Lesbianism Has Teeth

Butch/Femme, Transsexual Desire, and the Erotics of Refusal

My brand new book released please support it so I can spoil my wife.

This essay is free to read. Paid subscriptions are genuinely how I cover groceries and keep this going full time, so if the work means something to you, I’d really appreciate it.

The Filing Cabinet of Sexuality

Lesbianism gets dragged into the filing cabinet, slapped with a label, and passed around the institution until everyone forgets a body was involved. A relation between women becomes an attraction category. and the room has successfully avoided history, power, sex, family, men, labor, violence, inheritance, embodiment, and the small matter of women being punished for wanting the wrong people too seriously.

Nobody built law, medicine, religion, pornography, psychiatric language, family terror, schoolyard correction, rape threats, and dinner-table disgust around a harmless preference. Private feelings do not get centuries of discipline. Women get disciplined when their desire stops serving the route laid out for them. Daughter to father. Girlfriend to boyfriend. Wife to husband. Mother to child. Whore to buyer. Muse to artist. Object to subject. Wound to repairman. Body to owner. Lesbianism cuts across the route and men start acting like somebody stole the last oxygen tank on earth. The machine still runs, but one wire has been pulled loose, and patriarchy has always been dramatic about maintenance. A girl at thirteen reaches for her best friend’s wrist under a desk and the room temperature shifts somewhere outside her field of vision. A mother sees the photograph on the dresser and the photograph moves to a drawer. A father uses the word “phase” the way a cop uses the word “investigation.” A pastor uses the word “struggle” until the girl forgets her own appetite. The discipline does not need to be loud. The discipline only needs to be everywhere.

The witchhunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a distinctly modern apparatus for shattering women’s control over reproduction, sexual knowledge, contraception, abortion, and midwifery. Women’s reproductive labor was enclosed inside the conjugal household and turned into private machinery for the production of workers. The training of female desire sits downstream of that enclosure. Compulsory heterosexuality is the cultural infrastructure built on top of the material capture. Heterosexuality is what the capture sounds like after several centuries of being called love. Lesbianism interrupts the capture, which is why the apparatus arrived early in every lesbian’s life and brought every available instrument with it.

Heterosexuality gets called natural after the work of making it natural has been hidden. The family trains the girl before she has language for training. Religion blesses the arrangement. Medicine normalizes it. Law protects it. Romance sentimentalizes it. Pornography makes it appear inevitable. Street harassment introduces fear as public education. Marriage calls the whole thing maturity. The girl learns which kind of male attention counts as proof she is becoming real. She learns danger as courtship, surveillance as care, exhaustion as love, and sexual availability as adulthood. The uncle’s compliment about her dress. The pediatrician chuckling about future boyfriends. The boy at thirteen who pulls her hair and the teacher who says he likes you. The boyfriend at sixteen who puts a hand on the back of her neck in public and calls it affection while the back of her neck remembers it differently. By the time she can say what she wants, the world has already been inside the wanting with dirty shoes on.

Womanhood gets assembled inside that traffic. Wife, mother, girlfriend, daughter, whore, prize, emotional worker, reproductive body, repair project, cautionary tale. The category is made useful before it is called natural. Women are sorted by relation to men, then told the sorting reflects their essence, which is one of those jokes history tells with a straight face because history has terrible comedic timing. Lesbianism exposes the scaffolding. A woman turns toward women and the supposedly natural path starts looking like infrastructure. Two women hold hands on a train platform and a stranger’s face flickers through six emotions in eight seconds. He has not encountered a tragedy. He has encountered a refusal, and the refusal makes him feel optional, and optional is the worst thing his mother ever let him imagine being.

Desire does not descend from the heavens in a lace robe untouched by rent, race, hormones, childhood terror, beauty culture, family disgust, class hunger, pornography, medical power, and the fragile economy of who gets invited home after the bar closes. Desire gets trained. It learns through punishment and reward. It learns through what the room praises. It learns through what the girl is told to hide. It learns through who gets called pretty, who gets called difficult, who gets called safe, who gets called too much, who gets fucked in secret, who gets dated in public, who gets cited, who gets held, and who gets treated like a bad decision with tits.

Liberal sexual politics keeps trying to rescue sex from all of that because liberalism loves a clean subject the way a landlord loves pretending mold is a lifestyle choice. The subject consents. The subject prefers. The subject identifies. The subject validates herself. Power waits outside with a little cigarette and a respectful distance, apparently. Consent matters because violation matters. Coercion is not freedom because somebody got tired of naming force. A floor still does not make a house. “Consenting adults” tells us a line was not crossed in the narrow sense. It does not tell us what kind of relation has been made, who held the terms, who needed the touch, who paid afterward, who became ashamed, who became attached, who became useful, who got thrown away once the fantasy stopped being sexy. A woman can technically consent to her own erasure. The technicality is what the institution wants. The technicality is the cover charge.

A woman says she affirms transsexual women. Her body still stiffens when one sits too close on the couch and her thigh becomes a country with a wall around it. She says she loves Black women. Her lovers keep looking like the same three white girls rearranged by haircut and the same three white girls keep getting introduced to her mother. She says lesbianism matters. Her life remains open to every person whose feelings would be hurt by the word no, including the men she swears she does not sleep with except for the one in November and the one at her cousin’s wedding and the one who “doesn’t count.” The stated politics hang above the room like a cheap banner. The body walks underneath and chooses.

