The Strong Butch Female/Woman in a Patriarchal World

[girl_dee]

Originally Posted by Parker

This is true .... I have to wonder if that stretches into the realm of labels, for lack of a better term. I rarely ever hear gay men - the gay men in my experience and my circles (to add another qualifier lol) - talk about being male or female ID'd - save for the occasional butch or femme reference, nor do I hear a lot of my gay men friends speak in terms of cis- this or that, for them, it is straight up gay, straight, men, women.


But thb, I learned some of it on-line as well - because if we were irl, you could see my face, hear my tone and inflections and you would know that I was speaking for and about me, while not diminishing others; you would know that 99% of my sarcasm and humor is said and meant with zero malice because that's just how I am - a sarcastic smartass who means no harm.

On-line though, my sarcasm and humor can sometimes come across as asshole-ish behavior and I have had people in the past take posts like that and think I was trying to diminish others by speaking of my experiences; so have I learned to add a lot of and and sometimes, like above, just flat out say that I wasnt trying to marginalize others.

Bouncing into the online subject, While being online in Virtual Reality for a while (Second Life to be exact) and on these forums i found that many butches use the *he* pronouns online, then in real life they use *she* pronouns. (In real life i find this confusing). i chatted with a few of them when told me they are really more comfortable with *she* pronouns but felt that it was expected that if they were butch they were male ID'd. My Syr is the only one that i can remember that insisted on *she* and constantly correcting all of us that she is a she.

i don't feel one pronoun is better than another but i do feel that some people do, and there is some expectation that butch = male, that all butches should want to transition... even in our own community.