Where are all the butch lesbians?

I wrote this six years ago. A lot has changed, but some things remain the same. PS, some interesting names crop up in this piece, a kind of 'where are they now?' moment. I will say no more...

At her studio in Kent, I watch Shaz Riley, founder of the Butch Clothing Company (BCC), measure up a client for her first “butch suit”. Shaz, smartly decked-out in a fitted-waistcoat, crisp, white dress shirt, and tailored trousers, tells me about her wedding to Sue in 2011. “I was waiting with my brother and best friend Gareth whilst Sue’s brother walked her down the aisle to Wild Horses.”

Sue wore a traditional white bridal gown and carried a bouquet of white roses. Shaz wore a BCC suit, accessorised with cufflinks, starched collar, and pocket handkerchief. As the wedding singer belted out a cover of ‘Wild Horses’, Shaz took hold of her bride’s hand and the ceremony began. Shaz is what I would call a ‘classic butch’, not wishing in any way to either look like or actually be a man, but a proud lesbian who rejects traditional notions of femininity and celebrates her female masculinity.

When you hear the phrase ‘butch lesbian’, what do you imagine? A male-like female figure, predatory by nature, wearing tweeds and smoking a pipe? Or the updated version, such as Lea DeLaria in Orange is the New Black, with her short quiff, bow-legged swagger and male clothing?

When I came out aged 15, in 1977, the only lesbians I had seen had been on TV. The Beryl Reid character in the 1968 classic, The Killing of Sister George was a gin-swilling, cigar-smoking butch lesbian with a sadistic streak. Such was the ignorance and homophobia back then that, people, including myself, believed that butch lesbians were a group of female sexual predators who modelled themselves on men, that came after girls with a view to converting them towards their perversion.

I now believe that butch presenting lesbians are not only brave and very proud of their sexual identity, but are rigorously challenging gender stereotypes and expectations on women. I also believe that their identity – and their history - is under attack: the butch lesbian is an identity that is being co-opted and colonised by the powerful transgender movement.

Is the butch lesbian going back in the closet? Or is she enjoying a revival, as evidenced by the popularity of Orange is the New Black, and more recently Killing Eve, with the ever-so-subtly-butch Fiona Shaw character?

What has changed my mind on the way I perceive butch lesbians in recent years has much to do with the way that lesbians have become subsumed within an ever-growing list of so-called ‘queer’ identities, such as ‘questioning’, ‘polyamorous’, and ‘intersex’, none of which have anything to do with same-sex attraction. The ‘L’ in the ever-expanding and routinely used LGBTQQI+ is more-or-less redundant – an issue that was raised at several Pride events around the UK (in 2019). In Leeds, Bradford, Swansea and Edinburgh, groups of lesbians who campaign to reinstate lesbian rights and visibility in a context of a transgender takeover, made their way to the front whist displaying banners with messages including, “lesbians don’t have penises”, and “Transactivism erases lesbians”.

Today, lesbian is almost a dirty word, synonymous with “transphobia”. Many young lesbians are under pressure to use “gay” or “queer” and the word “dyke”, which many out and proud lesbians used to embrace, is becoming a rarity.

The history of lesbianism is in danger of being rewritten. Storme Delarverie was a black butch lesbian who threw the first brick at police officers at the Stonewall Riot in 1969, which gave birth to the gay liberation movement. Delarverie has been co-opted by the transgender movement. She is described as a ‘trans man’ by some, including transgender scholar Susan Stryker in Transgender History (2008), despite her being a proud butch lesbian who loved wearing male clothing.

Then there is Anne Lister, the first modern lesbian, currently being played by Suranne Jones in the BBC series Gentleman Jack. Lister, born in 1791, is known for her coded diaries which tell the story of her life and lesbian relationships. Last year, she was honoured with a blue plaque - put up in York where, in 1834, Lister received the church’s blessing to privately contract a marriage to Ann Walker. But on the plaque, Lister was described as ‘gender non-conforming’, instead of lesbian. There was such an uproar about this by lesbian activists, myself included, that York Civic Trust agreed have the plaque rewritten. It now reads “Lesbian and diarist”.