Desire Snitches

Auto Anon was right where the bed started talking. Public lesbian politics can lie for years. A scene can repeat every correct sentence about trans women and still treat transsexual women as erotic risk, symbolic sisterhood, fetish material, or late-night curiosity. A scene can declare itself anti-racist while Black women become intensity, danger, lesson, spectacle, or proof of someone else’s radicalism. A scene can talk about lesbian commitment while the women inside it chase the bodies that make them look least exposed. Everybody says community and then fucks like the landlord is watching.

The bed snitches. God bless her nasty little mouth.

A woman posts about transmisogyny and still wants the doll only when the doll stays funny, hot, grateful, and quiet about what is being done to her. She replies to my essay with three fire emojis and texts a transsexual girl after midnight with the energy of a man on a layover. She introduces her white girlfriend at the reading. She introduces the trans girl as “my friend, she’s hilarious.” A woman denounces racism on a panel and still treats Black femininity like a stimulant: useful for the weekend, exhausting by Wednesday, retired by the time she’s ready for a partner her parents will like. Desire keeps receipts. It chooses, hides, repeats, ghosts, marries, avoids, fetishizes, and calls the pattern chemistry.

Who gets pursued after midnight matters. Who gets introduced to friends matters. Who gets “I’m not ready for anything serious” after three weeks of being used like emotional fentanyl matters. Who gets the caption and who gets the locked story matters. Who becomes a lover, who becomes a lesson, who becomes a cause, who becomes “a lot” after she asks for the same care everyone else gets without begging. Look at the engagement party. Look at the seating chart at the wedding. Look at who is in the slideshow and who got dropped from the slideshow because the parents were coming. Desire routes women through a scene more efficiently than any manifesto. It tells you whose body confers status, whose body creates risk, whose body can be touched without changing the toucher’s social position, whose body makes everyone suddenly discover nuance.

I write this from inside the racial economy I am describing. I am a Black transsexual lesbian. The position is not a vantage point I selected for analytical convenience. It is the place I keep ending up in regardless of what I do with my mouth or my hair or my graduate-school vocabulary. The hand on the small of my back at the kickback either knows what I am or pretends not to. Both versions of the hand mean something. Neither one is neutral. The work my predecessors did on Black ungendering, on the racial history of the trans body, on the erotic as a power systematically denied to women and then sold back to us as the pornographic, was not abstract theory for the people who developed it. It was the description of the rooms they were living in. I am writing about the rooms I am living in now. The continuity is not coincidence.

The count alone cannot carry the analysis. Who lesbians fuck matters, but the list does not explain the hunger that made the list. Whiteness becomes erotic through reward. Class polish becomes erotic because it reads as safety, cleanliness, intelligence, stability, seriousness, an apartment with houseplants the mother is still alive enough to send. Thinness becomes erotic because discipline gets written into flesh and then called beauty. Certain masculinities become erotic because they promise usefulness without disturbing the wrong people. Certain femininities become erotic because they offer pleasure without making demands. Transsexual femininity becomes erotic when it stays excessive, tragic, pornographic, grateful, or funny. It becomes dangerous when it starts remembering. The girl who said yes when she was nineteen and on hormones for eleven months and broke. The girl who said yes when she had no other place to sleep that week. The girl who said yes when the alternative was being the only sober person in the room. Memory turns the doll back into a woman, and the woman starts asking questions about whose mouth she was supposed to be quiet under.

Audre Lorde drew the line between the erotic and the pornographic as the line between presence and its commercial substitute. The erotic was a power women had been systematically denied and then sold back to ourselves in the form of the pornographic, which is the exterior of desire without the interior, the gesture without the substance, the signifier without the freight. Most of what happens in queer rooms now is the pornographic dressed in the costume of the erotic. The pursuit is performed. The fascination is performed. The withdrawal is performed. The body in the bed is rented from the image of the body in the bed. Most of the women in those rooms are not getting fucked. They are getting referenced. The scene mistakes the referencing for an erotic culture and then wonders why no one feels held.

The girl in the bar does not merely “have a type.” Her type has been trained into her by every room that taught her which woman could be brought home without explanation. Her type has a class position. Her type has a race. Her type has a relationship to medical legibility, employment, social polish, danger, shame, and what her friends will say in the bathroom while she is in the booth being charming. The body calls this attraction because “I have eroticized the distribution of safety in my social world” sounds less cute on Hinge. The bio reads “love a tall butch” because “I want my masculinity domesticated by someone whose paycheck cleared and whose mother sends Christmas cards” reads as a confession instead of a preference. The preference is the confession. The confession got dressed up and went out for drinks.

A lesbian scene that wants honesty has to look at the erotic economy of its own rooms. Watch who gets touched casually on the small of the back at the kickback and who gets touched only when sex is on the table. Watch who gets called intimidating before she’s said anything and who gets called intimidating only after she’s said no. Watch who gets invited to the afters and who gets told the address never quite makes it to her phone. Watch who gets asked to perform emotional clarity at 4 a.m. after everyone else spends six hours doing ketamine-level avoidance without the ketamine. Watch who gets treated like theory and who gets treated like a girlfriend. The hierarchy usually sits in the room wearing eyeliner and pretending to be chemistry, and the woman at the bottom of it is supposed to thank the room for letting her in.

Sex does not become a political program because the people involved can pronounce “compulsory heterosexuality” between vape hits. A polycule does not become dual power because five people share a calendar, three mattresses, one cat with a human name, and a group chat older than the relationships inside it. A woman can come on another woman’s face and still spend the next afternoon arguing on the internet that the other woman is not really a woman, and the discrepancy will live inside her like a small ulcer until she dies, and she will call the ulcer a political disagreement.

