[Nat]

I have been in a few situations where a person close to me did everything they could to isolate me from my friends and family. This was achieved in a variety of ways by a few different people and it was effective. One person actually lied about the behavior of those I was close to - and was a convincing liar! I only figured out how convincing that person was, when that person began lying about me to other people (also convincingly!) - which further isolated me (and freaked me out). Other more normal methods of isolating a partner just involve criticizing whomever that partner has as a friend or family member. If the person you're with keeps stating that whatever person is not a real friend or doesn't really care about you or *fill in the blank* and they seem like reasonable people, it can get to you after a while.

I guess I'm saying all this because my first impulse was to say that your butch and trans friends are responsible for their own behavior. But then I began thinking back on the times when I was in situations where I dropped friendships due to the influence of another person, and although it was ultimately my responsibility to stand up to the onslought and maintain my friendships better, there was a fair amount of emotional abuse I was dealing with as well which made me unfit for friendship and unable to discern what was actually true due to the gaslighting.

So I guess I think butches, femmes and transmen should all make it a point not to discourage a partner's friendships whether or not they themselves jibe with a particular friend. I think there's a difference when a person has a problem with only one of the person's friends or of that person is actively isolating that person from others - which is an abuse pattern.

I also saw my best friend's straight cisgender boyfriend completely drop his long-term friendship with another man because that guy was really rude to my friend.

Since you mentioned boundaries -

I stopped hanging out with a (straightish) friend since I've been in my current relationship because she asked me to kiss her and when I told her no, I'm in a monogamous relationship, she started crying and asked why we had never been in a relationship. She was drinking at the time, and I consider her a friend, but I also feel like I can't hang out with her anymore without violating my relationship.

When I was new to the bf dynamic, I made friends with a couple and ended up totally crushing out on one of them. I never did anything about it, never said anything to this person about it, never attempted to break them up, would in fact talk them up to each other as a rule, never made a pass, never stated my feelings until they had themselves been broken up for many months and the other party had moved on - i thought at the time that I maintained a boundary by acting as though it was only friendship that I felt - but I figured out that the amount of availability, deference, care toward that person (and the lack of those things toward that person's partner) was invasive of that relationship.

I decided after that, if I ever have feelings like that again for a friend and either of us are in a relationship, I will put distance between us until those feelings fade. When a person has feelings, it shows and it's different than being a friend even if you're doing only friend stuff with that person. I couldn't tell that at the time - I had never run into a situation like that before. In my straight friendships, there had never been a need for a boundary other than, "don't do anything physical with this person." But in the queer world, so much emotional betrayal seems possible without physical intimacy being a factor. It's probably like that in the straight world too, but I just didn't have enough feelings about any of it for that to be a danger in my world back in my "straight" life.