[Sparkle]

As to friendships and gender identity...

I'm reluctant to make any generalizations about the ways in which Butches/Femmes/Transfolks value, build or maintain friendships because I believe our differences (as regards relationship building) fall less along gender lines and more along personality/character trait lines.

But I'm really interested to read other peoples opinions and experiences.

I'm a Femme and I have a lot of friends dotted all over the world and I have a small group of close friends with whom I bare my soul, also dotted all over the world.

The level of closeness of my friendships is not a direct corollary to geographic nearness. A couple of my closest friends live far-far-away and a couple live right here in town.

I tend to keep in touch with my people who are far away via social media, email and occasional video chats; with those people I know that even though we don't see each other very often, our connection is strong. I am indebted to the WWW for giving me the tools to stay close to those people.

When I need to talk about something, or want to be social, I prefer to do it in person with my closest people and I'm fortunate enough to have close people who live locally, so it's easy to do that.

But I HATE talking on the phone. hate-hate-hate it.

I spend a lot of time talking on the phone and/or schmoozing people in my jobs, the last thing I want to do when I get home is talk on the phone or have to sustain a conversation with someone that I am not close to.

Most of my closest people know that the best way to reach me is via text message or email. Text communications feel a little less demanding and invasive to me, they give me some space and time to reply. I can finish cooking dinner or watching a program or reading a chapter - before I reply. I can really take some time to think about how I feel, what I want or how I wish to reply - before I do.

Time feels so precious and so fleeting some days that I'm relieved to put my phone on the charger in the other room and be unencumbered for a couple of hours.

This feeling of time being fleeting has also changed the way I view my friendships.

I have more delineated circles of relationships now...(than I used to)

My core people (my partner, my siblings, my best friends) this is a pretty small group - 10 or less people.

And then concentric circles that include friends, family members, colleagues that I feel more or less connected to.

I choose to invest my time and love and support and energy in that core circle of people --- I still like a lot of other people and consider them friends but I don't invest as much in our relationships as I might have in the past.