Book Thoughts: Stone Butch Blues
After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit.
Original Sent Date: July 27, 2024
Listened to the audiobook for this since it's one of those things you feel like you should be reading in terms of LGBTQ canon.
Main thoughts are, shit, people have it really hard out there.
Other thoughts was that it was nice to see the book cover basically 3 decades and to see how Jess grew up and how unpredictable life is.
The part where she and Teresa broke up because she wanted to pass as a man to hopefully get beaten up less and Teresa couldn't accept this because she was specifically a femme who wanted to be seen as a femme and not as a straight woman was super interesting.
Other thing that was really interesting was how Jess basically is a AFAB masc nonbinary who ends up with a AMAB femme, who may or may not be a trans woman since those terms didn't quite exist at the time the book was written. Jess mentioned specifically that she didn't feel like a man but also didn't slot neatly into woman, and that Ruth was like her, which could indicate either that Ruth is similarly nonbinary or that she just has gender expansive understandings as a trans woman. (Wikipedia has decided on trans woman, at any rate.) TERFs must hate this book.
Terminology aside, I just appreciated how it argued for letting people be themselves instead of slotting them into roles, including the butch / femme dynamic which wasn't allowing of butch x butch and femme x femme etc. at the time. It also really showed how the need to survive warped a lot of many of the butches' ability to be emotionally vulnerable, in a way that was similar and yet not similar to men.
Other random thoughts:
Is it really possible to have sex with someone using a rubber dick and for them to not notice at all just because they don't touch it and the lights are down? Is rubber really that close to skin? Lol. That whole section was just also extremely awkward because it was the best sex this het woman had ever gotten in her life because butches know how to listen to women more than most men, but it was also technically boundary violating on Jess's part since this woman would have never agreed to have sex with her had she really known that Jess wasn't a man. Though I guess you don't owe that information to someone if you're living in a violent world that wants to kill you.
Not sure if it's who I'm following, but I've noticed an increase in anti-transmasculinity over the past few years. Rather, it seems like since asexual people have managed to fight some of their way back against the discourse, the new trend is to frame transmasculine people as inherently taking up too much space. It's interesting, of course, because a lot of my friends definitely believe the mindset of "transfeminine people always have it the hardest". I feel murky about this because survey stats do indicate that trans men face certain types of violence at a higher rate than trans women, but trans women are killed the most. And people tend to focus on who's dying. I don't know whether or not that is a good meter or if this should even be a race to the bottom to begin with, but after so many years of people talking about how trans women are the most vulnerable (or "women and femmes" phrasing etc.) and need to be centered, it is hard to not just default to thinking that. I guess fundamentally I do think attention is limited and so people are arguing over attention because you do need some amount of attention to get things done. But I don't think it's wrong to say that different groups face different facets of oppression.
I guess the uprise in online discourse distaste for transmasculine discussions has to do with the attempt to make a term for anti-transmasculinity (transandrophobia), which we've talked a bit about. Just saw a post today though that talked about how they don't get why people online assume passing as a man is extremely easy, such as just wearing pants, when a lot of men get clocked for not being straight from things like body language and then punished for it. This book just reminded me of that because whether or not Jess passed was heavily contingent on the circumstances and became a lot harder again when she stopped taking hormones.