#like the author of stone butch blues

[up-in-flames-writing]

In lieu of Stuff Your Kindle day, can we talk about the issue of how the m/m genre of books, romance or not, is almost entirely dominated by women? Can we talk about how the most recognisable gay couples in media are written by women? Can we talk about how queer men can't even write about ourselves, how we are only allowed to exist when it's from the point of view of a straight woman sexualising us?

Can we talk about that? Or am I going to get called misogynistic for pointing out the disparity between who gets the writing deals, & who gets their books turned into movies, & whose shit gets popular versus whose doesn't? Can we talk about how m/m fiction is only allowed when it appeals to a cishet gaze, or is that too much for tumblr to take?

Can we also talk about how trans queer men are even more hated by publishing? Can we talk about how we get shit from both sides? Can we talk about how books about the experiences of being a queer man, written by queer men, never get the same recognition as books written by women on this subject (barring academia which has its own problems)?

Can we talk about that? Can we?

#booker speaks #no bloody clue how to tag this #this is for the tags only but #people would get up in arms if the f/f book scene was dominated by cismen only #why are we not extending this same energy to ciswomen writers of m/m? #why did we forget about the original meaning of own voices? #why are queer men pushed out of publishing in the way that we are? #& im not just talking about romance here #like there are fantasy & scifi & contemporary novels about men loving men that are written by ciswomen who have a very narrow view of what #m/m relationships are like. & this extends towards stuff like manga too but im not gonna get into that cause i dont read mangs/comics #can we talk about how hard it is to find queer masc authors nowadays? #saying this both as a reader & as a writer #can we also talk about how lists of queer & especially trans novels almost always forget to include anything by transmascs & gay transmascs #or if they do include us its 1 transmasc book to 1 enby book to 8 transfem books or books about the 'trans experience' in nebulous terms #can we stop reccing detransition baby & start reccing the spirit bares its teeth? #can we look at works written by queer masc people that arent just red white royal blue & stone butch blues? #go read cemetary boys #read alexis hall & max turner #read bloom if you like comics. or nimona #read my shit too! #im gonna be focusing on my writing blog way more this year #& im working on some projects that may or may not end up being published in physical form #read more queer masc stories by queer masc authors!

[amarrymeinbostonwriter]

I picked up both The Common Reader and Stone Butch Blues again. I don't like leaving books unfinished.

#I listened to the first few chapters of Stone Butch Blues on Youtube but they only had the beginning chapters #I finally downloaded the pdf from Feinberg's (the author's) website and I've been reading it on my phone #I wanted to buy a print copy from a used book store but most for sale are 50+ dollars a copy! #stone butch blues takes place in the mid century so they're in the 1960's where I'm reading b/c some of the men are being sent to Vietnam #I never finished The Common Reader either #I just read parts of it for class or because they were Woolf's takes on authors I liked or read before #you KNOW I've already read all the victorian crit she did #she did chapters on Austen The Brontes and Eliot #these books both fit prompts for my reading challenge too #the birthyear book and the unfinished book #1993 was an interesting year for literature- Stone Butch Blues Girl Interrupted and Touched by Fire (a bipolar study) all came out #also happy 30th anniversary to all those books #both authors are lgbt! Woolf was bisexual #she's also my background with Radclyffe Hall and their pride flags (lesbian for Hall and bisexual for Woolf) #I finished Nita Tyndall's Who I was with Her and Norah Vincent's Self Made Man earlier this week #books #bookblr #currently reading

[walks-the-ages]

OP deactivated, and some of the links were broken/marked unsafe by Firefox, so here's a new compilation post of Leslie Feinburg's (She/her, ze/hir) novels and essays on being transgender:

Stone Butch Blues official free source directly from Author's website:

Stone Butch Blues, backup on the webarchive:

Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come, on the web archive:

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, on the web archive:

Lavender and Red, PDF essay collection:

Drag King Dreams, on the web archive:

(Also, if anyone ever tells you that the protagonist of Stone Butch Blues ""ends up with a man""........ they're transmisogynistic jackass TERFs who are straight up lying)

Please also check out your local public libraries for these books and see if they carry them, to help support public libraries! If you have a library card already you can checkout Libby and Overdrive to see if your public library carries it as an ebook that you can checkout :)

EDIT: another not included on the orignal masterpost-- Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or blue !

annnnnd in light of the web archive losing it's court case, here's a backup of both PDFs and generated epubs a friend made:

5/26/2023: hello! I am adding on yet another book of queer history, this time the autobiography of Karl Baer, a Jewish, intersex trans man who was born in 1884! Please signal boost this version, and remember to check the notes whenever this crosses your dash for any new updates :)

6/24/2023: Two links to share!

Someone made an Epub version of Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years, which you can find Here , as a more accessible version than a pdf of a scanned book if you're like me and need larger text size for reading--

And from another post I reblogged earlier today, I discovered the existence of "TransSisters: the Journal of Transsexual Feminism", which has 10 issues from 1993-1995, and includes multiple interviews with Leslie Feinburg and other queer feminists / activists of the 90s!

Here's a link to all 10 issues of TransSisters, plus a 1996 "look back at" by one of the writers after the journal ended, you can find all 10 issues on the Internet Archive Here !