I believe that many young butch-presenting lesbians are being pressurised into becoming trans men. This is despite the fact that a number of studies show that children and young men and women with so-called ‘gender dysphoria’ who do not transition to the opposite sex can grow up happily to become lesbians or gay men.

The Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, the only one of its kind in Great Britain (since closed), has seen the number of female referrals rise from 40 in 2009/10 to 1,806 in 2017/18, compared to 713 male. The youngest female referral was four years old.

Forty two per cent were referred to its endocrinology team (hormone doctors), which offers treatments, such as puberty blockers, and, from the age of 16, irreversible cross-sex hormones such as oestrogen or testosterone. If the young person decides they want to have sex-change surgery once they reach the age of 18, the Tavistock will refer them to adult services.

When the figures were released, Dr Polly Carmichael, Gender Identity Development Service Director and Consultant Clinical Psychologist, said: “There is no single explanation for the increase in referral figures, but we do know in recent years that there has been significant progress towards the acceptance and recognition of transgender and gender diverse people in our society. There is also greater public knowledge about specialist gender clinics and the pathways into them, and an increased awareness of the possibilities around physical treatments for younger adolescents.”

However, one senior clinician I spoke to, who has asked not to be named but practised in a gender clinic for several years until recently, found that there is a distinct fall in referrals in the 44+ age group, which begs the question, why are older people not taking advantage of the newfound freedoms and acceptance of transgenderism? This clinician would argue, as would many of the other experts I spoke to (but dare not be quoted), that young girls are being targeted on social media.

The same clinician told me that statistics for 2010 - 2015 from his (former) clinic showed a three-fold increase in referrals from young people, the majority of whom were females who presented as lesbians.

As well as the pressure to be transgender, butch lesbians tend not to be used by advertisers. Whereas the more feminine lesbian is often the fodder of male sexual fantasy, and appears in many a porn genre, right through to advertisements for banking services, such as the advertisement by the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The societal expectations for gender roles have a lot to answer for, as Ali*, 21, from Sweden found. “I was very tomboyish up to the age of 14, then I felt the pressure to conform. I did that during high school for about three years but I was always very uncomfortable with that and wondered, ‘What is wrong with me?’”

Like most young lesbians who end up transitioning, Ali had become embroiled with ‘queer’ theory, which grew out of post-modernism in the 1990s. Queer theory promotes a dumbed-down version of what radical feminists have been saying since the 1960s: that gender is not innate but a social construction. Queer theory promotes the notion that gender is performative, and that it is all a ‘fiction’.

This was quite a radical stance, in that gender was seen as fluid and changeable, rather than fixed and innate.

But today, if we are to believe the trans lobby, the opposite is true. Gender is argued to be ‘hard wired’, by some transactivists, who claim that biological sex is a social construct, not gender. Trans women say that they are women because they feel female. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential.

According to the trans lobby and its queer-identified allies, gender is ‘in the brain’ but the body is merely a vessel that can be altered surgically in order to redefine male and female. In the meantime, the butch lesbian, with her bravery and outward expression of her same-sex attraction, is now losing ground to a regressive notion that a woman who rejects femininity and embraces selected masculine traits is ‘really a man’. Why is an entire generation more predisposed to body dysmorphia and being tempted into surgery, rather than be comfortable in their own skin? According to a number of experts in the field of gender dysphoria, the fastest growing group at present choosing sex change surgery and hormone treatment is young lesbians.

Ali* is one of a growing number of young women who transitioned from being a butch lesbian into a trans man, to then regret the decision and seek to reverse it. “It took some time before my mum accepted that I wasn’t trans anymore. The definition of gender to her is based on stereotypes, so it was logical to her that I was really male on the inside. It has taken some time for her to understand that I can be a woman as I am.”

Three years ago, aged 19, Ali she began to wonder if she was really a man. “First I thought I didn’t want to take any medical steps because I wasn’t uncomfortable with my body, but I soon felt the pressure to conform from the Queer ideologues.”

“I wasn’t comfortable calling myself a lesbian,” says Ali, who grew up and lives in Sweden, “and I knew that my partners liked all the masculine things that were part of myself, so I felt it would be easier if I were a man.”

