The Self-Constructed Dyke

Introduction

If you are here, than presumably you know me, but for the benefit of those who don’t, I am Fae’rynn, a Jewish transfeminist and writer. Most of the time, I keep these sorts of thoughts to myself and stick to broader topics on social media threads, however recent conversations have compelled me to put my thoughts on gender to the page. I think every trans and non-binary person thinks about this (I am both) more than we should, but then again, we have to. Articulating our own experiences in a society that wants to strip us of our epistemic authority means that we don’t get the luxury of taking our gender for granted.

This essay is, admittedly, a more personal one. I, my gender and the way I construct it, am the example that I use. I do so for several reasons, primarily because I think conversations regarding gender can get far too broad and different people want much different things. Jess O’Thomson recently put out an essay titled They/Them Pronouns & Conflicting Access needs. In that essay, they go on to explain a simple concept—two disabled people have equally pressing needs that are in conflict with one another.

I will not be attempting to bring a resolution to that very real issue. Instead, I am going to talk about how I make use of social-construction theory to mold my own gender and impose it on the rest of society in the language of gender that many, even the cis, are familiar with. This does mean that some nuance is lost in my day-to-day life, but to be quite frank, the only people who are capable of understanding my gender are those closest to me. Everyone else gets an approximation (on my terms) that I can live with them seeing me as.

It is my hope that my thoughts help others, just know that I am not making any definitive statements. This is a materialist approach to doing a non-binary gender, but it is very much the way I do it. If that helps you, too, then I am glad. If you’re someone with a Conflicting Access Need, then you and I are not enemies—I just do this differently.

Narratives Shape Our Lives

There hasn’t been a time in my life where I haven’t been called some kind of slur—dirty Jew, kike, faggot, dyke, tranny the list goes on. The price, I suppose, of being a double closeted transfem futch lesbian growing up in the South of the United States. Being fetishized (as the good Jewish boy), feminized (for refusing to participate in misogyny, and for being Jewish) and contradictorily masculinized (on account of my ASAB, held up the standards of cissexist Manhood), has been an ever-present part of my life—forcibly constructed against my will. Still, in those teen years up to my late 20s, I tried my best to be a Good Man, to be better than my peers. Feminism and women’s rights were a passion of mine, all my friends growing up were queer women.

There were several attempted murders I will not go into detail of in those years, but suffice to say the way I tried to Be a Good Man who cared about women, invited a lot of violence from others. If they didn’t get me, I very nearly got myself with multiple suicide attempts—the underlying dysphoria was killing me. I say this, as it is easy for others to assume that I lived a normal life as a cishet man prior to transition, but that cannot be further from the truth. I should not have to rip open old wounds to be taken seriously, but alas that is still required of the tranny lesbian as even her own community has preconceptions of her that are not easily dispelled.

After nearly three decades and a lot of pain, I told the world “Fuck you, I am not a man.” That’s when I decided I was going to stop trying to be a Good Man and instead became an Evil Dyke. It was a dam that was always going to break, there is only so much a woman can take before she must violently burst free from her cage. Indeed, this act of becoming, of asserting myself on the world, was violent—the scars will never heal. Like a good futch, I wear those scars with pride, as a badge of honor.

Everyone knows the story of the closeted trans woman who played with dolls at the age of six, wore dresses and stole her mother’s makeup—the girl who always knew. I was not one of those girls, I did not know at all and did not have the language to articulate what the fuck was wrong with me.

That is who this essay is for—the women like me, the ones who were jocks, the ones who climbed trees, played in the mud and watched dumb action movies. The women who got into fights with the boys to stick up for the girls in our class even if it meant we got our teeth kicked in by a whole pack of them. It’s for the women who masculinity came easily to, who felt it was their shield and their sword. It’s for the women who, despite being everything society idolized men as, (strong, principled, and with a genuine desire to protect women), were still abused for being “wrong.” It’s for the women who are left behind in the desert, waiting for the mana of heaven to whisper in their ear “It’s okay to let go, it’s okay to be a woman—consider, also, that you can be masculine dyke.”