The contradiction shows up in the body. A woman believes trans women are women and still eroticizes us through porn residue, still flinches at the wrong moment, still asks the question with her mouth that her hands already answered. A woman believes Black women deserve love and still treats Black intensity as something to survive rather than something to meet, still goes back to the white girl when she wants to rest, still calls rest a personal failing instead of a confession. A woman believes lesbian boundaries matter until a boundary makes her feel mean. Desire walks straight past the statement of values and opens the locked drawer. Inside: the old training, the shame, the reward, the fear of being seen wanting the wrong woman too publicly.

Sadomasochism and the Form of Power

Sadomasochism is power with the lights turned on. A scene has a frame, duration, ritual, permission, refusal, command, surrender, touch, limit, aftermath. Pain becomes sensation under one arrangement and violence under another. Humiliation can warm the body when dignity is protected underneath it. Humiliation can become social murder when a crowd gets horny for punishment and calls the feed “accountability.” Same material. Different relation. The body knows the difference even when the discourse goblins pretend not to.

“Consensual, so fine” is liberalism with a crop. “Dominance, so patriarchy” is moralism in sensible shoes. Both readings flatten the scene because both are allergic to contradiction. Consent matters. A woman asking for pain is not the same as a woman being harmed. A woman being restrained inside a scene is not the same as a woman being trapped. A woman kneeling because she wants to feel held by structure is not the same as a woman being forced down. The distinction is real. It still does not finish the thought.

Desire starts tangled. The body attaches to fear, punishment, repetition, fantasy, care, shame, memory, and the humiliating little archive of everything that made it flinch. Pain can return as dread or heat. Humiliation can destroy a woman in public and become charged in private when the relation keeps her personhood intact. The psyche is not a polite liberal subject selecting pleasures from a laminated menu. The psyche is a haunted little freak wearing skin. Sex gives the haunting a room, a script, and sometimes a towel under the door because somebody had the audacity to squirt on theory night.

A transsexual woman who wants pain from another woman may be touching the entire archive attached to her body. The endocrinologist’s hand. The intake form that asked about her genitals in front of a stranger. The cop at fifteen. The boyfriend at nineteen who said he loved her right up until he didn’t. The pornography she found at twelve while looking up a word she did not have. The street at one in the morning. The girls at school whose disgust she still hears in her dreams. The family member who used the wrong name in front of company on purpose. Pain is already there. The scene gives her a frame where she can say yes, no, harder, stop, again, hold me. A woman she trusts pulls her hair, calls her a slut, leaves marks, holds her afterward, makes her tea, cleans the welts with attention. The next morning she walks through the same world that wanted to break her, only this time something about it does not land, because last night the breaking had her name on it instead of theirs.

Sex has to be read the way work gets read when analysis has not been lobotomized by liberal optimism. Bodies get organized. Roles get produced. Value gets extracted. Domination becomes ordinary through repetition. The bed sits inside political economy with its hair messy and a drink in its hand. Male supremacy turns women’s bodies into instruments of use. Some women eroticize use, negotiate use, mock use, perform use, refuse use, or turn use into a scene where the terms finally belong to them. None of that makes the structure disappear. None of it makes the woman stupid. Desire does not need innocence. Innocence is usually the first lie power asks from women.

Lesbian S/M ruins the cartoon. Dominance does not automatically belong to men. Submission does not automatically belong to women. Masculinity does not automatically mean violence. Femininity does not automatically mean injury. Femmes can be vicious with a manicure and a soft voice that turns the room into something a butch will obey by morning. Butches can be tender in ways that make masculinity stop smelling like a basement full of podcasts. A transsexual femme can take degradation inside a scene while refusing the social degradation people try to impose outside it. A transsexual butch can command, surrender, cry after sex because someone saw her too clearly, then fix the sink before dinner like masculinity finally found a useful hobby.

The dungeon often has more honesty than the group chat. The dungeon admits someone wants power. The group chat wants power, shame, punishment, surveillance, confession, spectacle, and entertainment, then calls the whole rancid little feast “safety.” The thread runs for six days. The screenshots arrive in waves. The receipts get reposted by women who were in the same bed as the accused two summers ago and forgot to mention it. The mob writes “we” the way a butcher writes “we” before cutting. People clutch pearls over leather while refreshing the downfall of a woman they claim to be holding accountable. At least a top with a flogger knows what she came to do. At least the scene ends, and the body that took the hits gets a hand on her cheek, and the room dims, and the work of repair starts immediately. The callout does not end. The callout has no aftercare. The callout was never going to have aftercare because the point was never the bottom’s repair. The point was the top’s pleasure with the bottom’s name in her mouth and her own face hidden behind the username. The erotic gets dispossessed and sold back to the dispossessed as the pornographic. The callout is the pornographic. The scene with form is what is left of the erotic when women refuse to be administered.

S/M can repeat the world. S/M can bend the materials the world left behind until old meanings crack. S/M can turn trust into a structure where surrender becomes possible. S/M can turn desire into hierarchy with mood lighting and overpriced rope. The scene tells its truth afterward: who can speak, who gets believed, who receives care, who becomes dependent, who carries stigma, who keeps dignity when the collar comes off, who is still held when the body stops performing.

Butch/Femme Against Heterosexual Meaning

Butch/femme makes gender answer to lesbian desire. Clothes matter because bodies are social. Gesture matters because recognition teaches itself through repetition. Labor matters because domestic life puts roles into the nervous system. Sex matters because erotic grammar changes the meaning of the act. A butch and a femme are a social form made through attention, touch, labor, public misreading, private precision, and the disgraceful fact that a woman can carry a toolbox into a room and make a whole philosophy degree feel like foreplay nobody asked for. A butch with engine grease on her wrist holds the femme’s chin in two fingers and the femme’s whole afternoon reorganizes around the smell of motor oil and aftershave and the small implacable competence of a woman who can fix what she touches.

