The femme voice is underrepresented in historical records, though markings of her presence abound. Often, she is the security behind the butch display, the one who makes the public bravado possible. Lady Una Troubridge's words to Radclyffe Hall, while spoken by a white, upperclass, Christian woman, capture some of the enduring aspects of femme power: "I told her to write what was in her heart, that so far as any effect upon myself was concerned, I was sick to death of ambiguities..." Yet to others, the femme woman has been the most ambiguous figure in lesbian history; she is often described as the nonlesbian lesbian, the duped wife of the passing woman, the lesbian who marries. Because I am a femme myself, I know the complexity of our identity; I also know how important it is for all women to hear our voices. If the butch deconstructs gender, the femme constructs gender. She puts together her own special ingredients for what it is to be a "woman/' an identity with which she can live and love.

— Joan Nestle, Flamboyance and Fortitude: An Introduction from The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (edited by Joan Nestle)

the thing is they really do let you hit because you're goofy.

Lesbian sex was invented as a way to pass the time on long train rides

"The butch and butch-fem image, as projected in this community, contained three explicit elements of resistance. First, butches, and the butch-fem couple, by “not denying” their interest in women, were at the core of lesbian resistance in the 1940s and 1950s. By claiming their difference butch and fem became visible to one another, establishing their own culture and therefore became a recognizable presence in a hostile world. Second, in the 1950s the butch, who was central to the community’s increased boldness, had little inclination to accommodate the conventions of femininity, and pushed to diminish the time spent hiding in order to eliminate the division between public and private selves. Third, butches added a new element of resistance: the willingness to stand up for and defend with physical force their fems’ and their own right to express sexual love for women.

This culture of resistance was based in and in turn generated a great deal of pride. Narrators are fully aware of how powerful their visibility was, challenging gay oppression and thereby creating a better world for lesbians today."

- Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis

Hello! I wanted to write you an ask because as a transmasc butch who's taken T, I really relate to the post you wrote. I also don't at all mean to take away from your experience as a transfem butch, because I know it's very different, but I agree with you and with the other anon you got, I don't feel the recognition on first glance in public. As someone with a deep voice, who often has a beard either because I like having it, or because I haven't had energy to shave, I'm read as a man the majority of the time, and it can feel alienating and invalidating a lot of the time. I often have to explain my identity both to other leasbians and non-lesbians, and it's a vulnerable position to be in, especially because you just have to accept that sometimes people aren't cool with it. It's easy here on tumblr to find support because our accounts have it written all over. We can advertise that we're butch lesbians, but in real life we don't get to walk around with a sign like that and announce that to the world. And don't get me wrong, I love looking and sounding the way I do, but I do sometimes look at those posts talking about the in person Butch Recognition, and I don't see myself ever experiencing that. So I guess I just wanted to say that while we come from different sides of this, I relate, and I feel such a connection with my transfem butch siblings, and that post really reminded me of that.

I've kept this ask in my inbox for a long time. I come back to read it every so often, I think today is the day I set it free

You seem to embrace and be very proud of your stone identity. I’m just coming to terms with my own, at least I think. How did you disconnect that feeling of shame from it? Personally, I feel like I’m lacking because I can’t reciprocate touch how my future partner may want me to or expect of me, so I can’t help but feel like being a stone femme is my inherent weakness. Did you feel a similar way when you realized you were stone? How did you work through that? Thank you for letting me rant a bit. 🤍

It hasn’t always been like this for me. I didn’t have the right words to communicate my boundaries so most sex up to my mid twenties looked one of two ways: hurried, aggressive bathroom bar sex in which my intentional four layers of clothing would prevent their hands from roaming too much OR hooking up with “straight” women because I knew we were uncomfortable with the same thing. So I can certainly understand your comment about feeling like it’s a weakness. I was constantly anxious that someone would call me out for something I was desperately trying not to talk about. Maybe that’s why I’m louder now because I wish I had understood that I could and should have been frank about it back then.

Being a stone femme isn’t your inherent weakness. That’s your superpower, babe. You carry with you the safety and comfort femmes have provided to butches for decades. There are butches out there looking for you. Looking to love you in the way you should be, looking to worship your body in the way only we can, looking to open up to you in ways that don’t include our bodies.

I wish I could help specifically with the shame piece you mentioned but all I can offer is that it slowly starts to wear off. I still experience deep shame, particularly when judgement comes from someone in the queer community, but I’m starting to care less. Now I obsess over how hot stone sex is instead of wondering if someone thinks there’s something wrong with me.

I know it’s hard to not think about future partners having an issue with your boundaries but when you’re with a stone top, they’re going to find so much solace in your body and your desires. And if someone can’t respect your reciprocation limits with sex then they certainly don’t deserve to be touching your body.

Thank you for coming here to rant a bit.