------

8/28/2023:

"Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out", can be found on the web archive Here, for the 25th Anniversary Edition from 2015,

and also Here, for the original 1991 version.

Each of the above can be borrowed for one hour at a time as long as a copy is available :D

This is a living post that receives sporadic updates on the original, if you are seeing this on your dash, click Here to see the latest version of the post to make sure you're reblogging the most up to date one :)

------------

October, 25th 2023:

"I began to dawdle over breakfast during shift changes, asking both waitresses questions. After weeks of inquiries, they invited me to a demonstration, outside Kleinhan's Music Hall, protesting the Israeli war against Egypt and Syria. I was particularly interested in that protest. The state of Israel had been declared shortly before my birth. In Hebrew school I was taught "Palestine was a land without peo-ple, for a people without a land." That phrase haunted me as a child. I pictured ears with no one in them, and movies projected on screens in empty theaters. When I checked a map of that region of the Middle East in my school geography textbook, it was labeled Palestine, not Israel. Yet when I asked my grandmother who the Palestinians were, she told me there were no such people. The puzzle had been solved for me in my adolescence. I developed a strong friendship with a Lebanese teenager, who explained to me that the Palestinian people had been driven off their land by Zionist settlers, like the Native peoples in the United States. I studied and thought a great deal about all she told me. From that point on I staunchly opposed Zionist ideology and the occupation of Palestine. So I wanted to go to the protest. However, I feared the demonstration, no matter how justified, would be tainted by anti-Semitism. But I was so angered by the actions of the Israeli government and military, that I went to the event to check it out for myself. That evening, I arrived at Kleinhan's before the protest began. Cops in uniforms and plainclothes surrounded the music hall. I waited impatiently for the protesters to arrive. Suddenly, all the media swarmed down the street. I ran after them. Coming over the hill was a long column of people moving toward Kleinhan's. The woman who led the march and spoke to reporters proudly told them she was Jewish! Others held signs and banners aloft that read: "Arab Land for Arab People!" and "Smash Anti-Semitism!" Now those were two slogans I could get behind! I wanted to know who these people were and where they had been all my life! Hours later I followed the group back to their headquarters. Orange banners tacked up on the walls expressed solidarity with the Attica prisoners and the Vietnamese. One banner particularly haunted me. It read: Stop the War Against Black America, which made me realize that it wasn't just distant wars that needed opposing. Yet although I worked with two members of this organization, I felt nervous that night. These people were communists, Marxists! Yet I found it easy to get into discussions with them. I met waitresses, factory workers, secretaries, and truck drivers. And I decided they were some of the most principled people I had ever met. For example, I was impressed that many of the men I spoke with talked to me about the importance of fighting the oppression of gays and lesbians, and of all women. Yet I knew they thought they were talking to a straight man" Transgender Warriors (1996) Leslie Feinberg

#bold text #large text #transgender #trans #nonbinary #leslie feinberg #neopronouns #activism #no id #pride #essays #Karl bae #memoirs of a man's maiden years #bi any other name

[vaspider]

How are you a lesbian if you go by “he?” Lesbians are exclusively women

Assuming you are asking this in good faith - which doesn't make it appropriate, but we'll get to that in a minute:

1. No, lesbians are not exclusively women, and this has never been the case. A great deal of lesbian writing going back decades upon decades posits lesbian as a separate gender - certainly we are not nor have ever been seen by society at large as "proper and correct women."

1a. My gender is butch lesbian. The end.

2. Pronouns aren't gender. Also, see above.

2a. He/Him, They/Them and neopronouns as pronouns for butch lesbians (who consider themselves women or any other gender) has at least a hundred years of history behind it, as does butch lesbians referring to themselves as Husband or Daddy.

2b. Have you read Stone Butch Blues? Like, ever? Leslie Feinberg (z''l) was not a woman. Zie made that very clear over decades.

3. And this is the most important, so I need you to listen very very closely:

ACAB INCLUDES POLICING OTHER PEOPLE'S IDENTITIES.

I hope that clears things up for you, as other people's identities are not matters for debate or for you to police. I am setting a firm end to this conversation; I will not engage further with you on it. If you would like to request more information from someone on gender theory and lesbianism to clear up your very clearly lacking education, including me, ask about the theory and don't involve the other person's identity.

Once you've read Stone Butch Blues - which is free online by the terms of the author's last wishes - if you'd like to return and discuss the long history of gender variance and gender freedom within the lesbian community, you may do so. But - and I'm totally serious - I'm not talking with you about this again until you've read at least that one totally free book and killed the cop in your head that makes you think you can come into someone's inbox and ... do this.

Would you walk up to someone on the street and say this? If so, who raised you? If not, why do you think it's okay to do to someone online?

