
That’s in direct conflict with another part of my struggle, which is that after he’d been on T for long enough, my physical attraction toward him disappeared. I’ve only ever been attracted to a rather narrow range of men, and the physical changes my friend underwent landed him well outside that range. The dramatic change in my physical reactions to him was disturbing to experience. It also had a further-reaching effect by making me fear it might be possible that physical changes that I or any long-term romantic partner might go through could destroy the sexual attraction between us.
I’m hesitant to post this, because I’m ashamed of having these feelings, and for not having been able to entirely eliminate them yet. I can only hope that sharing them will positively contribute to the conversation.
Thank you for commenting and for your honesty. We are all human and imperfect in that humanness before we are every other label.
I don’t think you should be ashamed of these feelings. They’re just natural feelings that you have to work through. If you try to ignore them or pretend that they don’t exist, you will never be able to work through them.
I think the fear that you talk about with regard to internalized misogyny with your friend is part of that misunderstanding that I mentioned. Those who misunderstand transness think that trans men are rejecting femaleness or that we think something is wrong with it or that it’s not “good enough.” I can’t speak for all trans men (or any, other than myself), but I think in most cases that’s it’s not a rejection of women in general. It’s not that there’s something wrong with being a woman or being female. It’s that there’s something wrong with me being a woman or being female, because it’s not who I am, and I think that’s hard for people who are not trans to understand.
If you identify as queer, then you are queer. You know how you feel. It doesn’t matter who you are attracted to. Don’t question your own identity because of the labels that other people might try to put on it. If you are a queer woman who is sometimes attracted to men and sometimes attracted to women, that’s who you are. Don’t second-guess your own identity because others have a need for specific labels. It’s unfortunate that bisexual, omnisexual, and queer people often become invisible – or at least their sexual orientation does – thanks to these very strict labels that people insist upon.
I think that attraction can change if there is a significant change in physical appearance. But it depends on what that change is and what the relationship is to begin with. People’s physical appearance changes dramatically over the course of a lifetime, but many couples stay together until death with no change in affection or sexual attraction. The physical changes in your friend are pretty dramatic, and they are very different from the changes brought upon by aging or even by an accident. A change in gendered appearance is a huge change, and I don’t think you can really compare it to other possible physical changes that a person might go through. It’s a whole other animal.
That’s just my two cents. Thanks for commenting.
Thank you for your kind and generous response. I’ve been struggling with this in silence for a long time now, and I had no idea how beneficial it would be to actually speak up about it. By detailing my emotions, and reading your response, as well as the other comments, things have shifted for me internally. I am learning so much from this discussion, and I actually feel like I’ve made a huge breakthrough.
You said: “It’s not that there’s something wrong with being a woman or being female. It’s that there’s something wrong with me being a woman or being female, because it’s not who I am, and I think that’s hard for people who are not trans to understand.”
I’ve heard things like this said before, but always in the third person. Seeing it in first person completely shifted it for me, and I was suddenly able to *get* in a way I never have been able to before.
A personal experience helped click this into place for me. (I know that when a privileged person claims to understand a marginalized person’s viewpoint because they’ve experienced something slightly similar, it can be highly problematic, since the privileged experience is divorced from the oppressive context. So I want to be clear that this is something that helped this cis woman break through some of her privileged ignorance around gender, but that I don’t believe it means I have a personal understanding of what it’s really like to be trans.)
I’ve gone through periods in my life where I would spend my free time playing MMORPGs. I’ve created many characters in many different games, and almost every single one of them has been female. I have tried, at multiple points, to create a male character. I’ve often done so on purpose, to try to challenge myself. But I’ve never been able to enjoy playing a male character. It always feels wrong and uncomfortable to me. This seemed strange to me, since I’ve been happy to dress as a male character on stage, or for Halloween.
Now I realize that the difference is that in person, people always know I’m a woman. It may seem transgressive to see a woman taking on a man’s role, but I’m always seen as a woman. But in a computer game, when the people I’m interacting with can’t tell that I’m actually a woman (and, thanks to the misogyny in the gaming community, I’m always assumed to be male), I simply can’t feel comfortable playing a male character.
