A request

[adorable]

Originally Posted by Martina

Put it in CONTEXT, Dylan. This is backlash to the fact that some butches are talking about being women. There have been way way ruder expressions of it. And i am sure the OP was quite genuine. But that's the context.

A fair number of people on this site think that butches speaking about being women silences and marginalizes them. i am not going to track down the posts that have made that very clear. They are mostly on the other site, anyway.

The fact is that in the past butches who are women were marginalized. Their speaking now about who they are is not silencing ANYONE.

Another fact is that you have an agenda. You want to to really separate queer in this community from woman -- as in drag them as far away from each other as they can possibly go. FINE. But that's your agenda. You should really be up front about it.

Characterizing butch women who speak about who they are as part of some hegemonic discourse that is silencing to others is intentionally FORGETTING that they were the ones who were marginalized and shamed into not speaking less for a long time.

The old site for a long time was very much dominated by the assumption that butches were male-identified. That is changing. That is A GOOD THING. It is not oppressing to people who are not women.

The issue I saw on the dash site was the sense that being male ID'd MEANT that you were trying to be a "real" butch or butchier then other butches. The default to he was being used all willy nilly instead of she. The question was asked why wasn't the natural default she? Which was a great question. Why did people default to he automatically - is that symptomatic of a greater social misogyny? That question quickly snowballed into "I am just as butch as you." This is where it gets tricky because it is at this moment that the two sides seperated.....

One side is saying because that is how I feel inside and the other side is saying that is how I feel inside...
And neither side is speaking to the actual question of why the natural default isn't she....which still IS a great topic for discussion. But it didn't solve the default problem because people were all jumping up and down for their individuality.

Yet, everyone still felt the same way on the inside and wanted to be respected for who they were. And lots of people had no idea wtf to default too because no one wanted to trample on people's insides, yet still wanted to talk to each other.

THE WONDERFUL thing about this site is the addition of the box over there
<----------------- which SOLVES the problem of how individuals want to be addressed. Default to anything no longer an issue. We can all be who we are and it be respected. YAY!

So now, with the box people can easily represent how they feel on THE INSIDE. I feel "she" on the inside. Not everyone does, I can tell because I look at the box and if I see "he" I know that means they feel "he" on the inside. Some people may not feel he or she on the inside so they could put something else in their box.

Can we ever have a question about why the default tends to be He instead of She? I doubt it. He and She are big parts of people's identities. And while I can stand back and see what happened, getting those who are mired up to their eyeballs to see what happened just doesn't seem to work.

It is almost getting comfortable for the two sides to just keep accusing the other of silencing - when in fact - they actually probably agree on the the idea that defaulting to he doesn't make a lot of sense and is a great question.

They really only disagree about how they feel inside for themselves. Which has nothing to do with the default being he as a bigger social issue...

For whatever reason they will not see as two seperate issues that have all got entangled together. So lets just keep with the lines in the sand and the argument over who's insides are more valid.