#acab includes identity police #queer stuff

[radiofreederry]

Happy birthday, Leslie Feinberg! (September 1, 1949)

A prominent butch lesbian author and activist, Leslie Feinberg grew up in Buffalo, New York in a working class Jewish family. Ze discovered hir sexuality sometime in hir teens, and ze began frequenting Buffalo's gay bars. Ze became involved in radical politics in hir twenties, joining the Workers World Party and becoming a contributor and later editor of its newspaper. Ze would take part in many radical actions and demonstrations both in Buffalo and after moving to New York City. Hir experiences as a butch lesbian in Buffalo and NYC informed the semi-autobiographical Stone Butch Blues, hir most famous work, which went on to have an extremely influential place in the lesbian community. Ze also wrote Transgender Warriors, an influential work of popular history on the subject of gender, as well as other books and writings related to sex, gender, and revolutionary politics. Feinberg died in 2014, hir final words being a plea to remember hir as a revolutionary communist. Ze was later honored as an inaugural inductee to the National LGBT Wall of Honor.

“Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other's differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.”

#birthdays #leslie feinberg

[queermasculine]

Do you have any butch resources (like reading materials) for transmasculine people that are unsure if they're comfortable IDing as a man vs a butch? Besides Stone Butch Blues (it just gets recommended in every list I already know about it) Trying to figure stuff out...

leslie feinberg has other books besides SBB that you could check out, like drag king dreams (2006), which has a special place in my own heart... but if you're all full on feinberg, another author whose work explores the intersection of butchness and transness would be ivan coyote. really dug their memoir tomboy survival guide (2016) for an example. that one exists in audiobook form too, narrated by the author themself. real pleasant voice on that guy!

neither book is necessarily directly about figuring out whether you're a butch or a man, but maybe they'll help you along in that process anyway. both books made me cry & made me feel very seen as a transmasculine butch personally. if anybody else has any recommendations or insight, i'm sure anon would appreciate it!

but at the end of the day, if you really can't choose between man and butch, you can just be both. you'd be surprised with the amount of guys out there who are both.

#sometimes the human heart is not easily categorizable #mail

[bfpnola]

Trans Reads is an ambitious project created by and for transgender people to openly access writing related to our communities. We believe education should be free and writing shouldn’t be behind a paywall. Transreads.org provides the opportunity to access, discuss, and distribute texts for free.

If you’re looking for books, chapters, texts, essays, or articles by, for, or about people who transverse or transcend western gender norms, you’re in the right place!

Trans Reads was formed through the work, consulting, and creativity of an anonymous group of trans people of various genders and races around the U.S. involved in organizing, academia, and trans liberation efforts. Trans Reads was launched in 2019 following increasing violence against trans people alongside the lack of accessible resources for trans people to learn about our own community.

There is a serious barrier for most trans people accessing content from our community. Trans people on average have less disposable income, time to read and purchase literature, and knowledge of the available texts. We created Trans Reads to address this problem directly. We offer the largest collection of free trans texts on the internet.

Get Involved:

Trans Reads is almost entirely generated through user content. By uploading, you can help a trans teen in a rural area learn about other girls like her. You could help a trans student who can’t afford a textbook easily pass their class. You can even share your own writing with the world on an easy-to-use platform exclusively for trans content. You can help grow our collection on our upload page. If you are interested in helping us upload texts for our collection, you can reach out on our contact page.

Ethics:

We are faced with the common ethical question about hurting the sales of trans authors. However, the largest ever study on piracy actually found that the piracy of copyrighted books, music, video games, and movies has no effect on sales. In the case of video games, piracy actually helped sales. As far back as 2002, we can see piracy boosting sales of media. Trans Reads strongly encourages you to purchase the books that you enjoy here or find other ways to support the author.

Academic authors rarely – if ever – see income from sales of their books, articles, or chapters. Most want to remove the paywalls withholding their content. Trans Reads is open to collaborating with authors, publishers, and journals on making this a possibility through our website.

History:

In 2014, Leslie Feinberg published the 20th-anniversary edition of Stone Butch Blues, one of the most influential works of transgender literature. The novel was a way for trans, gender nonconforming, and queer people to realize ourselves. It told us we aren’t alone. However, when the publisher went bankrupt, Leslie had to struggle to regain ownership over hir own novel.

“I had to work to recover my rights to Stone Butch Blues. When the first publisher went into Chapter 11 court, I had to spend thousands of dollars of my wages on legal fees to recover the right to this novel… While very ill in Spring 2012, I recovered my rights again.”

Ze didn’t want the book to be released as a film adaptation exploiting hir story for straight fantasies. Ze also used the opportunity to make the book more accessible. First editions shot up into hundreds of dollars. The least expensive print versions are still over $30 on Amazon. This simply isn’t affordable to most queer and trans people. The fight ended with Leslie publishing hir novel on hir website as a PDF, a strategy of reclaiming transgender narratives from greedy publishes by collective ownership of the text.

Trans Reads is dedicated to the memory of Leslie and all those who feel alone. Most individuals don’t have institutional access and cannot afford to pay for texts. Transreads.org allows visitors to effortlessly read texts by, for, or related to trans people online for free as PDFs. Trans Reads is the space where anyone can easily discuss, add, or download trans content.

This project is intended to foster discussion around the current state of learning. We refuse paywalls and withholding education. Trans Reads provides the opportunity to access, discuss, and distribute texts related to our community on its website in a matter of seconds.

Knowledge, learning, and community must be de-commodified for our collective liberation. Take it from Leslie:

“And on the day those paper deeds of ownership are torn up, it won’t matter about protecting Stone Butch Blues anymore from commercial exploitation.”

