Masculinity, Butch Identity, and Ableism

In S. Bear Bergman's wonderful book, Butch Is A Noun, there is a piece entitled The Honorable Butch Office of Moving, which is a story about when Bear was a young butch, and was asked by an older femme ze had just met to help her move. Ze tells the story of that day, how it was only hir and an older butch moving the bulky, heavy things (not because the femmes couldn't, but they didn't), and how much it meant for hir to be thanked - not just for helping her move, but for being butch.

And all of that is fine. Nowhere does Bear say to be butch is to be able-bodied, and I can't imagine hir ever saying such a thing. But it does point to the deeply linked connection between communal ideas about butches and ableism.

A big part of this comes from the past that butch identity arises from. Reading Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold - or any other account of pre-Stonewall butch/femme communities, butch was very much a working class identity, either possessed by people who came from working class backgrounds, or fell in class status due to inability to get access to higher paying, more esteemed by the class system work, either through sexism or exclusion based on gender variance. In very many ways, due to continuing systematic oppression of gender variant people, butch continues to be an identity often viewed as working class, and still often grounded in working class expressions of masculinity.

Able-bodied status is often heavily tied into working class masculinity, simply because most work that is considered available to working class persons is often physical labor and either requires one to fit many definitions of able-bodied, or extensive accommodations that are not often forthcoming in society to perform. While butches have never had the expectation of being breadwinners placed solely on their heads, there is still the expectation of being able to perform physical labor. None of this is a criticism of working class identity; it has been constructed in a way to allow for survival in a capitalist society as the exploited class. And, of course, people with disabilities, due to the systematic oppression of an ableist society, also experience falls in class and economic status, so they are just as much a part of working class voices and stories as able-bodied people are.

Of course, visible disability tends to be viewed as not masculine in general by society. Visible disability tends to render people paradoxically both visible and invisible, making them stand out from the crowd due to their disability, but tending to make the person with disabilities invisible other than for their disabilities. But our most intensely masculine images as a society tend to be based around able-bodiedness and physicality. And for a group whose masculinity is contested by society on a daily basis, butch identity would be heavily tied into able-bodiedness no matter what class it was historically grounded in and continues to draw from.

Disabled butches face a dual burden; if they can pass as able-bodied, in addition to all the societal pressure that people with disabilities face to pass as able-bodied, there are the additional butch strictures of toughness, stoicism, and hiding one's problems that further add to that pressure to not talk about and often actively hide their disabilities. Disabled butches that cannot pass must figure out how to reconcile disabilities with butch identity and how, like any person with visible disabilities, to handle questions and inquiries about their bodies from the people around them. It's hard for someone that feels they are supposed to be the one people go to when they need help to have people avoid asking hir for help, because they think ze can't do it, to have to figure out how ze can help, what limits ze has to place on it to work with hir body (which is a treacherous terrain for almost any butch, able or not), or to sometimes say that ze just can't help with the task at hand. And to endure all the talk from others saying that a butches are great when one has to move furniture, or do carpentry, or work on a car, or whatever other particular tasks hir particular disability requires accommodations for, makes more difficult, or rules out.

To further illustrate my points, I have personal experience both as a butch with invisible disabilities who sometimes passed as able-bodied, and later, as they worsened, as a butch with visible disabilities. When I could pass as able-bodied, I did, not talking about them to any but the people closest to me (which is method used too often by a butch with any problem or issue ze sees hirself to have), often pushing myself too hard, doing too much work, not letting on if I was in pain, having trouble, or if I was going to have to make myself scarce for the next day (or few) while I recovered. This only further raised my guard and made it harder to talk about my disabilities; after all, if I could do the task at hand, I was worried that I'd be perceived to be whining and not tough enough if I admitted to being in pain. This often led to me taking away all the time I had for myself to make up for how much I overextended myself for both work and to help other people, without ever letting on that it was an issue. Even when I was visibly having mobility issues, my silence about them would often lead people to believe I had just pushed myself too hard, and was worn down, and would be fine after a good night's sleep. Now, as my health has worsened and I am visibly disabled, I am questioned by just about everyone I have ever had a conversation with about my body and my health. Many of my friends and acquaintances are shocked when they find out about what I'm dealing with, how long I've dealt with it, and that I never let on. In some ways, I feel like my need to present an indestructible butch front has been in some ways a betrayal of the trust all but a few of those closest to me have in me. None have said that, and I'm guessing that many, most, or perhaps all of them don't feel it, but I do. It also feels like I have spent years betraying other people with disabilities, by hiding mine, and trying to avoid as much ableism as I could, which, much like any sort of passing and any sort of systematic oppression, is always a losing game. What you can avoid from the outside, will tear you up and eat away at you from the inside.

With acquaintances and random strangers, some of the issues are those any person with disabilities faces - the fixation people have on visible disabilities, and the right they feel they have to our bodies and experiences. Some of them are surely tied to me being someone who is visibly butch and visibly disabled. I'm sure that anyone who uses a cane to get around gets asked about it in the first two minutes of any conversation, I'm sure that many people who use a cane who are not elderly often get faced with "you're too young to need a cane!", and I know that unless people want to ask about our disabilities, we are often far less visible and far more often ignored than people who are or pass as able-bodied. But I'm not sure how much of "I'm sure you'll find a good doctor and be fine" and especially "you'll tough it out and be walking around fine in no time" (no matter how much I explain about my disabilities, and how they aren't tough out-able or things that tend to go away permanently or get better, there's at least a 50% chance someone is going to say this) is just the normal well-intentioned but highly dismissive pep talk, and how often the subtext of "you're a butch, butch up and get over" that I always hear is actually there.

And there's certainly a lot of this in my own head, too. As wonderful as the cane is for helping me to get around without totally exhausting myself, hurting myself, and making me more mobile, I hate it. Every time I look at it, I not only feel too visible and can feel everyone else's pity, I question myself. I try to somehow fit the reality of my body and my lived reality with the ideal of butch I have in my head, that of the mythic, strong, indestructible, unshakable manly not-man.

And this is where Bear's book is truly wonderful; ze has a wonderful way of naming the qualities of a butch that makes it about who they are as a person, what is in their heart, rather than about them being good with power tools and moving things. Being butch is about honor, pride, being a nurturer and protector of the community, about helping others, and many other qualities of character and identity both able-bodied and disabled butches share. And this is where I urge us as a community, butches, their allies, their friends, their families, and their lovers, to build from. To talk in ways that emphasize what we love in the qualities all butches have; the butchness we have in our hearts and in our heads, not in the tasks we'd like butches to perform for us or with us. Because that is where we can fight the ableism wrapped up in butch identity, where we can fight the misogyny inherent in labelling certain jobs as butches' jobs and others as femmes' jobs, and where we can build a community where people don't feel that their identities are threatened or questioned from the outside or inside by disability status.