Coming out triggered my divorce, my now ex-wife asked me all manner of probing questions about my gender and sexuality. That I was a lesbian surprised everyone around me, they assumed I had secretly been into men the entire time (the trans woman edition of CompHet is so real). I, however, didn’t have time to process those questions as I was dealing with said impending divorce and loss of access to my two children.

To say that this situation was really fucking unfair and traumatic would be an understatement. It was unreasonable to interrogate me on “how could this happen???” while kicking me out of my home. Fuck if I knew what my gender was or why! In the end, the only thing I knew for sure is that the idea of wearing skirts and tights was not for me—I was a woman, but not a feminine one.

My particular experience with dysphoria, and my history gave me a lot of imposter syndrome. How could I be trans if I wasn’t feminine? I knew butches existed, had several as friends even, but that was surely not for me… right? Was I ruining my life and marriage over a psychotic break? Everywhere I looked, I found the above narrative of the girl who always knew, or “you’re trans if you say you’re trans.” Both answers were completely unsatisfactory, the former being so far removed from my life and the latter being good vibes that did nothing to beat back the demons in my head. I needed answers, I needed something tangible.

I did, eventually, stumble on the Dysphoria Bible—the Social Dysphoria section provided the first key to understanding myself, to understanding the deep pain at being seen as a man. It was not my looks, per say, but the expectations—the social role of being a man—that felt like a noose around my neck.

So, I transitioned about it. I had already lost everyone I cared about; my life had imploded just for voicing these feelings. It took me years of searching, studying and pain to really discover my gender, even as I injected myself weekly with estrogen and fell in love with my body for the first time in my life. There was no easy script for a woman like me, not that there is for any trans woman, and painfully little history. Out as a woman, as a lesbian, I did look then to butches as something I could embody. Reading Stone Butch Blues as a Jewish dyke was like looking at an alternate, mirror version of myself.

I wish I could say it was as simple as reading a book and seeing incredible depictions of masculine women and go “that’s me,” but there was too much trauma around how society forced me to be a man, to be the son, the father and the older brother. As much as masculinity had been my home it was also the place of my deepest traumas, a shield that had been turned into a weapon against me. I needed to construct myself as something different, to carve an identity out for myself using cobbled together history and half-baked concepts.

Funny that the label that felt most at home for me was popularized by a fucking meme (The Butch-Femme Spectrum). That is where I started conceptualizing futch as my gender and what it meant for me outside the context of that meme. The concept of futch is older than this meme to be clear. The Black lesbian community, for example, has long had Stem (Stud+Femme) as a gender. However, the struggle for me was how I, a trans woman, would fit into this nebulous concept.

This has not been without pushback from other lesbians (who are not trans women… this is important), some even claiming it is lesbophobic (this has been said to my face many times), or “just androgyny.” Such incidents are a case of trans woman’s voice getting shoved down, in this case, mine. In my experience, we don’t get to have a say within the communities we walk in. Everywhere we go, we must conform to preexisting conceptions of gender, to adhere to the wisdom of our “betters” to gain even minimal acceptance. To be different, to break away from nostalgia or history, is treated as violence.

Well, that’s some bullshit to be completely blunt.

Let’s Talk Social-Construction

Anyone who knows even a cursory amount of radical or material feminism will be somewhat familiar with the concept of Social Construction Theory, the idea that gender is created by social forces and oppression (paraphrasing). There have been a lot of problems with the applications of this theory, particularly by some radical feminists who abandoned their principles and devolved into cultural feminism (terfs and later GCs)—deciding to adopt a gender essentialist model that is repackaged Catholicism. The theory itself is fairly neutral, explaining the mechanics of how society genders the body involuntarily based on observed traits and exploits and abuses that which is deemed feminine or female.

Personally, I use it to construct myself and craft legibility within preexisting models and understanding of sex and gender. I frequently talk about the Right to Embodiment, and expanding the boundaries of gender—including the way we communicate and understand gender. This has personal, material applications. I want to legibly be gender-fluid, but always a woman—a dyke. I am queer, yes, but I also have to exist in and deal with cissexist society. If I go out in a dress, or a suit, I want to be called “Ma’am.”

