Being Butch Doesn’t Make Me Your Basic Boyfriend

Words by Sibel Atalay (she/they)

I am butch because I don't have a choice.  

As a kid I never identified with the girls around me. I felt out of place. My body presenting the ways I couldn’t change. 

When puberty hit, the discomfort got worse. I constantly slouched and pulled at my shirt to create space for my chest. The first time Mum let me buy a T-shirt from the men’s section, it felt like I was breaking the rules. I didn’t understand why I felt so much shame and isolation amongst the dull shirts segregated from the pinks of the ‘women’s’ section. Why were clothes gendered? It seemed ridiculous to me. 

As high school approached, these feelings only grew. When I realised I was gay, I was attending an all-girls high school in Palmerston North. It was the perfect set-up for a Janis-from-Mean-Girls situation. But somehow, I escaped unscathed.  

A conversation with my high school girlfriend was the first time I’d questioned my gender out loud with someone I loved. Neither of us understood what non-binary was and couldn’t fathom how to know if you were.  

Now, living in Pōneke, it’s taught me so much about the intricacies of queerness. But I’ve realised that the way we talk about it can, at times, unintentionally reduce that complexity.  

A few years ago, someone referred to me as ‘butch’. I didn’t know how to take it. I didn’t understand why I found this word so offensive. For so long, I had rejected any piece of myself that leant into the role of ‘butch’ — strong, dependable, respectable. I was unaware of the word’s rich history — only to realise it described me all along.  

Butch comes from survival. Sometimes, it can feel like armour — a shell of ‘maleness’. But that’s where it gets complicated. 

The ‘masc’ label in the lesbian world has impacted butchness. The term ‘masc-lesbian’ is a lesbian who presents masculine, but wouldn’t go as far to call themselves a butch. There’s exclusivity to being a masc-lesbian, which can disregard the intersectionality of queerness.  

Often, masculine-presenting women are referred to with they/them pronouns. While there’s nothing invalid about that identity, it highlights a need to reclaim and redefine butchness in a society that’s quick to make assumptions. 

A butch lesbian is someone who presents masculine in identity and/or appearance. Working class lesbians in the 1940s used the word to refer to the masculine lesbians at the time. However, the label has lost its appeal these days because of its misunderstood meaning. It was only after reading Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues that I grew to understand the importance of butch as a culture. 

Art / Luka Maresca

During the 1940s, restrictions began to be lifted for women to enter bars without a man. This saw the rise of lesbian communities forming. For the working-class butches, these spaces became sanctuaries. Many spent their days presenting traditionally feminine, only to shed that facade at night — slipping into shirts and ties and finding belonging among their queer peers. 

Butch lesbians faced backlash from radical feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, as they saw the masculine gender expression as a perpetuation of patriarchal oppression. Similarly, they saw femme-lesbians as a group that was ‘buying into the patriarchy’. 

While butch-femme dynamics endured throughout the 1980s and 1990s alongside growing recognition of lesbian sexuality as its own distinct form of expression, we still have a long way to go.  

Even today, butchness is seen to be influenced by the rules and roles of patriarchal systems. For instance, the butch-femme dynamic can be seen as replicating a heterosexual relationship. These ideas are an insanely naive view on queerness, and something the queer community and its allies should be working to disempower. 

In a society plagued by assumption, we are stuck in a cycle of preconceived notions of what it means to be queer. 

I identify as butch to feel connected to its history. Butches have long been the backbone of queer spaces, and it's a culture we are still fighting for. Butch is a lifestyle. It’s intricate and it’s complex. Some butches use he/him pronouns, while some use she/they. Our identity is not inherently radical. People only see it that way because they’re afraid of viewing a masculine woman as a woman.  

Navigating womanhood as a masculine presenting lesbian comes with its trials and tribulations. I know I’m perceived differently from my femme-presenting girl friends, but it’s something I take in my stride. It feels like ancestry. It feels like coming home.  

It feels like me.