Heterosexual culture sees masculinity and femininity and assigns ownership. Masculinity belongs to men. Femininity exists for men. Strength means possession. Beauty means invitation. Protection means authority. Softness means compliance. Butch/femme steals the materials and reroutes them. A man putting his hand on a woman’s lower back in public is making a claim. A butch putting her hand on a femme’s lower back in public is making a sentence in a language the man cannot read.

The butch’s masculinity carries refusal, style, labor, vulnerability, competence, social cost, erotic force, and distance from male ownership. She walked through high school being called sir on the way to the girl’s bathroom and being shoved out of it once she got there. She learned to keep her keys between her fingers and her shoulders square. She learned which jobs would hire her and which would call her in for the interview just to look. The femme’s femininity carries display, demand, seduction, precision, survival, and refusal to let men remain the assumed audience of beauty. She did not paint her face for a man’s approval and she did not stop painting her face when she stopped sleeping with them. The eyeliner does not retire when men leave the room. The eyeliner becomes more itself. Men will sexualize a chair if it has legs. Their perception cannot own the meaning of the room. A femme putting on lipstick for a woman who knows how to look is speaking in a language patriarchy tried and failed to copyright.

Femme is not a category a woman builds alone at a mirror by declaring it into the glass until the glass agrees. Butch is not a category a body stabilizes in private. They are made between women, in the moment of being received. The body that receives correctly is the body that gives the other woman back to herself. The relation is the gender. The gender is what happens between two women who know how to look at each other, and the knowing is built across decades of lesbian practice that gentrifying queer theory periodically pretends it invented last Tuesday.

Difference moves through lesbianism without reinstalling men as the hidden grammar. Masculinity and femininity move between women and stop answering to their assigned owners. Gender becomes something women do to and for each other, sometimes beautifully, sometimes perversely, sometimes so intensely that a girl who was just explaining Wittig ten minutes ago starts acting like a hand on her thigh is a theological event.

Butch labor gets romanticized until the butch becomes infrastructure. Fix the thing. Carry the thing. Walk her home. Handle the man at the bar. Hold the crisis when the femme calls at 2 a.m. from a parking lot. Be solid. Be brave. Be competent. Be useful enough that everyone calls it desire until the bill comes due, and then the butch is the one carrying boxes alone at the end of the relationship while the femme keeps the apartment, the friends, the cat, and the story. Femme labor gets prettied up until extraction looks like intimacy. Be beautiful. Be socially fluent. Be receptive. Make the room charged. Make the relation feel meaningful. Make the ache elegant enough that nobody names the cost. The femme manages the calendar, the parents, the friendships, the holidays, the emotional weather of a butch who has spent her whole life not being asked how she feels and does not know where to put it now. Chosen family does not automatically distribute its costs evenly. The femme who runs the calendar and the butch who carries the boxes are doing the labor the heterosexual household used to extract from women, and they are doing it for each other now, and the new arrangement is better but it is still labor and somebody is still doing more of it. Love can live there. So can use. The same hand can hold and take.

Recognition gives the relation its charge. Her femininity sharpens when another woman receives it outside male use. A butch across a bar looks at her the way no man has ever managed and the femme feels her own body line up with itself for the first time that week. The butch’s masculinity becomes more determinate when another woman returns it to her without measuring it against men. A femme reaches up and adjusts the collar of her shirt and the butch becomes more herself in the gesture than she has ever been on a job application. The body moves differently after being seen correctly. Posture changes. Voice changes. The joke lands lower. The hand lingers. The world outside can still misread them, but the room has already given them back to each other.

Sex makes the form tactile. A butch topping is not “the man.” A femme bottoming is not heterosexuality with better lighting. A butch bottoming does not lose masculinity. A femme topping does not become butch by grabbing a strap and a bad attitude, though the bad attitude may improve morale. Command, surrender, service, refusal, penetration, restraint, praise, degradation, care: acts do not carry one permanent lesbian meaning. Relation gives the act its charge. A butch on her back asking to be used by her femme is not playing the woman. She is being a butch on her back with her femme inside her, and the sentence does not need to translate into anything heterosexual ever, and the people who keep trying to translate it should be charged a fee. History haunts the room. The body decides whether the ghost gets fucked, exorcised, ignored, or invited to hold the camera.

Transsexual Butch/Femme

The transsexual lesbian arrives already narrated. I am one. I write this from inside the body I am describing, not from above it. I am a Black transsexual lesbian. I want a vagina. I do not have one yet. My partner does. Many of the women I love do. The analysis I am building lives in the body that is doing the building, and the body that is doing the building has walked into rooms where the calculation about her happened at the door and has walked out of rooms where the calculation continued into the months afterward. The distinction between theorizing about transsexual lesbians and theorizing from inside transsexual lesbian life is the same distinction this essay has been making the whole way through: relation, not abstraction.

Hormones, surgeries, voice, clothes, names, lovers, sexual roles, domestic habits, posture, hunger, softness, confidence, and fatigue get turned into evidence by people who think staring counts as analysis. Her body enters the room with medical history stuck to one hip, pornographic projection to the other, feminist anxiety breathing down her neck, and the little buzzing hatred people disguise as caution. She walks into the lesbian bar and the bouncer’s face does a calculation, and the bartender’s face does a different one, and three different women clock her in three different ways before she has ordered her drink. Then she gets asked to make her lesbianism legible to people who barely understand cis lesbians without a diagram and a snack break.