Authors shouldn’t live in fear of their work being exploited or inaccessible. Trans Reads is just one small part of trans autonomy from corporate publishers. However, it is a necessary step toward engaging with our radical history, politics, and futures.

Click here to upload a text.

#trans #queer #resources #educational equity #reaux speaks

[queerliblib]

Is there any plan to add pieces like Stone Butch Blues to the library collection? And whats the best way for us to support the library? Like, can we donate books?

Hi! so as we said here, we can’t add Stone Butch Blues because it’s available for free!!! on the author’s website and there are no ebook licenses to buy.

book donations are tricky since we’re a digital library! there’s no easy way to do that with the way digital licensing works. the best way to support us is just through monetary donations - any amount you can afford, but reoccurring donations are particularly helpful for our long-term sustainability!

thanks so much for asking, happy reading <3

#asks #queer liberation library #qll

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Hey! Not sure if you're big on giving out book recs so feel free to ignore if no, but im trying to diversify my queer lit reads and just finished stone butch blues (cried so hard), i was wondering if you knew of any other fiction reads that are similar? I figure someone with your knowledge of books and queer culture would probably be a good person to ask

hi! I love this question!

this isn't how I normally do recommendations, but you might like this article from the NYT (linked without paywall) in which a panel of queer writes pick their 25 most influential works of post-war queer fiction.

the list starts with Stone Butch Blues and soars from there, weaving between formative 20th century writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde to more recent phenomena like Dykes to Watch out For and contemporary gems like poet Danez Smith and author Gretchen Felker-Martin. there are a ton of options to pick from and whole host of different styles and voices to sample!

#bookblr

[natalieironside]

Maggots in the Corpse of an Empire: An anarchist approach to gothic literature

Hey everybody, all the wonderful people who subscribe to my Patreon already saw this last week but I wrote another one of my grouchy rambling essays that I write sometimes and this one is some reflections on how I as an anarchist spec-fic writer view my genre. I think it's pretty good but of course I would say that. It's free to read now but if you wanna toss a coin to your author then you'll get early access to stuff for only $2 a month; I'd call that a bargain.

***

“America sleeps ahead of you, its nightmares filled with quakes, storms.  You’ll need to find your own path.”

As is so often the case with terms related to art and aesthetics, what is and is not “gothic” is infuriatingly difficult to pin down with mere words.  As a musical genre, subcultural lifestyle, or personal style of dress, the vast intersections between goth, punk, emo, hardcore, synthwave, heavy metal, and so on make a simple and concise definition nearly impossible to verbalize; one might as well say that a goth is a punk who wears lace while a punk is a goth with spikes.  Aesthetically, the gothic is a lot like pornography, in that I have no idea what it is but I’m sure I’ll know it when I see it.

Defining the gothic as a mode of literature is a bit easier, but still irritating enough.  In superficial terms (and, I think, in the mind of the average person), it’s tempting to say something like: “A gothic story is a scary story about an old building.”  In every nook and cranny of the vast gulf between Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, the word “gothic” calls to mind French cathedrals, English country estates, Carpathian castles, and American slave plantations, with all of the dark secrets, unpleasant pasts, and shallow graves one expects to find in such places.  But, of course, if that were all there were to it, every Dungeons and Dragons campaign about an evil wizard in a tower and every horror story involving a haunted house would be gothic; and, while those things certainly can be, they aren’t necessarily.

The matter is complicated further as the gothic genre contains immense variety, and even the works that most of us agree are all gothic can be very, very different from one another.  A work may be in the equivocal gothic (supernatural elements are ambiguously real or unreal, as in Wuthering Heights), the natural gothic (supernatural elements are not present, as in the aforementioned A Rose for Emily), the explained gothic (what was thought to be supernatural is revealed to be natural, as in The Mysteries of Udolpho), or the supernatural or marvelous gothic (the unnatural and phantasmagorical is present explicitly, as in Dracula), and still sit comfortably under the label of gothic.  What, then, is the unifying factor?

To my mind, the most elegant and concise definition of what is and is not gothic was put into words by James M. Powell in 1988, writing for the Syracuse Scholar about German narrative historian Leopold von Ranke:  “The great paradox of human existence is the refusal of the past to die and the danger that critical examination of the past, always fragile, may succumb.  Human beings live in the narrow margins between mythic pasts and hard-won efforts at understanding their past.”  To wit, I believe that a story becomes specifically gothic fiction rather than more broadly horror or fantasy when its central themes deal with the uncomfortable intrusion of the past into the present and the stubborn refusal of that past to die.