Ali found a therapist in Sweden who claimed to be an expert in gender identity issues, who, after a few sessions, diagnosed Ali as transgender. “She asked me, ‘How were you when you were young? Did you play with the boys? What kind of clothes do you like wearing?’ I also got the question, ‘Would you like to be in the military?’ My surgeon never really questioned me even though I was one of the first patients having gender reassignment surgery. She really believed I was a man I guess.”

After a few months in therapy, Ali began taking testosterone and proceeded to a double mastectomy. Ali paid privately to avoid the waiting list, and accessed testosterone online.

Six months later, Ali began to regret the surgery and gradually stopped taking testosterone. “Eventually I discovered the de-transition community online. I have grieved a lot, and definitely regret it. I lost on of my nipples, and have no sensation left in my remaining one.
Since de-transitioning, Ali feels “much better about my body in general. Recognising my female body has really improved my mental health.”

But Ali’s experience has been traumatic. “I lost most of my friends when I de-transitioned, and that’s awful, but I feel much better in so many aspects. My analysis now is society didn’t really accept me for being different from other girls. For being a lesbian.”

Another young lesbian who was pressurised into becoming a trans man is Max Robinson. US born Max transitioned seven years ago when she was 15 – something she now regrets. “It was when I started looking around for butch lesbian stuff that I learned more about trans. I was looking at the lesbian website Autostraddle, and everything about being butch leads into trans stuff.”

Autostraddle is an online magazine that claims to be the most popular lesbian publication online. It describes itself as “a progressively feminist online community” and one of its most contentious articles was entitled ‘How to have lesbian sex with a trans woman with a penis’.

“The experiences that are diagnosable as transsexualism are feelings that I and a lot of lesbians have,” Max tells me when we speak over Skype. “Like hating your body, and hating being treated like a woman and looking for ways to escape those experiences.”

Max was out as a lesbian for eight months before she started to consider transitioning. Her main source of support was online and says that transitioning was “definitely a natural progression for butch lesbians”.

Max tells me: “If your distress is from the way lesbians and straight women get treated, transitioning to be a guy seems easy.”

After a while binding her breasts, Max began taking testosterone and underwent a double mastectomy. Soon afterwards, Max began to regret her decision, and discovered blogs by former trans men that also regretted transition. “The stuff they were saying made a lot of sense to me. My life was getting into a stable place and although we didn’t call it that, I was in a lesbian relationship, and more able to work this stuff out than I had been as a teenager.”

“We need to acknowledge that women are having a bad time because of misogyny and people hating lesbians. I think I was a lesbian woman the whole time. That’s my identity and it’s very valid.”

Max and her girlfriend started a blog about de-transitioning and soon the threats and abuse came from some transgender activists. “Hundreds of people were saying we were scum. We had loads of detailed rape threats online,” says Max.

In 2017, James Caspian, a psychotherapist specialising in therapy for transgender people, began a legal action against the University of Bath Spa, for refusing his amended research proposal into people who regretted and reversed gender transition.

The idea for the research came from a discussion with Dr Miroslav Djordjevic who had been surprised to find that a number of patients had been asking for reversals.

Caspian became aware that growing numbers of his patients, who were mainly young lesbians were asking for double mastectomy, not wishing to be identified as women anymore. “A number of these women clearly had complex mental health histories,” says Caspian. Hearing from a gender reassignment surgeon who had performed a number of reverse surgeries on female to male transgenders, Caspian decided to research the issue. But the University was not having any of it. On applying for ethical approval to carry out the research, Caspian was told his subject was “potentially politically incorrect” as Caspian puts it to me, and that both he and the University risked triggering attacks on social media.
Caspian publicised the University’s attempt at censorship, which he is challenging in court. In February this year, Caspian was refused a hearing of the case in the High Court, on technical grounds. Caspian has now applied to the Court of Appeal.

Bath Spa has said it will not comment until after its investigation into the matter, as it is still ongoing.

“Ever since then I’ve been contacted by more and more people who either regret transitioning or want to reverse it, and lots of parents of teenage girls.”

American journalist Katie Herzog is a journalist based near to Seattle, and a proud butch lesbian. But that has not always been the case. “In my 20s I cared about what people thought and, because my friends were ‘queer’, I identified as queer and looked down on lesbians. I now reject that term and really embrace being a butch lesbian. However, if I was 10 years old now, with everything that’s happening I would probably have been shunted into a gender clinic.”