Any trans woman will tell you that performing femininity is required for us to be seen as ourselves in society and for safety reasons. Though, admittedly, it’s also just very fun to do it because it's something we choose for ourselves. Being a girl, does, in fact, rock.

It’s easy to tell us that we are upholding gender norms, that we are ceding to patriarchy when we craft our flesh with surgeries, inject estrogen to grow breasts and put on a stylish, feminine fit. It speaks to a profound lack of grace and empathy that, in the end, is abusive to all trans women and keeps many in the closet. All of us shamed by our very normal desire to embody ourselves on our terms. You cannot theorize or rationalize dysphoria away—trying to cajole us to do so “progressively” is still conversion therapy!

Isn’t it ironic that the above argument, the conversion therapy rhetoric, is based in social construction theory? It is a theory that draws a lot of ire from other trans and queer people. Making use of it will get you accusations of being a terf—even as the same people weaponize the very same jargon to abuse trans women; to moralize the nature of our transition. The truth is, social-construction theory is an observation of the language of gender and a contextualization of how patriarchy self-perpetuates. We are all socialized, to varying degrees of success, within this system.

I suppose it should not be a shock that people will hypocritically abuse women in the name of progressive ideals, using the same theory and concepts they claim to hate. There is a long history stretching back to the 70s of this rhetoric being deployed against us by people claiming to fight for liberation. Janice Raymond referred to us as “male-to-constructed-females” in her transmisogynistic screed of a book, the Transsexual Empire. She, however, is hardly the only person to wear her disgust with trans women on her sleeve.

Her ideas have been laundered into contemporary queer politics via academia and a troubling amount of crypto-terfs who hang out in queer fandom spaces. It’s even reproduced from first principles by gender abolitionists with a limited imagination. They all repeat the same criticism again, and again, and again—in spirit even if not word-for-word: “Trans women are regressive assimilationists who uphold the gender binary by modeling themselves to a cis conception of gender.”

If you ever have the displeasure of running into such a person, tell them to go fuck themselves.

The Futch, Different than the Sum of its Parts

In some ways it is easier to say what futch is not than what futch is, so I will begin there. The futch is not a more moral gender because it eschews conventional femininity or rejects hyper masculinity. Such criticism and moralizations, in general, are rooted in a cruel application of social-construction theory—we do not do that here. Futch is also not androgyny, at least not to me and how I perform my own gender day-by-day.

A futch is also not a butch or a femme, both being lesbian genders rooted in working class lesbian history. (Stone Butch Blues. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold) Nor is it cobbled together middle ground between the two. Futch is an imperfect word that is grasping for legibility, nodding to concepts that most people are already familiar with while being a distinct gender unto itself.

Femme trans women are more easily understood, though not always kindly. As mentioned above, trans women are often criticized for being hyperfeminine. She is legible to the world for better or worse. Most would not think twice when looking at a femme trans woman, other than some being confused that she is not performing her gender for the sake of men but for herself and for other dykes.

Butch trans women outright confuse people and draw invasive questions such as “Why transition at all if you’re just going to be a man anyway?” or “I thought butch was for transmascs or cis lesbians?” This happens, in part, because there is very little history of trans women embodying a butch identity. One of the earliest known examples is Xanthra Phillippa who published a poem in 1995 titled Don’t Call me Mister ‘Cause I’m a TS Butch. Finding earlier history of transsexual butches has proven very difficult, but one must assume these women existed even if there is little historical record.

As for why there is so little history, that is upsetting: trans women were, quite simply, forced to perform traditional femininity (including heterosexuality) to access transition care at all. WPATH guidelines didn’t relax until recently. With those relaxed guidelines, there was a surge of transsexual women who were eager to embody butchness! These butches were hardcore, too, getting involved in a host of activism, including pitching up at Camp Trans during Michfest and loudly proclaiming their existence.

In my research, I came across accounts of several of these butches ultimately becoming femmes in the later years of their transition. I can understand this, as it can be a struggle to have your womanhood respected while having even a trace of masculinity on you. For some, I suspect, they chose butch out of fear they would never be able to be femme and saw butch identity as a way to still be seen as a woman (even with the aforementioned struggles), only to find out a few years into transition that being femme was not as great a mountain to climb as they initially suspected.