Black women were rendered flesh rather than body, available to forms of violation the gender grammar governing white womanhood could not register and was not built to recognize. The contemporary transsexual lesbian sits in a derivative version of that arrangement, and the Black transsexual lesbian sits at the convergence of the two ungendering operations. We are flesh inside the lesbian scene before we are body. Our refusal does not carry the evidentiary weight a cis lesbian’s refusal carries. Our presence does not get the protections cis lesbian presence gets. The hand that arrived at our body without asking knew the grammar did not extend, and it operated inside the gap the grammar left open.

Trans femininity gets punished through a double movement. Femininity already gets treated as artificial, trivial, stupid, decorative, manipulative, excessive, and made for use. Attach femininity to a transsexual woman and the culture loses its shit with the discipline of an institution pretending to be instinct. Her lipstick becomes evidence. Her voice becomes evidence. Her pleasure becomes evidence. Her insecurity becomes evidence. Her confidence becomes evidence. She crosses her legs and the room files a report. She uncrosses them and the room files a different one. She laughs too loud and she is “performing.” She laughs too soft and she is “trying too hard.” She wears a slip dress and she is “asking for it.” She wears jeans and she is “really a man after all.” There is no neutral gesture available because femininity was never neutral for any woman and trans femininity is the version where they get to say it out loud.

The trans woman gets read as an evil deceiver hiding what she “really” is or a make-believer pretending to be what she’s not. The trap pre-exists the encounter and does not depend on what the trans woman actually does. Lesbian rooms have been generating new vocabulary for the same trap for forty years. The trans femme is faking it. The trans butch is leftover male. The pretty one is suspicious. The unattractive one is a discredit. The articulate one is a manipulator. The quiet one is hiding something. There is no position inside the trap that does not confirm the trap. Refusing the trap from inside it is the whole life.

A transsexual femme gets read as excess. Too much femininity. Too much sex. Too much artifice. Too much want. Too much body. If she enjoys being looked at, suspicion arrives. If she refuses the gaze, suspicion arrives with a different coat. If she jokes about being a bimbo, some illiterate little gremlin thinks the joke means she stopped thinking. If she writes a 6,000-word essay, the same gremlin says she is “trying to prove something.” There is no innocent femme position for a transsexual woman because innocence was never offered. The femme learns to stop begging for innocence and builds power from being seen badly. She walks into the room knowing the room has already decided, and she dresses for the room she should have been entering, and the cut of her dress becomes the argument.

A transsexual butch gets punished through another route. Her masculinity interrupts the story transition is supposed to tell for other people. They want trans women to prove womanhood through recognizable femininity, then punish us for doing femininity too visibly. When a transsexual woman is butch, soft masc, stone, practical, handsome, rough, reserved, strong, or simply uninterested in becoming somebody’s doll-femme fantasy, the room malfunctions. Her butchness gets read as regression, fraud, retained maleness, failed transition, or political inconvenience. The cis dyke at the party gestures vaguely at her and says “isn’t that just,” and the rest of the sentence is the entire problem.

The old pass-or-confess demand still governs the room. Either become legible inside the consumption habits of others or become illegible inside their suspicion. Passing meant the woman whose face got read at the pharmacy counter adjusting her voice down half an octave on the way home. Passing meant the electrolysis hours billed at sixty-five dollars an appointment, the practiced gait, the hand on the throat in the night because the voice had cracked inside a dream. Passing meant becoming legible to the cis world by erasing every visible trace of how the legibility had been built. The refusal was simple: the woman who had worked her way into womanhood would not pretend the work had not happened. The labor would stay visible. The body that had done the labor would carry the doing of it as part of what it now was. Transsexual womanhood was a determinate condition produced through work and inhabited by the women who had done it.

Recognition has never been handed to a trans woman. It gets wrenched out of every relation she has: out of the endocrinologist who looked at her body like a problem set, out of the boyfriend who left when his friends started asking questions, out of the cop who decided what was in her pocket before patting her down, out of the mother who came around three years after she stopped speaking, out of the lesbian at the bar who finally stopped asking questions her body had already answered. Lesbian rooms that circulate recognition through pronoun adoption and call it sufficient are doing the lighter version of the cis script. Perform the right vocabulary and we will perform the appearance of recognizing you. The recognition that came through labor does not evaporate when the vocabulary changes next year. The recognition that came through performance does.

The poststructuralist turn took the tactical unfixing of biology and turned it into an entire cottage industry of fluency with no material output. By the middle of the nineties a gender studies seminar could describe a trans woman’s body as performative, iterative, citational, a series of gestures anchored nowhere, and the woman in question, who had spent six years and ninety thousand dollars anchoring her body somewhere specific, was supposed to feel liberated by the description. She did not. She was looking for an endocrinologist who would write the script and a landlord who would not evict her when her ID still read M, and the seminar was producing PhDs on the contingency of her gender. Transsexual womanhood was demoted to a vivid illustration of what poststructuralism had been arguing about everyone the whole time. The women whose labor had produced the condition were being asked to celebrate the dissolution of the category their lives had been spent entering. The next essay in this thread takes the whole poststructuralist current apart.

