Butches hold open doors. Butches arm ourselves and patrol around the local queer bars in order to protect other queer folks from bashers. Butches use power tools, build sheds, haul the heaviest furniture when our friends are moving. Butches step in and beat down predatory men. Butches protect. Butches build. Butches act. Butches serve. This […]
Category: Gender
Gender Liberation
Every transgressive gender is a point of pressure and tension on the cissexual system. Living proof of the lie. Which is exactly why that system wants so badly to kill us. In my view, gender liberation has the potential to center the subversive possibilities of transness: bringing specific focus to the ways that trans […]
Self Assertion With a Body Out of Control: Chronic Pain, Transition, and Body Modification
I have been in nonstop pain for the last five years of my life. While pain and frequent illness have been features of my lived experience for as long as I can remember, chronic pain introduced itself first through a TMJ disorder and over the years since has made itself at home in most parts […]
Cry Like A Fag, Scream Like A Woman
Cis men’s emotions — what they are, how they feel them, how they deal with them, what patriarchy expects from them — have been treated as a concern of feminist theory for the totality of its history. Unsurprising, as patriarchy is a system that makes successfully understanding and navigating the emotional landscapes of men a matter of vital importance […]
Masculinity: Contested Territory
So frequent is the assertion in feminist discourse that masculinity is inseparable from patriarchy that many feminists use “masculinity” and “patriarchy” interchangeably in their theorizing, treating them as one in the same. When gender-nonconforming women (including trans and intersex women) and trans masculine people find ourselves in the position to offer a direct critique point […]
Butch Anarchy
Butchness is not only the appropriation of traditional masculinity, but the subversion of it. The sacred weapon in the arsenal of patriarchy, the one they did and continue to do everything to keep us from taking, is not something we even bother to steal under the cover of nightfall. Instead, we swagger right through the […]