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butchspace · 6 years

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You say all wlw can follow and are trans and nb open, so you seem to have a pretty inclusive attitude, but i just wanted to ask, do you support bi women using femme and butch or do you support our use of new terms for bi women (like stag/tomcat and doe/femcat)?

I feel like this is def in our faq somewhere but I’ve been needing to clear up my stance on this anyways so whatever.

We all have different stances on this, first off, and mine’s been evolving lately as I consider new factors to this question. I still essentially Do Not Care as long as we don’t end up with situations like the following:

actively identifying as butch or fem in the context of any romantic or sexual activity involving men*

reinterpreting butch or fem to make room for attraction to men, i.e. acting as if either identity can be alluring to men or compatible with them in any way

I’m not saying that you or any bi woman in particular is guilty of any of this; I just think that these are the main fears that drive the backlash against bi women using this terminology nowadays.

I think that there are so many highly personal factors involved (i.e. do you date men? do you flirt with men? do you prioritize women? are you in a committed relationship only with a woman / women? what spaces are you picking up ppl in? what contexts are you applying your butch or fem identity? who is involved in your butch or fem identity?) that it’s very hard to make blanket statements about who should or shouldn’t use these terms; context is important.

I do think that this post is important to read, especially the bit that says that butch/fem “has no place outside of contexts where women are solely dressing for & romancing other women,” because that’s really the crux of my stance and I don’t care so much about anything else as long as that basic idea is being respected.

Also a small note that, although I do not discount the possibility of a bi women identifying as butch or fem without contradicting any of the above, I do think that, unless they solely date women, any such identification is necessarily going to be different from how most modern lesbians do so. Nowadays butch and fem are more “live-in” identities for lesbians and often extend to every aspect of our lives in some regard, whereas a bi woman would have to practice a more old-fashioned version of butch-fem in which those identities became activated/relevant only in certain contexts (in certain places, with certain people, at certain times in their life, etc.).

So, yeah. I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic lately and my opinions have changed some so they might do so again in the future, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Oh and yeah, I think we all support newer alternative systems like the ones you mentioned if people want to use those. I think that @tomcats-and-tophats has realy good thoughts on all of this from a bi perspective + some commentary on the new identities you’ve mentioned.

-mod p

*I use “men” here for convenience’s sake & also bc it’s the group that is most important to keep divorced from the butch/fem dynamic, but the same can apply to all non-women/women-aligned people.

#mod p #faq #this is all my personal opinion obv i'm not pretending to be an authority #long post /#anonymous #asks

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