Trans categories did not emerge from racially neutral ground. They emerged from the same operations of ungendering that produced Black flesh as available to symbolic and material violation. The Black trans body sits at the convergence of those genealogies. The white trans body benefits from conceptual malleability without paying the price the malleability was historically extracted from. White trans women adopt analytical vocabulary developed by Black trans women, including by Black transsexual lesbians, and present the vocabulary as universal trans experience. That is not parallel oppression. That is appropriation downstream of the operation that made transness conceivable as a category in the first place.

The doll. The hypersexual femme. The fragile bottom. The threatening top. The pretty tragedy with a Cash App. The walking discourse emergency. Those roles arrive before we do. The first time a transsexual girl walks into a lesbian space someone has already imagined her into one of those parts before the door has closed. Some of us use the roles, twist them, perform them, mock them, eroticize them, refuse them, or move through them because life is longer than a category invented during someone’s panic scroll. Transsexual lesbians are femmes, butches, switches, pillow princesses, stone tops, service tops, sadists with manners, masochists with opinions, soft masc wives who cry harder than their femmes, and every other arrangement lesbians invented while pretending categories are beneath them.

A transsexual butch keeps her masculinity inside womanhood. She fixes the sink and she is still a woman. She tops her femme into the mattress and she is still a woman. She walks the dog at six in the morning in a binder and gym shorts and she is still a woman. A transsexual femme keeps her femininity inside lesbian relation. She gets on her knees for another woman and the act does not migrate back to the script the porn industry tried to assign her. Together they make lesbian gender impossible to reduce to birth assignment, genital configuration, hormone status, or the optics of who looks “more like the man.” The room cannot sort them without revealing the poverty of its sorting system.

People want trans women to resolve contradictions they refuse to think. Prove sex is mutable. Prove gender is real. Prove womanhood is social. Prove bodies matter. Prove lesbianism includes you. Prove boundaries can exist. Prove desire can be political and personal. Prove transition means something. Prove transition does not mean too much. Make everybody feel safe by the end of the paragraph. No. Transsexual women are not here to launder every contradiction gender produced. We live inside the contradiction and make life there. Sometimes we also fuck there. Sorry the theory has a bed.

Selective Degendering and the Transmasculine Lesbian Problem

The push around “transmasculine lesbians” reveals itself through the different treatment of bodies moving away from womanhood and bodies moving into it. Individual lives carry injury, dysphoria, survival, social pressure, language gaps, attachment, and all the messy debris of embodiment under domination. Nobody needs a border cop with a septum ring. The pattern appears in the room before anyone has to interrogate a stranger’s diary.

TME transmasculinity becomes soft around the edges when lesbian access is at stake. Masculinity becomes “masc of center.” Identification away from womanhood becomes historically lesbian. Relation to manhood becomes partial, porous, playful, too complicated for boundaries. Lesbianism gets asked to stretch around people who have named themselves away from womanhood because the stretch gets marketed as radical, compassionate, expansive, historically literate. Everyone becomes a poet of gender complexity the second TME people need access to a category built through women’s refusal. Pronouns are sacred until a transsexual woman uses she/her, at which point pronouns become “performative.” Identity is to be respected unconditionally until a transsexual woman calls herself a lesbian, at which point identity becomes “a category one cannot self-assign.”

Transsexual women get the harder instrument. Our womanhood gets tested. Our bodies get debated. Our proximity to lesbianism gets treated as a problem requiring evidence. Our relation to womanhood does not become beautiful complexity. It becomes a file. The transsexual lesbian has to prove she is woman enough, lesbian enough, safe enough, embodied correctly enough, politically aware enough, non-threatening enough, not secretly male, not too sexual, not too bitter, not too loud, not too correct about the bullshit in front of her. TME transmasculinity gets degendered into access. Transsexual womanhood gets hypergendered into suspicion.

Gender identity becomes sacred until taking it seriously would place a boundary around lesbianism that TME people dislike. Then gender becomes history, texture, fluidity, imperfection, lineage, complexity, a soft-focus photograph of a bar in 1978. The same flexibility rarely appears for transsexual women. Our womanhood becomes literal when it can be doubted and symbolic when it can be used.

Lesbian history contains complicated relations to masculinity, passing, work, police violence, survival, embodiment, and womanhood. That history deserves more than becoming a junk drawer for every current contradiction. A historical butch navigating masculinity under economic coercion, workplace exclusion, street danger, and lesbian survival cannot be lazily converted into proof that every contemporary transmasculine identification belongs inside lesbianism without remainder. The stone butch in 1962 was not the transmasc lesbian at the potluck in 2025. They share a wall in the museum and nothing else. Complexity should sharpen the blade. Cowards use it as fog.

“Transmasculine lesbian” often preserves lesbian lineage while draining the woman-centered relation that gave lesbianism force. The transmasculine person keeps attachment to lesbian culture, lesbian erotic legitimacy, lesbian political sympathy, lesbian care networks, lesbian history, while movement away from womanhood gets treated as secondary. The category opens for those moving away and tightens around those moving in. Funny how the door always seems to know who owns the house.

The demand becomes political when lesbian spaces are told to include more transmasculine people as proof of sophistication. The flier for the dyke night says “all sapphics welcome” and the next one says “all queer people welcome” and by the third flier the word lesbian has been retired entirely because someone got their feelings hurt. Refusal becomes exclusion. Boundary becomes harm. Lesbian specificity becomes suspect unless it demonstrates openness to people whose self-description no longer remains within womanhood. Meanwhile, transsexual lesbians get told to be patient with suspicion, patient with discomfort, patient with trauma, patient with genital anxiety, patient with people who treat our bodies as the one boundary everyone still gets to have.

