The Concept of Butch Flight

The idea of "Butch Flight" never really leaves the consciousness of lesbian and butch/femme communities, but it seems to be bubbling back up to the front of community consciousness with the recent panel on "The Gendercator" in San Francisco, which Mattilda Bernstein talks about here and here. And I think Catherine Crouch's film, while, from all the descriptions I've heard (I have not seen it, so I will not focus my discussion on it), seems to be laden with transphobia, it sounds to at least be concerned with the actual identities of butches, albeit in what may be a misguided way, which most discussion of "Butch Flight" ignores. However, for discussion specific to the film, I'd direct you to people who've seen it.

Discussions of the film certainly point to ideas of what transitioning means, what butch identity means, and how those two intersect, so I think it may prove to be a good starting point to confront the problematic nature of what discussions of "Butch Flight" revolve around, which is generally objectification and/or transphobia. First, it relies on defining butch as "masculine, woman-identified people who are sexually attracted to women"; while my personal definition of butch is "the subversion of masculinity toward queer ends", I'm certainly open to other definitions of butch, as long as they recognize the wide variety of people who identify with the label. So, really, what people are talking about when they talk about "Butch Flight" is the idea of butch lesbians transitioning to male.

What gets lost here is that many FTMs were not outwardly masculine prior to transitioning, may not have dated women, and may not end up masculine or attracted to women. However, many FTMs do first come out in queer communities as butches, as it can be a way to manage gender issues and to try to find a place that may be comfortable for a time, and, well, the discussion does focus specifically around FTMs who did have the experience of first living as a butch dyke.

The three biggest issues that people who raise the issue of "Butch Flight" seem to be the idea that people transition out of social pressure, that all the butches are becoming men, so that there are no butches left to date, and that all the butches are becoming men, reinforcing the gender binary. All of these stem out of some combination of objectification and transphobia.

The first issue is pretty obviously transphobic - the idea that people would radically alter their bodies and risk their status in their families and communities just to move about the world easier totally erases the idea that trans* identities exist due to internal reasons, and recasts them as purely a response to social pressure. It is this idea that justifies lesbians characterizing FTMs as traitors to the community. Yes, FTMs who end up gender normative and who can pass as cissexual men do gain male privilege, but, there is a world of difference between "my gender expression is at odds with what the world says it should be" and "my body is at odds with what I feel it should be". The two are issues that while they occasionally influence each other - the body certainly affects how we perform gender - are not in any way strongly connected. This issue disrespects the maleness of FTMs, and reduces both the agency of FTMs and non-FTM butches - they are either giving in to social pressure, or standing against it - what they actually want for themselves and their bodies becomes irrelevant.

The second issue, which at first glance, sounds silly, is actually raised. In a way, it reduces the FTMs who come out of butch circles down to nothing but an object choice. Often, these are the same people who are ok with partnering with FTMs until the point they (may) decide to start T, or (may) decide to get top surgery. And while everyone is attracted to what they are attracted to - and no one should be held up as a sexual object due to their particular bodily history (the idea that all FTMs are automatically different than other men), you don't get to dictate other people's choices or identities based on your own attractions.

The third issue places the weight of deconstructing sexism on groups oppressed in ways that those raising the issue are not subject to - in an intensely transphobic society, the burden to dismantle patriarchy does not rest solely or mainly on transpeople, and it is not a feminist goal to force people to live their lives in a way that most challenges the dominant order of things, suppressing their own needs and wants. Let people who are happy living their lives as butch dykes be the visible butch dykes.

A disturbing effect of this on dyke communities, in addition to not viewing FTMs as entirely men, is the view of anyone who is visibly rather butch, and proclaims a butch identity, as already being a "traitor" in certain communities and spaces. In many minds, vocally and visibly IDing as butch, visibly transgressing androdyke norms, is viewed as "transitioning". In some ways, the community reinforces its fears of the disappearance of butches by seeing all butches as FTMs or FTMs-to-be. This glosses over the differences between being uncomfortable with the gendered standards placed on bodies and the being uncomfortable with the body itself, and also reinforces the idea that any FTM that did not first live as a butch dyke is not "real". So in the process of marginalizing FTMs, the community also marginalizes butches, through social censure and wariness over including them in the community, especially butches that do not remain ever vigilant to appear still "woman-identified" enough.

As someone who is comfortable with my body, but uncomfortable with the gendered standards placed on that body, while I can embrace my experience as a genderqueer experience (one existing outside the gender binary) and a transgender experience (one that visibly transgress society's standards), I do not have an FTM experience - we face many of the same issues, and should stand in solidarity, but, lumping us together erases our individual experiences, and nonconsensually places a single narrative onto a diversity of experiences. What the dyke community, in its intersection with the queer/trans community, needs to work on is listening to the experiences of all involved, stop expecting gender variant people to live up to higher political standards than everyone else, accept the identities of FTMs without question, regardless of how they arrived at their current understanding of themselves, and cease policing the gender expression of butches, as if they are going to somehow stumble into an FTM identity.

Also, the understanding of "butch" as an identity needs better understanding. For some, it is an adjective that describes how they express their gender - a butch woman. For others, in a variety of bodies, it is a gender in of itself - there are butches who have no intention of physically transitioning, but see themselves as butches, and not women; there are also butches who physically transition, but still see their gender as butch - just in a body that better matches how they personally feel. And there are also FTMs who identify as male and men, but who still view themselves as butches. While this is not an argument that all or none butches should be allowed in women's space (that comes down to how we define women's space - and I go with self-identification, even though that leaves me...confused as to where I fit) - but an argument that butches continue to exist, and that it is not the responsibility of people at one point seen as butches to maintain that visibility at the sacrifice of their own happiness.