Sally Munt, Professor of Cultural/Gender Studies at the University of Sussex, is author of several publications on butch lesbian identity.

“There have always been trans identified people, but in the 20th century they might have self-described as stone butch [which describes a lesbian who will only give sexual pleasure to her partner but will not herself be touched intimately] or something else,” says Sally. Femininity for women now is more compulsory than it was.”

Shaz Riley, is another lesbian who wears her sexuality with pride. “When I was a girl I was called baby butch. I snuck up to London to go to gay clubs at 16.”

“Those butches who used to go to the bars, although they were hidden in society, they were out and proud amongst other lesbians. Today it’s OK to be butch,” says Shaz. “I think that we’ve still not had our day because butch lesbians are still a threatening group in society.”

Elaine Mackenzie ran a lesbian bar in Euston for 13 years which closed in 2008. “Somebody asked me when I first knew I was gay, and I said, ‘I came out of my mum’s womb screaming ‘I’m a lesbian’! I came out to my parents when I was 23 and my mum said, ‘You are a woman, you are black… why do you also have to be gay?’

“Because clothes hang well on me and because I’ve got good taste, that makes it easier for me to be butch. My wardrobe is just full of suits.”

Old style butch Lee Lynch is the author of classic lesbian-themed novels such as Swashbuckler. I met up with Lee in her home town on the Oregon coast recently, keen to meet the woman that sent me a review copy of the hilarious Butch Cook Book some years ago.

“I worry about young women who are not encouraged to respect their own butchness, and who think that the option of mutilating their bodies is the solution to bigotry,” says Lee, resplendent in plaid shirt and denims.

Sue Hardesty (who has since died) is ‘best butch friends’ with Lee, and lives in the same small town on the coast. The small, dapper women was born in 1933 in Southern Arizona and raised on a cattle ranch.

In her late teens, Sue lived as a man for two years, taking jobs in gas stations, and passing successfully with the other men.

“My first lover did not want to be with a woman and she insisted that I become a man. We went to California and I took jobs in gas stations.” But Sue was deeply unhappy living as a man.

“I got sick and tired of hearing about how long the men’s dicks were, and them trying to get me to go with them to some damn whorehouse. I didn’t want to be one of them, I just wanted their freedom.”

Growing up in West London, Mary Vassallo felt that she was letting her family down by not conforming to society’s expectations of a little girl. Mary, now based in Hastings, says: “When I was little, relatives used say, ‘She’s so strong’, which made me uncomfortable because that was not quite what a little girl should be. I have often thought I would have loved to have been a boy. I’d have even loved to ape a heterosexual situation.”

Similarly Maureen Duffy, born in 1933, is a lifelong gay rights activist who was the first lesbian in British public life today to be open about her sexuality, wanted to be a boy when she was growing up.

Duffy, 1968

“I was the man about the house because I had no father. I was out roaming the streets on my scooter. I had the fantasy of being a cabin boy and going to sea.”

Some women say they felt ‘butch’ before they knew what ‘lesbian’ meant.

“I think butch is getting a resurgence,” says Elaine Mackenzie, who defines as a ‘soft butch’. “I still occupy the area in life that is generally occupied by men but I express it as a woman. When I go into a restaurant, they will always give me the wine menu and if my girlfriend asks for the bill they will always bring it to me. There are lots of things men do traditionally, and they assume that you are taking that role because they don’t understand the dynamics.”

The way that others perceive butch lesbians is certainly an issue, as Katie Herzog says: “I think that men are threatened by us because they don’t find us attractive. Butches demand that society questions what gender roles are.”

Maureen Duffy agrees: “I think that visible lesbians are dismissed as butch because they’re not conforming to the stereotype of what men want.”

Sally Munt says: “I think being butch is something we should be proud of because there is a liberalisation around sexuality that we fought for. I think if you are a young butch lesbian then you’ve got an awful lot of very difficult things to negotiate to do with the overwhelming pressure on young women nowadays to be feminine.”