My opinions on literary fiction should be well-known to anyone familiar with my work, but to briefly summarize a bitter old woman’s lifetime of kvetching, I find the majority of contemporary so-called litfic to be uninspired and uninteresting drivel that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on (with the few notable exceptions, such as Leslie Feinberg’s incredible Stone Butch Blues or Latin American magical realism, notable as much for their rarity as their exemplary quality).  I find myself at home in the world of speculative fiction, in stories of imagined worlds and flights of fancy and phantasmagoria; what Professor Tolkien called subcreation.  Progressive speculative fiction is a genre dominated by science fiction, such as the dystopian near-future sci-fi of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and the “harder” far-future sci-fi of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle, with works of fantasy and phantasm (such as the fantasy of Margaret Killjoy, or Le Guin’s own Earthsea series) being comparatively uncommon.  This is to be expected; the fantasy genre is usually rooted, at least superficially or aesthetically, in the past or the present, and those artists setting out to create art dealing with progressive themes will naturally be most concerned with progress, whether that’s dreaming of a better future or ruminating on how the crimes of the present might affect the future.

However, the problem of the stubborn past is not one that can ever be discounted or ignored.  As the character Ulysses said in one of my favorite works of progressive near-future science fiction, the video game Fallout: New Vegas, “Who are you, who do not know your history?”

In his 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the brilliant political economist and passable wordsmith Karl Marx famously said:  “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted by the past.  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”  This, to me, summarizes the essence of the gothic as much as it's a statement on real-world history and politics.  The past, with all of its mistakes and all of its secrets, defines and creates the present.  The stage of history upon which the great drama of our lives will play out was set and dressed long before we were born, and the problems of the present that we fight to fix are the purest form of the stubborn refusal of the past to die.

Ever since the people who worry about such things have condescended to turn a critical eye towards genre fiction, rivers of ink have been spilled discussing the possible utility of horror fiction and the nature of humanity’s perpetual fascination with the grotesque and macabre.  The general consensus amongst critics and theorists, which I mostly agree with, is that horror is important both as a conceptual “safe space” in which to explore the more unsavory aspects of the human experience and as an unflattering mirror providing a far too honest reflection of ourselves and the world we live in.  This, I think, makes the gothic a genre uniquely poised to treat with the problems of the modern world; as the past creates the present and the contradictions of the past define the issues of the present, our lives as workers are haunted by the uncomfortable intrusion of the past into the present and by the stubborn refusal of the past to die, and the phantasms vexing workers in the edifice of a dying empire are far more terrifying than those haunting Victorian aristocrats in their decaying estates.  After all, as the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.

Marx also said, in his verbose and rambling but nonetheless insightful Capital:  “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more the more it sucks.”  We artists tend to be a disconnected and self-aggrandizing group who go through life with an over-inflated sense of the importance of what we do, and I as a novelist have got my doubts about the utility of fiction as a pedagogical tool, but it can’t be denied that all art is propaganda.  I do believe that, when we as artists take the time to explore the gothic, we might help deliver just a few more hammer-taps onto the end of the stake being driven into the heart of the vampiric wage system.

In love and solidarity,

Natalie H. Ironside

Horror Writers Association

IWW Freelance Journalists Union

#patreon posts

[cock-holliday]

Hey, I'm sorry if this is outside of your wheelhouse but you're one of my fav Butch bloggers and I wanted to get your honest opinion on it. I recently got an Instagram reel from a (white) Butch, yeehawllywood, shared on my feed which defined Butch as a Lesbian-exclusive gender identity and in a reply to a comment, that "Butch is to Lesbians what 2S is to the indigenous community".

Now I'm not Butch but I do have a cultural gender identity somewhat similar to 2S, and my partner is 2S herself. I think the comparison is somewhat offensive but since neither of us are Butch, I'd like a Butch Opinion on the whole thing so I'm not ignorant when I discuss how I disagree with it.

( the reel in question; I can't link comment replies but the comment it's attached too should show up near the top : www instagram com/reel/ CwHEbi0sCfK/ )

Oof, I am not two-spirit so I cannot speak to how offensive the comparison is but my understanding is that it would be pretty offensive and also at least fairly ignorant.

"Butch" as a term is not even woman-specific, as it was historically used in drag and ballroom scenes of all genders. But within sapphic spaces, it is neither lesbian-specific nor exclusively a gender identity. Butch can be used to describe someone masculine, it can describe queer masculinity, and it can be a gender. The beauty of butch is that it does not have hard borders--quite the opposite of two-spirit.

If anything, a term to compare to 2S is "stud," which is a descriptor/gender/gender modifier for Black masculinity which came about from gatekeeping of terms like butch over race and as a way to distinguish how Black masculinity has its own experiences separate from other mascs. Anyone who tells you that butch only belongs to X is a big liar, but Stud is a closed term that not anyone can claim.

"Butch" belongs to all genders, it belongs to all sexualities, and it describes a whole host of experiences of queer masculinity.

Here is a similar ask

Here is just the essay I Know What Butch is, which debunks all this (also included in the above ask)

The Butch Manual: text debunking the idea that butch is woman-specific

Literally any piece by Leslie Feinberg dunks on the idea that butch is woman-specific or cis-specific or woman-for-woman-only-specific

Stone Butch Blues

https://transgenderwarrior.org/

Other butch writers/speakers/authors who discuss butchness to look into:

Ivan Coyote

Jack Halberstam

S. Bear Bergman (author of I Know What Butch Is from Butch Is A Noun)

Kate Bornstein

Eli Erlick

Text/Video on this very issue

Another article on border fuzziness

Soooooo long story short--no that person is super incorrect.

Also thank you for the lovely compliment!

