Thanks for posting this video! I found it particularly fascinating to see the evolution of what butch means and how it has evolved since I found my way into the trans community (almost 20 years ago, even more adding in my first awareness as part of LGB community).

I still haven't found the right terminology that adequately expresses who I am, merely that I am continually evolving and growing.

Z

Quote from: transtrender on January 07, 2013, 12:12:33 PM

grr
i dont know
too much gender

This.

Sometimes, gender presentation, identification, and whatsuch are a little more complicated than they need to be. Life is as simple as respecting and accepting everyone's right to be themselves and to be happy, so long as they aren't hurting anyone by doing so.

I wouldn't say I'm a butch woman, personally, but I can see where they're coming from, and all the power to them for sticking up for themselves.

Quote from: Nygeel on January 07, 2013, 01:58:18 PM
I know most of the people in this video.

Being butch isn't about trying to get seen as male, feeling male, or like a man. It is identity, and how you feel about yourself. I feel like butch is a queer identity where as tomboy is more simply an action and isn't queer in and of itself.

Would you be willing to say more about what you think this difference is? I don't get what you mean by "tomboy is more simply an action". What does tomboy mean to you, then? I'm asking because I'm trying to understand why it is that butch doesn't feel like it fits me and tomboy does - but it feels like both words mean something different to me from what they mean to you.

I'm wondering whether it's a generational thing. When I think of butch, I can't help there being a flavour of "macho" in there. But from watching these videos, as a term it's clearly been redefined by some people until it means something so different from what it meant when I was their age that I don't know how to get a handle on it.

For me, tomboy is just as much a queer identity as butch is - to me, it implies being female but not feminine (but not masculine either - and to be a woman without gender stereotypicality is very queer) whereas butch does have this aura in my mind of conscious masculinity. This is clearly not the definition the panel has in mind. This is really fascinating!

Quote from: Padma on January 08, 2013, 01:21:18 AM
For me, tomboy is just as much a queer identity as butch is - to me, it implies being female but not feminine (but not masculine either - and to be a woman without gender stereotypicality is very queer) whereas butch does have this aura in my mind of conscious masculinity. This is clearly not the definition the panel has in mind. This is really fascinating!

When I started following this and related conversations, it was not as someone who identifies as butch or tomboy, but someone attracted to at least many of those who do identify as such (and some who have been identified by others as such).

Initially, I had the mis-impression that "tomboy" was a term that others tended to use to describe someone, while "butch" was an identity that someone claimed for herself (or himself, since the word also has a slightly different meaning in gay male circles).

One of my earliest close female contacts was an aunt who was often described by family members as a tomboy... she was the youngest daughter of my paternal grandmother, and someone I was very close to as a child, since I was raised in early childhood almost as a youngest child of my grandmother, for the period when both my mother and father were both working outside the home a great deal. These were the years from my birth until roughly age 4, but we lived next door to my grandparents, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, until I was 7. I've always felt that the bond with my aunt, and some of the tangled up stuff that happened between us (she was old enough to babysit me, but the relationship often had more of a playmates character to it)... anyway, I've long assumed this had a lot to do with the attraction that I developed for tomboys and butches as time went on.

Much later, after college, in fact, I became very interested in the dialogue in lesbian circle about butch-femme in general. I would have been interesting during college, but I was at college at the height of lesbian attachment to almost lockstep androgyny and so much defensiveness about confusing butch-femme with some sort of imitation of heterosexist notions of gender, that the subject was generally avoided or ignored.

It seems to me that, much as the dialogue has revealed commonalities in how we define these terms, in the end, each person has their own definition. Seems to me that panel discussion is one of the more obvious examples of that... many different individuals, each with her own definition. Personally I think that's the way it should be. It only adds depth to the conversation... people are still going to have their own definitions, and the discussions generally serve to clarify, and give others opportunities to share their own perspectives and personal histories.

Quote from: Elspeth on January 08, 2013, 07:54:37 AM
It seems to me that, much as the dialogue has revealed commonalities in how we define these terms, in the end, each person has their own definition. Seems to me that panel discussion is one of the more obvious examples of that... many different individuals, each with her own definition. Personally I think that's the way it should be. It only adds depth to the conversation... people are still going to have their own definitions, and the discussions generally serve to clarify, and give others opportunities to share their own perspectives and personal histories.

Yes indeed.

Interesting about the self-vs-other labelling, though - up until recently, my experience of people using butch has been much more of people labelling others as butch in a derogatory way, rather than people self-identifying as butch (so that's affected how positive I've felt about it).

I think I'm drawn to tomboy as a label because it's (in my mind, at least) more androgynous than butch is, and more ambiguous (genderqueer, but not necessarily sexqueer - though in my case, the whole lot). I think I said somewhere else here that it's always best to ask people what their labels mean to them (as well as what the labels they attach to others mean to them). One thing that's obvious from the panel and this discussion is that you can never assume two people mean the same thing (or mean different things). A label is just the start of a conversation. So I'm happy to call myself a provisionally-butch tomboy .