When I see butch lesbians today I am struck by their courage and visibility. Where I used to imagine that butches were emulating men rather than celebrating being attracted to other women, I now feel the opposite. To be a masculine presenting lesbian in midst of transgender ideology that would have us believe that butches are really men, is an act of bravery.

Mary Vassallo says femmes look for a certain amount of courage in a butch. Women have said it’s like having the best of both worlds, someone you can talk to but someone who also has a certain masculine attitude and way of being that they find attractive.”

For Sue Hardesty, “Femmes feel safe with us butches. They’re being protected. They feel like they can expand themselves much better than they can with men because, typically, butches want to be a partner rather than the boss.”

Each of the butch lesbians I interviewed spoke of the ‘pride’ they feel. “Butch is a power base. It enables me to express myself and occupy a part of society where women are not encouraged to go,” says Elaine Mackenzie. “Because I’m not predatory like men tend to be, other women feel safe. I’ll open the door, and I’ll carry stuff for her. It’s part of my character, and not a sexual role play.”

Shaz recognises that some men can feel threatened by butch lesbians, and put is down to competitiveness. “We often end up with better looking girlfriends than they will ever get, and that’s a big deal to them.”

Finn Mackay is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England. “For as a long as I can remember I was a tomboy,” says Mackay. “I used to tell people I was a boy when I was a child. I read Stone Butch Blues by Lesley Fineberg and remember seeing the cover of a masculine woman with a suit on. I thought, ‘OMG, the way that I have always been has got a name!’”

Mackay, who used to be a feminist, with Linda Riley, who never was

“The way that she describes female masculinity, things like un-tucking shirts slightly from your trousers so they give you more of a straight line, wearing vests under T-shirts, so that shirts hang straighter on you. My mum says she can distinctly remember the last time she was able to put me in a dress. I was two or three years old and after that I would physically kick my way out of it.”

For many young women, growing up in a culture of sexual harassment and prolific pornography use, presenting as butch can be a way of protecting themselves from male attention.

Lauren* and grew up in a working-class household in London. As a child, she loved boxing, which her father was happy for Lauren to pursue. However, everything changed when Lauren started school. “As soon as I started wearing a school uniform and going to the local comp, that’s when older men on the street would start harassing me. It made me despise my body and want to hide it,” she tells me.

“I didn’t want men to look at me so I constructed my entire way of being around trying to avoid men looking at me and talking to me. Being butch makes me confident. I don’t want men to look at my tits and I’m looking forward to when I’m old and men don’t look at me anymore. I get asked, ‘Do you think you’re a man?’”

But as Katie Herzog observes, “if you are being critical of this ideology, everybody is going to write you off as a TERF or a transphobe”. Which means it is hard to get the discussion going.

Finn Mackay conducted a survey into ‘lesbian and queer masculinities, and found that out of 200 respondents only 30 identified as butch lesbians. Prior to the takeover of trans-ideology, that figure would have been more like 100%.

“In a lot of the queer scene, since the early 2000s, there has also been a valorisation of masculinity,” says Finn. “I can remember being at clubs where FTM [female to male] guys who had had top surgery would come onto the dance floor and take their shirt off and dance, and every one would clap and cheer the fact that they had a flat, manly chest.”

I ask Lauren if she knows many out and proud butch lesbians: “I’ve not met a single other woman my age who would define herself as that,” telling me that she knew “only two lesbians” during her whole time at University. Both of those women are now on testosterone.

“We’re going to continue to see an exodus from butch and lesbianism for a while,” says Herzog, “but then it will get to a point where people will stop transitioning in such great numbers.”

Katie tells me she knows “dozens of butches” who have undergone double mastectomies in the last five years. “When I bring this up with my friends, they look at me like I’m a bigot.”

Finn Mackay tells me she does not think that butches will never get their Vogue front cover moment, mainly because men find such lesbians threatening. “I think they see a woman asserting what is her proper place, so that is threatening. There are those under currents about women ‘taking power’. I had some hate mail recently that said, ‘Clearly you are out to recruit, and are a danger to pollute other women.’”

Elaine Mackenzie is positive about the future: “There’s a massive butch revival. A lot of femmes who want to go out with butches are saying, ‘Where are the butches?’ But butch is absolutely here to stay.”

*Some names have been changed.