#ask #anon ask #butch

[lesbianboyfriend]

can i ask for lesbian book recommendations 🥹🕺

yeassss ofc my love <3

erm and obligatory disclaimer for any who might read that i don’t think “queer” or “lesbian” is a necessarily coherent category of books or adequate descriptor for a novel which is why i’ve also provided the actual genres here (sorted into which ever one i felt best fit) and descriptions. and these books have much more going on than just being about lesbians. however all books are undeniably awesomer with lesbians so yayyyyy

FANTASY:

-the salt grows heavy by cassandra khaw: fantasy horror; murderous mermaid and plague doctor come across a cult of children (could be read as not lesbians bc one character is nonbinary but i choose to read as. lesbians)

-the empress of salt and fortune by nghi vo: political fantasy; monk unravels the tale of exiled empress’ rise to power

-when the the tigers came down the mountain by nghi vo: political fantasy; monk unwinds the tale of a tiger and her scholar lover to prevent other tigers from eating them (stand alone sequel to empress of salt and fortune)

-ship of smoke and steel by django wexler: ya fantasy; girl has to steal a ghost ship to save her sister’s life

-the mermaid, the witch, and the sea by maggie tokuda-hall: ya fantasy; pirate falls in love with one of the ship’s hostages, a girl being sent to an arranged marriage against her will

-tremontaine created by ellen kushner: political fantasy; there’s a lot going on in this one okay just trust me that it’s really good esp if you love political intrigue (this was released serially and is easiest to acquire an electronic version)

-the deep by rivers solomon: fantasy/spec fic; African slave women thrown overboard gave birth to mermaid-esque descendants. one holds these traumatic memories for her whole people and must grapple with that pressure

-wild beauty by anna-marie mclemore: ya magical realism/fantasy; a family of women who can create flowers and whose lovers always tragically vanish fight to keep their land and to unravel the mystery of a strange boy who appeared

-siren queen by nghi vo: historical magical realism/fantasy; girl’s rise to stardom amidst the monsters of hollywood back in the days of the studio system

-gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir: sff; um. how to explain briefly. gideon wants nothing more than to leave the ninth house, but her nemesis harrowhark needs her sword skills to pass the emperors trial and become immortal. sure. (caleb i know you’ve read this just adding for any other viewers yayyy)

HORROR:

-white is for witching by helen oyeyemi: horror fantasy/magical realism; a house with women in its walls calls to miranda silver while the people she leaves behind struggle to make sense of what happened to her

-plain bad heroines by emily a. danforth: historical horror; when filming a movie about the macabre history of a boarding school, its past starts to become the reality for the stars and author of the novel it’s based on

LITFIC:

-girl woman other: contemporary litfic; the intersecting stories of Black british women told in verse

-nightwood: classic literary; i feel like i can’t describe this one well but nora and jenny are obsessed with robin, whose penchant for wandering and inability to commit drives them crazy. toxic dyke drama at its best

-the thirty names of night: lit fic; transmasc syrian american unravels the history of artist laila z who encountered the same rare bird his mother saw right before her death and realizes their pasts are intertwined

-under the udala trees: historical lit fic; coming of age set against the backdrop of civil war in Nigeria, two girls from different ethnic communities fall in love

-everyone in this room will someday be dead: contemporary lit fic; that moment when your ocd lands you a job at the catholic church even though you’re an atheist and also your relationship is falling apart

-stone butch blues: historical lit fic; butch lesbian realizing and grappling with her identity throughout the 40s-70s

-the color purple: classic lit fic; story of two sisters separated in their youth—one is forced into an abusive marriage and falls in love with her husbands mistress, wondering what became of her sister

-oranges are not the only fruit: semi-autobiography with slight fantasy elements; exploring growing up lesbian in a deeply religious pentecostal sect

SCI-FI:

-the weight of the stars: ya sf romance; aspiring astronaut is forced into friendship with a girl who waits on the roof every night for radio signals from her mother in space

-the seep: sci-fi/spec fic; what if aliens invaded and formed a hive mind of everyone and also your girlfriend turned into a baby again. wouldn’t that be fucked up

-the stars are legion: political science fiction; an awakes with no memory amid a group of people calling themself her family who claim she is the only one who can save their world

-not your sidekick: ya sci-fi; superheroes are real and they fucking suck

SHORT STORIES:

-sarahland: contemporary/spec fic short story collection; various stories about people named sarah

#jules.txt #asks #bookshelf

[sendme-2hell]

totally biased and unhinged wlw book recomendations list

Happy Pride! I have over 80 books in my “sapphic” goodreads list and these are my personal favs…I don’t have the energy to type actual descriptions but here are the first things that came to my mind with some of them. enjoy. or don’t. to be clear most of these are NOT romances. that’s a different genre and I feel like sometimes ppl get annoyed that the queer sci fi book had more sci fi than romance…but it’s just how it is. ** **

Literature/misc 

Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg

REQUIRED READING FOR ALL

fictionalized history of a working class jewish queer person and their experiences with lesbian bars, transitioning, unions, and more!

extremely heart breaking but I learned a lot of history I didn’t realize I didn’t know* **Last Night at the Telegraph Club-Malinda Lo **

main character is a chinese-american lesbian coming of age in the 1950′s in san francisco

she forms a sort of relationship with a girl in class and they go to a lesbian bar secretly

can’t recommend enough!  

Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado is the GOAT. Her writing is just incredible and some of these stories are haunting.

single handedly made me like short stories.

both Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers listed it as one of their favs. I Know the End is based on a story from this book.

contains a Law and Order: SVU fanfic which HAUNTS me* 

In The Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado

a genuinely heartbreaking book about abuse in queer relationships

semi autobiographical/looking at histories of abuse

Everyone in this room will someday be dead - Emily Austin

if you struggle with anxiety or/and depression and a fixation on death and/or illness, boy do I have the book for you.

Painfully relatable but also very funny. in a laugh at your own pain kinda way. and the main character is a lesbian in a relationship. I truly love this book and highly recommend.

I had it on my tbr for a year and when I finally started I finished it in one sitting. 

No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July

definitely an acquired taste but one of my favorite books of all time.

a bunch of short stories focusing on loneliness

many queer characters in the stories

The First Bad Man - Miranda July

a dowdy, depressed, anxious woman is asked to house her boss’ aggressive, sexual, and comparatively young daughter (20′s)

they start beating each other up

that leads to other activities

I cried so hard reading this book. That might just be a personal thing though.

It is gay and it is amazing but also it broke my heart. It’s also completely unhinged. can’t recommend more. 

Disobedience - Naomi Alderman

I did not expect to like this as much as I did. I hated the author’s other book. But I really liked about 90% of Disobedience. Really interesting look at religion and conformity. 

The Rehearsal - Eleanor Catton

another unhinged classic. A lot of my literary recs are a bit unhinged.

def not a romance.

A book about the weird relationship teachers have with their students, specifically in music and theatre. Touches on themes of consent and abuse, as well as sexuality and power dynamics. 

My Education - Susan Choi

Book about a woman who falls in love with her professor’s wife but the woman won’t commit to her. that’s kinda the whole story.

9/10 would recommend but that’s just me

end made me angry ngl

The Miseducation of Cameron Post - emily m. danforth

from the movie trailers I thought this book was about cameron at a conversion camp, but it’s about way more than that. and only maybe 1/5 of the book takes place at the camp.

Liked it way more than I thought I would! 

My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante

sooooo this book isn’t explicitly queer but ok actually it is and I will fight anyone on this. my favorite book series ever so it must be on the list.

this book has everything: explorations of class dynamics, italian language discourse, academic rivalry, shoe drama, explorations of gender dynamics, dolls, kinda mean main character, obsession, very internal main characters

The Lying Life of Adults - Elena Ferrante

this book IS explicitly queer and literally when the fuck is the sequel coming out?

has many of the same themes as MBF. I am a whore for Elena Ferrante so had to put it on the list but I wouldn’t say either of the books are like SCREAMING explicitly wlw content. but it does inform many of the actions of the characters*

Thriller/Horror/dark

They Never Learn - Layne Fargo

when I say this book changed my life

sometimes a hot bi lit professor ruthlessly murdering rapists on campus is the catharsis one needs

the inverse of bury your gays

this book made me so happy

Plain Bad Heroines - emily m. danforth

polyamory, horror, so many footnotes, every character in this book is gay and there are so many characters

the moral of the story is polyamory? I think

The Luminous Dead - Caitlin Starling

this is a really claustrophobia-inducing book about a woman who goes into a cave lead only by this asshole woman who really doesn’t care for her well being…they sort of trauma bond? I loved it.

you will NOT catch me cave diving

 Women in Gray - K.D. Rye

very dark book about a woman who’s girlfriend is an evil scientist who has created a technology that can control her and how she escapes

Sci-Fi:

One Last Stop - Casey Mcquiston

look this book isn’t for everyone and theres a lot of discourse but here’s why I loved it: time travel, public transportation, wlw, Lost references 

 A Memory Called Empire - Arkady Martine

an incredible book about assimilation in an empire

very funny and great worldbuilding/culture building

has really interesting themes and the sequel is even better imo

the main relationship is between two women and it is very connected to the themes of assimilation and personhood but also a cute relationship 

The Space Between Worlds - Micaiah Johnson

what if the multiverse was discovered but to travel to a parallel universe you can only do it if you’re dead in that universe. otherwise you will instantly die

so who do they chose to do multiversal travel? the disenfranchised because they are more likely to be dead in other universes

book very much delves into themes of class and race.

