Trans and Butch aren’t compatible. Detrans isn’t much better.

Akiva explains (from personal experience!) how to get your identity back from the trans industrial complex

A special thank you to our paid subscribers, who get early access to this post and our new podcast episodes.

Prefer to listen? Check out the audio version, read by Akiva.

---

There is an emerging discourse of women identifying themselves as “detrans” as a defining aspect of their experience and even, in some cases, their brand. I am a woman who previously took testosterone, had a double mastectomy, changed my legal sex marker to male, and passed as a man while living stealth. After several years, I stopped the hormones and gradually reversed my social transition, stepping back into the social identity of butch lesbian woman that I occupied previously. By the facts of my life experience, I am a “detransitioner.” But I’m not interested in letting it define me the way that others with similar experiences have. In fact, I’ve come to view it as an obstacle in the process of letting go of the most harmful parts of trans identity: the idea that based on personal characteristics, a female person should be set apart from other women. I believe holding onto any such separate status precludes reintegrating into the social category “woman” in ways that reflect and maintain trans ideology’s grasp on the self.

This is all to say: identity matters. While many in the radical feminist and gender critical discursive space prefer to eschew the concept of identity altogether, the reality is that language to describe the self pervades all human interaction, and provides an analyzable shorthand for self-understandings that shape the way that we interact with the world and others. For my own personal psychological health, it has been important to build new ways of self-understanding grounded in the body that help restore order where trans ideology made chaos and confusion. Healthy communities are made up of healthy individuals, and the psychological underpinnings of trans ideology must be dismantled to move beyond the sexism that it enforces.

When I realized that I was reencountering some of the fundamentals of trans ideology upon entering the detrans discourse, I saw how even some ostensible responses to that ideology could further entrench its harms. Trans ideology’s principal contribution to the world of ideas was to invent the notion of “gender identity” as an internal characteristic intrinsic to all people. (“Queer ideology” and “gender ideology” are both labels for similar systems of postmodern thinking, arguing respectively – for categories within sexuality and categories within biological sex – that there can be no meaningful distinctions drawn between those categories. One can think of trans ideology as the ideology of “what to properly do with” masculinity and femininity if one believes in gender ideology.) In consolidating their language around this collective invention, trans ideologues set up a dichotomy between people whose “gender identity aligns with their sex” – a.k.a. “cis” people – in contrast with “people whose gender identity does not align with their sex,” who are labeled “trans.” And then, to put the final nail in the coffin of analysis, the concept of gender subsumes the concept of sex. So, under this model, belonging to the classes of male/female is essentially voluntary, rendering any feminist analysis toothless – once sex (rewritten as gender) is seen as an elective characteristic, people socially understood as women must logically be assumed to have consented to their lower status in society. Further, since the model holds that femininity can make males women and masculinity can make females men, it necessarily enables the idea (while eschewing any structuralist analysis that would reveal this bias) that masculinity and femininity find their “ideal types” in male and female sexed bodies, respectively. Thus, it forces female masculinity onto a spectrum with maleness, as the latter’s lesser imitation. (The response by the male sex to the opposite problem, femaleness as ideal-type femininity, seems to be attempting to destroy the very presumption of female authority over feminine displays, through visceral hatred of “cis women,” that this ideology itself created. Again: sex discrimination isn’t a two-way street.)

For these reasons, it is inherently sexist to believe in gender as anything more than a system of dyadic labels used to culturally personify the sexes. Any concept of gender without sex leads to the idea that the bright line between male and female is (or should be) based on an individual’s personal adherence to stereotypes of the sexes, rendering any woman “stuck” in the category “woman” by the reality of her own body just another lady who “got what she asked for.”

Trans ideology’s resparking of competition between females who now, again and in a new way, must claw after the male capstone of the pyramid, is precisely the problem. You can hear more on this analysis in our discussions of this topic, but to summarize: trans identity for female people describes the aspiration to be inside a category (male or non-female) which they admit to being outside of (by being trans). This necessarily adds a competitive element to any attempt at a masculine display for which sexism becomes the most useful tool. In my experience socializing within this subculture, this has manifested both through attempts to project “normie” cultural stereotypes of how a man acts (sexist, entitled behavior towards feminine women) and through condescending behavior towards masculine women, who are perceived to be lower on the false spectrum of masculinity that the ideology dictates can only be fully expressed via characteristics of maleness. Ideology encourages transmen to believe that artificial physical characteristics imitating maleness give them access to another (higher and more real) level of masculine expression inaccessible to women without these transhumanist customization options.

