Butch
A masculine presentation and way of being, usually within sapphic and queer contexts.
Butch describes a masculine presentation and, for most people who use it, something larger than presentation: a way of moving through the world, a set of manners, a history of being read a particular way since long before there was a word for it.
It comes out of working-class lesbian bar culture in the mid-twentieth century, where butch and femme were social roles with their own etiquette and their own risks. That history is why many butches treat it as a word with weight rather than a label picked off a list.
It is not the same as being a trans man, and the border between them has been argued about for as long as both have existed. Some people spend time as butch and later find trans man fits better. Some are firmly butch women and find the suggestion tiresome. Both are ordinary and neither predicts the other.
Trans women can be butch, trans men can have been butch, and nonbinary people use it constantly. The word attaches to how someone carries themselves rather than to what they were assigned.
Its counterpart is femme, and the pair is not a hierarchy: femme is not the passive half, and never was, whatever the fiction of the period suggested.
Butch is not an unfinished version of being a trans man
The suggestion arrives constantly, from inside and outside, and it insults both groups at once. It tells butch women that their masculinity is a stalled transition, and it tells trans men that their transition was a failure to accept being butch.
There is real overlap in people's histories, and people do move between the two. That is a fact about individual lives and not a rule about the words.
Saying it well
Say this
- I am butch.
- A butch lesbian.
- Butch, and a woman, and both on purpose.
- Soft butch, if you want the detail.
Not this
- So you want to be a man
- Butch is just a trans man in denial
- Which one of you is the man?
- You would be prettier if you tried
Questions people actually ask
What does butch mean?
A masculine presentation and way of being, most often used in sapphic and queer contexts.
Is butch the same as being a trans man?
No. Some people move between the two over time, but butch describes presentation and bearing, not gender.
Can trans people be butch?
Yes. Trans women, trans men and nonbinary people all use it, because it attaches to how someone carries themselves.
What is the opposite of butch?
Femme is the counterpart, though the two are not opposites so much as a pair, and neither ranks above the other.
Where does the word butch come from?
From mid-twentieth-century working-class lesbian bar culture, where butch and femme were social roles with their own codes.