butch enough to fight baboons

There’s been an interesting little exchange of blogpinions here at WordPress lately, about butch identity.  If you’re interested, it’d probably be a good idea to start here or here and then you’ll get the link to the post she reacted to and various reactions all over.  Good stuff.  At the end of the day, as ever, I guess “how to” things are just ever-evolving definitions of ever-evolving things and … om …

As ever, the question of identity become entangled with the issue of labels and then you get people going oh hey let’s add more labels and that tie-dyed crowd who just want, like, nooo labels at aaaaall, maaaan.

What do I want?

Oh, fucknose.

I want labels to be as fluid as identity should be.  I want academics to stop studying identity and everyone to just get on with being.  I want to study gender and identity.  I want a cigarette.

Having always been a tomboy and having also always been “otherwise,” I embrace labels like “dyke” and “butch” and “queer” partly because they fit my exterior so comfortably, but also because they remain unfashionable and are perennially ripe for reclamation.

I neither know nor care what the butch manifesto says i am supposed to be or do or wear.  I wear boxer shorts, yes, but i also wear bras and have never and will never (oh I have just fucked the tense up nicely) bound/bind my breasts.  I don’t pack, I do use a strapon.  I can change a wheel, I can also sew a little green elephant patch on a jacket.  I wear men’s clothing, except for that blue shirt my gf gave me, but frankly it’s rather boyish.  I cry easily, I have no fluffy toys, I talk to my dog and pretend he talks back … eh, blah blah BLAH if you CUT me, do I not BLEED and so forth.

Where I do get all misty eyed about butch pride, is the same place I get it about drag pride i.e. diesel dykes and screaming queens are the people who get picked out and picked on, because they are the ones who are noticed.  They are also the ones right at the front of many important marches, where marches matter ito activism.

I wrote stuff about it all a while back, if anyone’s especially bored.

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Should you be male or female?

Take the quiz thingy yourself …

You Scored as Neither. You think neither like a man nor like a woman. What you are you may decide for yourself. Most people will consider you strange, alien, weird or funny. You are probably quite interesting.

{I am not interesting}

A friend of mine did this too – she’s in her 60’s and her results came out male.  First reaction, “You told them I was male!” – then she thought about it all some more and decided it was, “quite liberating.”

EDIT: Bored.  Did another one.

Your Brain is 40% Female, 60% Male

You have a total boy brain Logical and detailed, you tend to look at the facts And while your emotions do sway you sometimes… You never like to get feelings too involved

What Gender Is Your Brain?

blah

too much existentialism, i think, puts a thorn in the paw of the universe and it retaliates with a “healthy” dose of reality.  and that little +reality, if you’re listening and looking and hearing and feeling properly, is often a prompt to downsize all kinds of stuff.  lose a job and suddenly your budget’s anorexic, your social life gets pared right down and the only lesbo issues you really need to think about are “do i look too dykey for job interviews?“

oh – apparently i’m 53% gay.