tales from gender zero... part one

Tales from gender zero

I was born pretty.
It wouldn’t have mattered what gender I was granted at birth, either way someone looking at me would have said “ Damn! That’s a pretty woman.” Or “ Damn! That’s a pretty man.” Either way, pretty edging into beautiful when the stars lined up right.

With beauty comes a price. You are what you look like.
I so understand those dykes who gain weight to hide beneath, those who create abrupt and unfathomable personal styles to push away the unwanted attention. Sometimes it is just easier to be ‘regular’ or what my mother called ‘plain’. The girl next door looks just fine dressed in sunshine a smile and her jeans…

I remember sitting with my lover with a group of other dykes. We were all just hanging out together for the comfort of being able to be openly out with our girlfriends and not catch any crap without having to go hide in a bar or club somewhere- event though this is the land of the free and the home of the brave there are plenty of places where being a lesbian couple in a public park is asking for unwanted attentions.
Se we all were sitting on the grass, hanging when this butch dyke came up to us and started talking with us all. I remember, she was older than all of us, and we thought she was so cool. She started talking about what makes a real butch and how all her wives had been named ‘Candy’, which I thought was strange as I didn’t know any woman named Candy, and having 3 wives with the same name seemed kind of weird. Imagine, all of us, just into our first year at college, away from home, in dorms or little one room apartments, sneaking to see our lovers or living openly with them. So proud to be lesbians, so out. We were so young and innocent.
So here we are and this woman is telling us how real lesbians divide up into ‘butch and femme’, and we are all just eating up her words. She’d been out when we were in grade school. She came over to where my partner and I were sitting and said to my partner and said “Damn that’s a foxy femme you have there.” , looking over me with that ‘I want to grab you by the hair and drag you off somewhere’ look. I learned later that she was looking for a new wife, a new Candy… My partner and I were puzzled, my partner considered herself femme, although she was taller than I, and I considered myself butch.
Puzzling over this at home, we shrugged it off.
However, the butch femme craze swept through our group of friends and suddenly, everyone was either butch or femme. There were no longer hippy women, rocker chicks, college book dorks and nerds, all women and all lesbian, free to be who they were and love another woman. Suddenly, we were all either butch or femme.
It was looks, just looks, and with looks came a list of expectations, social codes and rules, as well as a dress code.

It was baffling.

While we were all fascinated with this concept of social roles and gender based rituals, listing to N.R. (the older butch woman), we also began to seek approval; from her, and then transferred that onto each other. With the adopting of butch femme roles, we also adopted a mad rush to ‘get married’.

This was long before domestic partnership agreements, long before the words ‘marriage rights’ even applied to gay and lesbian couples. But there was a minister who would ‘marry’ you at the Unitarian church, and many of us scrambled over each other to pair up in ‘husband wife’ complements, and get married and go on to a mimicry of married bliss based roughly of the Cleaver family from ‘Leave it to Beaver’.

I remember one girl talking about making ‘texas toast’ for her lover for breakfast every morning, so she’d ask her to marry her. Friends raced to the woman pastor who did non denominational gay/lesbian weddings. Tuxes and wedding dresses, rented. Fast bachelor parties and bridal showers for young lesbian couples. Gifts to set up playing house with. Lover wouldn’t ask you, or wouldn’t marry you then you were nothing. There was no polyamory, was no ‘living together’. No, if you were a real lesbian, you were either butch or femme, and if you were a real couple you got married.
It was interesting, the most real lesbian was a butch woman. Now If I remember right a butch woman was everything a man could be but without the penis. More man then a man…but without the testicles. Femmes were lesbians too, because they were with butches, but interestingly, femmes were supposed to be easy to steal away, by a butcher woman….or a man.
So the validity of our choice to love women became dependant upon this social construct, this social role. Women who a month ago had been hiking with me in jeans and boots now refusing to go because it might mess up their nails and hair, and hitting the mall instead. Women who were hated sports suddenly going out ‘with the men( which mean the girls who were now butch)’ for pizza and beer on foot ball night. New fashions, new hair cuts, partners breaking up and reforming all lined up butch femme, butch femme. And my girlfriend being coached to rise to her butch self, and enforce certain relationship standards upon me. No more of this gender queer, amorphous androgyny, hippy girl who liked this punk rock androgyny… no…I was pretty, so I was the femme, the wife, the sub, and I needed to get my ass in the kitchen, be on my back in bed and make my woman feel like a man.
Ouch. Such painful days struggling to figure out why the women we hung with, and those new ones we met were so insistent upon these rules, wondering if these rules were right and correct…and if we would be happier obeying them.

My girlfriend put up her skirts, put away her jewelry and began wearing men’s clothes, and ties. My leathers hung in the closet, my beautiful punk rock gender queer clothes were met with frowns when we went out.
I learned to put on nail polish- a disaster which lasted two weeks, and instead of jeans and tee shirts, to wear little tube tops and camisoles. I tried heels I really did. I so missed my boots. I missed my leather. I missed being able to walk with my head up, with a swagger. Instead, I was to walk quietly and pretend to be interested in cooking, home making, makeup, parties and being….cute and stupid. In this group, at this moment femmes stayed home, did not work, were sexually available and submissive. Flirting was something femmes did at their own risk, a femme could get yelled at or beaten for leading a butch on. After all, a butch had a sex drive like a man, and if you ‘asked for it’ you got it.