This is something that has actively troubled me for years, and that I still think about somewhat regularly, even though I haven’t gamed in a long time, and it’s been years since I even tried to create a male character (even as a mule to carry my other characters’ stuff).
My cis privilege has allowed me to spend my life not really considering myself as being fundamentally gendered (much as my white privilege has allowed me to not have to think about my race). I’ve never had to think about it, because I’ve never been forcefully misgendered. But I think I now understand a little bit what having a gender means.
I can’t possibly imagine how much it must hurt to have everyone around you (the general you), including your loved ones, telling you that you are not the gender you know you are, despite your insistence. It’s gaslighting. It’s abusive. I am so sorry. I’m sorry to have been a part of this, even if only in the privacy of my own thoughts. I will do better.
This has been and is a great discussion. I thank everyone for their input. I was particularly interested in the idea that lesbians were concerned that seeing trans men who were once in the lesbian community might lead outsiders to conclude that butch lesbians are really trans. I didn’t think about that as a possible reason why some lesbians might react negatively to trans men. This has been a very enlightening discussion for me, so I hope it continues, and thanks to everyone again for all your input.
I am a butch identified person who has had the experience of watching most of my formerly butch ID’d friends transition over the last 10-12 years. I will tell you that my feelings have evolved and shifted quite a lot in that time. My first reaction when my very first friend started transitioning when we were 20 was pure jealousy and confusion. I didn’t understand what made my friend “so different” from me that he needed to transition. We both were very masculine identified people and externally our gender presentations seemed almost identical so it was hard for me to wrap my brain around what made him a man and me a butch. I wanted to interrogate his identity because I was insecure about my own. I worried maybe I was a man. If he who was so similar to me could be a man then perhaps I could be too. I kept most of my feelings to myself at the time because even though I was jealous and confused I was supportive of his transition and genuinely happy for the happiness it clearly brought him. I learned from watching him transition that it didn’t matter where someone else stands on the “gender spectrum” in relation to me or my presentation; all of our paths towards loving ourselves in our own skins are different and valuable.
I think the second major emotion I felt as more of my friends began to transition was a loss of my butch brothers. I understand that many transmen are not/were never butch ID’d, but in my case my friends were, and I felt suddenly shut out of the club a little bit. It wasn’t until I gave myself permission to be in transmasculine spaces (when it was welcomed and appropriate) and could see my female bodied butchness as having a different, but similar and valuable masculinity that I stopped feeling lonely and realized that I hadn’t lost my brothers at all.
I work in a queer/feminist organization and while the blatant transphobia (ie support of transphobic policies at Michigan Women’s Music Fest, etc) has really changed in the last ten years, there are still definite trances of it that linger. The number one thing that I experience as a butch is femininely gendered women (never other butches) telling me “not to drink the Kool-aid and transition.” This kind of comment coming from self-identified feminists really makes me angry because the roots of misogyny and transphobia are the very same. If folks have not yet read Whipping Girl by Julia Serano it is the best book I know of that discusses transmisogyny and transphobia within feminist movements. It is the book I hand people when they make ignorant comments about how “all the butches are disappearing” or “what a shame it is that transmen couldn’t love themselves as masculine women.”
Because ultimately, what I have come to realize over the last decade of watching so many friends transition and choosing not to myself is that our (queer/LGBT) community is richer for having these hard conversations and loving the places where our edges are stretched almost to bursting. And to the homophobes and the transphobic haters we all look the same so we better get each others backs.
I think I just fell in love with you a little bit
I knew this would be a hoppin’ discussion as soon as I saw the topic. I’m not gonna jump in because I have nothing constructive to add (besides, this is a touchy subject with me, so the sarcastic and snarky side would probably emerge), but I want to thank all the commenters because I have learned a few things. I’m not feeling hopeful that this problem will be resolved anytime soon, but a resolution can only come through such discussions. So thank you all.
