Here we continue the re-release of SBD audio and writing (with identifying info redacted for CYA, yay!) — with this “butch toolkit” recorded in response to the queer misogyny on Instagram which, a few months after this was posted, got our Instagram banned. Below is the original description:
By request of several listeners and of my own heart, I made a longer-form introduction to Episode 4 that I ended up (duh, should have done this in the first place) pulling out as its own clip.
I've edited, reedited, fleshed it out, and here it is.
This minisode was prompted by some "fun" stuff on the Stone Butch Disco Instagram this week. [TL;DR: on the IG, some folks took our site's female lesbian namesake, Leslie Feinberg, whose website prominently displays her femaleness and she/her pronouns, and told us she was *actually* male -- then weaponized that fabrication to explain to us how the central aims of our project, 1) fighting for butch lesbians like us to reclaim our female bodies from the patriarchy and 2) fighting for femme lesbians to be allowed to say they exclusively desire female butch women, are both immoral and unenlightened to the obvious fact that sex is made up.]
I recorded this as a "toolkit" for anyone listening anywhere who has experienced similar hostilities, online or IRL, for talking about the specific ways they experience being a butch lesbian or a femme lesbian. (If you know, you know.) If this hasn't happened to you, great! I'm glad the queer community respects somebody. But if it has, here's something I hope helps. I'm learning more and more how many people share with me, but are as terrified as I have been of talking about, the routine experience of being told their language for their own political analysis of their own identity is not just difficult, or even unpalatable, but also makes them a shitty dumb idiot meanie.
Again: if that's not you, then ignore this one! It'll probably sound too quasi-academic and too much "blah blah." But if that is you, I hope this gives you a back-pocket resource to remind you (and me) there's not any damn thing wrong with us, and that Leslie Feinberg was a proud female lesbian who promoted transing gender conventions precisely because she fucked with gender like we do.
Like a female-out-of-line does.
Support Stone Butch Disco and the StoneButchDisco.com lesbian writing and archives project at https://www.patreon.com/stonebutchdisco.
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