In Defense of Butch Bodies

Let me start by saying: Watching Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, be eviscerated by Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-TX, brought me a certain kind of Black Feminist Joy that I didn’t know I needed. The knowledge that Greene will never un-live the moment when she realized she couldn’t comment on a Black woman’s “fake eyelashes” without getting a clapback continues to live in my mind rent-free since it occurred on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on May 16. This was a moment when Greene thought she could disrespect a Black woman—a trained lawyer, nonetheless—in the House chambers, and instead, she received her reading papers.

Now it seems the moment will live on for everyone else too, because Crockett has not only started selling merchandise adorned with the phrase “BLEACH BLONDE BAD BUILT BUTCH BODY,” sometimes shortened to “B6,” but she has also recently purchased the trademark. When I first read about this whole altercation and watched the video 17 times, my first concern was about a sitting House member using their position to sell merch. But, as the story settled in my body, I realized it wasn’t just the merchandise itself that bothered me. It is the message it sends about all the supposedly “bad built butch bodies” of the world.

Six days after the viral moment, Crockett announced on social media that proceeds from her new “Clapback Collection” would support her campaign. In follow-up interviews about the confrontation, Crockett rightly noted that Greene’s attack likely stemmed from racist tropes about her appearance. Crockett called out MAGA trolls who frequently use stereotypes and other slurs about her hair and nails to single her out. For these reasons, and so many others, it makes sense that Crockett felt inclined to respond to Greene’s inappropriate and disrespectful comments. My concern is that whenever there is a debate between cisgender, heterosexual-appearing people, there is always a risk that queer and trans people will become the collateral damage when the insults take on the homophobic and transphobic attitudes held so widely in society. That is precisely what happened in this case.

Butch culture has long existed. For many queer and trans people, butch gender expression represents a homeplace, one that they’ve worked hard to locate. What is important about butch identity is that many people assigned female at birth have struggled with this categorization for generations, often shifting between lesbian identity, transmasculinity, and/or nonbinary gender expression. For example, Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 loosely autobiographical fiction book Stone Butch Blues tells the story of a true “stone butch,” a lesbian who will not allow her partner to touch her sexually. This term, for many, has been a critical and freeing site of self-naming and self-reclamation. But for many lesbians and trans people, it remains an intimate reminder of the violence and discrimination they’ve faced during their lives.

In many lesbian and nonbinary communities, the term “butch” often refers to masculine-presenting people and body types. These are usually individuals whose physical presentation rebuffs traditional gender norms and standards of expression. Rather than leaning into cultural expectations centering the cisgender heterosexual male gaze, these folks express gender in more androgynous and masculine ways, which frequently lean away from what mainstream culture regularly associates with people assigned female at birth. But these are not rules of butch identity. Rather, they are just a few of the ways butch folks express their gender and sexuality. For example, ballroom culture has played with the terms “butch” and “femme,” blurring the lines between trans women and gay men. In these spaces, butch may mean masculine, manly, or mannish, but it never has to mean only one thing. All bodies are self-defined and expansive. No rules have to apply across every case.

Butchness allows space for a diversity of body shapes and types that don’t have to fit into anyone else’s standard. There is absolutely nothing wrong with butch bodies. In fact, for many of us queer people, butchness is an aesthetic we find ourselves romantically and sexually drawn to. Butch bodies are beautiful.

The normalization of insults like those shared by Crockett desensitize the broader public to violence against LGBTQ people. Many LGBTQ women experience disproportionately more intimate partner abuse than other groups of women. Many of these women were harmed by cisgender men with whom they had started families, gotten married, or once cohabitated. The risks to their personal security and health, and the safety of their children, often impels these individuals to stay in abusive dynamics without revealing truths about their gender and sexuality. For many of these women and nonbinary people, identifying with butch culture has allowed them to step more actively into their full selves, only to have heteronormative and cisgender folks turn that into the butt of a joke on a global scale.

Many butch folks who had absolutely nothing to do with this confrontation have now become collateral damage in a battle of wits between two normatively gendered women. Not only that, the insult will now be immortalized on t-shirts, stationery, and other paraphernalia for the foreseeable future. Since the release of the now-viral video of the argument between Crockett and Greene, the phrase has been quoted by Reading Rainbow’s LeVar Burton on Twitter (now known as X) and plastered across videos and social media messages across the world. All the while, very little has been said about the “butch” in Crockett’s clever alliterative phrase. It seems most people have simply accepted the word as a slur for cisgender, gender-normative white women, so much that they barely notice how disrespectful it is to whole communities of queer and trans people.

This is how cis women openly participate in harm against their queer and trans peers. The same women who demand solidarity at the ballot box from queer and trans people are the ones who subtly (and overtly) reveal their lack of community and regard for those more vulnerable than themselves.

So, this is for all the butch bodies. You are all built perfectly. And we see you.

Jenn M. Jackson is a queer androgynous Black woman, abolitionist, lover of all Black people, and assistant professor at Syracuse University’s Department of Political Science. Their books include Black Women Taught Us (Penguin Random House, 2024) and the forthcoming Policing Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Reprints and reposts: YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps.

Republish This