Transition is designed specifically to socially disrupt the legibility of one’s sex, and trans ideology promotes to the world the idea that male and female are defined by conforming to masculinity and femininity, rather than descriptions of physical bodily realities. Widespread adaptation of trans ideology destroys the ability for butch lesbians to be socially understood as such, regardless of their individual identities, because of the conflation between masculinity/maleness and femininity/femaleness. Female masculinity and male femininity cease to be understood as their own unique expressions embedded with homosexuality and instead become pathetic futile attempts to imitate the opposite sex. In the climate of gender ideology, butches must go out of their way to continually assert their femaleness against a chorus of voices that want to erase them into a “man” box or a “nothing” box – the latter is best encapsulated by the experience of being referred to by “they/them” pronouns constantly, even against one’s stated “preference,” and even after that “preference” has been forcibly demanded by a pronoun-giving ritual. This reinforces femininity (and implicitly, heterosexuality) as the defining characteristics of femaleness.

A butch lesbian’s insistence on social legibility as a woman despite having an unconventional female appearance is core to what makes her identity powerful, specific, relational, and meaningful. By contrast, “detrans” identity based on interventions to the body runs the risk of being essentially an inversion of trans identity, retaining many of the same problems. Whereas trans identity is defined by a disconnect between the mental experience of gender identity and the desire to escape the physical reality of one’s sexed body, “detrans” identity is defined by the struggle to reassert the truth of one’s biology after irreversible changes. Women with these experiences may become attracted to a new ideological fixation: the notion that in having this history they are now, somehow, set apart from all other members of their sex in a profound new way. As someone with this set of experiences, it’s easy to understand why this is tempting: it’s difficult to give up believing in one’s essential gender-specialness when it’s brought meaning to challenging experiences for so long. While for trans identity this difference from other members of one’s sex is thought to emerge from the inside (mystically, as from the soul), which one then cements by externalizing it through medicalization, for “detrans” identity this “set-apart-ness” is based entirely on an interpretation of the physical reality of the body caused by the trans rituals of hormones/surgery/etc. that can generate and reinforce an ongoing gender-victim status. I have found that what’s necessary for healthy integration after abandoning trans identity is actually quite simple: ceasing to set oneself apart from other women on the basis of any mental, social, or physical traits.

As a butch woman, emphasizing a detrans identity would continue to set me apart from other women in much the same way that the previous trans identity did. Butch women commonly have the experience of being mistaken for men in various contexts, and must learn to navigate this. Prior to any medical transition, I was mistaken for a man constantly, and my post-trans reality is hardly changed by the subtle cosmetic changes to my body. With that knowledge, how could I continue to rhetorically set myself apart from butch women who never were surgically or hormonally altered, when we’re having the same social experience? Worrying about my similarities and differences to other butch women was something handed to me by trans ideology; continuing to emphasize my medical transition as a transformative experience would produce the same anxieties about whether I “belonged.” Trans “medicine” didn’t make me fundamentally different in some new way that I wasn’t before, and believing falsely that it does or did would be perpetuating its impact – especially by isolating me from the very group of people who would best understand living at the nexus of these patriarchal notions of womanhood and the “not like other girls” of trans ideology.

Based on the false understanding of butch identity as a primarily aesthetic term, similar accusations to mine against cementing a “detrans” identity have been levied against butch lesbians, accusing us of setting ourselves apart from other women in the way that trans-identified females do. These criticisms do not hold water because they mistake the vector of the declaration of identity: butch lesbian identity, in contrast to trans and detrans identity, is taken up in relation with femme lesbians rather than in answer to an internal self-conception. Only through receiving love and affection specifically for the parts of myself that made me “different” among women, from someone who didn’t share that difference, was I able to fully realize my authentic sexuality and self. Relating to other women is the means by which a butch’s perceived disarticulation with womanhood can be quite elegantly resolved.

Butch and femme lesbians together produce a unique synergy based on a push/pull, yin/yang, proceptive/receptive dynamic that is most clearly expressed in a sexual context, and made socially legible to others by the adaptation of masculine (for butches) and feminine (for femmes) aesthetic characteristics. Butch lesbians appropriate masculine aesthetics to express their proceptive lesbian desire. This is most archetypally expressed through strap-on sex, where a butch lesbian provides the type of sexual experience that men often believe they have sole claim over. This action transforms the cultural narrative around intercourse, the most socially significant sex act, as centered around the pleasure of the female recipient partner, rewriting the script of sexuality in a way that trans ideology finds so threatening, it must append it (literally) to maleness. But that’s the thing: butch lesbian identity loses all self- and social legibility without a knowing connection to one’s embodied female reality.

