Butch

That grammar is the reason this catalogue files butch as an expression term. A butch person may be a woman, may be non-binary, may be transmasculine. A great many describe butch as a gender in its own right, and the femme lesbian historian Joan Nestle has argued exactly that, that butch and femme may be seen as distinct genders in and of themselves. The filing decision is about what the word primarily reports, not a ruling on what any butch person is.

Where the word butch came from

The masculine sense is older than the lesbian one. Butch is probably a shortening of butcher, first noticed in the nickname of Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, though Wikipedia's entry says plainly that the exact origin is still unknown. A separate strand ran alongside it: to butch was a verb meaning to kill animals for food, recorded in Brockett's Glossary of North Country Words in 1846, collected again in 1875, and still in daily use around Clitheroe when Notes and Queries asked about it in July 1918.

The sense of masculine lesbian develops in the 1940s, and through the 1940s and 1950s butch became a central identity in the lesbian community, taken up from inside it. Because it was always understood in relation to femme, and because the pair was studied as a pair, butch on its own has stayed somewhat ill-defined in the literature. Merriam-Webster's second sense is a reminder of how far the adjective travelled from any of this: closely cropped, as in a butch haircut. The dictionary also carries the noun butchness.

Definitions inside the scholarship vary. The Queen's Vernacular had it as a lesbian with masculine characteristics. Gayle Rubin, in Of Catamites and Kings, described butches as lesbians who use masculine mannerisms, or wear traditionally male clothing, or experience gender dysphoria. What most scholars agree on is narrower than any of those: a butch is a lesbian aligned to some degree with masculine traits.

How butch worked in the bars

Mid-century butch was a social position with consequences. Butch women in the United States were usually confined to the handful of jobs with no dress code for women, factory work and cab driving among them. Through the 1950s, with the anti-gay politics of the McCarthy era and the Lavender Scare, raids on gay and lesbian bars were routine, and while femmes fought back too, defending the bars as women's space became primarily the butch role. The prevailing image was severe but gentle at first, and grew tougher as violent confrontation became a fact of the week.

The experience was not the same for everyone holding the word. Black lesbians, particularly exposed to police brutality and racial segregation, often socialised at private parties instead of bars, and often dressed formally, against the T-shirts and jeans of the white working-class butch. Leslie Feinberg's novel Stone Butch Blues is the standing piece of butch literature on all of this, on bar culture, on police violence against drag queens and butch people alike, and on butch eroticism in the 1970s. A stone butch is a top who does not want their own genitals touched during sex.

The separatist feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s pushed butch and femme underground, on the reading that lesbian gender roles replicated a heterosexual arrangement. The 1980s brought them back, and in the returning version femme-femme pairings were acceptable and femme became a lesbian gender that could stand without a butch beside it. That is why the Femme entry and this one both carry a defensive edge that dates from the reclamation and no earlier.

Why the identity argument is unsettled

The disagreement is between named scholars and it has not resolved. Jack Halberstam argues that transgender men cannot be counted as butch, since that conflates maleness with butchness, and that butch-femme is geared to work inside lesbian relationships specifically. Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling read butch and femme as something other than an attempt on traditional gender roles, gender being socially and historically made. Nestle takes them as genders in their own right. Jewelle Gomez suggested that butch and femme women earlier in the twentieth century may have been expressing a closeted transgender identity.

The line against Trans man is the sharpest version of the argument, and Halberstam named it a border war in Transgender Butch. Some butch people identify as women and undergo some medical transition; some trans men identify as butch men. S. Bear Bergman, who is both butch and a transgender man, put the position as butch and transgender being the same thing with different names, except that butch is not a trans identity unless it is. Rubin's summary is that the difference has as many interpretations as there are butch people, and Halberstam's warning is that hard distinctions between butch women and transsexual men have tended to serve heteronormativity and neither group.

This catalogue records the disagreement and does not settle it. The not an identity note required on every expression entry says what the word reports.

Who else the word butch describes

Butch is not confined to lesbians, and never entirely was. Wiktionary's quotations for the adjective are mostly about men: a Polari speaker admiring a butch body, Colin MacInnes in Out of the Way in 1979 on a proud bisexual butch Italian, Gay Macho in 1998 on closeted men adopting feminine affect while butch men embraced traditional masculinity, and Yorick Smaal's Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific in 2015 on butch men who had sex with effeminate queens. The word originated in the lesbian community and is now used across the wider queer one.

Neighbouring words carry their own communities, and substituting one for another loses the history attached to it.

The filmmaker Daniel Peddle followed six AGs for his 2005 documentary The Aggressives, including women who bound their breasts to pass as men. BUTCH Voices, a national conference for people describing themselves as masculine of centre, was founded in 2008.

What the surveys have recorded about butch

The figures that exist measure recognition, and none measures a population. Research in the United States in the 1990s found that 95 per cent of lesbians were familiar with butch and femme codes and could rate themselves or others against them, and that the same 95 per cent felt butch and femme were unimportant in their lives. Both halves of that sentence are the finding. A survey of butches in the same decade found 50 per cent primarily attracted to femmes and 25 per cent usually attracted to other butches.

The Gender Census recorded butch for 7.9 per cent of its gender-diverse respondents in 2022 and 9.8 per cent when the word appeared as a checkbox in 2024. Both come from a self-selected community sample, and the movement between the two years is at least partly an artefact of the word being offered on a list where before it had to be written in. The survey publishes its own measure of that artefact and butch is one of the words it names: when butch moved onto the checkbox list its share rose by a factor of 5.3, against a mean of 10.1 across the words added that way.

None of these figures says anything about the birth assignment of the people counted, which is where butch parts company with the terms in the binary group. A butch person may be Cisgender or not, and the word reports nothing either way.