

“what does it mean to be fem?” curiously, she asks me and I know there are a thousand answers that anyone else could give her - but only one that I have, that I hold in my heart.



“it means to love,” I say, “and by that I mean it is to love butches”.

“to love butches in all their commonality and all their diversity too. to love them in their best moments and those that they struggle through, to love them in all of their shame and glory.”

this doesn’t make sense to her, but I am used to that. “but why?” she wants to know and I wonder where to start…

I think of a sweet butch I know, twenty-one, who when I first met her at the top of the stairs up which I lugged a suitcase, she instinctively sprang forward to help me. how it touched me then, to be breathless with my hair in rollers and so much older and still be worthy of care. I think of her perfectly parted and combed hair and the labrys pendant she wears, how she embodies her butchness in a historied awareness.

I think of being twenty-one myself and straddling the lap of my red-haired lover, her work-strong arms abruptly lowering me to the old carpet in a way that made my cunt clench and my hips surge towards hers, realising abruptly how much I needed a butch to take me into her care like that, how I craved to feel like a woman in a dyke’s arms. I think of an older butch in a perfect tweed suit slipping a long leather glove over my hand and how wet I got right there in the store from the sheer sensuality of it. I think of how her eyes were like green grass when the sunlight hit them just right.

or of the pink and grey fluff of a sunset streaked sky racing over Enmore Road as I press my breasts against my butch’s leather jacket and feel the throb of her bike between my legs, roaring down the street like freedom given form. how she loves to put my helmet on me and strap it up and how I love to let her do it. how while we ride I let my hands drift upwards to where the scars across her chest ripple beneath her shirt and know that later I will be tracing them with my tongue. and what it means for her to trust me to do it.

of a stud visiting from London who would grin and grimace with equal ferocity and the prickly velvet of her shaved head when I ran my hands over it. how she wouldn’t hold my hand at Coogee Beach because ‘white men don’t like seeing white women with black men’ and how much I comprehended then I had no comprehension of. what it means to be butch across intersections, what that means to show care and return it.

I think of a tattooed butch with a sweet face and a bashful grin who got onstage at a show and asked people to give up their seat for fems in heels - and how much it touched me not to be disdained or shown contempt for a change. how my heart was healed a little bit that so contested a choice would be treated seriously and with respect. in front of everyone.

and then I think of a young butch who looks like a long-lost dream in 501s and a white tee-shirt, cupping her hands around her fem’s cigarette in a windy alleyway. I think of the butch I’ve never met before who shows up here at the plea of her fem, stuck in traffic, keen to help me set up an event I’m running. and then of being gently embraced and ushered into a cab by a broad-shouldered butch who volunteers on the RFS when I dissolve into tears one hard night out. of the stud who rolls my joints with extra long filters so that I can hold them without burning my long, long nails and the boi with tousled hair who runs around the bar getting every fem a chair, heels or not.

I think of so many butches over so many years who have smiled just to see me and made me feel welcome, who have given me a shoulder or a helping hand and let me be a girl. who have welcomed my intellectual curiosity and political fervor and still helped me into my coat. who know just the right moments to treat me tenderly and when to smack me on the ass and tell me I’m hot. of their kindness and ferocity, the generosity of their energy and their passion too. of the pain they too often hold at their core and how the very act of being fem is to stand guardian over that. all of the lessons I have learned by their sides, perhaps most of all what it means to me to be fem.

so at last I tell her: “because in loving them it is that I know myself. because in loving them I finally make sense.”

“fems!” she scoffs, “you always think it’s all about you!”

off she walks but I am used to that too. it doesn’t matter, because I have come alive now with the heat of my memories and the sweetness of their knowing, in the love of people who each shine in their uniqueness and the gift it has been to love them. because I know the truth, and the truth is that what it means to be fem is to love butches; that really, it is always all about them.