I also am late to the party, and I think other people have added some great perspectives.
One additional area I want to point out is that while some lesbians do not understand what trans is, some trans men do not understand what butch is either. So when they try to explain the difference, they demonstrate a lot of ignorance (and give the wrong impression about what trans is).
To give one example, how many explanations have you seen about of how someone knew they were trans because they like “stereotypical masculine” things (clothes, hobbies, hair, toys, games as a child, etc.)? That classic narrative is identical to the butch narrative.
I’ve met older butches who have admitted that they might have identified as trans had trans been something they were more aware of when they were younger. And I’ve met older butches who would never have wanted or considered it for a minute. There are trans guys who would have aimed for whatever transition possible (e.g., social) if they were time machined backwards. There are others who would have just been butches.
The reality is that the ONLY difference between trans and butch is how a person identifies. There is no other checklist, test of behaviors, or other indicator of gender identity. In a society filled with both transphobia AND homophobia, I think that reality makes a lot of people uncomfortable and prone to “misunderstanding.”
That’s a great point: even when trans* people don’t set out to reinforce the binary or assume that all butches or effeminate men will transition, the existence of binary identities, and especially the narrative of biological destiny, can be seen to de-legitimize the idea of “butch”.
One possible root of the issue is that we tend to believe cis identities are all alike, especially because cis people don’t routinely publicly interrogate their gender. However, unless we include multiple spectrums of gendered-ness the trans* narrative and the butch narrative are in direct conflict: either people labeled female who feel and act masculine are men or they aren’t. If one person’s “reasons” why they are trans describe other people who aren’t, in order for the two groups to get along everyone involved has to tolerate cognitive dissonance and just keep their opinions to themselves.
I think the piece that is missing on both sides is that three of the spectrums on the genderbread person should be “identifies with any social gender: not at all to strongly”, “identifies with a position on the masculinity/femininity spectrum: not at all to strongly” and “identifies with any physical gender: not at all to strongly” (and those three definitely aren’t connected). Even among cis people some people identify very strongly with their gender and others don’t care at all. Some women breast cancer survivors, for example, are devastated by loosing their breasts while others don’t seem bothered by it (and neither reaction is “right”). It’s only in such situations that the difference becomes apparent, though: the people who don’t care and generally conform mostly just don’t talk about it.
I believe there is something more fundamentally different between the butch experience and the trans experience, but it probably doesn’t even apply to many individual butches and trans men. There are a multitude of spectrums: some people are attached to the social side of male-ness (“I want to be called ‘he’/get invited to to the bachelor parties/play on men’s teams/be attractive only to people who are attracted to men”), some people are attached to the physical side of male-ness (“I don’t want breasts, I do want a penis”), some are attached to socio-sexual gender dynamics (“I am a masculine person who dates feminine people” or “I am a masculine person who dates masculine people”) and others are attached to masculine behavior (“I like fixing things/lifting heavy objects/riding a motorcycle/wearing suits and ties/shaving/styling my hair”).
I think all of those have some biological basis, but that while sometimes those bits of biology are linked they aren’t always and few people actually hit them all.
What is far more universal is perception of gender: humans start distinguishing male and female as two distinct groups at least by 4 months of age, years before children develop an identity of their own. So we’re trying to jam a multi-diminutional peg through a round hole and simplify ourselves into our perceptions of gender. Our identities ends up being based not only on how we identify our own genders, but how we personally, internally define “male” and “female”. Those descriptions will determine which, and whether, we fit.
As such, it makes sense that people with possibly-identical presentation who have a personal definition that put them on opposite sides of the binary would come into conflict. One defines himself as a man because “like[s] “stereotypical masculine” things” is his definition of man-hood, and someone else defines herself as a woman because her definition of man-hood is “like[s] stereotypical masculine things and isn’t a woman”. For now peace, where it exists, has mostly been bought through just not talking about these issues because there isn’t an actual, objective definition of these two categories. Since how we apply these categories is incredibly deep-seated, someone who holds binary views asked to accept that someone they mentally, instinctually classify as one gender is the other is like asking someone who’s left-handed to write with their right hand. They can do it, and many do, but for some it will be out of respect or a desire not to offend, not because it is actually internalized.
