A butch account of sex, love, and self-loathing

Content warnings: Butchphobia, lesbophobia, brief mention of sexual assault

Sex is never easy to talk about, if you’re queer then doubly so, and if you’re butch there’s almost no point in trying. There is such complete ignorance and apathy towards butches expressing a fully realized sexuality that eventually you get tired of even considering yourself a sexual being. Sexually speaking, butches are only ever thought of in relation to femmes, which is to say, butches are only thought of as how “regular” lesbians replace men. Growing up barely conscious of how complex everything was, I went along with all of it. Pieces are constantly made from the point of view of feminine women, but I think butch stories urgently require recognition and a place in wider discourses. Butches, however, have never been able to be captured in the broad strokes of explanation.

How I realized my butchness can be attributed to all the butches who have ever or will ever exist. There’s moxie to butch life that is irreplicable and which enraptures everyone around us. The straightforward beauty of butches is what gave me the ability to comfortably become everything I dreamed of. During high school, I had a conversation with an older butch soon after I finished reading Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. I was incredibly depressed at the time and I think they could tell, so they did what any great person would and sat with me as long as I needed. They gave me a conversation I may never forget as well as an undying need to never give up on my expression. In that conversation, I got, for the first time, a look into a future that did not include being attacked and scared. After that day, I could never look over another butch again, I finally figured out how to find the love in their eyes.

That said, the first butch lesson I ever received was not from another butch, but from television. I learned quickly that when a story wants to portray a lesbian as a human to respect, they are feminine, and when it is time to humiliate a dyke, they create one who looks like me. Learning just how gross people see you is the best way to have a healthy view of your sexuality. I lost my virginity at sixteen and to some extent, it felt like a way to tell myself that maybe I can be desirable. Desirability is the key; butches are thought of so little and the idea of butch positivity is exceedingly rare. As a result, I latched onto any woman who thought I was attractive, for better or worse. Mix the extreme self-loathing with the number of times people would follow me in their cars to call me a faggot — or more directly, just attack me — the fleeting feeling of being desirable and safe was nice for a faggot like me. I was not oblivious to what the women I was with were doing but I wanted to feel wanted more than I wanted to preserve my self-respect. High school was, for at least the first two years, sexless and awkward with weightless ideas of what love is meant to be. High school ends though.

Many lesbians come to university as virgins; many others come to university only having had experience with men; yet still, some others arrive with incredibly pointed experiences of what sex is. In my incredibly short life, I’ve had sex with plenty of women as well as men. The men I had sex with did not see anything but a hole to shove a dick into but the women I had sex with, while still objectifying me, had the tact to be a bit more complex. I was often a human dildo, or a doll to project daddy issues onto, or in the worst cases mistaken for someone who could make adult decisions. I’ve been 6’0 since middle school and being a fun mixture of tall and broad has definitely helped me a ton. My height, as well as my masculinity, made it very easy for everyone around me to mistake me for someone much older in more ways than one. Sex was never truly an avenue for me to explore, it was a way for women who had never seen anyone like me before to cum without the compromise of fucking a real man. Being the “best of both worlds” makes you wonder why you never seem to be talked about outside of the other masculine creatures they know. Over time, you learn just how alone you are and eventually, you tie your self-worth to just how well you fuck—it’s the only thing people seem to care about, right? You really want to tell people how it feels but it’s a lot more intimidating and a bigger risk to do that than nothing, so you do nothing.

Being as imposing and autistic as I am makes it difficult for people to believe you were anything but an aggressor, the onus was on me to make myself more inviting. The issue with constantly worrying about seeming predatory at 16 or 17 is that it severely fucks your ability to understand your sexuality. You begin to worry about how the people around perceive everything you say and do. It’s what made feminine women who were straightforwardly into me so appealing. Many of the women I was with were often college-aged and in one case older than that. I was still in high school, though, still figuring out my sexuality, and I was utterly confused about what place a butch has in the world. It was a lonely time of wondering what a future for someone like me was. I fell into whatever the women who slept with me wanted and didn’t realize just how much they objectified me until later. I remember once, having sex with this girl that went to one of the local universities, and she called me daddy during it. I hated that she did that, she wasn’t the first nor the last, she was one of many who couldn’t help but assume what I wanted. For a couple of hours a week, I actually was a replacement male.

My symbolic role as a butch has always been placed before everything and it makes you wonder what people really think of you. I got so used to constant objectification I stopped caring whatsoever. When your sexuality is predatory, gross, non-existent, but also degenerate it becomes hard to talk about yourself. Talking about yourself is even harder when you don’t even get the courtesy of representation. If you’re the only reference point many of the people in your life have for a butch it’s difficult to convince yourself that sharing anything matters. Feminine women who deal with terrible misogyny will often have people who went through the same thing—or who can at least empathize—to help them. Considering many of those same people either think—implicitly or explicitly—it’s a shame that women ‘like me’ are forced to be masculine or that I’m just reproducing male roles there is nothing for me. Even porn, the first point of contact for so many queer and trans people, completely brushes over butches. My understanding of sex was purely a collection of all my first-hand experience, for better or worse. Walking through the world without having anyone to corroborate your memories is a lonely existence. I remember my feminine friends telling me stories of gross men sliding into their DMs, they all giggled and supported each other in a way I had never seen up close before. I never experienced the same unwanted sexual advances; ugly dykes don’t worry about the “wrong guy” being infatuated with them. What I kept to myself, though, was knowing exactly what it’s like for particularly gross people to fantasize about raping you.

The butch existence is more often than not an ultimate contradiction that you have to navigate. I am a woman but also not one, I have male privilege but not when it counts, I’m predatory but cannot escape predation, I do not get objectified and yet cannot escape a constant cycle of de-personification. The only thing I can cling onto as universally mine and recognized by everyone who knows me is my butchness. Even then, the women I’m with will often suggest feminizing me or in some way, changing the way I move through the world. Even my friends will innocently suggest doing my makeup and while they are well-intentioned people it still offends me just a bit. There’s a sense of total humiliation that comes with invoking makeovers. A reminder of how ugly and mannish the person they see is. Butch sexuality is funny in that way because I’m meant to understand myself as ugly and impossible to find sexually viable as well as be as sexually available as the people around me want—a two-front war between the women who wish to erase my transgressions and their boyfriends who want to erase me from existence.

I remember my last hookup in my hometown of Kitchener-Waterloo. The sex was not good enough to be memorable but what I always look back on is the journey back to my mom’s apartment. I usually would have taken the LRT, but it was too late, and I had to walk back instead. It was the weekend before the quarantine started and I remember wondering how much longer I wanted to do this for. Blasting Jeff Rosenstock in my earbuds, I sat on the curb and looked up at the sky. I stared for maybe ten minutes, nothing in particular caught my eye, but I was hoping something would eventually. Sitting there, I gazed into an overwhelmingly dark abyss, waiting for a Disney moment where a spirit would appear in the sky and I would be shown the way to my destiny. It was the last time I would see the people who could not see me, and the sky stayed black.