Manface: The New Enslavement of Lesbian Masculinity

A masculine woman reflects on feminism and femininity, by Aaron Kimberly

Many of the butch lesbians of my generation, who medicalized to appear as men, came from second wave feminism or, conversely, were repelled by it because of the disdain some feminists have/had for butches. The question on the minds of many: Is feminism responsible for current trans narratives?

Second Wave Rules

In the 1970s, Shulamith Firestone argued that women’s oppression is situated in our biological role of bearing children. Beyond her view that contraception would enable women to make choices about when to get pregnant, she further argued that conception and gestation outside of the female body, by technological means, would be the ideal route to liberation. Such views have, arguably, set the stage to view the female body and its functions as something to be transgressed, by any means necessary, lest we be forever in our bodily trap of womanhood. It is indeed a short leap from there to consider leaving the female body behind altogether, and becoming men, by means of technologies, to escape our oppression.

However, to blame this line of feminist thought for the medicalization of so many women fails to recognize that so many of us are lesbians who had no concerns about pregnancy, accidental or otherwise. Lesbianism itself was the cure for our bodies as baby factories.

Are Lesbians Women?

When I was having severe gynecological problems as a young adult, many (male and presumably heterosexual) gynecologists eagerly encouraged me to get a hysterectomy because “why would a lesbian need a uterus or ovaries?”. This view, that our sex organs are nothing but baby incubators, fails to see the female body as a whole system, in need of hormonal messengers and the pelvic structures of our organs. These gynecologists, though unlikely, as men, to have ever read feminist theory, seemed to agree with Firestone – “why not liberate yourself from your womb?”, as if lesbians aren’t wholly women, unless we want to make babies. I wonder if that same medical advice would have been applied to my breasts, since their function is to feed babies I’d never have. The lesbian body struggles to be whole. I did eventually remove all of the organs which signify womanhood but, while I disagree with Firestone, I don’t blame her. The lesbian body as not fully female is far more pervasive. Let’s not let the culprits off the hook.

Also in the 1970s, Monique Wittig wrote:

“Frankly, [the definition of woman] is a problem that lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective. “Woman” has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual systems. Lesbians are not women.”

Here she captures the problem more succinctly and constructively than Firestone, pointing to the social, not the biological. Social problems demand social solutions. She wasn’t confused about the materiality of femaleness. She was articulating the construction of “woman” as a social concept, complete with expectations of how women look, behave and function as a social role, defined by heterosexuality and childbearing. She was attempting to define lesbians as something else – a third “gender”, which exists entirely outside of the societal conceptualization of womanhood. Many feminists have seen lesbianism as the ideal escape from the patriarchy, leading to the “political lesbian” who chose lesbianism to break the shackles of womanliness.

A Queer Liberation?

Are lesbians liberated? If this were true, would we not see lesbians with greater economic and social advantage? Would lesbians not be seen as more valuable within our economic system, without the liabilities of pregnancy and the need for maternal leave? That hasn’t born out. Lesbians are, in fact, taking hormones and removing reproductive organs at an ever-increasing rate. The messages iterated by my gynecologists, shared by many, weren’t ones of value but devaluing my place within the social hierarchy of gender and sex - a ‘use them or lose them’ mentality, regarding my sex organs. The “third gender” of Wittig didn’t feel like liberty when men screamed “fucking dyke” at me.

By the early 1990s, lesbians like Judith Butler and Judith “Jack” Halberstam spoke as prophets to me and many others of my generation. From Halberstam’s 1998 anthology, Female Masculinity:

“There is something all too obvious about the concept of female masculinity…I hope this book opens discussion on masculinity for women in such as way that masculine girls and women do not have to wear their masculinity as a stigma but can infuse it with a sense of pride and indeed power.”

I was a young lesbian at that time. A masculine one. Somewhat lacking in pride and power. Riffing off of the feminist theory of gender, as the societal imposition of what a woman is, the word “transgender” was a name given by early Queer theorists to Wittig’s third gender - Not a denial of sex, but a life lived outside of the social box of womanliness. That is, lesbians with traits and an appearance seen as unwomanly. Something worthy of reverence, not scorn. This centring of lesbian specificity, and our difference, was something I embraced because it embraced me. Yet, while I studied the text, I was repeatedly told within academia that this lesbian specificity made the academic work I pursued irrelevant, too specific to have any broader social or commodifiable value. Butler and Halberstam must have been told this as well, in some form or another, because they quickly pivoted away from any grounding in femaleness into a denial of any relevance of sex. Queer Theory became an intellectual circus of pure subjectivity, divorced from bodily reality. This is a troubling departure from what’s implied by the title of Butler’s 1993 book, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex.

The Patriarchy Strikes Back

By the early 2000s, “transgender” was no longer about lesbians and gay men. It became its own personhood and birthright - The “trans child”, who would grow up to be the opposite sex through the application of technologies. “Born in the wrong body”. There’s speculation about why this narrative shifted. It takes us back to feminism. The heterosexual patriarchy, and its economic interests, saw no value in empowering the masculine lesbian (nor the effeminate gay man). As my academic supervisors in the 1990s warned me, there is nothing commodifiable in lesbian specificity and social change. There is commodifiable value in the fantasies of men. The transgender concept and the medicalization of bodies became big business, profiting largely from the ways in which women’s bodies are blamed for our oppression, and the ways in which men covet a sexualized object of womanhood. Butler and Hamlberstam, once champions for lesbians, sold us out to what was profitable to men, and three generations of lesbians have been medicalized in service to what is desirable to heterosexual men. Men can now be their own fantasy of womanhood, and lesbians, far from being empowered, can become smaller, gentler, pliable, unthreatening “men” – at great cost to us. Men profiting from the conception of bodies as objects to be rearranged is not a feminist idea.

French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, whose work through the 1960s to 1970s, was the foundation of Queer Theory, warned us: Systems of power will shift the goalposts and devour everything meant to liberate. This is exactly what has happened:

“The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.”

Butler and Halberstam have fallen into their own trap. A movement meant to improve the quality of life of lesbians and gay men has been hijacked by heterosexual men and put us back into shackles. This is not the fault of feminism. It’s the full realization of what feminism has long resisted: The commodification and ownership of our bodies, this time under the guise of social justice. It’s a trick so entirely underhanded that countless lesbians and gay men are nodding along, complicit and active participants in our oppression.

I now look like a man and have lost the organs that our society sees as irrelevant if not used for incubating and feeding a man’s child. But, in service to lesbian specificity and our liberation, I am a male-passing woman. I’m not the least bit interested in whether or not there is a market for my femaleness, on heterosexual men’s terms. I’m not a commodity. My female masculinity requires liberation once again, on my own terms. My body serves my own purposes, in what it can do and make actionable, in its own pleasures and frailties. Watch how much I’m abused for saying that I am female, and you’ll see how incendiary the new trans monster is, and why we still need feminism, now more than ever, before all women become men while men think they can become better women, better lesbians, than us.

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