Today in 2025, futch has become increasingly popular among trans women. Discovering many trans women with similar feelings surrounding their gender and similar trauma was a godsend… finally, I found my people. It is easy to feel alone when you never encounter someone like yourself and when the communities you walk in have a nasty habit of being willfully obtuse about the nature of your existence.

The futch, to me, is a fluid but always dyke gender. There are days where I will look indistinguishable from a femme, and on others I will appear as a typical butch. Mostly, my default is somewhere in the middle—a soft masculine woman with makeup, including glittery eyeshadow and lipgloss.

The poorly defined nature of futch is appealing, it’s a place to carve out a new kind of embodiment. Adopting butch or femme as your identity often makes one feel locked in to a specific aesthetic and gender role; accusations of not being a Real Butch/Femme are, sadly, extremely common.

Semi-formally defined genders are all well and good for those who feel at home in them, who fit neatly into a historical prescription, but it can become a new type of cage when a woman carries the scars of forced Manhood on her heart. Likewise, the pressure to be as feminine as possible to even have an ounce of humanity granted to you, is a totally shit deal.

We get policed enough by society, many of us chafe at the idea of being policed within our communities as well—especially when we don’t even get a say in the matter.

What than does a trans woman, a trans dyke do? For me the answer was to reject prescriptive gender entirely, and self-construct my own embodiment using a term with less baggage that came only somewhat pre-conceptualized. Many trans women I have met feel the same way, even if others struggle to understand us… struggle to understand why we don’t just be pretty girls or feminine men.

We Exist

I cannot count the number of times people simply do not realize a trans woman like me is real. I am asked questions about my gender constantly. I see butch and futch used exclusively for transmasculine or cis lesbian embodiments. When people discuss among themselves what a butch or futch must be, trans women are excluded from the conversation by virtue of total ignorance. When someone gets mad at me online or even in person, I am suddenly a “White, Binary Trans Woman who has no idea how hard it is. You’re new to oppression.”

This is beyond frustrating—the butchphobia, the enbyphobia, the transmisogyny that I face on a regular basis from people within my own community makes me want to scream. For a group of people who rail against the idea of trans women doing material feminism almost as much as terfs do, and who preach idealistic validity politics, they sure seem to love to pretend like trans women like me are imaginary. For a group of people who constantly whine about “stereotypically pretty trans girls” who “just want to be basic barbies,” they sure seem to break down the moment they have to deal with a masculine trans woman who does masculinity intentionally.

To be perfectly clear, I am not saying feminine trans women deserve the treatment they get—they absolutely do not. I am using myself (and others like me) as an example that we trans women can do nothing right. Many people need to sit with this and treat trans women, in general, far better; to respect the authority we have on our own lives and the knowledge of gender we bring to the table.

Right or Wrong

I sincerely apologize if you came to this essay hoping for a step-by-step guide on how to do Futch Gender. This is something I fundamentally don’t believe in. Hell, I don’t even believe in innate gendered minds or souls. I know my dysphoria was real, both the physical and social in regards to Manhood and being man-shapped, and that it drove me into a constant depressive state. I also know that giving up masculinity completely was anathema.

I know that it is real the same way black holes can only be observed by the effect they have on surrounding stars. I am not interested in finding an answer in metaphysics or biology or whatever. I just don’t care.

At the end of the day, I am a descriptivist. If you feel the call of the futch pulling at you, to blend the masculine and feminine and hold them in tension—than I encourage you to do so and see what works for you. You should not feel pressured to do futch correctly.

Personally, I think futch is for us freaks who don’t know where else to fit in.

There are as many types of women are there are stars in the sky, and we live in a society that desperately wants to snuff out the ones it deems unacceptable. We also live in a society that understands certain things as Man or Woman and it’s quite possible to weaponize that in order to carve out something self-actualizing—to expand the boundaries and language of gender with viciousness against a system that demands conformity.

Godspeed evil dykes, you are our strongest soldiers.