The schema of trans ideology destroys femme lesbian specificity as much as butch, as it renders femme sexuality impossible (or thought-illegal) to declare as specifically oriented towards masculine women. Hostility to the sex-based nature of femme sexuality is why so much queertrans media and conversation must recast “femmes” as either ambiguously (undefinably) “queer” or homogeneously, gender-ly equivalent to other “feminine” people who date men. When I dated a closeted femme while living as a transman, my identity left her unable to articulate the reason why she was drawn to me specifically. To “respect” my identity as a transman, my partner needed to lie to herself and others about why she was drawn to me in the first place (my female masculinity). Her family questioned why she would want to be with me: If I was essentially a defective man, and she liked me, why shouldn’t she just be straight? At the time I understood my transman identity to be essentially a modern continuation of butch/femme, and I passed her The Persistent Desire early in our relationship with the hopes that she would find what she needed to locate and explain her experience. But regardless of the sexed reality of our lesbian relationship, without my asserting a clear, unambiguous female identity, there was no solid ground for her to stand on to defend her unique experience of attraction and specific choice of partner. Meanwhile, the notion of being attracted to someone on the basis of sex rather than gender is cast as immoral by trans ideology’s anti-gay insistence that sex never be named apart from gender identity. In a trans ideology framework, femmes’ attraction to the specific combination of female and masculine is forbidden to be named. At best, a femme can discuss being attracted to a nonspecific “queerness” that masks her true orientation toward masculine females. In this way, trans/gender ideology exists in opposition to butch/femme lesbian sexuality, transforming it into a love that dare not speak its name.

To get even more “real” for a moment, on the subject of relationships: we’ve also seen trans ideology produce the worst kind of sexist egotism. When relating to femmes, a butch setting herself apart from women jeopardizes the integrity of her connection to the people who are actually most likely to love and understand her. Trans ideology completely shatters every feminist element of butch/femme, and lays a framework for toxic relationship dynamics. By believing that you are outside of the category “woman” due to your masculinity, you’re setting up a construct where you’re on another level than your feminine partner. I’ve described how “woman” becomes a voluntary “opt-in/opt-out” status under trans ideology. Given this, it’s not hard to imagine how this could become very toxic if a feminine woman enters a relationship with a transmasculine-identified woman, who implicitly believes that the feminine woman has consented to a lower-status position than her. Anyone with proximity to queer spaces knows exactly what I’m talking about, although we at SBD are awash in further examples, releasable as needed.

This stands in sharp contrast to actual butch/femme relationships where the difference between the two partners is plainly descriptive and non-hierarchical, rather than aspirational and in comparison to males/heterosexuality. Healthy butch/femme couplings lend themselves to a kind of natural feminism, because these bonds deessentialize differences of aesthetic, personality, and style between women, allowing for equality (both the butch and the femme are women, neither thinks they are on another level than the other) without the artificial enforcement of sameness between them. It is an accidental but incredibly demonstrative celebration of the diversity within the category “women”.

In contrast to trans-identified females, who see maleness as the sole form of masculinity to aspire to and something their female body prevents them from expressing, butch lesbians fully embrace their female body and their masculinity, defining themselves in relation to other women, not men. While detrans identity does acknowledge the baseline differences between male and female, it continues to reaffirm the trans rites of surgery and hormones as even having the ability to create a change in one’s “gender” in the first place. I believe (from experience attempting to interpret my own masculine physicality as somehow manifesting a trans experience and finding that interpretation rather meaningless), that to be pro-woman and mentally healthy, we’ve got to abandon the idea that superficial physical characteristics shut down one’s possibilities of self-expression – to be female, to be lesbian, to be woman-identified, etc. Detrans “realist” arguments that the “social reality” of trans medical procedures makes it “impossible” to reverse a transition often reify the same limited patriarchal notions of the category “woman.”

For butch lesbians swept into trans ideology, procedures of “medical transition” often already took place on a foundation of visually passing as men without any medical interventions. If you expect to have a perfectly smooth experience in the world being understood as female after detransitioning, immediately and clearly in all contexts and judging anything else as a failure, then the female identity that you’re aiming to come back to doesn’t sound like a butch experience. Butches continually assert their femaleness along with embracing their natural masculinity, so obsessively navel gazing about insufficient levels of physical/visual femininity not only gives up the power of your identity, but also abandons your responsibility to your femme partner, to uphold your and her lesbian reality in the face of patriarchal, trans, and trans-patriarchal forces that would rather rewrite her as a queer/questioning woman and you as a pitiful wannabe man. Femmes, whose sexuality is oriented toward female masculinity, need their partners to own every element of that object of their orientation – to be female, lesbian, and woman-identified, and to treat femmes as full human beings with different and complementary needs and also as women just the same as them. Holding a not-like-the-other-girls complex either because of a male identity or because of the idea that hormonal and surgical interventions deprived you of womanhood is failing other women and ultimately failing yourself. You have to toughen up, and learn to proudly share that you’re female without qualification. That’s how you really move on from trans.