I think the root of strong gender identity is strong and inflexible definitions of gender: thus people with gender identities strong enough to go to all the trouble of transitioning or to go to all the trouble of living life as a masculine woman are, biologically, more likely than average to be unable to change those internal definitions and be more bothered by average by people who don’t fit them.
I hypothesize that butches and trans* men do share an early conflict between others’ gender definitions and their own genderedness. Where they differ is in their own, internal, definitions of gender: butches that would never, ever transition have internal definitions of “female” that firmly include themselves and definitions of “male” that firmly exclude themselves. Trans men who would always transition have the inverse. Those people in between are weighing the balance of their investment in various facets of gender against how they, personally, classify those things. However, this means that some trans men wouldn’t be the men they are if their definitions didn’t exclude butches’ identities and vice versa.
“To give one example, how many explanations have you seen about of how someone knew they were trans because they like “stereotypical masculine” things (clothes, hobbies, hair, toys, games as a child, etc.)? That classic narrative is identical to the butch narrative.
The reality is that the ONLY difference between trans and butch is how a person identifies. ”
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recently there was a website where people posted images of themselves to "prove" that they were born this way, i.e. gay or lesbian
All the little lesbians were boyish and the little gay guys were girlish-
While the gay community has fought hard to get away from the stereotype that gays and lesbians are somehow not real men or women, i.e. not gender normative, (and that is one reason for the transphobia in the 1970s and 80s)- there is still a huge grey area of overlap between trans and gay/lesbian that nobody knows what to do with. And I think that overlap makes some people nervous.
It gets especially complicated for gay and lesbian trans people–
Hello. I’m sure that happens among the Lesbian communities. As a MTF I have to say that I had always been welcome among them. Farther more I always thought that there was space for FTM’s in the Lesbian communities. Of course I’m not one and I only have some friends that are sweet as can be. Now among Gay men there is a huge discrimination towards my kind. I live in SF since 1983 and never had visited one of the Castro St. bars even before my transition simply because I never felt gay. Since then and for the last 15 years I had lived my life as the woman I’m. My profession is related to communities and whenever I had been involved in work that required gay men the oppression is felt without leaving anything for the imagination. I long ago decided that I don’t need that community to be happy when there are many others that embrace me with open heart and arms.
Happy Valentines!!!!
i appreciate this discussion. as a queer femme, who is married to a trans butch who uses female pronouns, is female bodied, but does not identify in any way as ‘woman’ or ‘female’, this is a complex subject.
to speak about my partner for a moment — she has experienced the pressure from trans men in our community to transition, as well as the assumption that she will naturally do so. she has also experienced a vast range of demeaning, feminizing language and behavior from other trans men in our community, many of whom started out IDing as butches in the lesbian/queer community. one (quite a good friend, in fact) had dinner with us one night & then on our way out of the restaurant said ‘good night, ladies’. to me and my masculine partner.
One thing I object to is that it seems like she has no option but to transition to keep even her close friends from calling her ‘lady’. this friend apologized, but it has stayed with me, and has happened on more than one occasion. i witness her frustration & alienation on a daily basis. And I admit that incidents like these cause me to lose faith & trust in the trans men around me — I cannot count on them to be my allies, or to be allies to my partner. So why should I take my valuable time, energy, & resources and put them toward making sure that trans men are safe in my spaces (which are queer, not lesbian-only), when they enter those spaces & then make me & my partner feel unsafe?
I actually do work on trans rights, I feel like trans rights are intimately connected not just with the well-being of medically transitioned folks but all gender non-conforming folks, and so I fight for equality, acceptance, and justice for all. But at the end of the day, I don’t have many trans men as my close friends, and I think that this inherent conflict is why. I have not yet gotten close to one who will see my partner’s gender as equally valid, and equally masculine in its own way, as theirs. I wish very much that this weren’t so — but I am blessed to live in a place where there is a large queer community as well as a large trans community, and these conflicts never seem to go away or resolve themselves.
