Butch

It is filed here as an expression term because what it reports is presentation rather than an answer to the question of gender. A butch person may be a woman, may be non-binary, may be transmasculine. Many describe butch as a gender in its own right, and that claim is common enough that treating it purely as a style would misdescribe how the word is used.

Where the word came from

The slang butch, meaning tough or masculine, is older than the lesbian sense and is usually attributed to an abbreviation of butcher, first noted in the nickname of Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy. The specifically lesbian sense develops in the 1940s, and through the 1940s and 1950s butch became a central identity in the lesbian community rather than a description applied from outside.

That period matters to the meaning. Butch and femme roles in mid-century bar culture were not a fashion; they were a working-class social structure with its own rules about who asked whom to dance, who fought, and who was safe with whom. Later feminist criticism in the 1970s read those roles as imitations of heterosexuality and much of the culture went underground, which is why the reclamation from the 1980s onward carries a defensive edge.

Why the identity argument is unsettled

Ask whether butch is a gender and the answers split, consistently, and both sides have a case. One reading holds that butch describes how a woman presents and that calling it a gender erases butch women. The other holds that butch is not reducible to masculine woman, that it names something with its own history and its own internal sense, and that the people living it are the ones to say.

This catalogue files it as expression and records the disagreement rather than settling it. The not an identity framing is a filing decision about what the word primarily reports, not a ruling on what any butch person is.

What is actually recorded

The Gender Census had butch selected by 7.9 per cent of gender-diverse respondents in 2022 and 9.8 per cent when it appeared as a checkbox in 2024. Those are shares of a self-selected community sample and not a population figure, and the movement between the two years is at least partly an artefact of the word being on the list rather than written in.

Related terms sit in different communities. Stud is used chiefly by Black lesbians and carries its own history, and masc is a broader and newer word that does much less specific work.

None of this is a claim about the birth assignment of the people involved, which is where butch differs from the terms in the binary group. A butch person may be Cisgender and most are, and the word reports nothing either way.