Dykes Like Us: a Butch-Femme Introduction
Words by Amelia Kirkness (she/they)
As a lesbian, gender can be a messy topic. In a patriarchal society that stratifies women by their adherence to the male gaze and assumes attraction to men as the standard, the simple lack of this attraction can leave one alienated from the baseline of womanhood. And that’s without taking into account the complex relationships individual lesbians have with gender presentation—all the ways in which some of us have never had a chance to pass as straight. Enter butch and femme.
Butch and femme, in the historical sense, are a pair of discrete identities that can encapsulate gender presentation, relationship dynamics, self-perception, and behaviour. While historically the categories and expectations were more rigid, the modern definitions of butch and femme are more diffuse and variable. As identities, they are not interchangeable with ‘masc’ and ‘fem’, which have come to function mostly as aesthetic descriptors, and not all lesbians are butch or femme.
Butch typically denotes a more traditionally masculine gender presentation (short hair, menswear, looking better in a pair of cargo shorts than any straight man ever has, etc.), but it exists outside of just the physical aspects. Butch is the ‘outlaw’ figure of lesbianism—visibly gender-nonconforming and often the most stereotypical image of a lesbian in straight culture. Butch lesbians take the brunt of stereotyping and homophobia within the lesbian community, being perceived as ‘the wrong type of lesbian’ compared to those that fit more neatly into femininity.
They also have unbelievable amounts of swag. Stone butch is often misrepresented as just presenting extreme butch, likely due to the proliferation of the ‘futch scale’ meme. It actually refers to specific sexual boundaries that some butches have where they prefer not to receive touch during sex. This frequently stems from factors like trauma or dysphoria, and is a boundary to be respected.
Femme is the other side of the coin, a lesbian with a more typically feminine style of presentation or role within a relationship. In recent years, femme style and femininity have come to be associated with playful, exaggerated, and kitschy aesthetics—femininity that alienates men rather than entices them—but this isn’t true of all femmes. Ms Frizzle from The Magic School Bus was definitely on some gay shit though. Femmes have been a contradiction to historical notions of sexuality that used to posit that all lesbians wanted to be men (the ‘invert’ model) and a contradiction to notions of butch undesirability.
High femme, also featured on the ‘futch scale’, is not an aesthetic descriptor either, though it is often co-opted to refer to an exaggeratedly feminine aesthetic. As the inverse of stone butch, high femme refers to a femme who prefers not to give touch during sex. This is once again an important boundary that should be respected, even as the internet loves to dunk on pillow princesses.
In some schools of thought, butch and femme function as lesbian genders divorced from womanhood. Some lesbians don’t see themselves as women at all, but as lesbians. There is a long and beautiful history of transmasculinity, transfemininity, and non-binaryness within lesbianism. I align myself broadly in this category. ‘Femme lesbian’ describes my gender identity a whole lot better than just ‘woman’, although the latter isn’t necessarily incorrect for me. My lesbianism shapes my relationship to my femininity and the world. If I could choose to be an amorphous blob of shapes to cishet men and a girl only to the gays that get it, I would.
Butch and femme as distinct labels largely originated in working-class lesbian bar culture around the 1940s and 50s, when women’s freedom to attend bars alone began to grow. Historically, butches who refused to compromise their presentation and had a harder time ‘blending in’ to straight society were often forced to work blue-collar, manual jobs where dress codes were less oppressive.
Some of these historical butches may have chosen to instead identify as trans men if they had been alive today and had access to modern terminology, but transness has always been closely intertwined with butch-femme identities. Even in the 20th century, lesbians like Leslie Feinberg have existed across the trans spectrum. Feinberg chronicled elements of this experience in hir seminal novel Stone Butch Blues, an essential read for this period of lesbian history. Femmes of this era were less obviously identifiable as lesbians, able to access wider social mobility through their more acceptable presentation, but by no means did working-class bar femmes have easy lives.
Lesbian bars became a safe haven for butches and femmes to explore their identities and express themselves freely, away from the eyes of the world. These were hard-won spaces subject to frequent police raids, often requiring butches to be ready to physically defend themselves and the bars as a lesbian space. Butch-femme dynamics were a highly codified norm in these communities. There was an intricate sense of ritual to lesbian bar courtship. In this period, the roles in a butch-femme relationship were more stereotypical. The butch would be strong, willing to fight for their femme, while the femme would provide emotional support.
Though this has evolved throughout history, it often falls to a femme to weaponise their acceptability or invisibility to defend their butch, gender non-conforming, and trans friends or lovers. As a femme, my invisibility can be frustrating. I am perceived as available for male attention and assumed as straight in plenty of situations. Joan Nestle, writer and founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, argues that though the femme in a butch-femme couple is invisible without her partner, they make the pair exceedingly visible by publicly showing their desire for the butch and highlighting their difference.
In the 1970s, butch-femme roles were pushed out of favour by the lesbian feminist movement which decried them as heteronormative, imitating straight couples. Butchness was seen as equally harmful as men’s masculinity, and androgyny was favoured by the typical white feminist movement, with little place for butch and femme identities as well as little inclusion of working-class or POC lesbian issues.
In spite of this, butch and femme identities persisted, albeit as a less dominant force in the lesbian community. Their comparative lack of visibility in the media as distinct identities, as well as a disconnect from our history and from queer elders, means that butch-femme identities have continued to remain on the sidelines of younger generations’ visions of lesbianism.
New generations of butches and femmes have built considerable communities through social media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and TikTok, sharing resources and support. My ‘femme awakening’ happened in high school, when I found a Tumblr blog that discussed lesbian history in-depth and talked about the owner’s experience as a high femme. They shared PDFs of books like The Persistent Desire and Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, reposted pictures of vintage lesbian pins or slogan t-shirts, and posted scans of DIY zines.
That was my first real engagement with femme and butch as rich, full identities rather than just archaic words. Understanding myself as a femme dyke was revelatory to me. This new wave of femme-butch community-building continues the spirit of the aforementioned lesbian DIY culture of the 20th century, with new femme-butch zines like Beloved, Dyke Diaries, and Femme Dyke being made, as well as artist Stella Hobart’s iconic custom ‘BUTCH BAIT’ and ‘FEMME BAIT’ shirts in the slogan shirt tradition.
As far as wider media representation goes, although queerness in general continues to gain visibility, there is still a long way to go in representing the depth and breadth of lesbian identity. Not only do the powers-that-be keep cancelling lesbian shows (rip Netflix’s First Kill, trashy but forever in my heart), the most commonly depicted image of lesbian remains largely white, thin, able-bodied, and fem4fem—sometimes fem4slightly-edgier-fem if you want to get really crazy. Butches are harder to find depicted favourably in media and butch4butch relationships are particularly scarce. It’s extremely important to be able to see representations of people like you and in relationships like you in the media, and I hope on behalf of every other baby dyke that this sphere continues to improve. It would have probably saved me a few years of confusion if I had realised sooner my attraction to butch masculinity rather than… male masculinity.
Ultimately, present-day butch-femme communities are a love letter to our elders and our community’s past, cherishing our history and continuing to defy the social pressure to abide by the ‘acceptable’ images of lesbianism. Butch-femme is frequently misunderstood in frustrating ways, with people branding it as heteronormative, toxic, or restrictive. It isn’t for everyone. Still, the butch-femme community is a vibrant demonstration of the expansiveness and power of lesbian identity and the diversity within it. I take strength from the proud dykes who came before me. It is an honour to carry their legacy.