One last thought — whether you want it/ask for it/take it or not, you cannot escape privilege. Privilege is externally imposed. If you are white and you medically transition from female to male, & you are seen as your preferred male gender, you have white male privilege. You just do. It doesn’t matter if you ‘exercise’ it, you have it, and it works for you in complicated ways. I will never have this privilege, because I am seen only as a white female. I have other privileges, but not that one. People who deny their white male privilege while having it are further behind those who understand that they have it & work to overcome it.
[I have lots to say on the discrimination against trans women in the lesbian community, but this is off topic to this particular post. I do want to call it out though -- it is something insidious & wide-spread. Queer women should welcome our trans sisters, end of story.]
I must apologize for my ignorance. I promise you that It does not come from disrespect.
You are married to a “trans butch” who uses female pronouns and yet gets insulted because people address your partner as female?
I am utterly confused both by the term “trans butch” which I have never heard before and by your partner’s hurt.
Again, please understand that I am not coming from a place of disrespect.
Why is anonymous femme’s partner’s hurt confusing? People are being disrespectful – members of the greater queer community who should know better. That’s pretty clear.
Identities can be complex. Within queer and trans communities there are always going to be people who self-identify in ways other folks may not understand or be familiar with, but that’s no excuse to be ignorant or disrespectful in response.
The partner uses female pronouns, so why is she insulted when addressed with female pronouns?
If you read my response, I clearly stated that I was NOT being disrespectful. You obviously have an issue with my question, though it was not directed at you or about you.
@accidentalbeard I thought this was a safe space to ask a respectful question.
I know I said I’d stay out of this discussion, but I want to thank you, anonymous femme. Your comments have made me see things I hadn’t thought of before – especially the part about working to overcome privilege, rather than denying it.
“Privilege is externally imposed. If you are white and you medically transition from female to male, & you are seen as your preferred male gender, you have white male privilege. You just do. It doesn’t matter if you ‘exercise’ it, you have it, and it works for you in complicated ways.”
I honestly can’t tell if I have it or not, let alone whether it works for me. As a light-skinned Hispanic medically-transitioned trans man, I’m aware that some people see me as male, others don’t . . . and some people see me as white, while others don’t. Does that mean I sometimes have it and sometimes don’t? It’s crazy ‘cause it all fluctuates depending on perception. How can I use that if I wanted to or try to overcome it? I guess I’m saying I don’t feel I experience it anyway, so maybe I don’t need to do either.
“these conflicts never seem to go away or resolve themselves”
That’s how it feels to me too, which is why I’m pretty much done trying to reach an understanding with some people at this point.
I am an amazon trans womyn who has been respecting womyns space since 1999. The worse part of the whole hate scene is that i have limited myself to a life of celibacy. At first i thought i was attracted to lesbians and then to trans lesbians and then trans men. I live very butch and many see me as a butch lesbian but i have nothing to do with the LGBT community, except for a little bit online. I am not one to invade anyones space. I don’t like being where i am not wanted. I don’t seek sex just love. I have stayed celibate and single for over a dozen years. I am a caregiver to my mother. Yes i had that surgery back in the 90′s but i never thought that made me anything. It did though relieve me of something i never liked on me. I have settled for being happy with my identity and lack of sexuality which has opened my life to doing many things that previously got detoured due to my past hormonal makeup. My body does function very very well but it’s always in my dreams. Being hated by some surely hurts many. Ironically there are many like me who hide from the LGBT commnity due to the hate or jelousy. I always wonder what it would be like to be loved by all but that only happens in my dreams.
I found this topic very…painful. Needed, but painful nonetheless.
I lived as a lesbian for 15 years. The first 5 because I didn’t have any concept of “Trans” the following 10 – well, because I just wasn’t able to accept that aspect of myself.
