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Chelsey Lichtawoman

I use the pronoun “she.”

When I came out as a lesbian, I came out with fat activism. The fat activists around me were fat femmes, so I took up that identity – femme – inspired by the people I was learning from.

But I was confused because, really, femmes were who I wanted to fuck, not who I was. People always told me I was butch, but I had too much internalized homophobia to figure out how to get there. But the more comfortable I became as an activist in the queer and feminist community, the more comfortable I became as butch.

I’m super-aligned with femininity and feminism, so I align with butch rather than gender queerness.

It used to make me really upset when people called me “sir,” because I felt like a fat genderless blob, but that’s my internalized homophobia. Now it still stings, but I’m less panicked about it.

It was interesting to me that, as a butch, I became way more sexually desirable in the queer community. As a butch, I’m fuckable when I was femme and fat I wasn’t desired the same way. As a butch, I’m invisible outside the queer community when I was femme, I was invisible inside the queer community.

Butch has historically been associated with female masculinity, but on the spectrum now, people want to align more with masculinity, leaving female behind. People are reluctant to talk as much about femaleness. The movement’s more toward gender queerness.

We live in a patriarchy, so people are more drawn toward masculinity and align themselves with maleness and masculinity.

Right now, the paradigm is shifting. I don’t know how viable an identity butch is going to be. Young people on the masculine spectrum are changing their names, their pronouns, if not from female to male, then at least to gender-neutral pronouns. There aren’t a lot of young, masculine-representing queers who say, “I’m butch.”

But I’m not holding on to my identity because so many people are transitioning. I’m holding on to it because it’s who I am.

I don’t want to be male-identified.

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