Why would a butch lesbian want to identify as male? That would completely miss the point of challenging gender roles / stereotypes / expectations. (Note: not that I think most people start being gender nonconformist out of a desire to break the binary etc, most gender nonconformist adults were gender nonconformist children / young people - but I think it's highly unlikely that as you grow up and have to deal with bullying / teasing / general backlash for not conforming to gender expectations you don't realize that what you're doing can't be just a personal / individual choice, it must work within the whole system of beliefs / ideas about gender.) All gender is an accumulation of stereotypes, society and prejudice - we don't select our genders based on preferences, we don't live in a cultural vacuum - our bodies are gendered (whether we're cis or trans) and the society we live in reads them as gendered - and after it does that, it proceeds to treat us very differently based on our gender. So, your gender does dictate the way you perceive yourself as a queer / not straight person and it dictates the way society perceives you as a queer / not straight person because models of cis female nonheterosexuality are very different from models of cis male nonheterosexuality - and when it comes to trans people it's even more complicated.
- The Rumor:
- @ kafka.
So how come stereotypically butch lesbians don't identify as male? Gender and sexuality are two separate things because they do not dictate each other. Maybe they are linked through stereotypes, society and prejudice but to the individual they are different things. Someone being straight doesn't have anything to so with their gender or transgendered identity and the same goes for other sexualities too.
Gay men tell people that gender has nothing to do with sexuality because it doesn't. A gay man is no more womanly than a straight man - in that both can be effeminate or masculine but they are still male regardless.
I've already said that gay men's thoughts and feelings about how much homosexuality perturbs gender are very biased by the fact that womanliness is considered very degrading.
October 4th, 2012 at 09:19am