But after suffering for so long, I finally made peace with myself and began my transition. And in one fell swoop – lost EVERY single lesbian friend I had.
Losing my best friend hurt the most. She never said anything about my transition bothering her – she just stopped calling (and answering). Then I noticed the lack of status updates in my Facebook feed.
I think many of you put the issue very succinctly so I won’t rehash too much. But I wanted to put it out there that this is still an issue (and not just for the older guys…I’m barely 30).
I have to ask a question coming from pure ignorance, so I apologize in advance if it is rude. It isn’t meant to be.
My question is, for people how take hormones as part of their transition, does that have any effect on personality or behavior? Of course you’re still the same person, but then again you’re not. Body chemistry can really affect mood and behavior. So I’m wondering if hormone therapy causes more than just physical changes.
The reason I ask is that I wonder if for some friends who wander away, if it may have nothing to do with you per se but just that in their eyes you’re not exactly the same person you were before because you’ve changed in more ways than the physical? This is not an attempt to blame anyone, but just to identify potential reasons why people may drift apart.
As someone who has taken hormones I can definitely express an opinion. I began taking estrogen’s some 18 years ago, I think. Anyway when I was able to finally suppress the testosterone poisoning I was undergoing, I became a much calmer person. I was a nasty individual, quick to anger, not I am more subdued. Besides the physical changes ( and I love the changes), I also experienced a change in the desired person I sought out for companionship. I went from not really being attracted to anyone, to being attracted to men. It was 18 months into HRT that I felt as if a switch was thrown or a light bulb went off, and I discovered men. I have presently dated some very nice guys, but I am still waiting for my Knight in Shining Armour to come on his white steed and rescue me , okay it could be a white S600, but you get the idea. I have dreamed of being a bride one day, being a wife and homemaker. I have had this dream my entire life. Presently I am looking to be a grandmother. So do hormones effect more then the physical, yes they do.
Having been on t for a little less than three months I don’t have a wealth of experience in this area yet. But so far I find that I am much calmer and generally more relaxed.
Although I concede that in some cases I would not be surprised if hormones played a part in the deconstruction of friendships; in my own case however it must have been something else. When I lost my lesbian circle, I hadn’t started hormone treatment. I had only started to come out as Trans and explain my intention to start my transition.
Devon, I’m really sorry that you lost your friends.
Even if someone would change due to the hormones it’s just bad behaviour to stop talking to a long time friend.
I second what anon says, and thank you Randi and Devon for responding.
Once again, a very interesting and fruitful continuing discussion. Thank you all for your comments, your experiences, and your insights.
I definitely want this to be a safe space to make comments and ask questions, so please continue to do so. If the person of whom the question is asked doesn’t want to answer, that person does not have to do so. But I think that any questions asked in the spirit of gaining further understanding are valuable.
I continue to learn from these discussions, so I really appreciate them and all of my readers.
Professor of Sexual Politics Sheila Jeffreys knows better than you – she’ll tell you so herself.
http://www.feminist-reprise.org/docs/jeffreysftm.htm
http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/sheila-jeffreys-the-mccarthyism-of-transgender-and-the-sterilization-of-transgender-children/
The comments on that last one will be educational. Much as reading Mein Kampf is educational.
Wow. Why would you post something that intentionally fans the very flames we’re trying to put out here?
This is both sad and funny – sad because Sheila Jeffreys must lie awake at night worrying about how trans people are destroying feminism. And funny because Sheila Jeffreys must lie awake at night worrying about how trans people are destroying feminism.
Good point, Matt, she must be exhausted from lack of sleep . . . that explains why she doesn’t think clearly.
This has been a great discussion. Maybe the whole LGBT community needs to have this discussion. Bottom line: We are all human beings and we need to understand that and to validate everyone no matter where their personal journey takes them. There’s no “right” and “wrong” – just a matter of acknowlwdging that every person on this planet has his or her own journey and that is a good thing.
Alot of problems come up because we are so attached to binary and all the words wwe have to express ourselves are binary words and pronoouns for people who don’t identify as either male of female.
