Is femme a gender or a way of presenting?

Both readings are in use, and this catalogue files femme as expression while recording the argument. What the word primarily reports is feminine presentation and the queer context that gives it meaning. Many femmes nonetheless describe femme as a gender in its own right, and that use is common enough that treating it as a style alone would misdescribe how the word works.

Where does the word femme come from?

It is the French word for woman, taken into English through Old French and Latin. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the general slang sense of a young woman to 1928 and the sense of the more feminine partner in a lesbian couple to 1961, though the butch and femme bar culture the word belongs to was established through the 1940s.

Since the late 2010s the word has been used of feminine people across gender and sexuality, cisgender men included, and gay male culture has its own long use of fem as a description of appearance and manner. Whether that use is legitimate is exactly what is argued about.

Why do some lesbians object to the wider use of femme?

The objection is that femme came out of a marginalised lesbian subculture, that opening it to everyone who wants it erases the history and the women who built it, and that the erasure is a form of appropriation. The counter-argument, put by femmes in the Autostraddle roundtable, is that the boundary was never as firm as the objection assumes.

Is femme the opposite of butch?

Wiktionary lists butch as the antonym, and the two words were built to work as a pair. Neither is a complete account of the other, and plenty of people use one, both or neither.

Femme: Meaning, Origin & Who Uses It

Femme

Femme describes a feminine presentation and stance within queer life, and it is the paired term to Butch. Wikipedia records the traditional sense as a lesbian woman with a feminine identity or gender presentation, and notes that gay men, bisexual women, trans people and non-binary people also use it.

It is filed here as an expression term because what it primarily reports is presentation rather than an answer to the question of gender. A femme may be a woman, may be a man, may be non-binary, may be trans. A great many femmes describe femme as a gender of its own, and that use is old enough and widespread enough that calling it a style and stopping there would misdescribe the word.

How femme grew out of bar culture

Heidi M. Levitt and Sara K. Bridges trace butch and femme to American lesbian communities after the Second World War, when women entering the workforce began wearing trousers and a masculine aesthetic became available. The pair became the organising shape of working-class bar culture through the 1940s and 1950s, with its own rules about who approached whom and who was safe with whom.

Joan Nestle, who wrote on femme identity from inside it, argued that femmes sat thinly in the historical record. They were attacked for passing as straight and accused of copying heterosexual roles for pairing with a butch. Her answer was that the pairing carried a vocabulary of its own in stance, dress, gesture and autonomy. Arlene Istar Lev reads the same roles as erotic and social statements rather than imitation.

The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the general slang sense of young woman to 1928 and the lesbian sense to 1961. The word is the French for woman, arriving through Old French and Latin.

Why lesbian feminism turned against femme

Lesbian feminism rejected the butch and femme dynamic and the femme identity with it. Femmes were charged with reproducing patriarchal beauty standards, and Audre Lorde wrote in Tar Beach that the role playing was the opposite of what being gay was about. Bisexual women in the same communities were pressed to call themselves lesbians, and bisexual organising did not formalise until the 1970s, which kept bisexual femmes out of the record twice over.

By the 1990s the lipstick lesbian had reached the mainstream and femme had become a catch-all for a feminine lesbian. Levitt and Bridges record the two words moving into bisexual communities across the same decade.

Who is allowed to claim femme

Since the late 2010s the word has stretched to cover feminine people across gender and sexuality, including heterosexual women, cisgender men and transfeminine people. In that reading femme is a political position rather than an erotic one, and a femme need not present femininely at all. The phrase women and femmes came out of it, and has itself been criticised for running two different categories together.

Lesbians using the word in its older sense contest the stretch, on the grounds that taking a term from an already marginalised community undervalues lesbian history and the autonomy of women to name themselves. The Autostraddle roundtable of femme writers found that argument running inside the group rather than only at its edges, and several of them described it as generational rather than settled. This catalogue records the disagreement and does not settle it.

Rhea Hoskin turns the question outward, towards femmephobia: the devaluation and policing of femininity in any gender, which she separates from misogyny because it targets femininity rather than women.

How femme is counted in surveys

The Gender Census had femme selected by 11.4 per cent of gender-diverse respondents in 2022. That is a share of a self-selected community sample rather than of any general population, and the word appears in that sample alongside masc, butch and a long tail of write-ins.

Common questions

Questions about Femme

Is femme a gender or a way of presenting?: Both readings are in use, and this catalogue files femme as expression while recording the argument. What the word primarily reports is feminine presentation and the queer context that gives it meaning. Many femmes nonetheless describe femme as a gender in its own right, and that use is common enough that treating it as a style alone would misdescribe how the word works.
Where does the word femme come from?: It is the French word for woman, taken into English through Old French and Latin. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the general slang sense of a young woman to 1928 and the sense of the more feminine partner in a lesbian couple to 1961, though the butch and femme bar culture the word belongs to was established through the 1940s.
Can a man be femme?: Since the late 2010s the word has been used of feminine people across gender and sexuality, cisgender men included, and gay male culture has its own long use of fem as a description of appearance and manner. Whether that use is legitimate is exactly what is argued about.
Why do some lesbians object to the wider use of femme?: The objection is that femme came out of a marginalised lesbian subculture, that opening it to everyone who wants it erases the history and the women who built it, and that the erasure is a form of appropriation. The counter-argument, put by femmes in the Autostraddle roundtable, is that the boundary was never as firm as the objection assumes.
Is femme the opposite of butch?: Wiktionary lists butch as the antonym, and the two words were built to work as a pair. Neither is a complete account of the other, and plenty of people use one, both or neither.

Added 2026-08-28 · Revised 2026-08-28