That was what a femme was, in our world, in that moment.
I remember the little sweet girl who made ‘texas toast’ for her lover got married, and then stopped working. Then, she had black eyes. We all knew she was being beaten, but no one knew what to do. No domestic violence agencies worked with lesbian women then. Her girlfriend got slapped on the back and congratulated for keeping her girlfriend in line. After all, when they went out she had smiled at another woman…

Domestic violence ran rampant through my friends and it became a fad and fashion to hit your femme girlfriend, or yell and berate her loudly. After all, that was what real men did.

My partner got tons of positive feedback for her ascension into butchdom, and tons of good attention. It almost worked for her. Praise goes along way, but more so, the butch role had so many positive traits for her. The butch who was going somewhere in life, a career of importance, butches worked, went and got degrees, had a social life, could cruise other women. They were strong and powerful, respected and real. She made a great butch in public. I no longer went out with her, with these friends. After all, I was in denial of my femme self, exploring a transgender program, insisting that I had enough masculinity to at least be considered androgynous- even if I wouldn’t cut my hair. At home, I could be who I was, and she could shed her butch costume and climb into bed and be the woman she remembered.

Time passed. The roles hurt. We left this social group. We moved away. Butch femme roles were everywhere, so we lived in the country. Many of our friends moved away, embarrassed that they’d forced themselves, or each other into the tight roles we once swore were patriarchal trappings created to control reproductive rights and the balance of power by gender affiliations.

NR, the butch woman married one of us, beat her to a pulp, and went to jail threatening to get out and kill her errant wife (who’d escaped) or to kill herself.
When she got out she remarried within a month.

She is gone now, my beloved. There are many things that steal away a partner. Life, death, fear, loss… illness. We all come to the clearing at the end of the path sometime, we all reach the final stand.

Fast forward many years.

I am still beautiful. I am still butch. I still have long hair like a rock star and the voice of an angel.


By now you have formed an image in you imagination that describes to you what I look like. For some I will be tall, some small. My hair will come in different colors. I will be handsome, or pretty, dashing or alluring as your mental movie chooses to describe me.
Of course, you will not quite be right. When we hear a voice we imagine a person, and always, we are off.
That’s OK, what you imagine is just as real as anything else, for this moment, right now.

Real. I kept coming across women who define ‘real’ lesbian by narrow and limiting ideas. The older women who get together to watch “L word “ reruns, they talk about their butch identity defining ‘real lesbian’. In this group, a true lesbian is a butch lesbian, and femmes? Well you still need to keep your eye on them because they are like to run off with a man. Especially those who like penetration and strap on sex.
Hmm. So if a woman likes her g-spot massaged she might run off with a man?
I never knew or noticed that. Wow, where was I? I so thought a woman who wanted another woman to massage her g-spot might be…a lesbian? Which meant (I thought- struggle with me here brain cells) she liked….women.

They remind me so of that first butch woman, who told us all how to behave so that the world could identify who we were….

The young artist girl I talked to told me a real lesbian was woman identified, and rejected all masculinity, as a woman who was too butch, too ‘masculine’ was rejecting her natural state. Nature made her a woman, and a woman was a celebration…for all, no matter what they felt inside. Natural state…..

I was born pretty, born into a family with clear white middle class American gender roles played out before me, yet even there I watched ‘roles’ between my mother and father evolve as years went by and society changed. My mom, who once was a stay home mom, went to school worked. My dad, who once did ‘the commute’, was barely home except on Sunday in time to bring home the money, wash the car, mow the grass (until we learned we could get money to do it for him) and watch sports, became a man who loved to cook, loved his dogs (and his family) and found his creative side. My parents became who they were inside, together and side by side, sharing the work of life without regard to who was the ‘man’ and who was….not.

From this family I grew up with enough male inside to want to transition, loving women, and very …queer.

Another woman told me real lesbians are the ones who don’t use toys. She was quite angry and positive about this. If you liked toys, or needed lube, you were really straight and needed to get with a man. OK…. We didn’t date long.

One said you were only ‘real’ if you’d never slept with a man. Those women who once were with men could never be ‘real’ lesbians. Bisexual women, they were a class unto themselves. Curious, she seemed to have a passion for little straight girls who wanted to play gay… and was quite proud at the number of ‘straight’ girls she’d had and ‘turned’, described much like how a werewolf or vampire turns someone they bite.
I didn’t know if you made love to a straight girl she ‘turned’. I thought milk left too long in the refrigerator turned and you threw it out.

Real. I am not sure the word means what we hope it does. It becomes the definition of our limits of self, of the outside face we show, when we are so much much more….

I am a woman, I am a man, I am sacred, I am profane. I am beautiful I am horrible. I am dark….and I am light.
I am myself. Everything and nothing and all spaces between.
I am real.
I am also many other things as well…