I personally feel “male” – always have and always will. But that doesn’t mean that I buy into the societal roles forced upon male or female people. I want to look male but don’t want to be forced into strictly “male gender roles” imposed by society. I am me and I am finally happy.
I was in the lesvbian community of the 1970s and was a poor fit for that and felt I didn’t belong anywhere. Then I was in the lesbian and gay community – and straights – in the leftist community during the 1980s. I wasn’t in any of these communities from 1988 to 2009 when I began my journey back to my true self and I started my transition almost a year ago. I try to understand where people are coming from and to accept people for who they are and who they feel they are. It is all good. And yes, transphobia and homophobia are so entqwined that you can’t really separate them apart so we need to deal with both tohether to get rid of them.
I am a femme who is deeply uncomfortable with trans men in my community, and I am ashamed of my feelings and working on it.
For me, I think it is the same discomfort I have had with dating bisexual women: it makes me very insecure. The biphobia goes like…”if she likes both, why bother with me when she can have a socially acceptable heterosexual relationship and live happily ever after?” With a transguy, it’s “If he is a guy, why doesn’t he just date straight women?” I do think it is about [perceived] privilege. I feel like these people can just walk away–nobody would choose to date me, a lesbian, if they had another choice. So they feel like they are not a “real” part of my community. And as a femme, I am so often unrecognized by other lesbians who cannot identify me as because of my gender presentation that I am very prone to this kind of paranoia.
Yes, I know this is not rational, we all suffer from our culture’s oppression and our community should be diverse to have strength–but fear is never rational. And it is all just fear, of not belonging, of not being taken seriously, that makes us mistrust each other.
(I also think, as a sidenote, that these problems are maybe not as prevalent in the under-35 set.)
I hear what you’re saying. These are tough issues to work through. I’m glad you spoke up.
I see some overlapping stuff going on here.
Re lesbians dating bi/queer women: Just because a straight relationship is more privileged than a lesbian relationship doesn’t mean it’s preferable to a woman with a choice. For one thing, entering into a relationship with a cis man means striking the terrible bargain.
The dating pool of men who date women is much larger than that of women who date women. So even for queer/bi women who prefer to date women, it can be far more likely for them to end up dating a man. This is only compounded by biphobia shrinking the number of lesbians who will even consider them. And if they’re on the femme side–well, you already know about femme invisibility.
Re lesbians dating trans men: A trans man is a man, not a woman, and so isn’t in the standard dating pool for lesbians, who are not attracted to men. (Although as I learn more about asexuality, I’m discovering that for some people, attraction is not a prerequisite for dating, so I imagine that some lesbians might be willing to date men without being attracted to them.)
However, there are some lesbians who are attracted to trans men. This is problematic, because it suggests that they are still thinking of trans men as women, which they are not. I can’t tell anyone else what their orientation is, but it seems that if a self-identified lesbian is attracted to trans men, perhaps she’s actually queer or bi, but can’t come out as such because of the biphobia in the lesbian community.
As part of the over-35 set, I hope you’re right about the younger generations. Making close friends and finding long-term romantic partners are so hard to begin with. Transphobia, biphobia, and all of the other fears and misunderstandings we’re dealing with are only making it more difficult to find community, connection, and love. I’m glad that discussions like these are letting in the sunlight to help us clear out these stale ideas and insecurities.
+1 Insightful.
Some straight women find that dating a guy who’s trans is the best of both worlds. Strong masculinity (and some gals are really into that), but less general assholery and MCP-ery.
There are exceptions, some guys don’t seem to have learnt from their past, but in general, they’re not wifebeaters.
It can be interesting seeing the effects 2-3 days after a guy’s T-shot. You start emitting the most interesting pheremones, that can cause spectacular physiological effects on us.
Hi
I have heard that some non trans lesbians don’t have much liking for trans women either. I cannot make too much sense of it. Matt says that its at least possible that they feel a transguy is leaving thier community. If thats true surely a transgirl is joining the same community, yet some queer women don’t like us too much either.
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