Look at that thats pretty cool

For the most part, my approach to prescribing hormones is “sure,” but I will note that the one thing I lean HARD on patients about is smoking. If you’re transgender, and you’re on hormones, the number one thing we want to protect is your cardiovascular health. That’s frankly the number one thing I want to protect in all my patients, but anyone taking exogenous hormones is at higher baseline risk. And the best thing you can do for your heart is DON’T SMOKE. It’s a bitch to quit, and I didn’t even smoke much or long before I quit in my late teens, and I STILL didn’t enjoy quitting and had smoking dreams for years. It’s harder to quit than just about anything else up to and including crack and heroin, and that’s coming from a patient of mine who recently passed in her early 60s who’d done all of those things—for years and years—but eventually was able to quit everything except smoking. And that killed her. She developed severe COPD and eventually called to say her blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the 70s, which is incompatible with life. She was lucid enough to decline medical care, including refusing to call 911 or go to the ER. A week later, after both I and one of our outreach nurses had contacted her to ask her to please go to the ER, I got a notification that she’d been found dead. She had been so frustrated that she wasn’t a candidate for a lung transplant.

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

Since I moved home as an out queer, word got out, and there’s a whole apartment complex of lesbians in their 60s to their 80s who come see me—sitting next to their wives in the office, nagging about blood pressure meds, tattling about not having gotten the shingles shot they said they would. To be clear, when I was growing up in town, I knew no lesbians. Not one. I knew one gay kid in my class, which eventually turned into two. We were it. To see these women living decades with their wives and being able to squabble like any couple in my office over who was supposed to bring their home blood pressure cuff in for us to check it… it means the world to me.

cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other. even when they're both woman adjacent.

(cowboy au of my dnd ship between val (top, she/it) and hana (bottom, she/they). tumblr allows kissing, right? in joe biden's america?)

"just not seeing enough people talking about carl clemons-hopkins, the first out nonbinary actor to be nominated for an emmy, and the nonbinary flag gown they wore last night"

@mattxiv

Carl Clemons-Hopkins on IMDB

The Dyke Project manifesto printed on the back of estradiol and testogel boxes

Statement: Student organizations in the Gaza Strip in solidarity with the Student Intifada in the United States

In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful… We, the students of Gaza, salute the students of Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and dozens of universities across the United States who are rising up in solidarity with Gaza and to put an end to the Zionist-U.S. genocide against our people in Gaza. As we remain under the bombs of occupation, resisting Nazi genocide, grieving for our martyred colleagues and faculty, and witnessing the destruction of our universities, we welcome the examples of solidarity offered by students facing arrest, police violence, suspension, eviction, and expulsion in order to demand that their universities end their complicity in the Zionist-U.S. genocide and renounce their support for the occupation and the war profiteers that arm it. We have seen hundreds of students arrested across the United States as they work to transform their universities into “Popular Universities for Gaza.” Students, faculty, and staff are disrupting university operations and making clear that while universities in Gaza are being bombed, university business cannot continue as usual in the United States. These actions come as university administrations collaborate with members of Congress to discredit conscientious student activists and faculty, expel students, ban events, shut down student organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine, and condemn activists working to end the Nazi genocide. At the same time, these same universities invest in the same companies that profit from the continued sale of weapons to the Zionist regime to continue its genocidal offensive. Our students – and our educational system as a whole – in occupied Palestine are subjected to ongoing genocidal aggression: our universities destroyed and bombed, our student organizations banned, and our student leaders subjected to torture, assassination and mass imprisonment. However, in Palestine and around the world, the student movement has always been a driving force of our struggle for liberation. When we see videos and images from American universities today, we are reminded of our history of student struggle as well as the student uprisings of 1968, which challenged imperialism from Vietnam to Palestine and reshaped the face of Europe and the United States. Now, in 2024, the student movement is once again leading the way. From here in Gaza, we see you and salute you. Your actions and activism matter, especially in the heart of the empire, in the United States. As members of Congress agree to provide $26 billion in additional weapons to bomb our people and continue the Zionist-U.S. genocide, you are taking meaningful action to shut down the war machine on your campuses. It is clear that a new generation is rising that will no longer accept Zionism, racism and genocide, and that stands with Palestine and our liberation from the river to the sea. Your global student solidarity is breaking boundaries, and it is time to smash the US imperialist war machine. From Gaza to Columbia, to Ann Arbor and Berkeley, our hands are joined to end Nazi genocide and achieve our collective liberation.

femme lesbians' femininity is unique and beautiful and refreshing and claiming that it conforms to heteronormativite gender roles discredits it so much. it's not a performance of femininity catering to men and it's insane to even claim that. it's a complex, nuanced identity that reclaims feminity in a way that it doesn't conform to heteronormativity. it's genuinely so sad to see people not understanding the label and misconstruing what it means

the way that transmasc people sometimes hold onto aspects of femininity that still serve them is so alien to me because if i did not publicly absolve myself of masculinity on a regular basis it would be used to disprove my existence

happy lesbian visibility week to all my fellow dykes <333

paintings by me

"butch bait" and "femme bait"

both oil on canvas, 50 x 40cm

some of my favorite replies to this tweet. happy lesbian visibility week!

the FCC restoring net neutrality as if anyone had noticed the difference just to keep FISA out of internet-related headlines I see you you fucking villains