Watch who benefits from the stretch. TME transmasculine people can retain access to lesbian social worlds, erotic history, care networks, and political sympathy while gaining the symbolic charge of transness without being positioned under transmisogyny. Transsexual women carry pornographic projection, suspicion of male residue, violence attached to being read as deceptive, and the burden of making everyone comfortable with our inclusion. One group receives complication as protection. The other receives complication as prosecution. The transmasc lesbian at the kickback is welcomed with both hands and asked about her surgery in a tone of admiration. The transsexual lesbian at the same kickback is welcomed with one hand and asked about her surgery in a tone of audit.

Purity has no place here. Purity is a cop with better stationery. Form does. Lesbianism with no relation to women as women becomes a prestige category for anyone who wants its erotic history. Lesbianism with no boundary becomes raw availability. Lesbianism that stretches endlessly for TME departures from womanhood while scrutinizing transsexual women has preserved the old transmisogynistic hierarchy under a fresh coat of “complexity.”

Against Spreadsheet Desire

“Monosexual” turns desire into arithmetic and mistakes arithmetic for politics. Lesbians and straight men get placed under the same analytic umbrella because both supposedly desire one gender. The category looks neutral after structure has been dragged out of the room by its ankles. A straight man’s desire is backed by patriarchy. A lesbian’s desire interrupts male access. Counting the number of genders desired tells us almost nothing about the social position of the desire.

A straight man refusing men pays no structural price. His refusal confirms the world. He goes home to a wife who cooks. He receives no scrutiny. He is asked nothing. His sexuality requires no defense because the entire civilization is the defense. A lesbian refusing men angers the world. Her refusal has been pathologized, criminalized, fetishized, corrected, mocked, converted, disciplined, and treated as a wound men can cure with enough force or charm. His sexuality is backed by family, law, religion, pornography, property, inheritance, medicine, and violence. Her sexuality is treated as a social error. Calling both “monosexual” empties desire of history and hands the empty vessel to a podcaster.

A lesbian who says she does not want men becomes suspect because her desire has a limit. The limit becomes exclusion. The exclusion becomes power. The power gets compared to heterosexual domination because someone learned politics from a spreadsheet with abandonment issues. A boundary is not domination. Sometimes a boundary keeps a relation from being swallowed by everyone who experiences specificity as rejection.

Lesbians get accused of rigidity by people whose politics require lesbianism to remain infinitely available as history, culture, erotic validation, and social access. The accusation works because women are trained to experience refusal as cruelty. A woman who refuses men is cruel. A woman who refuses to dissolve lesbianism into a broader sexual commons is cruel. A woman who refuses to treat every adjacent identity as equally situated inside lesbian relation is cruel. The old demand remains intact: women must make bodies, spaces, categories, and meanings available so others do not feel deprived.

Direction does not equal domination. A lesbian desire directed toward women does not become oppressive because it has a boundary. A straight man’s desire directed toward women does not become neutral because it also has a boundary. Structure matters. Removing structure produces garbage analysis, and then everyone acts shocked when the garbage starts leaking.

The Boundary Has Teeth

Lesbianism needs boundaries because relations need form. Form means shape. A relation without shape becomes availability. A politics unable to distinguish boundary from domination will always treat women’s refusal as violence. The demand for infinite inclusion often lands on women as the demand to become usable. Open the category. Open the space. Open the body. Open the relation. Open the history. Open the language. Open until nothing remains but access.

A lesbian boundary protects the material history of women’s desire for women. Refusal of men matters. Womanhood matters to the relation. Transsexual women belong as women, not as exceptions, experiments, or brave little add-ons to somebody else’s tolerance project. TME movement away from womanhood cannot automatically become central inside a category whose force comes from women turning toward women.

Without boundary, every critique dies inside personal validity. Someone says their identity is complex and the whole room is expected to lower the knife. Complexity does not abolish structure. A person can have a complicated life and still benefit from a category being stretched in their direction. A person can carry real pain and still participate in the erasure of another group’s specificity. A person can deserve compassion without being owed access to every relation that feels meaningful to them. Horrible burden, adulthood. Many such cases.

Lesbianism can recognize difficult histories without surrendering the category to every demand. It can honor butch masculinity without pretending every masculinity belongs. It can include transsexual women without treating our inclusion as charity. It can critique lesbian racism, transmisogyny, class filtering, sexual cowardice, and social punishment without turning lesbianism into a failed project. A relation can be defended and criticized at the same time because political thought is not a fucking light switch.

The Room Women Make

A lesbian room changes when women want each other. Attention moves. Men lose centrality. Femininity changes audience. Masculinity loses its male owner. Touch carries another history. Refusal becomes erotic. Domestic labor changes meaning. Protection loses its automatic relation to possession. Submission loses its automatic relation to female inferiority. Command loses its automatic relation to male power. The body becomes possible under another woman’s recognition.

Beauty lives there, and danger too. Women do not stop being cruel because they love women. Lesbians can reproduce racism, class hierarchy, transmisogyny, ableism, sexual exploitation, social punishment, addiction dynamics, and the emotionally bankrupt behavior of people who call every bad habit a trauma response. The polycule with five rules in the shared doc and zero accountability in the bedroom. The friend group that closes ranks around the abuser because she is funnier. The scene that confuses ghosting with care. The roommate who lets her girlfriend scream at the transsexual sublet and calls the scream a “rough patch.” Lesbianism gives women a relation outside male centrality, and every relation built under domination carries damage into the room with it.