I’m obsessed with the budding relationship between the mc and her “handler”.

misunderstanding taken to a whole new level

Gideon The Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

what if necromancers were in space and they were all kinda catholic but also queer 

don’t make the mistake I did and not read it because it has a man’s name as the title. Gideon is a lesbian

Fantasy: 

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain - Nghi Vo

what if there was a sexy tiger lady

lots of important themes 

The Witches Heart - Genevieve Gornichec

like Circe or the Penelopiad but for Norse Myths and the mc has a girlfriend

Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse

great fantasy book that is based not on eurocentric standards

lots of different queer characters

I kinda forgot the plot but I remember there was a bi mermaid and some priests and i liked it a lot

The Broken Earth Trilogy - NK Jemisin

not actually sapphic (except a very side character) but it is very queer and also one of the best fantasy books EVER so it goes on the list

what if the oppressed really were dangerous? would it be ethical to oppress them? (the answer is no)

the oppressed in this case are earth benders

very dark when you connect the story to real world atrocities

The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

the first in a so-far-great series about the horrors of colionalism/imperialism and one very fucked up girl’s journey to avenge/save her island

one of my favs and very gay but also will make you cry

the series as a whole has a LOT of great queer women in it

will make u so depressed about historical and current atrocities

She Who Became the Sun - Shelley Parker Chan

china in 1300s and a girl takes the place of her brother and claims his destiny

mc is actually more of nonbinary

great writing. highly reccomend

The Unbroken-C.L. Clark

another book about colonialism

mc is a soldier who ends up working for the ruler’s niece who is trying to stop a rebellion

lots of ethical questions about loyalty and such. lots of drama. don’t get me wrong it has a lot of queer stuff too 

The Jasmine Throne - Tasha Suri

the world is based on histories of India 

a magical woman and an ambitious princess form a shaky alliance 

#book recs #pride 2022 #pride books #i had fun writing this even if no one reads it

[rjalker]

so now people are jumping from pretending AMAB trans people are believed about their gender more often and then going straight back to saying that gender nonconforming AFAB people never face any backlash at all and are completely accepted by society.

can you people please just speak to real trans and/or gendernonconforming people besides yourself for once in your life.

no one believes AMAB trans people about their genders. That's why they're hated so much. Everyone has a problem with AFAB people not being the white supremacist ideal of femininity. That's why books like Stone Butch Blues had to be fucking written in the first place.

Official PDF version released to the public on the author’s wishes:

“https://lesliefeinberg.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Stone-Butch-Blues-by-Leslie-Feinberg.pdf”

(Archived link)

You can buy an official at-cost printed version here:

“https://www.lulu.com/shop/leslie-feinberg/stone-butch-blues-20th-anniversary-author-edition/paperback/product-kjqzjj.html?page=1&pageSize=4”

#sigh #transmisogyny #transandromisia #transmisia #exorsexism #misogyny #butchmisia #anti transmasculinity #antitransmasculinity #gender nonconformity

[nothorses]

do you have any reading material on anti-transmasculinity that isnt blog posts?i have a surface level introduction on material conditions of transmasculine people from reading some of your account and some essays. but i like long form media where the author does not have to defend themselves from online trolls the entire time. i would like to learn more so that my understanding of transphobia is less one sided. thank you

I don't think there are any coherent, dedicated books on it yet (or frankly any academic lit at all?) because this is a topic that only very recently started gaining traction and space for discussion.

That said, I think Feinburg's Stone Butch Blues has some great historical context, and I have Becoming a Visible Man on my reading list on recommendation from others. I'm sure some of my followers have recs as well!

#recs #you can also check that tag out for more

[mistermaxwellboucherdieasilived]

Doing @charlottan's book tag game Hiiiiiii Charlotte :) And thanks Skippy for tagging me

Favorite books: We'll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss, The Street by Ann Petry, Notes From my Captivity by Kathy Parks, Hunger Games trilogy (Catching Fire is my fave I think), Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram SOOOOO GOOD, Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, More Than This by Patrick Ness

Favorite authors: Sorry for this some of these I've read literally one of their books. But anyway. Jason Reynolds, Lemony Snicket, George Orwell SORRY, John Webster, E. Lockhart LOVEEEEE HER

Favorite genres: Realistic fiction, lgbt coming of age/romance, YA but I don't consider that its own genre, novels in verse, early modern british drama sorry, survival narratives (idk if theres an official term)

Book(s) you're currently reading: Sort of The Hunger Games trilogy because I'm writing a paper on it, about to start reading Stone Butch Blues (for fun) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (for class)

Books on your to read list: Stone Butch Blues, The Poet X, The Hate U Give, The Handmaid's Tale, House of Leaves (THIS SUMMER I WILL)

Books you loved as a child: STARGIRL BY JERRY SPINELLI <3333, Nature Girl by Jane Kelley, Captain Underpants (the whole series), Animorphs series, any scary stories collections but especially David Lubar's Weenies series, A Series of Unfortunate Events <33

Preferred book length: Like 300-400 pages

Books you couldn't finish: Omg so many.... Sense and Sensibility, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Scarlet Letter, Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar... these are just for school

Fiction or nonfiction: Fiction<333333333 I <3 narratives

Buy, borrow from library, or read online: Library LOL. I also love thriftbooks

Author you've read the most of, but DON'T recommend: Laurie Halse Anderson. Sorry. Okay.

Favorite book character: At the moment, Katniss Everdeen.

If you at some point stopped reading but then started again, what book/books got you into reading again: What most sparked my interest in literature for school was probably Macbeth or Heart of Darkness. I stopped reading much around freshman/sophomore year but one book that really brought me back would be You Asked for Perfect by Laura Silverman. I remember reading it in one sitting and feeling like myself again because I read it so fast lol. Smiles

Tagging @verpaso and anyone else who wants to heart