[“Eight months into transitioning as far as I could get from male, I developed a strange interest in power tools and short hair. But I was too scared to say I was butch. I learned otherwise by dating a femme.

We’d met years before in student organizing, but only shared tea after I’d started transition. She was a big bi femme; a broad who fucks who and how she wants. Her mum and dad thought that it would be kind and freeing to raise her as they would a son. She disagreed and out-femmed this attempt. But even though her femininity was, from the start, a rebellion, in queer spaces, it started the process of her erasure; the men she dated finished it. Consigned to the “quiet ally” seat, she was left dating bi-curious women, whose curiosity she offered to satisfy, sans underwear. Her dates declined, remaining bi-curious rather than bi-informed. She remained frustrated.

Dating a tranny—a girlfriend with stubble and a necktie—made her smirk. She clarified my doubts and explained to me that I fuck “like a girl.” She was my anchor in women’s circles where I would not be welcome were she not beside me, calling bullshit. Dancing with her, fisting in washrooms, it felt right, intimate, honest. Together, we were bold. We were femme and butch.

Still, I was scared to call myself “butch.” Wouldn’t that be a contradiction? An Eddie Izzard joke? But she saw the butch and named it. I owe her.

I encounter femmes who shepherd friends and lovers through the FtM spectrum. When they see the butch and smell the trans on me, they discreetly offer a rolodex of gentlemen and genderqueers, friends and exes, to whom I can talk if I, y’know, need to talk. I explain that I am changing the other way. They are happy to hear this, to know that I can honestly be myself right now.

I see how many butches lean on femmes, whether we know them romantically or platonically. I feel like a bulldagger Lois Lane to their Superwomen. Escorting us through everything from washrooms to transition, I wonder and marvel at how femmes save us over and over and what they get in return. Visibility? Help moving boxes? Someone who is not femme who will say, “People see butch and expect male, but I am not. People see you and expect conventional, and you are anything but.”

I wonder what we can do so that they could openly lend their help at dyke gatherings, rather than catching our ears in private.”]

amy fox, from changed sex. grew boobs. started wearing a tie, from persistence: all ways butch and femme edited by Ivan Coyote and zena sharman