A femme becomes sharper when another woman recognizes her femininity outside male use. She comes home from work, takes off her bra in the kitchen, and the butch looks up from the cutting board the way no man has ever looked at her, and her shoulders drop, and her face becomes thirty seconds younger. A butch becomes more possible when another woman receives her masculinity without measuring it against men. The femme leans into her chest at a party and the butch’s whole body learns where it is supposed to be. A transsexual woman becomes less available to public interpretation when another woman touches her as a woman rather than a debate. The hand on the back of her neck does not arrive with a question attached to it. The kiss does not arrive with a footnote. A masochist can take pain without becoming property of pain. A sadist can hold power without pretending power vanished. What Lorde named the erotic, the full bodily, emotional, spiritual engagement of women with our own desire and with each other’s presence, becomes briefly available, between the right women, in the right rooms, under conditions we mostly have to build ourselves. No angels appear. No revolution descends from the ceiling wearing a harness. The relation gives the world less access. Some days that keeps a woman alive.

Lesbianism names the body turning toward the woman who changes the meaning of the body. Desire with history in it. Sex with social form. Refusal with consequences. Women becoming central to each other in a world trying to route women back to men, markets, medicine, family, religion, politics, and every institution hungry for a claim on the female body. The relation has teeth because it has form. The form attracts management.

Lesbianism without boundaries becomes availability. Lesbianism without erotic seriousness becomes content. Lesbianism without transsexual women becomes a lie about the present. Lesbianism without butch/femme becomes flatter, poorer, less able to understand how women make gender answer to desire. Lesbianism without sadomasochism, contradiction, kink, drugs, refusal, and the difficult truth of wanting becomes a moral museum where everyone speaks softly and nobody admits what bodies do when the lights change.

I want lesbianism alive enough to be difficult. Sexual enough to tell the truth. Material enough to know desire does not float above race, class, transmisogyny, disability, housing, medical power, survival economies, or the fact that half the girls are one bad breakup and one missing refill away from logistical collapse. Tender without becoming stupid. Cruel enough to cut through the lie that inclusion requires dissolution. Generous without making women sexually or politically available to anyone who learns the right words. Honest about women hurting women, and more honest about women building worlds in each other that men cannot enter.

Lesbianism points to the room after desire has reorganized it. The femme who becomes sharper because a woman knows how to look. The butch who becomes softer because her masculinity finally has somewhere to rest. The transsexual lesbian made into a public argument who still finds a woman’s hand reaching for her as if she were not a debate at all. The sadomasochistic scene where power becomes formal enough to examine. The refusal that makes men irrelevant. The desire that makes women unavoidable.

The world wants lesbianism as identity because identities can be administered. The world wants lesbianism as culture because culture can be consumed. The world wants lesbianism as history because history can be cited while living women get ignored. I want lesbianism as relation because relations can bite.

Donate to my Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/bundleofstyyx

Source Notes

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by J.N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press, 1977. For recognition, lordship and bondage, and determinate negation. Read for method, not for gender politics, unless you enjoy watching philosophy fall directly into the family form and hurt itself.

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I. First published in German, 1867; first English edition, 1887. Also Theses on Feuerbach, written 1845. For materialist method, social relations, labor, and the refusal to treat consciousness as floating above the conditions that produce it.

Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4, Women: Sex and Sexuality, Summer 1980, pp. 631–660. For heterosexuality as institution, enforcement, and infrastructure.

Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” in The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Also The Lesbian Body, trans. David Le Vay. New York: William Morrow, 1975; originally published as Le Corps lesbien. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1973. For the straight mind, the political production of sex categories, and lesbianism as a break in the heterosexual social order.

Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. For sexuality as a political relation rather than a private feeling.

Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse. New York: Free Press, 1987. Also Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Putnam, 1981. For the ideological apparatus through which women’s bodies are organized as available.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004. For the witchhunts, primitive accumulation, and the capture of women’s reproductive labor under emergent capitalism.

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The “American” Connection, Summer 1987, pp. 64–81. For the body/flesh distinction and Black ungendering.

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Also Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. For the afterlife of slavery, scenes of subjection, and the persistence of slavery’s ideological structures beyond formal abolition.

C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. For the racial genealogy of modern transness and the relation between Black ungendering and gender’s conceptual mutability.

Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984. For the erotic as power and the pornographic as its commercial substitute.

Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds., Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. New York: Routledge, 1991. For the refusal of the pass-or-confess binary and the insistence on transsexual visibility on transsexual terms.

Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22, no. 3, Summer 2007, pp. 43–65. For the deceiver/pretender double bind.

Joan Nestle, ed., The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992. Also A Restricted Country. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1987. For butch and femme as relational lesbian genders, not isolated identity trinkets for people to arrange on the shelf and call politics.

Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. For chosen kinship and the labor that queer and lesbian kinship absorbs.

Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007. For transmisogyny, femmephobia, and the scapegoating of femininity.

Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 1919. For sadism, masochism, fantasy, guilt, repetition, and the psyche’s nasty little habit of turning punishment into desire.

Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 267–319. For sexual hierarchy, erotic stigma, and the politics of sexual danger.

Tara knight (meeee): “The Casualness Is the Violence,” “The Line Where Sisterhood Breaks,” “Desire Is Not a Political Program,” “The Prison House of Sexualities,” “Monosexual Give Me A Fucking Break,” “The Dialectic of the Cuckold,” “The Liberalism in Auto Anon’s Illiberalism,” “Your Polycule Is Not a Revolution,” “This ‘Bimbo’ Knows More Than You,” and the soft masc/butch-femme writings.

My next essay: an essay on the poststructuralist turn in queer politics and what its thirty years of theoretical fluency have produced for actual transsexual women, which is approximately nothing.